“When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.” —Stars, “Your Ex-Lover is Dead”

(Put your shoes on. Where are you going, and why are you going there? There is will when it comes to the coming and going. A voluntary compulsion. Perhaps this autotomy is mandatory, for if we do not choose our traveling then it no longer is travel. It is then a forced migration.)

Dear diary, you are completely worthless.
For the past fifteen years I’ve filled yr pages
I’ve hurt my hand trying to describe
Each & every joy & trauma to you.
In intricate detail.
These endless notebooks that compromise yr soul,
Yellowed paper, faded graphite, bleeding ink
A lifetime of stories, of people, of places
All of which don’t matter.
Or rather, will be forgotten.
In spite of my best efforts throughout the years,
Why didn’t you just tell me?

Hello, I’m glad I wasn’t late today. And then we begin again, again.
For the day cannot break without me paying the usual toll:
The willpower required to unearth myself from these cotton bedsheets,
The mechanics laying underneath my arm to lift this red plastic toothbrush,
The thousands of hours of labour that allowed this cereal to go
from rural farmfields to this urban decay.
The quaint characteristics of trying to figure out today’s newspaper
with ten-thousand serif words spilling bad news that’s yet to come.

It begins with the apples, first light then heavy—
budding greens slowly becoming hardened reds.
Drooping the busy branches of many autumn trees
who have yellowed and oranged their way towards asleep.

(A sunset will never look as good in a photograph as it does in real life. And yet, a sunset will never stop being photographed by people — until it stops setting. That’s how I go about writing her.)