I never dreamed of sitting in the meadows that blossom in your chest. I only allowed myself a small window to hope, to wish, to crave. I know now that it was big enough to climb through. We were meant to align, to feel the pull of each other, to recognize the thirst. We are lock and key. We are the lonesome trees, greeting lighting. We are the sound of jars taking their first breath after so long. We. It tastes so soft when I say it, falling out of my mouth like honey vanilla.

I thought about running my fingers through your hair a hundred times. I didn’t. I stayed exactly as I was. I was afraid of the electricity in my hands. I did not want to start a fire on accident. I did not want to mend the burns. I thought about resting my hand on your wrist. I didn’t. I did not want to wake you. I imagined lacing our fingers together as our body temperature dropped and our breathing slowed. I didn’t. I do not know how to sew very well. I was two heart beats away from lightly placing my leg over yours. I didn’t. I was afraid of wanting to wake up beside you too much.

My heart is a deck
with vein blue grip tape
and you are the wheels.
The trucks get looser
and looser
and before I know it
I am
swerving
across the white line,
dipping into love
like it’s a bike lane.
I cannot steer
with you
holding my hands.
The sun is a retired drum set
beating
on my shoulders,
your hands
land on my hips
with the sound of cymbals
murmuring.
Our melody is silent
banging,
the sweat
and the blood pressure,
the only remnants
of the music.

I had been flickering
for months

I became deaf
to my own white noise

I did not hear
the sizzling
of my own
dying candlelight

perplexed by
the burning
between my fingertips

I looked to see
miniscule carcinogens

I stopped feeling
the breeze
I could not calculate it
without equating it
to the swaying
of my flame

Without an internal inferno
it is cold in November

My hands are sore
from the friction
I have been causing
myself

with gratitude
I am burning again
my heart beating
with lovely combustion

“Do not peek under your armor,
Do not peek under your armor,
Do not peek under your armor.

You can feel the rushing of your rivers without them leaking through,
You can hear the thundering of the heart beats inside you above the murmuring of sickness.

Though your darkest parts may scream for a silver lining,
may beg incessantly to be let out,
do not let them breathe,
do not let them breathe,
do not let them breathe.

You are stronger than the snarls echoing in your ears.

Scream louder,
drown them out,
drown them out,
drown them out.”

I cannot always find my voice.

the soil in my soles
is wet
this time of year
the cracks
filled with summer sun
are mending

the seeds
of recovery
have been carefully
placed between
my veins

with every heart beat
I can feel the green
starting to make way
to the surface

it will be a long autumn
blooming with sobriety
nursing the chrysanthemums
adorning my lucidity

with lotus hands
I have surfaced
from the mud

I mistook the suffocation
for the ground loving me
it felt too good
to be true

it was thick with leaving
warm with sunlight
I was a junky
for the murky

tired of the cloudy
I am striving
to exist
in the space
next to godliness
diving into
clarity

a flowering proclamation
of a renaissance

I heard someone utter the words,
"Sober is just another word for thirsty."

And I did not believe her.

Until my throat started itching,
the moment I stopped the stitching
of molecules that altered me,
turned me around,
I had been treading backwards.
My body ached with vacancy,
my hands trembled with an appetite
that played the part of
of my hands on the wheel.

It is an agonizing contradiction,
to be weighed down by nothing,
every drop that plunged into my mouth,
every plume that escaped
the narrow path to my lungs
was a nail in my soles,
keeping me firm to the ground,
I became stagnant,
only dipping under the influence
to ask for what I thought
was needed assistance.

My temporarily
stainless bloodstream
bred venomous ideas
while the darkest parts of me quivered
with insatiable hunger,
and made a show of it
with my fluttering fingertips.

I had dreamt
on nearly every day of the week
with my eyes open,
of clawing my out of this
canyon of flesh
I had been trapped inside of,
the echoes of an empty heart
were enough
to keep me awake for days,
witnessing a continuum,
of sunset,
sunrise,
sunset,
sunrise,
yet the sky never brightened.

The darkness was addictive,
I became a junkie for the murky,
and I have been buried.

Underneath habits
that stifle me.

Smoke that leaves my lungs
no room
for new air.

There is an invisible layer
of soot
caked onto my skin
falling from my nights spent
drunk and unaware
of which direction
I was growing.

My odometer
slowly screams
for me to stop,
to reverse,
begin again.

My shower head works hard.
It tries to bathe me in rebirth.
The shampoo bottle whispers
with its shape,
asks me to sing again.
Why did I stop singing?

Because I no longer enjoyed the sound of my voice.
I stopped believing in it.
Drenched in half truths
and uncut delusions,
my tongue was poison.

I had denied the beautiful methods
of me.
And employed the ugly.
I gave a managerial promotions
to the mean
the spitting mad
and the angry
slices of my heart.

But I will dig through
these concrete slabs
of toxic routines.

And I will take back my beauty
and revive my love.
And become who I am,
climbing out of who I have been.

How do you get those boots on?
I’ve never seen any straps or laces or snaps or velcro.
When did you know you could fly?
Did you fall out of a tree when you were five and missed the ground?
How does Gravity feel about this?
Does that spandex itch?
Do you wear underwear under the spandex under your underwear?
Do those cuffs rub against your forearms?
How does it feel to a lift a car?
Like a tin can?
Like a paper bag?
Like a bucket of feathers?
What it is like to look eighty stories down and know that you are safe, that you can always save yourself?
Do you have a sixth or seventh sense?
Does it ever wake you in the night?
Do you experience the blistering heat and the chilling cold?
Do you feel it in your bones like I do?
Do you want to destroy your living room when someone has lied to you like I do?
Have you ever destroyed your living room when someone has lied to you?
Does your cape get stuck in the elevator doors?
Do you ever take the elevator?
Do you ever take the remote into the kitchen during a commercial break?
Can you stay on the couch and reach all the way to the counter?
Do you wear a mask?
Does it leave those red marks like my glasses do on my nose?
Do you want kill people who are dangerous and rotten in some places on the inside with one hand?
Does evil reside in you as well?

Only in retrospect
do I put together the pieces
that form the key
to my own sexuality.

The weeks when I bought
spearmint gum
and prayed to Jane Lynch
hoping that the girl who sat next to me
in third period Chemistry.
would ask me for a piece.
I didn't like spearmint
as much as I liked peppermint.
But she did.

The lunch breaks I spent
in the classroom
of my vertically rewarded
gloriously collar boned
and beautifully articulate
English teacher,
when I knew very well
that there was nothing wrong with my
essay.

The nights
when I was slide
as close as possible
to my best friend in sixth grade
thinking maybe she would turn over
and look at me
the same way I gazed
at the back of her head.

The smiles
that landed on my parent's faces
when I told them,
"I want to kiss girls
the way my friends want to kiss boys."

The hug
my best friend gave me
when I told him
I didn't want to join the
Gay Straight Alliance
because I didn't want people to think I was gay.

Because they would be right.

For a long time 
I thought that the smell 
of the elderly, 
"that old people smell",
was the smell of decay. 

A smell so honest, 
other fragrant molecules 
could not bear 
to intrude 
or cover it up.

I wonder when 
I will start to emit a scent 
that signifies my adventure 
turning to departure.

Will any of my atoms 
transform 
when I arrive 
to a new life? 

Will I fill the noses 
of strangers with 
rebirth? 

With beginning?

I sweep up the pieces.
Methodically
and with the same rhythm
of the feet that walked through me.

I gather them and I spread them out.

I touch
and feel
and remember
each piece
and who resided there.

I think about all of the places
they took them
and all that they must have seen.

And after studying and remembering
and maybe imagining
some of the history
since I last pulled out my needle and thread,

I write.
I stitch together things that were,
I thread through myself
the things that couldn’t be,
and I plunge
into everything
that will never exist.

I come out of it
shocked
and sober.

I draw my heart
into a Venn diagram of sorts
and try to keep experiences separate.

The lines fade after time.

Sometimes I awake
in the middle of the night
and must sort through everything again
because it has all slid to one side.
I walk carefully,
attempting to keep balance;
the road is not smooth.

I cry.
A lot.
I flush out the sadness
and fill myself
with emptiness instead.

But then I feel hollow
as if a breeze could pick me up
and I might blow away,
and I allow the thoughts of what was
to weigh my heart down
and anchor me;
this heaviness leads to
me ringing it out again.

Heartbreak is a vicious cycle
that tears me apart
but teaches me how put myself back together.

I also drink a lot of chai tea.
I warm myself from the inside out.
And do a lot of ballet.
Discipline my muscles.

The most excruciating part about heartbreak,
is that it is completely irrevocable.
I do not,
cannot,
remember
what it was like
to not feel this way.

How did I sit still
without my heart quivering
and making a show of it
with my trembling hands?
How did I smile
without feeling untrue
to the inner most workings of me?
Will there always be these cracks?

My heart begins to
quiver, and makes a show of
my trembling hands.

I never walk through a crowd without scanning for the back of your head.

Those beautiful black strands dancing just above your shoulders 
lure me to those blades 

that you sharpen during the day and you pull out at night. 

They threaten but their beckoning is stronger. 

When I squint hard enough, I can see the magnets in your hands. 

Your fingers brushed mine enough to configure my blood to run in your direction. 

Like the river you are everywhere.

Every branch sways with your rhythm. 

You have a beautiful act. And you never revealed all of your secrets.

I am here 
and you are here
but we have disappeared.

There were days when I was sure
that those jars in the back seat of your car
held the breathes I couldn’t take when I was with you.

Did you take them for me?

When I did breathe, it was deep and slow,
I wanted you to dive into the micro veins at the bottom of my lungs and stay in my mind.

For months your name and my pulse were made of the same letters.

For hours our hands were not our hands,
they were one warm sizzling popping absently ever present hand.

You told me you felt altered
and we were.

We birthed a new shade of infatuation when we swirled together.

Never before had such a hue been found in the spectrum,
but we were sure we had seen it before.

Some place,
some time.

Maybe we can paint a house that color together.

In a different place,
in a different time.

Regret
sounds like
knees hitting carpet
faster than words can travel
through a cellphone receiver.
It looks like
a black left fender
on a brown Honda accord.
It feels like
boulders placed
between your joints.
It does not leave
until you pick it out
from between your teeth.
It is a filling meal
that leaves you unsatisfied.

You must recalibrate your scale,
convert the value of moments gone.

Wipe your shield clean,
and watch the road ahead.

Asphalt under your tires
can fill you to new depths.

And you can be light again.

cotton swabs.

iodine.

needle.

deep breath in.

deep breath out.

deep breath in.

deep breath o—.

a spark lands on my nose.

smoldering and burning.

metal is hot and loving.

rebirth is a pyrexia.

Embers under my feet.
Burning into the earth’s memory.
Scorching my way to you.

I am a flood.

Take me to a desert.

Unleash me when you are facing a drought.

I am murky,
I can soak you through.

I am teeming,
I am sure I could be heard,
splashing into the hollows of you.

A tin can,
rasping for rain.

Creak to the tune,
of the dripping from my veins.

Pouring bubbling trickling.

Come here,
basin.

Empty me.

There are rockets in my feet.

Take me to a new level.

Where the oxygen falls into my lungs

and my blood slides through my circulatory system.

My love is unmelting ice under the sun.

Here I am.

Where are you?