Tyler Malone

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart/ The very next day, you threw it away…

Pile hot coals into your mouth before the same song eats at ears year around.
Muffle It’s only a season years on years as cozy music plays as comfortably
as someone routinely seen naked sings through walls, thankful a month ago
there’s no Thanksgiving music but complaining about horizon’s light pollution.

For now, haunted houses put on their best show & darkness has color
while society chews active charcoal to spit out “It’s that time of year.”

Pull music over bodies, get cozy & don’t you dare go go. It’s WHAM!AGEDDON!
Time to say I’m sorry, I can’t give more & someone else says I’m not sorry
you discovered less than I deserve while waiting for last Christmas to drop
from corporate coffee playlists where it shares no artifacts of Christmas.

No frankincense or Coke cheers; the only present is a mailed heart, broken again a year later to believe in optimism in ways only the broken do, all alone
as arch enemy archangel George Michael created last Christmas on his own—
a fake pianist, three lost fingers on a keyboard, the same way most of us love:

Tapping out trying to return unwrapped dead touch without a gift receipt.

“Last Christmas” put more than hot coals in mouths that you’ll never kiss:
George Michael’s royalties — 100% of a beaten heart, all of it! — fell from tabid skies
to bite into African famine while we starve ourselves on annual replayed heartache,
a globe of silence, trite songs about ourselves, as we feast on our own knuckles

& we can no longer pretend forgiveness and music aren’t the same discovery.

Hotel coffee creamer trails back to ignition,
before beachside dovetail into the Oregonian horror story.

Sea trees listen to lying minds and American radio repeats,
plumpest gulls in flight widen circles around rainbow kites
that will never cross oceans with that many strings attached
straight as lined paper above sand dollars and beached bright crab meat.

The end creeps in from spilling cinnamon oceanic reaching as palms
from a body that lost the long swim to shore, but it arrived anyway.

All the Pacific catches on fire and everyone leaves seaside hotels for a dip.
Elderly Southerners drag sleep apnea machines in trenches as children stop
on crystal smoked gold sand to write out the name of a burning stranger
they’ll first love before rising swell flames claim misspelled indiscretions
spelled out before the inferno takes those fingers swimming out to parents
who already lost touch and found fire more profound than any will to live.

Waves rushing beachfront whistle with established desperation.
I don’t think there’s anything softer. I traveled here, and so did the tide.

Nightscape beach mutt howls as low moon extinguishes flames on water
and sheets of skin unroll in as kites join sandcastles without hands
to never tease them again.

Flames take names written but never loved.

This isn’t how people died on the Oregon Trail
but death adjusts to our quality of life.

Seaweed feathers from afternoon bird suicides at sea layered in driftwood spell
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY
and I know no one can leave that for me on any beach, so this has to be the end.

Home in a toothpaste splash mirror, a smile starts on
a seasoned face while listing out who to leave
a year behind, one name over and over, over one card

alongside planted gifts under trees grown to shrivel while housing
color-toned cannonballs, dying as a rootless pine homestead hazard
by a window to emaciate as a half-breathed grandparent remembers
they’re withering light in reverse over and over.

Fetishize what strangers open, not much is darker
than memory. But there’s a you to love in the dark.

Cranberry blood boxes explode in a raging gift, setting
fire to ornament sap, blaze to dry nettles. Say it’s an angel.
Say don’t be afraid, it’s good news with one name over and over
on every box filled with bones of dogs seen alive but they never die.

Wet, violent kisses fetch your neck, bone on bone, over and over.

Goddamn walls have ears, bar tables have heard us all say
as others ordained as bartenders clean for us, sit and exist
to trace prints on glass as air fills their sequence in patterns
we hope others don’t call our personality.

We’re circles fit in circles on circles. Same table, same mess.

Dip tongues into etches on your palms, say no one’s ever been here before.
But there are cuts and a dried drink eyes, both looking and listening
to dates when she orders beer and he orders a dirty martini,
two goddamn words that don’t go together—martini/dirty,
filthy/nachos, proud/cop, moldy/toothbrush, broken/cookies, dead/dog.

Those daters, looking at their table, ask, “Can you clean this up?!”

Inches above ground, we demand comfort but that doesn’t mean clean.
With where our bodies have been, we need acidic volcanic bleach
so wood smells of hospital tools, splinters as scalpels for elbows.

Lips to lips, sips between bites, how many times has I hate my life,
I love you, or I hate that I love you been echoed in glass held up
to faces with no dimples to kiss as the best has already been said.

Except others have been here, that’s a messy comfortable necessity.

Hell is filled with denial and there will be no new comforts
from our world, our circle growing sand and water. Our table.
Our us at the tip of a knife carving initials into moments
as we hold nothing but drinks and bones.

But there can be more. Take a seat.

See others have sat here before, and maybe they’ll be back
to share differences between a hand and the knife and the words
left behind on a table grown from earth’s dirt
to hold a single moment for as long as it’s dead.

Water park parking lots aren’t for church buses,
they’re dried urban gardens for starved grackles.
Clouds split sun same as children who flushed themselves
clean with water slide enemas.

No laughter’s missed, it’s the loss of the loss of humiliation.

Red eyed burdens, we hope to carry sunburns again,
slide tubes to inhale waves and rise to see spotted blue sky.

Who knew without water white clouds could be apocalyptic.

What a way to start and end wet in the sun’s teeth shaking bodies:
Suits not stuck to skin of no girls not swimming just not to be seen,
no overweight boys in white tees hoping to never not be invisible.

Children aren’t allowed to be anything but alone.

It’s not how many kids have drowned, it’s those who lost opportunity
of diving in and floating up dead to be dragged across asphalt
brightened by smudgy church bus windshield sun reflection prayers.

Think of all this and ask forgiveness.

Summer! Please come back!

We won’t be better but we’ll be different. We’ll be desperate
to see constellations with chlorine eyes, what came and went.
Every inch of skin drips, lungs deflate, eyes sting
to see life at the bottom of this,
speaking in bubbles that if we live happy for much longer,
we’ll die down here.

With no goddamn words, thank God baby Jesus won’t come this year.
Wise folk don’t travel, the North Star is at war with all bodies
sick of holding our prophecies because we dared to drag them down to us.
Now what the hell can we believe in? No stars, only wars.

We heard rumors of starlit wars and viruses, but neither was born in movie theaters
for a Christmastime miracle of militarized nostalgia on a giant screen.
The last movie too many saw in a butter-slick seat was Star Wars
trapping all our lives in sneeze wakes, sequels, phone text crawls.

All needed to be saved from sin but every moment was disappointment,
pressing a straw over tongues, not sharing a sentence even though
next year we’d never see a stranger’s set of spontaneous teeth.
All air in-between us was toxic but we’re all box office poison’s grandchildren.

Our world’s made art out of killing aliens, but other people?
They kill everything.
We’ve known this but now it’s all we know. And you’ll kill them too.
We used to just kill lights for stars caught in humankind’s last frame.

Stars pulse and hiss, don’t speak, but we give them stories.

Last Christmas, in a galaxy far, far away, something went outside in snowfall,
closed all its eyes to see how snow tastes, if it could be different far, far away
as seasons shift, colors drain from a savior’s lips dead to the taste of a virus
from others standing under a solo sun and feeling the force of their own dead.

Now in our universe, we see so much but not past this moment.
Seasons will come and go but stars won’t, neither will wars,
and none of us will live to count them all as we look ahead
to live funerals on tiny computer screens while stars war with
the deepest night finding us a million years from now, far, far away.