Holiday For a Friend

Holiday
For a Friend

The conduits and symbols of love will fill
and empty in step with the wink of our tongue;
neurons will burst open as your spinal cord twists
into a tesla coil, the walls of the temple shrine

unraveling. There will be only words, spoken
in morse code, in dots and dashes, images
and photoreels, taste and sound underwhelming
in their edict, their muddled signs and prophesy.

We will hawk for Oligarchs, haunt cylindrical thought
for fun; euthanize desire with the static emanating
from our fingertips; taste, then spit up, philosophy
and beliefs, live like nothing, like nothing at all.

And I will hang your hopes like a cowbell
about my neck, the sun growing jealous
of our foreheads & we will forget who we are
or why it mattered. Let the temper of this air

leave you breathless, the sentence of this moment become
your nothingness. Do not deal in prayer
or petals of ash, dim when compared
to their counterparts. Embrace only the moon

drawing static along the bottom curve of my iris,
the blood siphoned from beneath our tongue, the mercury
marking what’s left, fossilized points and lines.
Abandon the fuel, the reality that tethers you,

unclothe, delineate, go mad, magnify the architecture
of empty space, my palmprint; set loose the funnel
of crows in your throat, let my carcass of iron torture
your compass needle, and you will have your holiday.


-Austin Moyer