You have plastered my eyelids open 

Non contact tonometry

Force fed with gavage until I no longer awake 

at the smell of burning grease.

Burrowed into retinas like a small flaming needle,

each flick a savage hunger

so passionate and blistering that only once I am vomiting do I cease 

to consume.

Caress my cerebrum in your arms

Mold my synapses together

Treading your fingers down the lurid beige sides until it is to your liking,

Until I can no longer remember what color the sky is

just before it folds into night.

So I stop smelling petrichor and go to sleep wondering if I will ever feel 

the rain caress my fingertips

Like it did before they were stained with the sickly sweet fluid of my self doubt.

Keep me craving more.

So that I trail off when I open my mouth to speak because I simply lost interest in my own self expression

So that each broken human runs to your arms so quickly they fail to notice the knife behind your back

So that every shattered soul bleeds green into your pockets.

Without it I am

Nothing

Without it I am

Alone

Without it I am

And I have been made to deny that.

It's summertime in Montana, and because we ranch, because animals and plants and the weather are on their own time, I sit around and wait a lot. There's a book in front of me, on the dining room table, and I would have read to the end of the chapter, but something makes me lay it down, open, in favor of writing. I'm not really sure how much time I have; all I know is once ten o'clock comes, I'll be walking across the creek and into the stack yard--the place where we wrap the bales of hay in air-tight plastic and lay them down in long rows, like blown up tobacco rolls in bright white.

There's a boy out there I'm not so sure about. His hands--what I've seen of them--soft around a can of Coors Banquet, the tips of his fingers plush, prints pushing into the skin of my knuckles when he reaches across me--make me a little uncomfortable. I work longer hours, use those appendages more, and yet the softness of him is the same as mine. Why am I soft? But he makes my brother happy, and that makes me happy--my brother needs friends, and I need the reassurance that he has them. 

More waiting; I watch them walk down the path to the gate after lunchtime, sunlight on their necks, making my brother's tan skin shine. I watch his friend run, lumbering a little across the dusty yard. The cat swings her head around and peers at me with something akin to confusion, but that's not it--she's a little deaf, a lot blind, or vice versa, maybe--she's lost in thought. The kind of thought anyone can have when all of their vital senses are dulled, the kind of lethargy that comes from being far underwater or in a small, locked room. 

Two hours before I go to work, at the restaurant on the west side of town. 

More waiting.

I should shower, probably. Wait until the cold water runs hot. Step out, wait until the air dries my hair. Find the clothes I need, wait until I have to leave.

Light spills through the window onto the table, and I let my head fall forward onto my forearms, cheek cooled by the plastic table cover.

Or maybe, today, someone can wait for me.

The door hums as it opens

I oiled it so it wouldn't creak on my entrance

no automated voice announces me

or where I am

or when

I built this ship of spare parts I collected

from people I knew

It took me years to make and more years in cryo to get here

cold

unfeeling

This planet I am on now is lush

and I will keep it that way

park my ship in a cave and let moss grow in the cracks

in the metal that was 

cold

unfeeling

I left behind

ruined minds

cold

unfeeling

skyscrapers that ripped clouds

houses that sat on trees

I searched the milky way for a beacon

but we had a curtain drawn across the stars

I left coordinates

but they'll have to know how to build their ships to get to me

they must listen

and be of good heart

warm

full of feeling.