I want you to want me unrequitedly.
I want you to see me in your morning cereal and in each sidewalk crack and in the ink of every headline,
while I am blind.
I want you to hear me in the songs on the radio and in the pounding of the raindrops and the birds chirping for the summer sunrise,
while I take out my hearing aid.
I want you to remember the name of my favorite poet and the way my hair falls over my eyes when I'm tired and the rage I have inside of me that come with thunderstorms,
while I only remember the stars.
I want you to feel naked and alive and cut open and brimmed with acid tears,
while I am clothed and dead and made of granite.
I want you to feel about me the joys of the world and the heightened feeling of love and the way you've never felt about anyone else before,
while I feel nothing.
I want you to want me
Unrequitedly,
So hurt me with your tears,
I'll bathe in them.

One man
can really change the world,
even if it's just by dying.
One man
can really lead thousands
if he kneels down and prays hard enough.
One man
can influence his pale demons
to lay down their pitch forks,
and also to pick them up.
One man
is just a man
is just a father
just a husband
just a preacher
just a speaker
just a man.
And does he truly want to be that
one man
that can really change the world,
even if it's just by dying?

I woke up and craved a foreign touch.
Foreign, forbidden, unforgettable.
Blue eyes that cut through diamonds
and the ribs of a skeleton.
Blue and orange and electric shades of fluorescent lights
and accidentally sitting cross-legged and delusional in the passenger seat.
I craved a touch I didn't know and didn't want,
and felt the peculiarity fill me like tar,
and I realized sometimes it's addicting to cut hearts open just to watch them bleed for you.

I kept a picture of you
above my bed for a long time.
I don't know why I left it there
for so long after you had left-
maybe it was out of hope that you would come back,
or out of the blind faith that you had never really left.
But it stayed and gathered dust and waited.
Waited for a day it thought would come,
the day when you reentered and found joy in its presence.
This picture saw me water
my bedspread every night for months,
hoping that would bring back old flowers that had died in the winter's cold.
This picture saw me hold a fragile piece of
lined paper in my hands
as if the words would revive some dead corpse buried deep
in the hard dirt.
This picture saw me look out my window and
gaze across the dead sea,
wishing to see floating pieces that could be put back together.
But when flowers die there's no coming back.
And corpses always stay cold.
And the dead sea has that name for a reason,
its pieces shrivel up.
So this picture,
it saw it all-
the cold months, the dreadful months, the months of repair and repentance, the months of sunshine and hope-
and for a while it held onto pathetic moments that seemed optimistic.
But pictures are amoral and hold no bias.
It was not fooled by faux-kindness and false hope,
unlike I,
and begged to be taken down.
Every time I walked into my dungeon it moped and wailed, but I was deaf.
Until one day, you ripped off my ears and forced me to hear.
So I took out the picture
and dropped it in the fire,
the death it had been begging for.

"Talk to me
in poetry"
he said,
so I whispered
nothingness
through the quiet cold air
breathless
for he was my silent prayer
and I
just a pattern
in the chaos

In another life, I was born a painter.
Gliding colors over canvas to imitate emotion.
Stepping back and marveling at the impressionism or the modernism or the realism of what I just created.
And people could look and gawk
and give gracious complements.

In another life, I was born a dancer.
Helplessly allowing melodies to transfuse my blood and move my limbs the way ocean waves move water.
Elegance in my bones, loveliness in my tendons, beauty in my ligaments.
Boys would leap toward me
and I would jeté toward them or grand jeté away from them.

In another life, I was born a singer.
A voice of gold and diamonds
that people love to eat
and bathe in.
Like summer sunlight in the springtime,
snow on December 25th.
Things people love to experience.

But, in this life, I was born a writer
so I live with what I must.
And I'll paint with my words-
give them color and life and realism, with just a hint of impressionism.
And I'll make my words dance-
across white pages, dressed in black, the smell of sweat and blood soaked within their skin.
And I'll make my words sing-
sing the ballad of my heart and the ballad of my mind and, maybe, even the ballad of the world.

Words are not inadequacy,
even in a world of painters, dancers, and singers.

I woke up to grey today.
It's windy and bitter and stale.
And I feel light as an anorexic feather
and heavy as a binge eating stone.

The sun used to shine in September and October.
It would spread a warm feeling across my back,
a nice break from the fresh, sharp fall air.
The sun doesn't shine much in the month of November.

The sun doesn't shine and I wish you were gone.
You hold me in your warmth and I wish you were gone.
You trace the contours of my face and I feel the trembling of your heart
and I wish you were gone.
I'm writing this poem and you're asleep in your room and I wish you were gone.

Because you make me bleed by trying to heal me
and the blood drips like tears on letters returned to sender.
A stained wedding dress infects my mind and suddenly
I have the urge to rip it to shreds, only to stitch it back together again.
(The internal conflict between staring into eternity or evaluating glass).

I hold your hand and I touch your lips and I tell you I'm glad that you're here
but I wish you were gone.