Letter 080624 telling machines
Dear Ethan Hawke
Sister found the first of the human heads. She had been to practice sleepwalking from one abandoned building to the previous two. She thought it was a bird’s nest. A boy’s head, blue and quiet. She got her brother’s bike and brought the head home. She gave it a pillow then went to keep her brother awake. She took her brother next day to the spot, and the head had returned. Her brother carried it this time home and she pushed the bike beside him. Her brother was a mover of things underwater. Sadder, more serious. It took both of them to process the suddenness of knowing that the head had not in fact returned, but that instead there were two heads. Matching, in their home, on the same pillow. The third day of this insomnia thieved them again to the spot and gave them another matching head. Sister was glad for the bike, for the way it spaced her hands. From here, the story makes the sister old and the brother older. There is a day that someone beats them to the spot, and it’s the day of the last head. The head of god. But they don’t believe.
Letter 080524
Dear Ethan Hawke
It’s hard to miss god. Believe me. I accepted something into my body. I drank until I could drink even more. My palms turned blue in a black psalm. My wrist looked for its plural in a mirror known for its blood-colored echoes. Forgiveness has two left hands. Broken by faith.
fuck me I miss
loneliness
Letter 080424
Dear Ethan Hawke
Suicide is the only way to let people know you want to kill yourself. God is just an alien with a tattoo. I say things so finally that my body stops hating me and my soul starts. The angel of clickbait says fucker fucker vote. I don’t want to die. But there has been some criticism.
Letter 080224 longer than sleep
Dear Ethan Hawke
It has always been the end of the world. Language says this and only this. Time was born in the middle of god. I have carried children from one car to another. Practicing and alive.
Letter 080124 scenography
Dear Ethan Hawke
My eyes eat themselves in a blood-filled apple. Doomscrolling is the face of god. Rain, pain, pine. The cops let him say mom.
Letter 073124
Dear Ethan Hawke
Pain aches for its desperate star. I crack a tick like an egg on the skull of this dead pup. I’d eat, but light hurts my teeth. My fastball when I had it was described as melancholy on paper. In person, a fat spider losing blood in a cheekbone. No matter. I am going to burn my poems while watching The Phenom. A tank will roll toward my birth and god will take forever to put on clothes. Ethan they are using sound to count bullets. Jesus got three days with his twin.
Letter 073024 I don’t think my brothers
Dear Ethan Hawke
God moves my brain but not before it turns the bread in my stomach black. I call it sleep, but it’s not sleep. My wife is tired and my cousins are sad. The lossless, also, grieve. I call it the present. I tell my sons that all slasher movies are about homesickness. They find a sweetspot in the volume. A ghost hears an angel. I underwater tell my daughter there is hope. Men and lonely men make the same loneliness twice. The science is silent.
Letter 072924 end machine
Dear Ethan Hawke
Adam, though soundproof, could not fathom the silence of Eve. I don’t brush my teeth when I’m sad. My son is a bitemark that thinks I’m a word.
kingsoftrain 