Sounds of a shower ringing against your back like skylights.

I whisper to myself in the silence, a long cotton smile and a breath.

Pillows wreaking of evergreen tides and the taste of your tongue.

Mancala eyes rolling, reminiscing the best parts of my childhood.

Curls caressing me like question marks. I want nothing more than this.

Happiness is holding a hand that never has been held before.

Neon light peaking behind my eyelids, strange faces flashing in the night.

Handed me a triple shot of gasoline in a room full of mirrors.

Homemade pasta and a heaping side of unnecessary apologies.

Stay a little longer. Let’s wake up next to the clouds on my carpet.

Taking care of myself and I’d let you take the wheel without a license.

Ask me if I’m okay again. Go wash your hands again.

Tomorrow is never a promise. Hopefully this lasts past Saturday night.

I don’t even see.
They’re just words on a screen.
She wrote them, no seatbelt fastened.

Gray eyes and all
I love myself,
and my dark passenger.

She’s starting to
arrive at that destination
We never planned a trip for.  

I hope she’s not waiting at the gate.
The way I waited for you,
as you waited for me in that very room.

The words glaring and I see your face.
Touching you touching her touching me touching her.

If I met her mother would she
fatten me up respectfully? Leave it open for spring to come home?

How do I explain
the way you shut my closet door?
The one I was born and raised behind.

I being the poet,
You being the poem.
Amor Fatí, forever and ever, Amen.

Will she drown in
an ocean she wears to class everyday?
Will she still come over for dinner?

Maybe I stay silent.
“She’s not here and that’s okay.”
They’re right.

If you never ask you never know.
They never know unless you speak.
It’s just fire in an uncorked bottle.

Without jet fuel, I burn out eventually.
Don’t lift a finger,
I’ll let my body embrace the atmosphere.

Free falling.
Crash landing.
Into no one’s arms but my own.

Have you ever run so fast down a wave of asphalt that you feel your breath catch up to you from behind?

Smacking into your back like a riptide at noon, the ocean striking like you were out past her curfew.

In the movies they catapult themselves from the crest and into a sun kissed embrace, those prettier than I.

I’d like to think of you on that shoreline waiting for my feet to hit 55 before our ribcages collide. Unfortunately, I left my room and board up north.

Where the ocean coughs up sunrises for the mountains and the city sleeps off a perpetual hangover.

Years of smoking and not smoking and smoking and not smoking won’t allow me to chase those swells. My lungs will never be like hers.

Thus, I will run like the devil in the opposite direction. Away from every advance even when your face is permanently scarred into my arm.

No matter if I build Oprah’s million dollar sandcastle, in the end, my greatest work of art will be not falling in love with you.

But I wouldn’t mind a kiss goodbye.

I take two showers a day now.

Mainly because I’ve been sweating bullets and tar.

Cleansing lightning and your thick black ink out of my pores.

Vintage sweatshirts on the beach and a dining room sky.

A pair of haunting eyes going down the drain a little more each time.

I keep your silver close. I haven’t forgotten.  

I feel it cold against the bones in my neck, good memories tears and chills down my spine.

Soft kisses and a storm, wisteria tapping on your window. Whispering our secrets to the neighbors.

When our bodies melted into one against  purple plum thunder.

Letting go is like trying to sell a wool sweater in the summer.

I’ll always remember loving you no matter the weather.

I had a dream about her last night.

We were different but the same. Gray hairs, gray eyes, New scars, Old memories.

Weaving through a foreign castle, crumbling. Rollerskating on cobblestone floors. Rough surfaces yet smooth sailing.

She was wearing cherrywood lipstick.
Every single tattoo, concealed and forgotten. When she smiled the gap was bridged. Requiem for flaws that never existed.

An orange friend with white pants and golden eyes hovering. Laughing together, smiling together, making trouble. How it used to be.

Yes.

She was there too.
She wasn’t me.
I was okay with that.

I saw how they slow danced.
How they cared and loved.
A perfect human in my eyes had changed in someone else’s arms. I didn’t mind.

Yet, I couldn’t tell you if she was happy.
I want her to be. Did she know happiness with me? Is it a game of following the leader?

I won the race, and I still got the **** beaten out of me. Too fast, too slow, just right? **** prize money, I just want peace.

Poreless skin hitting stone harder than cayendo and I was not the one coming to the rescue. Standing by nevertheless.

Watching new lovers roll around in the grass from a window in a tower. Sill cracking yet intact. Being strong on my own despite the pain.

Making love to other women, and not loving other women. Moving at the pace of the sun. Emotions stitched into the moon.

Are we deceiving each other? Am I deceiving her? When the foundation caved the walls stood tall. Sturdy and ruined. Holding both, destruction and tolerance.

A playground for the curious, hopeless, and romantic. I’ll dance here for a while. This is still my home. Diminuendo into the darkness. I’ll rise again tomorrow.

Jesus Christ, clad in a T-shirt and blue jeans.
Still emotionally raw relying heavily on her sending agency.
the face of savagery and danger.
Twenty-two years broadly chronological, better than any other outsider.
The rain was coming down in buckets

between the savagery no ladder was needed.
contrasts, atheistic of search and rescue.
she who led the search party was invaluable.

I have broken the Summer of all good things I might have had.
attracting Someone, to stage a brief burial service
Many of these materials took shape,
from memory in the pouring rain.

Hold me closer tiny dancer.
Not too close!
I am liquid nitrogen on fire.

I’m still learning how to breathe
my own fumes.
High on my own supply.

Long aqua hairs
floating around in my favorite
swimming pool, sage green sheets.

Carnations dipped in her tender
could cut glass with precision.
Shattering what used to be my truth.

Her entire body under one of my arms,
I am weightless, and I weigh a ton.
She still carries me home.

Small moments like strings on a guitar.
I’ll sing to her, my worst damage has already been done.

Didn’t the tortoise win anyway?
Infatuation ****** the hare and left before sunrise.

Two bodies beaming
in the darkness.
Trying to make light.

She wants to air out my ***** laundry,
scrub the dishes,
cut tiny holes in my heart.

The best medicine
bursts in, unexpected,
Be mindful of addiction.

I was never a structural engineer, but I could pass for a knock off pyrotechnic.

I can tell you that

Even people that have never smoked can burn holes in your home.  

Their arrival,
is a patiently waiting for sale sign.  

Call me if you’re interested.

Their absence is heavier than the dust has been settled for years.

Its hard to remember
that you are made of that same ash.

Not like the kind in your mothers backyard, you’re the type to burn a bridge and run.

If you ever step foot in this town again
I will know.

I have been a skyscraper.

My entire life.
Taller than the other suburban girls.

Can you see me ablaze
from halfway across the world
hands releasing what they never used to hold.

A fire has never melted steel faster.

Who was I when you loved me?

She is molten in your neighbors driveway.

My elevator has been playing that song for
months.

Waiting.
walk in.
Press three.
Door close.

As you rose higher I began to fall.

Begging for your love was easier
Than begging for you to get out of my head

like that song.

So I’ll let you stay.

Walk into the lobby
and be greeted with a smile.

Cradle her home
Back to a city of witches and wonder
flying against the falling sky.

Staring at the earth 30,000 above
I hope she’s thinking of me.

Wings slicing through gray atmosphere.
Heart spinning at the speed of sound
I used to hold her here while she slept.

Safety in my absence,
Gravity our only enemy.
I succumb to the pressures of silence

Turbulence and tolerance.
It’ll all be over soon.
I descended leaving no mercy.

Of course, no one trusts a cargo plane
just like a beautiful woman
on the edge of sanity.

Leaving her stranded on the tarmac.
Divine is the departure of my natural disaster.

The one or one of many,
raindrops like beads on aerodynamic steel.
Her hierophant is missing in action.

A special type of hell,
wading in the chaos you create.
Expecting a savior other than yourself.

Not anymore. The clouds have parted.
Two breeds of fire burning brightly on their own.

Seat-backs and tray tables ready for another take off. Look up to the peach pit sky. Whisper my name out with a smile.