aluminum pillow

i think you’re just a little too much weight for my back

and i’m not talking about those sleep-induced erections pressing upward against the toes or one of those cardboard nametags we used to separate the vanishing points from our drawings of the hallway

she didn’t say anything, i didn’t even know what “talk” meant, i received the same stream of syllables which spilled from the mouths of their slain believers

there was nothing i could distance between myself and the far end of the moonlight

on the couch she’d ask me, the vast crimson couch, Jesus, the pastor zigzagged back and forth, reaching up to visit me every few weekends through to the skin, a kind of door, a bottle with my next breath like steam

construction paper taping them firmly against the surface of my bare pages maybe the adults would believe i’d drawn it up on my forehead, then the wrists and the feet because feet were all safely inside

“i’ll wait out here” i knelt in front of the tip of the hill, scurried around the torso of a well-built man in yellow bikini briefs, could feel my pulse in the hospital but he paid more attention to others than he did to me, and i believed everything shaped like a big aluminum pillow

she saw wherever she looked an enormous silver belt buckle at the edges some of the white perms had been double-stacked, their spines even still the books sketching in the lines

then that’s interesting she chuckled, hospitalizations made you the way you are and whatever god does is fair because god had told you a question about something on the bedroom walls, now and throughout history, no cheating

we sat in small circles, you knew that the suicides were suppose to be you, part of this is faith, resentment had briefly touched down

i’d never seen a balloon stay aloft for so long