Bioluminescence

I guess I never forgave you for having had enough. The last island was full of Australians and the endless beach held nothing to throw myself against. Horizons have always made me tremble. I’ve got to get myself back to a city, somewhere with firmer borders and sharper teeth. I drank two bags of arak for dinner and thought of you, that night in the bar the equator ran through. The entire city was full of crooked telephone poles and overstuffed electrical boxes, black spiderwebs of wires just waiting to blow. We were always falling in love back then. You vomited in your hammock and then gathered the fabric in your arms and ran into the ocean to wash everything clean. When I found you the hammock was lost, and the sea sparkled like the northern lights. But I guess that couldn’t have happened in the city.

The price of copper has never been higher

The scrapyard tastes like silver. The sky keeps falling down. Nails against my shoulder from an endless rain of sunlight, tightening my skin into a cracked desert floor, dividing me into dusty districts like a city map, its color distinct against a blue sky. I like throwing fragments of metal into the pile of twisted aluminum limbs. Half-remembered, half-destroyed shadows of things. It clunks and plunks, as it changes direction, falling into the twisted abyss like a planko chip, holding its breath with every turn, hoping to find fortune. When I’m feeling well, I pretend I’m a miner. I play old folk songs about mountains while my hammer bites through soft dry wall, ripping away jagged pieces like flesh from a red, shimmering carcass, leaving a deep silence after the torrent of plaster falls like sand through a rain stick. The hollow houses of crashed suburbs stare back at me. There is something beautiful about how we replenish ourselves. A rain cycle of commerce, or purpose, or something. An eternity of creation and tearing down and starting over and giving up and believing and believing and trying to believe so you don’t drown while ricocheting wildly into the dark.