Our little collegetown is a jungle tonight,
with the deafening, staticky drone of locusts constituting
its own kind of warm gravity,

sidewalks drenched and carpeted with a rotting mess of
blood-red maple leaves, and

thousands of spiders the size of human eyes, glaring
down from the dead-center of their backlit, dew-drizzled webs.

I always thought that I'd never be loved enough.

In crafting anthologies on the angles of my favorite noses,
I pretended I didn't want someone else’s protractor on my own,
and prepared for a life sentence as the uncharted geometer,
the invisible painter, the secret poet,
the immortalizer, rather than the immortalized.

I find myself, now, to be a poem––
your poem––
etched into the curvature of your jungle-green eyes.

But walking home in our jungle tonight, I feel sick.
Your ears distort my hesitant laughter
into a dissonant, deafening euphoria, and

when I lay my head on your heated chest, I can feel the blood
gushing underneath your skin,
surging through your veins, storming, drowning
you, and I feel sick because all this love you pump for me--
all this love you are drowning in--
only rots in my guilty stomach...

When my memory is watching me
with her thousands of glaring eyes,
she will always mourn the breaking of a beautiful heart.

I need new paths —
My feet in love,
They walk more willingly
Than any of these strangers know

And yet in going
There is only this,
Such willingness resolved to be
And so — with hope I go

No heights can test
This smokey breath
Breathe out another jog and let

This heartbeat ache
Which throbs in pace
And patters like the dove and yet

To feel your feet
Guide underneath
Like oceans smooth with opal flow

Its warming breath
And pounding chest
This besting high you runners love