I wasn't the first person to leave
It's not novel
People have been doing it for decades
It has set precedents
None of which resemble accountability
I'm sorry
I carry that accountability up the Delaware on my back to you
It's all I can do
We're not holding the smoking guns
But we were all in some ways machines and therefore in some ways weapons
You told me the only way I could save us from the searchlights
Was to throw our bottles into the river
The shards of shattered trust
Worked their way back through the past
To the scratches on my knees
And the chimes on the ceiling
This is a story hollow as my bones
There's no honor in flying alone
Nobody hears their own mistakes
When the smokestack with the trigger clumsy hands
Pushed me from the branches
And swallowed me into his labyrinth
I realized that he called himself chimney
Called himself safety
Called himself home
Burning everything for fuel under hundred year old logic
That said

"Darling,
Build me a mirror I want to subsist off your adaptation
Of what you call sunshine and I call data
You are warm like the blushing sighs of the ocean at night
I am warm like an overheating computer
If I crash against you enough times
We will make sparks"

It's what they taught him in school
He wanted to be like the movies
He wanted to try cattle brand
He wanted to try stick and poke
I said

"Let me go,
I don't want a tattoo from you
I have a hundred tattoos
My tattoos name is spit
My tattoos name is anchor
My tattoos name is glass elevator
Your name is hunger
I didn't make you
Just because I didn't know how to unravel your anger
Doesn't make me responsible
I am irresponsible
I am a tattoo
I am a hundred
I am because a glass elevator
I am rings of flowers
Spinning into thread on a ferris wheel of
Burning the old songs that kicked in my apron
When I was contracted by birth to sew myself into your bones
You lost a needle in my clothes
And I was so scared to move
I asked everyone I'd ever met to leave the room
While I stripped every last feather from my body to find it
I was alone
When you tried to burn me in the hearth of you but choked on my glasses
I carried you up the Delaware because
All the grownups said
I'd have to rescue everyone if I want to be a real boy
And I'd have to be a real boy
To rescue myself
Don't tell me what the river is made of
Don't ask me where the birds go when it's raining
They come here
To the bridge in my chest
It's the only memory I have left
They huddle together under the storm like
They are not trying to spit fire
They are not trying to catch lightning
They are just trying to stay alive
They are a hundred
They are irresponsible
They are a tattoo
They are because a glass elevator
Shatters
Like a shopping cart torn open by it's own antlers
And someone else's cigarette powderkeg flick
I am go away
I am shut the door
I am done"