My legs are purple
where your frustration
curled its way around them,
greed of fleshy vines,
sore and sorry.
Lay alone out of necessity,
your arms around her,
my stomach heavy,
presented proof of
my inadequacies,
tell me I matter;
I'll lap it up
like sweet cream.
You hurt me better
than anything,
lies tying me
to your bedposts,
how lucky you are
that I'd rather be
wanted than loved.
Feb 26, 2017
Feb 26, 2017 at 9:07 PM UTC
There’s something so sweet
in the way you cradle
your cigarettes, the moon’s face,
bright, opaque, as it strays
behind you, not quite full,
a tilted, gilded halo.
Your fingers, long and steady,
ash setting into the tips
of your calloused skin
as I fall in love with the way
you mumble, lips thin
and eyes wide,
laying down these pipe dreams
so I stumble in
and I can already tell
I’m a goner,
I want to be between your teeth.
You’re tonguing my filter
each time we meet,
and I’ll stain your insides,
sure, but these bodies
are composed of dust,
I’ve heard. Return
to damp Earth,
someday, She must miss you,
on nights like these,
incinerate me, cardboard
crust and sinew,
and rust,
and I’ll burn for you
while we still crave heat.
Aug 3, 2015
Aug 3, 2015 at 12:41 AM UTC
We didn't work
because my brand of love
is bargain-bin CVS romance novel,
there are no fairy tales in which the prince battles addiction,
the princess starves herself all day to make the two beers left in the kitchen
last longer than they were meant to.
Nothing was eloquent in the way we sat on her mattress,
anger seated deeply in our stomachs,
bugs hiding in the curtains, buzzing invisibly,
comforting to me as I felt invisible too,
the sun trickling anemically
through cobwebs and window panes.
We didn't work
because a picket fence will never feel like home to me,
I don't drive so well at night, she smiles
so pretty when I'm not around,
I've heard,
all teeth, and laughs gutturally
in that way she used to
when my fingertips gripped the edges of her
ribcage, before my skin got so rough.
Her eyes are bluer
than the chemical cleaner I use to scrub pots
for rent money, my tongue
just as harsh as she folds into herself
like origami and I ask
what the hell kind of shape it's supposed to be.
We didn't work
because we craved the pieces that were missing,
it made the puzzle hard to look at straight-on,
and I speak in clichés,
and she barely speaks at all,
and that silence broke my bones.
Aug 3, 2015
Aug 3, 2015 at 12:15 AM UTC
I speak about temporality as if it were some
beautiful, foreign monster,
caged and docile,
and I spectate safely from behind the glass.
It feels better,
somehow,
to romanticize it,
pretending poetic sadness is lighter
than its less eloquent counterpart,
namely, sobbing under shower heads
and clutching onto my arms like
I'm trying to keep my organs inside
my skin, rocking in tempo as if the inertia
of it will stop my cells from scattering
across your bed,
when my veins flare up
like gasoline on train tracks.
Nothing gold can stay,
can it, when you find a boy
with a silver heart
who starts to feel like home,
and home has never been
a place you can go
when you need it to be, and
his fingertips, the way they weave
cheap beer and cigarettes into a
safety net, *********
and the way he says your name
like it was meant for his mouth.
The observable universe
is comprised of atoms moving
away from each other
at constantly increasing speeds,
we theorize, and
never have I been more aware of the
space between our
particles, and I wonder,
if we move fast maybe
time will slow down and
this feeling of falling
will stretch out to eternity,
and it isn't my fault that your tongue echoes,
and you never meant to be a singularity.
Aug 5, 2014
Aug 5, 2014 at 11:43 PM UTC
My heart had learned to forgo depth
Instead beating across a breadth of broken others
Splattering its matter into sanguine stars
Against a violent violet sky
Gazed upon by tattered lovers
Jun 26, 2014
Jun 26, 2014 at 7:56 PM UTC
Knowing her has taught me
we love stars with such intensity,
and our longing for them surpasses
the depths of oceans,
because they are a fire our fingertips
will never know.
May 4, 2014
May 4, 2014 at 2:53 PM UTC
My mouth can’t recall
the way my lips curled
before they met hers,
when kissing was
something people did, then
something that lit me on fire, then
something people did.
The thought of her
no longer loving me
is what I try to drown in gin,
cut free from my skin,
smoke out of me like bees
made a home of my ribcage,
caustic, burning holes
through my eyelids until
my irises spill heavily
into my palms like the
egg yolks we separated
on Sundays, when
breakfast came at lunch time and
lunch came after we
made love, lying lazily
on her newly washed sheets.
We loved with the
full force of naivety,
ravenously, brazenly, but
nothing gold can stay.
Apr 29, 2014
Apr 29, 2014 at 12:50 AM UTC
Look, another kid,
hungry for a metaphor;
taste of what its like
to make a point,
but it’s stuck on the
tip of her tongue.
Lack of inspiration,
from Walmarts to broken hearts;
world in black and white,
not even gray
enough to be sung.
Oh, how great the world
would be, if rainbows weren’t
only tricks of light.
If promises
meant something more than
give and take.
If words were said
with a sense of conviction.
Teach us what it’s like
to make a point,
if there was ever
any point to make.
Mar 7, 2014
Mar 7, 2014 at 1:26 AM UTC
Her eyes remind
me of mountain tops,
blue, pale like apathy,
speckled summits
dotting amongst her irises,
and I climbed halfway up,
and I looked down.
Have you ever dreamt of how
content
you might be
to observe the world,
its luscious waves
lapping at its shorelines,
from the top of a mountain?
It keeps me up at night.
Mar 7, 2014
Mar 7, 2014 at 1:01 AM UTC
There are some days when “us” falls out of my mouth,
heavy and hearty, throat opened fully
to expel an airy hope for the future,
instead of “I”, which begins similarly
and ends with the back of my tongue surging upwards
to stop the air flowing outwards,
closing my throat off to widen the sound.
“Us”, with guttural UH,
rooted firmly in my chest, its silky S
finishing off strong, hissing
like sea foam
washed up on the sand
shortly after softened waves slink back
from the shore.
“I”, with its AH like a sigh of
relief at the freedom of singularity,
its ending EE like the creak in the floorboards
when I’m home alone,
like the squeaky back door
that no longer calls out to me
as a precursor to your footsteps
on the kitchen floor.
I correct myself. “I”.
Mar 5, 2014
Mar 5, 2014 at 9:07 PM UTC