Untitled – Isaac Garner

January 2, 2019

When I am to die scatter my ashes in a fishbowl in the attic. My astronaut’s helmet. Infinity feels like nothing until I am among the stars. Searching for something I have lost long ago in an interstellar burst. For nothing matters until the ceiling breaks through in my hovel exposing me to the cruel reality of a mayday world. Last legs. Albatross. In this life I am a giant. No. Much more. I am limitless. I am creation and death. No one is invincible. No one is immortal. These are the rules. Driving down the highway with my secrets the silence kills me. Arrows in her. The way a ghost becomes a part of you. Like an old jacket thrown into a dresser drawer. It still fits but it doesn’t feel like yours. Everyone’s story will be told. Chemicals inside of you cannot be destroyed anymore. Not since the universe started and not until it ends. On the day they find a place where stars are safe from everything except the brightness of the moon. Lay me there so that I may become what I end. No one is invincible. No one is immortal. You must follow these rules. Thank you for the memories as I’m heading out your cracked storm door. I’ll use them to hurt someone else soon enough. We’ll all be empty when we return home anyway. Stretch your skin across the mirror to fit what you love so much and let me know if it’s a good match. Write your name big and gold across the sky today and let the world know that you don’t care anymore for its a sin to dwell on the past. We were a meeting point of a mountain. In a valley. When our mountain collapses it will fill the valley into a dull flatland. Until that beautiful collapse we will live in harmony. Lioness grab me by the scruff of my neck for I am unfit. You cannot defeat the darkness. At the core of night I can’t imagine anything I’d rather not be than the light. And in this I mean literal darkness, literal light, and literal night. We are limitless. Darkness is an infinite container. Let me be absorbed by something I can become an agent of until we may both become malleable. Headlights in your parents driveway bobbing towards us until we have nothing but the beating of our hearts and the exuberance of our lungs left to guide us into heaven. After the hallway I stumble to my bed. Isn’t this fun? I feel safer now floating out into the precipice. I liked you like I liked the dark. Why would I aim to defeat it? It was there in the breathy way you said my name I learned to be whole. There. With the smell of leaves on my hands, blood in my mouth, and sweat on my brow that I truly became human. For such an experience cannot be mulled over like a read book on a shelf. My house is empty. My hands shake as I think. The buzz is light. It tickles my head like my hair tickles my spine. My name is safest in your mouth. How can we give in? And someday you too will feel exactly the same. A singular history will give way to a grand realization because this too shall pass. Whenever, if ever. Maybe that beautiful someday will help me in the long run. I will become more cognizant and productive. Perhaps it will destroy me and my muse with it. Let’s have one last hurrah for the unknown and move on for that’s all we can do. It’s a sin to dwell on the past.