Fragment 2015, in which I try to mimic the cadence of those around me

Now again, the cum of the poem.
I feel immaculate when the lights are off. I’m gone off the stage soon as the deposit clears.
I feel like Rimbaud when the phantasmagoria hits.
Smile pretty & leave my appetites in the drafts.
I lit a cigarette with Jess under the bisexual lights & we watched the visions roll by in silence. I
could sell this longing, could market this as the most divine heresy but I won’t. I’ll take six
hundred dollars and shut the fuck up forever. Somebody could build a museum of all the
things we ever called the morning birds outside their names.

I writhed around on the floor / acid-burned-and-blood-starved /
while they were picking through my notebooks, looking, I assume, for the
shadows of the afternoon sun.
I wasn’t as lucky as the birds that time, but I could always be luckier, stare out the
window a while.
Sometimes I forget they gave Union Station that halo of angelfire on purpose.
Everything out there was made to taunt us.

Navigating this place, its strung out psychogeography.
I watched your hands scrawl the message & lost the content. Worrying over
tendons, sinew, framerates. The glass fragments, broken under fist; a mosaic of
our cancelled friends, lovers breathless in undulating starlight. Peace lily, cat hair,
half- melted plastic.
Sometimes I forget & then
I have to wake up again anyway.

Tyler King is a non-binary poet from Dayton, Ohio. Their work has appeared in Pandemic Publications, Ghost Heart Literary Journal, The Louisville Review of Books, and other places.