beginning_with_two_out_of_three_words raze in_another_life, underwater, we were pinnipeds pinned to the ocean floor. you would have found the fossils of our former selves curled into togetherness, attempting to hold hands, our fingers fused as part of some strange prank enacted by the pitiless process of evolution. as terrestrial beings, we lack the grace of the marine mammals we almost were once. it's so much simpler to hold each other with these brittle bodies that carry us home. 251224 ... ovenbird we_hold_each_other white_stars against a howling sky our light took a lifetime to make its way here hydrogen minds reaching through time to find the rift where space gives way and we smolder and we flare and we fall 260115 ... ovenbird my snowlight_and_sun, Winter will soon loosen its grip and I find that I don't want to traverse the dark without you for the rest of my days. You are mist-made frost inlaid with silver. You are a gold-flecked shimmer just below the river’s surface. You are the crust of sweet meringue on a March morning that I inadvertently fall through, my feet finding the moss that melts pockets in the snow with its verdant heat. You are the water borne song of candle ice. You are everything that glints in the gloaming and all the light that gathers on the edge of tomorrow. Your name is the music of snowflakes melting on my tongue. There is no dawn without you. your forever_love, bird_before_the_sun 260201 ... ovenbird whispering_to_you after_our_bodies stop time your fingers skimming the braille of my spine your name becomes air becomes breath becomes sigh 260223 ... ovenbird whatever_happens i_was_a_dream_of_myself and i, the dreamer, eyes closed against the day’s fullest light, refuse to wake (or can’t be roused) and so i urge myself into fractured time settling into what is almost real and almost mine 260330 ... raze starving pelican, let me feed you the warmth of my words until your bipartite belly is swollen with all i feel for the wonder that is you. we can live on language if its bedrock is weathered by what wearies us into the deep well of each other's eyes. 260422 ... raze if_you_read_this catalogue_of_wonder, i hope you'll find a moment on its pages that speaks to you the way only memory can when you hold it like a borrowed breath between the bones at the base of your lungs. 260611 ... ovenbird soul_shards casting_a_single_shadow we close around the last of what means what matters what moults On their wedding day they danced to Peter Paul and Mary: “Do you believe in something that you’ve never seen before?” They said “we do, we do” and continued to believe long enough to let out the line of the rest of their days. I have forgotten the precarious art of believing. we gather now in the name of the feather, the song, and the hounded spirit we are one step away from dissolution we are one forever away from faith our shared shadow is long where it flees from the setting sun 260701 ... e_o_i this_is_the_plan upon_waking: after eating, put the poster for the humour-writing workshop together and send the "online sessions report" plans are not poetic unless you plan them to be or not to be 260713 ... ovenbird perfect_love_comes_softly_if_at_all as_ravens_greet_the_morning love like a diamond tail fanned against the lifting dark gloss black ruff at the throat the startling croak of a wind carried call. perfect_love_comes_softly_if_at_all. 260718 ... ovenbird i_want_nights where_the_wild_things_are. If I’m going to be sent to bed with my stomach empty and hunger chewing at my guts I want to find a boat waiting for me that will take me far away from here. I want to land on the shore of a place out of time where no one can find me. I want firefly nights where hearts become drums and we are danced by the world, our bodies twirled and stirred by something outside our control. I want to lose myself to firelight and meet the feral beasts I’ve worked so hard to keep docile and tame. I want to see their teeth. In the most recent picture I have of you you’re smiling a smile that transforms your face into something so open and free. I could have lived forever in that moment where joy cracked us open and I saw you lit from within. We danced, didn’t we? To all the music that can’t be heard. When I was called home for supper I didn’t want to go. 260807 ... ovenbird true_love_waits, bloodlit and broken, for an answer. It asks to be allowed, and there have been so many years of dismal disappointments, so many disasters of desire. Strangeness asks to be met with an echoing strangeness so it can begin to believe it is not wrong, but precious to someone. Desirable. You cannot make yourself desirable, though you try. You’ve worn a winter coat with nothing but a lick of lace beneath because this is what people do in the wild. This is the ritual you’ve been taught to enact. Desire– you must call it forth, foster it, be its object. Be normal be normal be normal. And what you wanted was so small as to be almost nothing. What you wanted was less, not more. What you wanted was quiet and strange and of course you would never find it, but the question kept slipping out, the what if? The maybe. Because there can’t be an answer without a question. There are no stupid questions. Though there are definitely wrong answers. So many wrong answers. You dared to ask the question one more time. Now everything is strange and you hope it will get stranger. 260921 what's it to you? who go blather from