dear _,
                         i can't imagine.
no way to believe i
  could sweep you off your
                                                       feet.
you don't want me.
but i think i have to
ask anyway. try.

i hardly know you. and
i'm scared to try anymore.
                    i have
                    a wine-stained
                    mattress headache
                                            hell.
ways to look at this place
           that would make you
           ache and shake and hurt....
it's hard to want to
share or shed that.

i ask for the chance to lose.

                                              give me
          cold and shivering; i'll
               give you what's left.

spinach,
baby arugula,
alfalfa sprouts
typos, misspellings,
guns, gods, lies, news,
jokes.
mushrooms, sauté
suite suit
suits
you well.
you are well.

i am no more lonely, but physically alone.
or yeah, maybe just that much more lonely.
i hate work. not equally, but differently.
i love music, because it's all i have and
my life depends on it. get me through this!


me?
i crave
***.
connection, even without ***.
love.
or apathy.
i'm not sure where to go, what do do....

25 in 17 days.
i thought growing up made sense.

i want love to do
more than whisper,
but right now it is
more than shy.
and i want anger to
**** this blank page
like the best make-up
*** i've never had.

i don't think i will
survive long at this
rate.
my bones hold my
heart hostage, and
my veins are filled
with clear, sweet
poison, and lust.
sometimes it's all
i need.
sometimes i want to
give in, give up,
sell all my junk,
wander the streets
like the bravest
raving lunatic.
wild wide-eyed
******, soapboxed
symphonies of
sin.
the problem is,
i don't know my
own gospel, i have
no clear message.
just blood that
hates needles and
a head that loves
hands.

Two evenings together;
there are large chunks
of conversation that I
will never remember
because we were both
******.

You told me a couple
stories that were hard
to hear, and even
harder to look you in
the eyes after hearing.
And those were the good
stories.

You were vague, but I
used my imagination to
fill in the gaps with
grace.


I shied away from your
glances. I forced myself
to look away from your
****. You did have nice
ones, though.

You let me kiss you, you
kissed back. I pulled
away, silenced, finally
begging your eyes to meet
mine. You kept them closed,
or when you opened them you
let them dart, keeping a
peeping tom from seeing
into your windows.

Maybe you had worse stories
than I could ever invent.
Maybe you found someone else.
Maybe I was too *****, too
gentle...
Maybe you realized you were
too close to a madman.

I'll never know, and I'll
never ask for you back.

"7:45pm"

it means time and time again that everything is new,
that
magazubes conzine poetry, that spelling is relative.
it means the last kiss is the first kiss,
is the first **** worth this?
it means i am numb, i feel [or fall out] harder than you,
i think until i bleed,
i mumble the streets mid-morning, mid-slipping sleep;
the windows aren't lit, the neighbors still sleep.

it means last night was a quickly remedied failure,
fixed by mix of music and a can of aerosol aimed at
canvas, or a bottle turned inside out, or a typewriter
being taken advantage of.
it means the groping and loving before the fight was
genuine but an uphill, losing battle against ourselves.
it means i love you and hate myself for wanting to
release my grip upon your heart because then you would
be even more hurt and i would be even more alone.

the closer i am too you, the more it blurs. the more
i cannot focus, the more i feel like a locust that
is just greedy and hungry and can't give back what
i've taken from you. i want to give back.
but locusts travel in swarms and eat crops alive;
this is not how i learned to survive.
my heart begs for it to make sense, my head begs
for this **** to stop.

dear *******,
you're still fresh-cut flowers in my mind,
every addiction that i wound'nt leave behind.
you're still that razor-sharp wound
that won't heal quite right.
you're the face in other faces
i've been trying not to see.
lucky for me, you're nothing
but a distant memory.

it aches and burns
going through me.
every lyrics matching melody,
just as perfect as
december eighteenth;
quoted and whispered and
applied to each other
like journal entries, like
the future, like street
portraits.
naked bodies (a
caricature of the
bliss that turned to
****).

Using spirits to drown demons,
using every excuse in the book to avoid eyes in the mirror.
A surreal, septic,
self-destructive narcissicism.

I want to be saved or see the dream
played backwards,
like antichrist orchestra, like
outside-inned extraordinary,
exploring your heart, veins,
no more pains;
held to your face
by your guiding hands.

in love with it
even if it will never
be as good as now
ever again.
that's what stops me.

knowing now will never happen twice.
the decline is what kills me....
falling in love is ****** enough,
falling out of love
is a ******-suicide.

after each breakthrough,
a breakdown. it's not something
i'm proud of.

i know you. but we've never had a conversation.
not a single one.
i know your tastes in music,
i know you're a lucky man to have her.
i know it must be right.

i know you well enough to know
you can be trusted,
that you like beer,
that you and i would likely get along.

do you know me?
do you know how many times i've loved?
do you know how the illness eats,
how the waves drown, how the song sounds?
do you know this is about you?
you'll never read it,
so no, you don't.
the song drowns, the illness runs free and sick.
i'm so glad she has you, because that illness would eat her,
too.

don't worry, self.
You paint your own hell.
things in the heart best unfed,
unread,
unsaid.

don't worry,
health.
you will bleed ulcers and
insomnia will own your dreams,
screams,
and heart too.

even in dreams, perfection is
a mutation of your fantasy.
weather between legs, like a flash
flood through cotton,
or like blood and *** on
my sheets,
and liking it,
it's hard to tell dream
from memory.

you diagnose, i drown.
only my shell will be found
as i pollute my head will i recover
revoke
repeat.

lungs fill like gills gasping for
water, choke like humans do.
in my mind, i wrote six stories,
half
true, half fiction. and they sifted
and shifted and silenced themselves
into what is forgotten:
Caroline, you are my childrens song,
the dreams undreamed, the eyes of a
love i can't fake. you are the *****
blonde busts and the sugar-coated won'ts.
the enticing do's and Don'ts.
the icing on the cake and the
lather, rinse, repeat.

I am afraid of what I've made myself.
I am a Demon, you're beliefs 'n your loves
are enemies.
I've tried so hard to leave behind the
memories of what once was so
precious: emotion, wrathe, **** and wicked
lit like wicks and taken through
Daytona dark, the strip we marched, the
palms looked like black fireworks.
The ocean sang, the handclaps rang and waned,
and Bobby talked to me for hours. But
in the end I still felt alone, fell quiet,
the handclaps rang and waned.

he was your Door your floor for you to walk on.
lips to press against light making the day
look like night in comparison.
is
grammar all i get? does the wit *******
and leave my lungs like wind and puke?

music does it, four me.
1music
2what i already feel
3you
4everything else

i swell Crescendo a catalyst string cheese section
of bittersweetmorsel perferationperfection.
piercing me from the outside in and back again i'm
letting wounds heal the long way taking the scenic route
and enjoy the unfinished road.

thirty picturepoemsplay in my brain all at once- i
grab my butterfly net to try and capture as many
creatures
as
i can.

take my hand and
stroll be my leash and love
me taste good be
mine domestic life strife
rifles through my chest as i do my best
to keep it there.

dance, climb me like a tree-
stump.
rip my heart with sharp teeth.
Tth-thump. squish.

pick apart my embarrassments
like you'd pick apart my bones.
like vultures would.

i get to watch my own slow death,
you get to kiss me to death. slowly.
it's all the same.
distance suddenly makes sense.
Vivisection: i'm
sporadic neurotic
erratic ******, i'm
the smaller wheel on a tricycle, so
we get to go in circles.

i'm the fungus you can adopt!

cutting myself open, i can see what
makes me "frrrrrick."
heartache hopeful, i'm walking into
what i know are traps, what i know
is sure to hurt. i tell myself out-
loud, eyes closed, "THIS is gonna
hurt."

and i'm right. and i want more.
any and every relationship is more
and more masochism. it hurts more than
it ever heals, winds and wounds and
it musics me back to melody. hold me
hold me
hold me like
the car's gear shift, you only use me
sometimes.

don't tell me **** about
being okay.
that's not what i'm here for.
complacement is no more satisfying
than the empty -ness
and less interesting that loneliness;
thought it might be cheaper.

i can't expose these nerves in person.
even alcohol isn't enough to allow
myself to touch,
barely enough to talk.
i could blame it on not finding the
right person (and that probably is the
actual reason). but i am far more
likely to blame myself, or my surround-
ings. or

i would love to say
"this has to stop" but it doesn't have to.
and i believe it drains me of the drive,
and steals the better part of my breath
away.
i'm ready to end a paragraph, ending a
chapter. to enter a new home to make me
a bit more clear-headed, if not necessarily
more.


i get into a daze, almost convincing
me that i'm in love. but with who?
no face touches my memory, it's just
an anxious, empty wish. that there could b
e someone worth wanting.

unrequited love is my best relationship,

one-sided lie to myself, easy enough
to swallow whole. hope.

chest tightens reason to worry through isolation and fury,
i'm ill and attempted, lacking redemption and
owning not even myself today.

i imagine your heart as seen through a fool's eyes,
from afar, so i can't see all your scars.

it's always been tangled, from my head-to-
heart-to-head-again:
it's like, love, or lust,
my heart and heads may bust or break, or fake
the flow that we all long to know, that gorgeous glow
like the first snowfall and a slow fall or my
heart explodes.

"holy **** it feels like years"

i close my achey eyes and breathe your silhouette.
i smell you, your skin and shampoo and funk,
scents on my pillow become cents in a jar.
i am working hard tonight to become
a mess and alone.
the rain slowed and disappointed me, i hoped
to be washed away.
i hear airplanes and apostrophe,
short of breath and epiphany.
meat-hook and drag me like something worth catching
and carving.
you may eat me alive without ever knowing it.

nights i'm better.
night i can want you.
the days are months
blinding.
filling me with
aggravation.
afternoons are drunk
alone and angry.
night is alone too,
but wants you,
wants to write
'love' upon your
skin, kiss upon
the inches.

good morning, the
night dies fast.

deep down, they
remember.
bitterness, happiness,
they choose to be
quiet. i usually do
the same.

i can't say much has
changed. i'm no better,
no more, no catch.
i spew or sparkle;
look twice, you'll change
your point of view.

i starve on purpose,
hold back, hide, drink to
death, back.
hold back, you can't starve
me further, i can ****
myself.
love. now there's a ******
up guy.
me, i'm nothing like him.
never illogical, never excited,
never
mind.

there is no sun, no west,
no east.
night falls, morning comes like
clockwork.
but,
what does the night hide?
and what does morning make new?
i don't know when you wrote this
poem,
or if when you wrote it you
had a song-to-be in your head,
but i've rarely (at least not
first-hand) seen you wander into
the night; rather, you - much
like i often do - ignore possibilities
that another morning could bring,
and choose to grasp
a bottleneck as if you could choke
yesterday's throat. i would know -
i've blamed a lot of yesterdays.

and you went on to say that
rays of new sun beam onto
beauty that rests, as if it were
potential energy.
beauty is kinetic.
beauty does not rest. it is a killer,
and a victim, as it suckerpunches
you, and cowers. beauty is
not love, and love is not a victim,
and doesn't cower. those may be the
only differences, but i prefer to
think that love may have its
redeeming
qualities.

i don't care how sunny,
it doesn't shed light on a
**** thing, clears nothing up
anymore than night hides things.
but you were right:
"somewhere in time
something is lost"
but what did you lose that you
have not re-found and lost
again and re-found and....
there's no hiding, man.
we were always more alike than
most, and

i know what you're looking for -
love, for "things" to make
sense, for that orange-y
haze of childhood innocence (yes,
in my mind, childhood was orange,
carpeted floors, "playing house" (and
"doctor") and an electric *****
by the hallway that no one ever
played) to return, for the "real deal" -
whether in the form of a woman,
an oblivious grin, fruity drinks
on a remote sandy beach, or finding out
the hard way.

i'm finding things out the hard
way. i'm missing "things" (people,
smells, strangers (not to be confused
with the aforementioned 'people'), and
everything else i knew would
be missed. i'm realizing that
all the time in the world
doesn't necessarily mean an abundance of
inspiration. i do dishes wherever i go.

cage me in your chest;
i'm an anxious pet, a hungry dog.
let me chew on your bones,
**** on your carpet,
or air purifier.

trade me like a baseball card.
maybe i will be worth more to
someone else. i never wanted
it both ways, you wanted it every-
which-ways. every witch has her
way.

mess with the bull and you'll get
the horns,
look through my dresser, you'll
probably find ****.

i'm not proud of much, and i'm
certain of even less.
no beliefs to die for, no one
to live for, just suburban
survival, shelter from vultures.

you want pretty pictures?
i want ugly.
i don't mean i want to be ugly, or that
i want a woman which is ugly,
or that you are, or that i am.
i just want that sick sad truth
told by lies. it can only be told by lies.
because the truth is what you leave out;
those whispers, little insignificant
details you "forgot" to mention;
those colours and smells that burn the
back of your brain, the shapes and sizes and
faces and flavors you savor and
forget as a favor
to yourself. the truth is that we want the
best, but never give our best,
you can't accept embarrassment
so it's denial, which tastes somewhat
sweeter.
so does scotch from orkney.
i write a lot, and get tired of sharing
because you must get tired of reading
about a drunk punk with
motionless ideas
who questions himself
and you
and your motives
and the everything in between;
craving solidarity, craving connection,
craving clarity,
craving does nothing until you sleep it off,
wake the godfuck up, and open your skull
to today.
therefore i sleep some more,
you turn the page,
and the globe
fits like
a glove.

i suppose i deserve the warped subtlety
and loud silence, in a karma-sense; after all,
i've dished the same for a long time.

you want me to know, want me to guess,
lips zipped-closed mind-read wonder.
that doesn't get to exist without an end to the hope.
the hit ***** the fan, the bag's out of the cat,
the nail hammers the hammer this time.

what goes around goes around
and i never aimed to disappoint. but i will.

so choking down a medicine, sweeter than i deserve,
listening to songs that are sweeter than i deserve,
this comes honest and idiot, and i've been on both sides
of both arguments, and both sides of the cardiac,
and i've bled out and i've inhaled and i've
made an effort to say too much because
for so long, the silence has been too loud.

should i take the bitter medicine, instead.
a period gets to end the questions
we already know the answers to.

Please,
do me a favor:
stay out of my dreams.
i'll be beneath sheets, silent.
her love, even love for another
was a flood through my mind
at 2am.
you blend, spirit to spirit,
the ghost that i never catch.
the hope that lingers
like garlic breath.
swimming the lake,
it's slow-motion, it aches.
it's filled with possession,
money-drug manuscript
and reaching out without a grip.
she wears clothing, i wear internal
organs on my sleeve.
she wears lipstick, i wear warpaint.
i melt plastic for fun.
i melt into her, miles at a time.
she fancied displaying
naughty pictures of herself; hell,
i fancied looking at them.
angel wings, or what was imperfect
becoming so very perfect.
now she taunts me without
knowing it.
i wish for a long moment ago,
i wish i had closed my mouth
and made myself stay still.
i wish 50 weeks hadn't gone by.
i wish i had closed my eyes and
woken up in bed after a bad dream.
it was her halloween photograph,
that was the moment i sat in the
dark diningroom, staring, and
feeling my arteries bursting
through my sternum.
many nightmares later i am no longer
alone, and a noose in name is my
favorite false memory:
i electrocuted myself, three times
as a child.
once, using metal scissors,
i severed the cord of a radio
plugged into the wall. hurt like hell,
my arm went numb.

in the wrong place. i was released,
and ran like a fool back into
the trap.
i wanted to be trapped by
you. and NOW i have to force
myself to close my mouth
and stay still.
every day i stay away from you
is another ******* costume.

Reminded me of that night:
from the 30th floor of your eyes,
your tears lept, committing suicide.
I shaved my head in the hotel bedroom
while you curled up in the shower.
When I heard the water turn off,
the bathroom lights were off.

I tried to calculate how many bedsheets
I would need to make a noose.
Then I decided you weren't worth it.

Sitting on the floor with you, I
watched your hopes collapse. You blamed
me for what I did, and a little for what
I didn't do. What I did do was hurt you.
I slammed the back of my head into the
wall I was against, you elbowed me hard.
You sobbed and I felt weak and I was. Weak.
I just wanted it to be over, for you to
stop crying, for me to have an explanation
that could wash this mess away.

I'm still trying to piece together exactly
what I really meant to say.

Understand me: it's okay to be scared.
I need to buy baking soda and soap.
I have hope. It's good to be prepared.

I want my home to be clean, I want to
be trim and trimmed like a landscaped.
I want to be beautiful to you.

Hold me like you hold your breath,
behind your teeth and in your chest.
Exhale me, I'm nothing more than carbon
dioxide.

Underwhelm me: don't hold weave into my
fingers, don't basket me to bread.
Or please sweep me off worker's boots.

you and me?
yeah,
our kids will bathe in paint.
look like that colorful zebra
from the brand of gum that i can't
think of the name of
she'll have your ears and nose,
and lips if she's lucky. my eyes, my short legs
my love of spicy food.
he'll have my hair and nose,
and good teeth, eh, maybe.
he'll be born with your tattooes. maybe my dad's sense of humor.
grow taller than any of us, turn into a tree.
span the view of sky from the tips of you and me.
she'll cradle this planet's ashes in her hands,
and he'll hold our hearts together with duct tape.
she'll have your voice and my phrasing,
a hybrid accent in between.
this is the best hallucination i've ever seen.