an x-ray

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my spine is swirling paintings
melting up my back and i
watch it bleed in the mirror and it's running
farther away than i will ever go —

the air is the color of the inside of a car filled
with helium and explosive silence
and your fingers are tiny drums
that are the line my toes rest on,the
line of the car mat that my spine is pooling into
with van gogh waves

we go nowhere
the car is filled with your towers and they waver
in the corners of my vision plastered to
the doors and growing over my head
like a canopy of tiptoes that barely brush grass and
fluttering fairy wings
the speedometer is 95 and i am blinkofaneye years old
and your foot is on the brake
we're sinking through
the quagmire of blindness
and molasses dirt and it's painting your towers —
have i mentioned that they're obelisks and
i'm searching for you at the top?
the car is small.

you are a sunflower in this blue car
that isn't really a car at all — it's a color,an emotion/
hazy mental picture and brain waves that hit
my bones and bounce back
going nowhere
to keep up with the rungs of the ladders crawling up
your towers like
my spine.

feathers are falling around me
and i am walking through them with a dress of
a dress of
of
a dress
of broken glass and it shimmers around me because stars aren't fire, they're
just
they're just
you
and in your hair all the time,how
am i supposed to know where they go?
my fingers clumsily assembling the puzzle
but i gave orion the little dipper
and the big dipper his belt
and go back,go back, go down
your towers
and put your feet on the ground,
bring your marigold head with you
because we don't need to leave anything else
with the stars

because i don't know what they look like.
i'm
blind
the room is dark am i
lying underneath a pile of wreckage
or am i the last human on earth?
i can still see my spine vangoghwaves (one term,
you can't add or subtract or even distribute because it's fully simplified —
my spine and the melted street lights are separate entities of the same origin, separated as much as possible
but still //
intertwined //
because my
spine
is liquid and cool
and floating away from me
my spine is many more things than i'll ever be and
i watch it go with its suitcase
of sunflower heads and ladders.)

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