It all pours overhead,
a crashing wave of guilt and hungering lust.

Innards feel like fingers pruning,
sitting at the bottom of the shower for too long,
plugging the drain, watching the water pool.

Rose colored glasses, those aren’t for you.
Cerilian blue sadness, how I weep in mine.

Grab hold of yourself,
see what they’ve all seen so clearly.

What they’ve all said before,
does feeling have a memory?

Does that feeling ever like to sneak up on memory
and hold it by the neck
with a knife
and a threat.

Puncture it,
fill it up with blood.

Latching onto it’s victim,
creating crimes of agonizing nostalgia.

The kind that wakes you up at night
but then turns on you,
keeps you pressing the snooze button,
the same things you want to forget, you want to remember-
your thoughts,
a cruel crime of forever.

The fog spread like peach jam
overtop the overpasses.

Deep inhalations
held in our tired palms
as we watched exit signs
pass by
and marked each mile
we could no longer turn back
further.

A colony of sparkling starlets
lay a glow on the dashboard.

A small slip of fumbling thumbs  
or perhaps a trip
in the wrong direction
sent me backwards
a tipsy turn
or subconscious fear of directions.

But soon,
she found herself trapped
between diluted affections
and a car headed fast
in but one direction.

I am
water droplets,
molecules
splitting down
the center.

Dividing and
dissolving.

Salt enhanced
rain water,
rolling down
hot skinned
cheek bones.

I think kissing
is the easiest way
to get to know someone.

The insides of their lips have hold
of every word they have ever said,
or ever will say.

And doesn’t that say more
than a hand shake or a hug?

The pressing of my heart
to yours
is more like feeling
of the weight
you surround in me.

Your thoughts
on the other hand,
can’t be held
by my hand at all.

The insincerity of a hand
can only be told
by the doors it holds open
and doors it slams shut.

Senior year is about telling everyone what you will do after you graduate and go off into the real world.
The real world is about i’m not really sure but i think i have to start paying taxes.
Paying taxes is about paying your dues in the place you live, which might be called your home.
Home is about the place you feel most comfortable.
Comfortable isn’t about growing.
Comfortable is about the deep breathe you take after getting good news.
Good news is about the funny youtube videos that your’ chronically optimistic friend tags you in on Facebook.
Facebook is about having a place to post the things you hope other will people care about in your life.
Life is about trying to love more than you hate.
Hate is about a bad taste in your mouth and tears running down yours cheeks.
Hate is about breaking dishes for no reason.
Love is about washing dishes for no reason.
Love is about a fluttering butterfly that could have left but chooses to stay.
Staying is about not leaving.
Leaving is about change.
Change is about going to your favorite restaurant and ordering something different.
Change is about your heart beating twice as fast.
Change is about a pursuit of happiness.
Happiness is about laughing when you least expect to.

Its funny,
you calling me
“good girl.”

Hands running
down my thighs
and
your lips
leaving saliva,
sticky little white lies.

My back arched
and my eyes closed,
pretending.

I’m this
******
up
feminist.

But tell me,
what to do
when you assume
because we kiss
your hands
have any place
on MY body.

And tell me how,
you wish
for me
to be
your'
“good girl”
when you have yet
to ask
if it’s okay
that you are already
sticking your fingers
inside of me.

She was *******
a pair
of earphones,

in hopes that
feelings
could be drowned out

by some

beating
on her ear drums,

or some

smacking
of her thighs.

A soft bellow blooms
where your hand meets my skin.

Every nerve ending awakened,
like the striking of a match.

An unripe fruit,
not yet sweet
on my lips caress.

Beneath an unmarked grave,
here I will stay.

With each step back you take,
I gather more dirt upon my chest.

Hushed tones,
a song still unwritten.

Your affection,
a dripping faucet
I so thirstily lick from.

Heart shaped locket
that I shall never open.

Our relationship sitting in a car
of a parking lot,
my body tangled in your arms.

Around the country
and your grandfather’s house.

It would rain
a lot
and so,
we would drive.

You used to look away
from the road
and into my eyes.

A cup of coffee
and a squeeze of my thighs.

I used to love you so much,
and now I just drive.

I woke up to cold cotton sheets
twisted around my drunk worn body.

Stomach to mattress
my head,
a mess in a pillow.

Silently spoon feeding my affections
like the smoke that was falling from the tip
of your desires,

or cigarette.

French kissing your worst fears
became the adrenaline rush of a first date.

But still,
thankful that you came,
and went.

Icing, no cake to cover,
too sweet,
a rich lick of lust
and a cardboard heart underneath.

Oil spills into skies,
my thoughts polluted by your dizzy daydream
of color and lies.

I always drove backwards,
a hill and a midnight parking lot.

The condensation creeping up on us,
gazes drifting from street lights to soaked eyelashes,
every last part of you wants to go back.

But,

it’s like how you get into heaven,
you must die first.

i forget to take my contacts out at night but i bet the shape of your collarbones is probably still the same
crooked half moons covered in cream

just like the type of gum you chew

spearmint

and the cigarettes you don’t smoke

marlboro reds

and i bet you still swear too much

****

i forgot that forgetting is hard and that tears on cotton t-shirts will always remind me of the first time i was going to have to start forgetting about you

yet i still forget to put my clothes in the dryer

it’s hard to forget the taste of kraft macaroni and cheese on your lips at my parents house
 
or sinking into buttery leather in a dark room
planting kisses on the smooth insides of your elbow

i forgot that forgetting is hard but i think that if the trees can shed their leaves then it must be possible for you to shed me

how come forgetting you has become so hard when i can so easily forget my dad’s birthday or my brothers favorite band

i forgot that forgetting is hard when you brushed back my hair with the same hand that wrote me a sweet symphony of words worth remembering

and ******* if i never realized that forgetting would be so hard when
i was looking at the pink duct tape around the side mirror of your car while you were deciding whether or not to first kiss me.

I keep count
of the words
you haven’t said.

You sent
two pictures,
instead.

For your silence,
is not close
to deceiving.

And I shall not rely
on all those
mixed messages,
and how
they’ve left
me feeling.

I’d like to say
good-bye,
but now,
that sounds
less
then appealing.

you and i are like
the words on this paper

they’re all unfinished
sentences with no periods

a boom-a-rang
with out a room

you and i are
sinking fast

bottom of the ocean
bottom of the bottle

you wrote the book
skipped the last chapter

silent but fast

sequel

a girl gone sad,

haven’t you had enough
of being had?

It was with a boy, a parking lot, and a hill.

mid-afternoon, mid-september, on a sunday.

stammering words,
holding eyes,
catching breathes

at the top,
around the dead grassed corner,
between two trees,
we sat and watched the leaves wander down.

gripping gazes and stealing secrets,
fields of flowers in my head growing
with the ideas of you.

wide open spaces,
they have this funny way of making the one you fall in love with
seem like eternal possibility,
like the ***** of the hill to the parking lot
was full of more then potential.

teasing through purple flip phones
and lips bitten to hide myself from smirking at the screen
meant parents asking questions,
where have you been?

we forged gaps of time between impossible increments,
just to kiss each other,
in a car parked in a parking lot
at the bottom of a hill,
on a late night in november,
where each and every latent october leaf had already all fallen
in love,
with you.