Spark Plug, 2025

I am changing the spark plugs in my car,

white horse of errands and radio static mixed with rough idle.

My pants ripped across the thigh,

a scrape with no bleed,

our semi-healed suburban myth -

wrists aching, grease staining nails.

Denso! The irony. Japan, the factory father!

I pull the plug, charred black like his letters never sent,

engine misfiring like the Sunday calls that never came.

He made these - thirty years, molten metal, the math of disappearance.

He gave me socket wrenches, oil changes,

but not the language of keeping, only of leaving -

so I write new vowels in the air: stay, witness, soften.

My hands know bolts, but not how to say “you’re right.”

Fixing less than problems made.

Isn’t it damn poetic?

That the part that ignites combustion

the tiny prophet of power

burnt out, old, useless -

comes from the man who couldn’t hold flame

and now I remove it gently like an apology

and thread in a new one, bright, unlit.

I strike a match in the engine,

not to burn it down

but to go

further.

Crooked Prophet in a Borrowed Robe, 2025

Better words of my love drowned in kitchen sink water,

dripping down the porcelain mouth like tired apologies,

beat by beat by beat,

as we ache in the timbre of drying towels and cracked soap.

You - coyote-eyed and chipped nail polish - howled beneath the weight

of unanswered questions,

hurling forks at silence, breaking through the wall of our domestic theater -

I said “I love you” like a tired actor forgetting his lines.

The home became a pilgrimage of slammed doors

and the refrigerator light,

always holy, always humming,

witness to our empty midnight gospels of bread and cheap wine.

We wore each other’s grief like winter coats in August,

sweating through sorrow, too proud to strip down,

too hungry for something -

more salt, more fire, more something.

But love, O love,

that crooked prophet in a borrowed robe,

came limping back from the junkyard of our intentions,

waving a half-burned letter and a bag of oranges.

And somehow, without sense or syntax,

we sat in the ruins and peeled fruit.

Your laughter - rare, sudden, stupid, divine -

tasted like mercy.

We didn’t make sense,

but neither does the moon,

and yet it keeps pulling the ocean home.

If you,

capable of love,

find its difficulties to do so overwhelming,

I shall make it my mission to ease your burden.

At the cost of myself,

with suppressed internal truth that this will combust like a blown fuse,

a matter of time,

a matter of pain,

I began my unlearning,

a matter of time,

until the day soon I'll choose,

to burden the weight,

of a matter of pain.

Lost Control Again, 2025

I was alone in the gallery when the lights surrendered,

a small electrical death rattle,

breaker box coughing its last mechanical prayer,

while Joy Division leaked from the speakers

like prophecy disguised as bassline.

I mistook it for ambience.

I mistake most warnings for ambience.

Ian Curtis repeating himself in the dark,

as if saying it again

and again

could staple the body back to the voltage,

and then the room complied.

Blackout.

The kind of black that swallows the architecture of your hands.

The kind that remembers you are sixteen feet in the air balanced on a rented machine.

I laughed.

Or something inside me did.

The waveform on Unknown Pleasures,

those skewed white ribs,

always looked like a heartbeat refusing its coffin.

That night the coffin sparked.

The pulse jumped species.

Electricity became instruction.

I build space for other people’s revelations,

hang their ghosts at eye level fifty eight point five to center,

calculate lumens like a minor god of surfaces

and the grid said enough.

The space failed me on purpose.

A small divine interruption.

A reminder that if I won’t turn it off

it will turn itself off.

So I kept the charred altar.

Cradled the dead panel like a saint’s bone.

Painted the tremor back into it.

Inserted Ian into the wound.

Made the failure function again.

To mark the hour the lights went out.

To honor the overload.

To lose control

and call it power.