I am falling
No
I am about to fall

There are instructions in my hand
something about landing safely
Something about floating
Not flying

I do not know who has decided this for me
There are tools in my hands
I am expected to build a kite in the freefall I think

Somone pushes me
If I land safely then she will love me
this is dream truth

I am a kite now
I let my string drag along the surface of the earth

Reel me in as I pass by
Or don't

I don't care
I can't fly
But I can't fall anymore either

I feel like a big man
in a straight jacket
who has just learned
despite all his strength
he'll never break the restraints

I'm not saying
you should ever give up

Just relax when you can
Don't fight so hard
You'll be free soon enough

It is  what loneliness feels like on late nights
and I find myself drunk texting poetry

I want to make your ears time capsules
for the things I have to say

Sometimes I settle for your phone

I want to wake up
in the morning
with a message from you

A picture of your smile
Your smile
Your stupid beautiful smile

It is all I ever really wanted anyway

The posted photo
made on somones computer
looked like loneliness
dressed as wisdom
and begged you to believe the fallacy

It said
Don't fall in love when you're lonely
fall in love when you're ready

You will never learn how love works
if you save it

give it away
get hurt
give it away again

Love takes practice

And even if finding my love
looks like the crackhead's
needle in the haystack

Know that my love isn't dirty
You won't get sick from my love
It is just that my love has been used

And that is all that love ever wanted anyway
was to be used

It is not some Star Wars action figure
Meant to never be opened
to maintain value

Imagine Luke Skywalker's
Anger at you upon tasting fresh air
Thinking
Have you seriously been keeping this from me?

Have you seriously been keeping this from me?

My love is pure
Been refined
by the filter of bodies
and coming back to me

My love is top shelf
but it is always free

The doorknob to the closet
full of my skeletons is made of
funny-bone

But there are days
when honesty tugs a little too roughly and
I realize this isn't all that funny now
Is it?

As a writer
You learn presentation is key
In the bend of language
I create this man
I want you to believe me to be

And so I tell you these stories
like they are jokes
Like they are no big deal

Like the first time I got drunk
was with my friend's mom
who was a known child molester
She tried to order us porn
But couldn't work the cable

Or my friends and I used to travel our city
via the water drainage system
Near the mall
We got lost once
and while standing
in ankle high water
we saw at least 20 homeless people
sleeping on pallets
We called that place Bum City
We had to get directions back out

There's a possibilty I have been an accessory to murder
Around the time in my life when I learned
How not to dwell

My body was a wishbone
My father meant to break
But every beating
left me the better half

I find so much of it funny

My brother's most recent suicide attempt
My mother's
My father's Alzheimer's

He once chased after our mailman
naked
Asking him about some letter
from some woman
I have never met before

I find laughter
and beauty
in the bend of language

When this chest becomes a broken radiator
and my heart grows cold
The metaphor mutates Campfire

Come here
I am lonely
and I have a story to tell you

I wouldn't call it a fear
of falling in love

But how this feels is like
A child's drawing of infinity
But he tells you
Actually it is two people kissing

And I want to cut the image in half
so I can talk in circles
and filibuster the time
I should be using to kiss you

Kissing does not mean you are falling in love
But it is a start

In the same way I sleep best with a body against me
But I have a twin bed

Sex is not falling in love
But it often ends
with you falling asleep  
against me

And from there
what do we fall into?
and
Who does the catching?

After the sweat cools on your now
dirty neck
it changes the scent of your skin

I want to place my mouth there
And taste you like the ocean
Filtered through a cloud

I get so mad at the sky
Pulling itself inward overhead
I swear that it is a breathing thing

Then rain comes
And it's breath is now laughter

It pleases the sky to keep us here
inside

But I am still a child
Man sized
Holding you

I suggest we walk in the rain

It is not cold
But we are getting wet

The rain changes the scent of your skin

Your neck is still a little dirty
I want to put my mouth there

Sometimes the mornings are restless
and the hangover is heavy
and the heart is heavy

And everything goes quiet
The body goes quiet
Maybe the sheets rustle
But the body is quiet
In silent prayer

This headache a revival
Back into existence

She has awaken already
She does not even leave her scent behind

I am thankful
Mostly for the quiet
As the sun illuminates the blinds
Like the beginning of light
exploding through a wall

And I am thankful
That no matter where these nights take me
Every morning
feels like home

His hat says
I Remember Pearl Harbor
He asks me to put the wine in the basket
Hanging behind his motorized wheelchair

He smells a little like pee
His sweatpants have dark stains all over
Like a leapord who has gone old and grey

"They can put a motor on one
of these things
but they can't make them comfortable"

"When you're an old man like me
maybe yours will fly
but I bet your ass will still fall asleep all the time"

I tell him
that when I am old
I hope they make wheelchairs
that feel like a father's shoulders

He shakes his head after I say that and laughs
"That sounds like it might be nice
But i couldn't say I know what that feels like"

Me neither
I tell him

"I am leaving to see your mother"
He tells me

He hums
But it is not music

The doctor says people in end stage COPD
make noises like that

I hope that when I am old
my body will uncontrollably make music too

"Dad," I say

"Hmm"

"You know you fucked up at being a dad right?"

"I know" hmm hmmm hmmm hmm

"I'm proud of you anyways though"

"What for?"

" Time I guess. I couldnt say. Can you tell me just once that you love me?"

"Will it change anything if I do?" Hmmm hmmm hmmm

"No"

"I'm going to see your mother."

"You've gotten so tall"
she says

"It's only been a few months" I tell her
She looks directly into my mouth as I speak
Her face is different
Hair
Even the way she smells
I can't place it
but it is ugly

"You're taller"

"You drank yourself blind. I haven't changed"

"You know you were a c-section
Cut out like a tumor?"

"I know"

I remind myself
that forgiveness
and being cordial
and finding peace
can often be different things

She holds her elbows out
and my father helps lower her to the couch

"I'm coming home soon," she says
"You're going to have your mother back."

I am leaving soon I tell her
and I am never coming back

Sue tells me that there used to be
a railroad
a few streets down

The shopping center was just a big dirt feild

"When we were kids"
she says
"We would put our hands to the windows sometimes
You'll never know what that feels like"

I imagine her bones
As railroad tracks
No one traces the topagraphy of her body anymore

Her hands shake as
She picks up
her saucer and tea cup
I hear a train coming

This poetry is bad art now
As fragile and as tasteless as a communion wafer
In the mouth of a murderer

I thought this poetry would make you love me
But your body stands like a marble statue
In a Stendhall suicide exhibit

Looking away is easy

Maybe I gave my heart away to easily
That flattery is bad manners
When everyone is a subject

Forgive me
For I have sinned poetically
Lived solely for the stories I want to tell later

So that my chest might be a campfire
And voice the gravel trail that slips beneath your feet
You listen to maintain balance

So yeah
I fucked up
I feel fucked up

Like poster board
Covered in Jackson Pollock blood spatter
And called an "Homage to the Murder of Failure"

It's lazy

This language is lazy

My heart is lazy
Pulsing with the same low voltage of the moon

I don't care anymore

I don't care

After reading my first love poem
And misunderstanding my first love story
Romanticizing your bleak hope
I knew I was fucked

And in trying to explain this
I am left feeling like a schizophrenic Walt Whitman
Scrawling poems about your beauty

As if love is something you can actually seek outside yourself
While inside you there are walls
Mine fields
Trapdoors leading to deadfalls
All to keep you from it

I want to stand at the entrance to myself
And be baptized in my own sweat
From the work of this deconstruction

There is heaven and peace in the rubble
Blueprints for a home without safeguards
A simple place you can rest your head at night
This chest

Love is not something you seek
But you tell that to these hands
This pen
This mouth
Tell these eyes without losing my gaze
That it is not hiding somewhere behind you

It is not
I know this now
I know that love is this
Your heart is this
Your body is this

A spare room in a small house
You had intented on living alone in

And everytime someone comes to your door
Know it is always nicer inside
And be grateful that someone came to it
Let them in with your smile
say
"I have been expecting you"
Then let them leave if that is what they must do
They might

Just remember to be grateful for their presence
Everyone who sought your door
Sought it because there is something good there
There is always you

I want to write this poem
Like a band-aid
For a knuckle scrape the stucco frustration

The adrenalin shiver
Maybe you look at your fingertips
And know you'll never be a doctor

A poem that finds you peaceful

We go to exrtremes so often
This middle ground has leeway
Move around in it

There are things I need to say
Halfwritten letters
Stacked inside a gut-heavy dumbwaiter
And if I ever found the courage to pull the rope
I might choke

This poetry gets scared sometimes
I know you get scared sometimes
There are memories you re-live
Like a masochistic dvr
Or a photo album labeled
"Let's not go back to this place"

I want there to be poems in response to this

A literary anitbiotic
For the sickness we create

There is a reason chemistry makes use of the alphabet

And I find myself searching for the language
Like a child holding his head up to the rain with his mouth open
And wondering why he never feels a single drop touch his tongue
Like a scientists he decides that the water evaporates because of the heat in his breath
So he holds it

It has taken me years to finally understand
You don't need to hold your breath
But you do need to be still
And the reason you think the rain never touches your tongue
Is because your tongue is already wet

And you
Every moment of you
Already is poetry

I have traveled back in time
Or maybe I have dreamt this place in 1987

A bank
My mother a teller
In the middle of a divorce
Or maybe the divorce hasn’t happened yet

My father walks in
He is a security guard
College dropout
Ex-marine
Loves fighting as much as I do

She never went to college
Maybe she thinks he is mysterious
He prevents a robbery
Beats a man in the parking lot

He flirts with her over a coffee break
And this is the part where everything goes fuzzy
Because I could never see my father as a charming man

I want to tell them to stop
If love at first sight
Cared enough to have foresight too
They’d stop

Maybe they were nice people once
If we all knew what we’d one day become
We could fix things

I want to tell them that they will have children
I want to tell them about the things that they will do to these children
And then to themselves
And back and forth and back and forth
Like a pendulum made of knives and soft things

But I do not exist in this place in 1987
And even if I did

I want to live
I want to live

It hasn’t been as cold lately
The train of shopping carts rattles
Vibrate my forearms
Especially as I cross the yellow speed bumps on the ground

The city put those there to trip up skateboarders
And to confuse babies in strollers

Old women on walkers avoid them

There are things designed to make us slower
More careful

I think about my last poetry reading while filling the coolers
And don’t ask myself why when alone
I take myself to the places that make me most happy

My cashier asks me when he can go home

You do everything slower when
You keep yourself company
When you’re lonely
You’re not savoring moments
You just taking your time
Because you can
I set the alarms and lock the doors
The moon has been out for a while
I will go home and write

Everyone is asleep except for me
I crack open a few beers
Open the window so the moon can keep me company

Forever I thought there was something wrong with me
But I have learned
Like the moon
Some things will only shine in the nighttime
Not everything looks like gold under the sunlight

Writing poetry is a lonely thing
It looks you square in the eyes, smiling
It asks you to write alone
Even in company
When writing poetry
You are alone

And even lonelier still
It asks you
To go inside of yourself
There are things there you must find

There is a man inside my body
A boy
And they look just like me
They each hold letters
I do not know what they say
I must find them

Poetry is love you want
Is someone you want to be in love with
Poetry is a child tugging at the pant-leg of someone
You want to be in love with

Poetry is the coffee stain on long sleeve shirts
Right over the wrist
Your mother called them chocolate stains
Never blood

Poetry is my drunk fingertip stumble
My white-boy wasted
My way of loving less awkward

Poetry is someone telling you they love your poetry
Poetry is loving someone for loving your poetry
Poetry is also kissing that person

There is a man
In mirrors he might be me
We have a letter we want to give to you
But they read like a feeling

We spend hours in solitude
Finding ways to step into the daylight

Poetry is convincing you
You need a reason to step into the daylight

There are words etched into your teeth
All white
No bling
The letters change with the shape of your mouth

Smile more often
Even when you don’t want to

Poetry is trying to teach you to speak peace
with the words in your smile
To people you don’t want to speak peace to

Poetry is an angry father
Is neck bruises from belt loops
Is rug-burn from being dragged across the floor

Poetry does not love you
It simply asks you
To find space inside of yourself
And then it wants you to give it to someone else

There are people inside of you
With stories

Writing poetry is a lonely thing
Giving it away
Until no one can be a thief to your soul

That too
Is poetry

I am a bear inside the church of bees
There are people in here I am in love with

They are covered in bees
They tell me that the bees hurt

I am hungry
The pastor tells everyone it is god’s gift to them
This sting

I want to hold you like honey
I have been eating daffodils
There is sunshine in my belly always

I am not afraid of the bees

The buzzing is loud
If you listen carefully it is god sending you a message through white noise
Listening for it is futile
You are in pain

I begin to pluck the bees from the bodies
Of the people I am in love with

Though I try to be gentle
I hurt them still

There is honey and blood on their skin
I want to lick both

Punch today in the face
She said

Today you will make a stranger happy because you can
Today is your day to be charming
Don’t waste it
I said

Just so you know
That wasn’t a sunset you saw
That was bruises on the face of the ending day

And I smile
Every time I think of you

Charming is a birthmark you just found out you had
You find you like its shape

Be charming like a birthmark
It makes people trust you
You can have oodles of charm
When you want to

It is summer
And the wind presses the thin fabric to your body

Every woman’s ass looks perfect in a sundress

You have been sweating
And the fabric sticks to you in the next breeze

In stillness you are a Greek statue
With wet folds of fabric outlining your frame

There are wrinkles in some places
And I think that you might look like this when you are old