I wish I could sleep.
Days on end
an endless cycle
no waking at all.

Maybe when I'd wake up
the world would change
to something better
I'd be better.

I wish Rip Van Winkle
would give me advice
I can't seem to sleep
even if I try.

It makes me feel worse
the fact when I am awake
the people I love
are just asleep.

They are not conscious
While I am stuck alert
Not knowing why
I can't just sleep.

Sleeping for a long while
would be a gift to me
Not waking every few hours
like a newborn child.

If I did sleep for a time
I wonder what I'd miss
I fear I'd miss so much
Wake up and everything gone

I know it's strange
Unusually sad
I wish to sleep
But fear time passing

I hate waking
in the middle of the night
I hate sleeping
when I'd miss everything

The conundrum of it all
Fearing sleep yet need it
I must sleep.
Wish me luck.

I could cry making love to her, said he about me. He took me
through the countryside where he endured and at times, enjoyed
life as a child, met his father; surprisingly winsome and caring.
Showed me the clearing where dreams of wedding vows reside,
wildflowers and sunlight and the smell of the wind. Said he could
not wait to kiss me inside the threshold of his new house, could
not wait to make love to me on the new bed that he bought to
contain the exclusive bonds of our two bodies, he said time and
constancy would prove his devotion

I am here.
I am not going anywhere, said he to me.

I scanned my instincts and found incredulous peace, my own disbelief
was the only recognizable fear, and a reason NOT to be happy would
need to be birthed by ignorant spontaneous invention. I felt beautiful,
loved and secure, with laughter and poetry, singing and guitar,
tranquility and passion and rain on our first kiss, cooing Hey Jupiter.

Undone. My head is throbbing from smashing against the proverbial
windshield because he slammed on the brakes and slipped every
thing about me into reverse tragedy has taken his mother away and
sisters and brother look to the eldest for help his 3 year old daughter
has just returned from Maine.

Too- much- at- once, he gasped, I am drowning! Take my hand
love, you are not alone, I will sit beside you, I won’t say a word.

But he wanted nothing of me from me or for me because my sea
colored towels recently hung in his bathroom have been speaking
auditory hallucinations “She has come to steal your autonomy” and
he felt shame for this, after all it was he who asked me to put my
toothbrush in his cabinet. No need to over-complicate; he thought
he wanted a relationship, until he remembered all the things he
can’t stand about relationships and now my form represents all
the things that [and] he cannot stand, and the face in the mirror
said to him “Don’t listen to the towels, you coward! You are afraid
of letting her down. Just let her down now, get it over with and
then you can pretend that she never happened.”

He listened to the mirror and to the towels and declared,
I am here.
I am not going anywhere. Thus, he got rid of those goddamned
towels and the woman who brought them into his house. Life is
too hard to include you, said he to me, just accept it; this has
nothing to do with you.

Hey Jupiter, nothing’s been the same.

I lay my head down
On this uncomfortable couch
& try to find ways to make it
Through this last week.

Four months of sleepless nights
Has passed me by alongside
Two seasons but I swear
This year was different.

Its like the weather had no transition
It felt like just yesterday
That I held my chin to my chest
In efforts to keep out the Wisconsin snow

Now its the end of June
& the grass is green again
But I have this lingering feeling
That I have over stayed my welcome

I'll soon return to the valleys of California
Where she waits for me just like she has
For too damn long but she tells herself
One more week & I'll be home

I know I don't belong here
So I lay on this couch & try
To find ways to make it
Through this very last week...

Four months of sleepless nights
& a whole summer to make up for
All the days we spent apart

A whole summer to make up for
Every
Lonely
Week.

It’s a pitiful hilarity.

An early Sunday evening, a frantic phone call to a voice whom I’ve only met once, I think. We were chastising a mutual friend like the voice and I were two old pals, but I don’t think she knows my middle name, just that I feign being a good person, or rather, that what she sees is a good person.

Linnea.

We were talking about Linnea. About how she took the final step off of the pedestal we had all placed her on for so long. I saw her tumble down like her teardrops. She was well aware of her fall from our graces.

I knew I should’ve seen her plummet. But I didn’t. I saw a graceful descent. I saw finesse. I saw beauty.

I saw her levitate somewhere between the pedestal and the ground, and on days where I was feeling particularly vengeful, I wanted so desperately to see her streak towards the ground like a doomed meteor. I wanted to see her burst into flames as she came crashing to the Earth where the rest of us mortals live, far from the spot among the heavens to which we all assigned her.

On those days, I knew I wanted vengeance, but for what, I did not know.

I think it was for loving her.

No, it was for caring about her.

No... It was for loving the idea of her.

We both had major roles in our school musical. On the evening of the second performance, she gave all of the seniors tiny little cards in matching envelopes, like the cards you put in bouquets of flowers, that teenage sweethearts attempt to fill with novels, and old married couples just sign their name and “Love you.”

I didn’t open mine.

I think I wanted the contents to be something a bit more concise than an adolescent love letter and a bit more detailed than a 40 year old force of habit.

I wanted the card to be her. Everything that I wanted her to be. Everything that I wanted her to want to say to me.

I wanted her to be filled with giddy anticipation while writing my card as I am when I know I get to see her soon.

I keep the card in my wallet. Unopened, still in the envelope. I want to keep feeling that little twist in my stomach of anticipation every time I open it and I see the crinkled corners peeking out from behind the front pocket.

Writing about it now, I see how pathetic it is. How futile my conviction is every time I take the envelope out of my wallet and mull it over with my fingers, as if I am going to open it.

My wallet is my pier, the envelope my green light across the bay, and my legs and my mind are getting tired from playing Gatsby, waiting, hoping for a redemption of an imagined past.

It’s pretty funny actually.

This too is a pitiful kind of hilarity. The kind that makes my chest cavity quake as I slowly begin to roll my chuckles into one another, until I can no longer tell if my shoulders are shaking from laughter or light sobbing.

The punchline comes when I debate between grabbing the letter opener or the matches, but I was never one for timing, and I always place it back, neatly in the front pocket.

Sondheim said it well; this joke could use some clowns. Don’t bother, Linnea.

He’s already here.

O, the naivete of a flower to blossom.
Can't you tell they watched you bloom
just to cut you from the bottom?

Today I walked into Barnes and Noble to buy my summer reading book which just so happens to be super thick and it's 1930s science fiction (kill me now!) Anyways, while we're there, out of curiosity, I asked if they had any John Green books (because everywhere else, they're either sold out or on hold) and they did. The lady brought me to a table. A few of my friends had recommended his works. Scanning the table of books, unsure of what to chose, a guy walks up to me. He looks about my age, maybe a year or so older. He's pretty cute, which is quite the pleasant surprise because usually guys don't talk to me. He says, pointing to The Fault in Our Stars, "I couldn't help but kind of overhear you talking, but I read this and it was amazing." He points at Looking for Alaska. "My girlfriend read this... said it was pretty good." So I say thanks and something awkward like 'I'll have to check it out,' and get The Fault in Our Stars. This small gesture has restored my hope in our generation. The guys in my school are mostly arrogant airheads with no taste in music, in my opinion, anyway. In addition to this experience with a stranger, today, while at a shopping center, I saw a girl wearing a 5 Seconds of Summer shirt, as I had mine on, too. I complimented her and she smiled and said, "Thanks, you too." This small gesture has also restored my hope in our generation. Today I learned that not everyone sucks and that makes me really happy. I guess that if you put yourself out there, ever so slightly, in the right places, you might learn things or make new friends.  What if I'd talked to the girl about 5SOS? Or asked the guy about other books he's read? There are so many opportunities every single day to improve the quality of our lives and we pass them up, because they're things that are thought of as small, but can have huge impacts. I believe that if each and everyone of us tried, just a little bit, to talk to  strangers, the world would be a better place. Not everyone wants to hurt you. I'm not saying to invite some random person  into your house, but to talk to people with common interests, or compliment someone on their shirt. Little things like that, as they did to me, can make someone's day. I walk to my mom with a pile of books. She turns to me and says, "Since when did cute boys talk to you at bookstores?"

He wants me to shut up about before and after, he doesn’t
sleep anymore to throw off a balance
between now and then,
here and later, when it happened in regards to tonight. My mind
works as a clock of who we have become since:
my body only exists in the place of Our Great Divide.
Morning is just sheets of velvet upon a
lover’s breast, to be peeled, to reveal her strawberry scars.
Evening is when I feel her fists inside my skin as if
I am being penetrated by icebergs
and I cry, your cock hasn’t been the same since it happened.
The blood seems to get lost in the train-track
to your veins. In our divide,
I wonder if most of it was passed to her half of your heart
but that thought makes me so sad I remember I am mostly water
whereas there is simply the milk of her curves:
I have the talent
of turning myself inside out when I want to be dead.
She just curdles. I was once the same,
he wants me to shut up about before and after but at least I
can cry on anniversaries without needing a calendar or
rotting the post of my ex-boyfriend’s bed.

Considering the context
I'd say it has something to do with self-reflection
Self-realization
Or Orwellian Dystopias
I just can't decide which...

What is certain
Is that it's not about love

Perhaps a Eulogy
Sung in the Key of abstraction
Perhaps a snare of low cunning
Sprung on the unwary
Perhaps a dissonant reconstruction of post-modern  proletarianism
Or other such big words

But certainly
Not about love

No,
This poem
Is about the errant nature of nature
About pinning still fluttering butterflies to dry-wall
About scribbling half-drunk non-sense on the wall of a bathroom stall because it's the only way to keep yourself from screaming
This poem
Is about sleeping with the lights on
But it is not


About love