I shouldn’t be here.
This is a love song, not where I belong.
This is the maker, taker, the gamebreaker.
This is somewhere between violin hands
that weren’t meant to touch.
This is where the eyes will blink.
This is where the blood will rush.
I shouldn’t be here,
where fingernail window stains paint vivid memories,
where the silver broach didn’t intend to fall in love.
This is where the voice rose and fell,
where the dress turned as checkered as a past.
This is where cigarettes go to die,
where tomorrow slept with doomsday.
This is the notebook library, the dream anthology,
the bespectacled spies faster than a gun.
This is the crescendo, the roots,
the bud snipped before its time.
I shouldn’t be here.

Tomorrow is you, you, you day, doomsday, Tuesday, too-soon day,
But for now, we have headlight heartthumps and stars in your eyes.
We have oceans of asphalt where we sail in shopping cart man o’ wars.
We have frizzy hair where moonlight hides and kisses on our magenta lips.
Tomorrow is for you, by you, with a special guest appearance by you.
Teleprompter notebook clutched in non-regional fingers
as your throat flies over the early morning traffic for the eight am report.
Tomorrow is to die for, lie for, try for, because you need it, seed it, want to be it.
We have place, we have lace, fingers traced over the skin between the lines.
Tomorrow is lentil spectacles, vision impaired, nightmares in mirrors that are closer than they appear.
We have scarves, secret sensuality, subconsciousness, sovereign sometimes and their armies of selfish senses.
Tomorrow is springtime revolution, noodle-nooses and ready, aim, fire reanimated dreams.
We have the means, the torn seams along the moments when we know what we want.
We have what seems to be the day, the day, the holiday, the you-day.
Tomorrow is every day.

Why are you so
posed in repose,
your toes curled
into baby fists?
You've made your lists,
hissed at boys who
endured the fallout
of your failure
to say hello.
You kissed the girls instead.
And I don't blame you,
nor will I shame you,
tame you, but I will shout
your name at oblivion,
hoping it will recant you.

I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,
your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,
yes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
in city and in forest they smiled like me and you,
but now it's come to distances and both of us must try,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.
I'm not looking for another as I wander in my time,
walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
you know my love goes with you as your love stays with me,
it's just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea,

but let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't
untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.
I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,
your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,
yes many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
in city and in forest they smiled like me and you,
but let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't
untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.

I took the casket by the hand,
whispered to her that everything was going to be alright,
and then poured my heart out to her.
Literally.
The little red pieces get buried tonight.
The viewing's at eight, between final exams.
You can take a piece with you.
Don't tell the funeral director.
He's afraid people will cut themselves with the shards.
But I don't mind.
A few scars do people some good.
Ironic.
I wouldn't have said that if my heart were here.
He always knew what to say.

Oh, what's that?
You want to fix him?
He said in his will
that the idea of repair was stupid.
Funny
that my heart would believe in YOLO.
Oh well.

So, coming to visit soon, old love?
He left you something in his will.

Himself.

How temporary be the hours,
our residue of memories left to wither.
Her empty whispers, his empty promises,
Misses and Mister This and That, dear lovers,
Earthly things all the same—shadows.
Owed debt, be it green sheets or gold bars,
bars us from seeing beyond skirts and ties,
ties us to all these things we hold.
Hold me close, memories of forgotten time,
timeless thoughts that barely cross mind’s plains.
Plain to see here—a painful wound we ignore.
Nor shall we admit it, for it bares the scars within.
In our ignorance of purpose, I ask now—
Now that you see, ask yourself, “How?”

Scars are fireworks.
They dance like breaths,
breath, pause, breath, pause.
Breathing is a cry for help.
You brushed my forehead with your fingertips
like wind and smiles and time
and what kisses are supposed to be.
Like time, time, time,
memory typewriters tick and tock.
They sound like footsteps,
like pallbearers and raindrops
and heartbeats and whispers and
time and time and time and time.

Scars are like spiderwebs
and patterns in half-full coffee mugs
and scales that shield, that measure.
and they're like empty stairs
and definitions the textbook wouldn't accept.

Scars are dreams.
A skirt and skin and whatever else that implies.
Scars are consensual, like sugarcoated suicides.
Scars are bodies.
Bend them, break them,
cracked contortionists.
Watch stardust pours from eyes
and arcing, narrow roads.

I found you in
peeling silk shadows
and socially unacceptable acronyms.

I met you
and you remade me
in the image of self-realized dreams.
Frayed heartstrings
blossom
from used ***** dealerships.
Spinal cord columns, rib rotunda,
cranium cabaret and Lazarus lungs.
We hugged on collarbones and
loved in dimples.

We ran.
We ran along shores we never knew,
skirted expectations like cliff-side raceways.
Somewhere
along a three way road of cobblestone delusions,
at an intersection of gas stations
advertising ninety-nine cent perfection,
we misread the legend
and the map lied anyways.
There are no u-turns in relationships.

You made me dependent upon
perfectly posed pixels and
lacing my fingers with the air.
Half of lace is empty space.

You're a beautiful mystery clad in gorgeous enigma.
You're poetry that looks good in a skirt.

There's an orchestra on your tongue, playing the sound of your voice like a melody I can't forget,
matching the tempo of the drums in my heart
and the broken strings of my violin compliments.

You are a notebook, a yearbook, a sketchbook, a burn book,
every facet of you written in swirling cursive,
rhymes and famous signatures snaking between cinnamon hair and cleverness.

You are a pen running out of ink,
bleeding dry in Barnes and  Noble Moleskin journals,
but that's okay because I have more ink,
and you can borrow whatever you want from me--
store it in the heart you stole if you're bored enough to hunt my words for the pieces.
You have the key already.

You're the first dream of the boy too scared of nightmares to sleep again.

You are the taste of honey and cigarettes on the lips of the first girl that boy ever kissed,
because she was a rebel and he needed a hero
who wore boots instead of Mary-Janes
and band t-shirts instead of blouses.

You are the rose he drew when he was bored,
an outline with potential,
mysterious, entrancing, incomplete,
not yet ablaze with the red of desire
because he was never good at finishing things.
You are a dictionary. Your picture isn't just under "beautiful."
It's under "dangerous" and "witty" and "myth"
because Medusa bowed at your feet next to James Bond and Edgar Allan Poe,
and you're too good to be true anyways.

You are a poem, a telltale heart beating inside a lesson in vengeance,
temporary only because nothing gold can stay.
You've walked past where the sidewalk ends (certainly the road less traveled by)
and come back far more darling than any buds of May.

(You are the paperback novel he read under the covers,
the flashlight only bright enough to show paragraphs,
and every new page unique in shape and form
while the text remains the same.

You are the raw words read aloud by the daring poet,
standing beneath midnight moon,
the power of the throne,
the breath of a whispered promise falling upon the ear,
the warmth of kisses on the cheek,
the passion of all hope there ever was in trust and truth.

You are the fire in lightning,
the sparkle in the snow and the glitter in the rain,
the fierceness of the wind and the gentle, soothing peace,
the blazing chill of winter and the roar of summer's heat.)

But you're still a mystery.
A beautiful,
beautiful
mystery.