.

i. as soon as i wake my throat screams for drink so i am not drinking, quench it instead with a flood of migraines and hallucinations torrential as they've ever been. don't have to climb mountains to freeze on their summits, taunt tigers to meet the inside of their stomachs. no singing will silence no run pull me under spill blood and it joins them break bones, well, i wonder with the resolve of autumn leaves, vision is water still waiting for spring let it wander or sunder the season that's snared it career like a vagrant cursing the shade of a dusk-flooded basement.

ii. and somehow he's never left that place where what a name means is less important than the fact that it's meaning. and how's knowing nothing better than not knowing at all when ultimately neither's going too far?

iii. i've threaded the letters you've sent me
with hairs i stole as you slept
they hang like a lantern
of lifetimes supplanted
by phantoms
dear phantoms
relent