So it's gotten to this point,
     Where I'm refreshing each page
And checking my phone
     Every
          Two
               Minutes
In hope
     Someone,
          Anyone,
Will find me interesting again.

If you were anything other
Than what I thought you were,
You’d be everything ugly.  

Because I looked to you
As if you woke up the sun each morning,
But you only ever blotted it out.

You took some frizzled brush
With its bristles cut ragged
And pointing in all directions

And you painted the sky
Some slimy, green-black shadow
Which reminded me of pond ****,

Or worse yet
It reminded me of the filtration
In my fish tank I never got around to cleaning,

Oozing yellow pus
And clearing any room with its stench,
It was so much like you.

For just like a soaking,
Disgustingly rotten fish tank filter,
You maintained the image of beauty,

You plucked the sickness
And flakes of half eaten food
From the sea of this world

And built it all up inside of you.
So now people gaze
With some sort of admiration in their eyes

At a tank housing a vibrancy
Of life and plants and healthy things
That only exist to brighten the day,

But little do they know
That if you undo this,
And unscrew that,

You’ll pop right open,
Your filthy inner workings exposed,
And taint all the good things around you,

You’ll leak out into the crystal clarity,
Make it hazy and cloudy and
You’ll blind all the fish,

You’ll **** all the fish
If we don’t keep you closed.

The tides of my time
Turned over themselves
Again and again
As the trees of thought
Rotted in the night of my mind,
And I was lost and without
The will to raise my wings,
Blind to the fact
That the sun might rise again,

Only she who wore
Those moonlight eyes
Washed with the blue of the sea
Could sharpen the horizon
And expose its potential
In her milky twilight glow,

For the moon hung lazily
By some rusted hook in the sky
Wavering with a subtle chill
From the quiet wisps of evening wind,

The moon was silent and seeing,
Overlooking the stillness of it all,
Perched atop some invisible stand
Cemented in the stars,
Untouchable by hands
Far from greatness,

Forever strung from the heavens
By some apparatus of fishing line,
The moon listened to my sorrows
And cradled them gently
So as not to damage them,
And let me cry away
The carvings of indecency
I had etched into the loose
Fibers of my being,

She was my moon,
Grandly lit in the ink of my mind,
So desperately trying to light her own,
And she called me her angel
Whose feathers were always ruffled,
Soaked wet with the weight of our dusks,
But it seemed to me
Her brilliance never flickered or dimmed,
Never blurred or shrugged
Until the day she sighed,
And rolled her eyes
And cut my wings away.

I'll sit here,
Encased in the night
Before the sun of my screen,
And look over my shoulder
Every now and again
Because I can't stop now,

I'll write another
******* love poem
Like it means something to me
Like these words spilling
Like broken glasses
Soaking this mangle of a poem
Can actually say anything about how I feel.

I could absolutely alliterate
And methodically metaphor
Like a truck stuck in mud
But you see
That's all I'll ever be,
Just stuck in this muddled mind of mine,

Grasping at the ghost of us
That does not exist in any
Tangible reality,
And so I'll write another
******* love poem,
And someone will swoon
And clap their hands together
And tell me how lucky you are
To have someone like me,

When in the scheme of things,
It's not how I feel.

It's not even close to how I feel
Because how I feel
Cannot be articulated through some
Random array of 26 letters,
26 effortless, meaningless symbols
Slapped together without caution,
Stitched together with some form
Of a string of tears I cannot cry
Because the real me is trapped inside you see,

He's trapped up there,
Locked in a rusty cage with
Nothing to read
And nothing to sing
And nothing lovely to smell
When that rotted core of a sun
Beams over whatever fleshy horizon
Exists up there,
You see I'm not sure how to say it
Without making this some
God forsaken love poem
That's just like all the others,

But I'm trapped up here,
And only you
Give me hope
That I'll ever get down in one thinking piece.

There is a man
I notice sometimes
From classroom windows
Across the school
Who rides a raging
Metallic beast
With a razor reach
And craving for cuts
Of grass that never stops growing,

He’s soaked in a midday sun
Peeking around a sea in the sky
Dotted with whispers of white,
And drenched in his thoughts
As the hum of the engine
Shrugs off the blurred haze
Of traffic close by,

And he ponders:
“Does this grass feel pain?”
As his blade sweeps away
The shagged green fingers,
For sometimes among
The clean straights he trims
And behind the static of
Mindless television too late at night
He imagines the grass
Sprung from the ground
To be himself,
Lost among a crowd,
Nothing more than a hint of color
In some dizzying hue,
A hair on the Earth
No one would care to lose,

And while he sighs
Once every week or so
And shifts into gear
The lawn to be turned slick
And shiny,
Well kept
By some unsung hero,
The subtle acknowledgements
Chime in hushed admiration
To his unhearing ears.

The lilac
Is the flower of first love,

And while you sleep in my arms
Someone else holds

My bouquet of lilacs.

A dash of dust
Unwilling to settle
Coats the pink insides
Of my lungs
As the butterflies
In my stomach
Scream,
They want to get out and I don't know how to let them out anymore
Because I threw away the key
Thinking it was tarnished and needed polishing
But really the only thing
That could polish a rusty key
Is to keep it in the door,
The door I so foolish locked
And slammed shut
Without so much as saying goodbye.

And now here I sit,
Dazed and confused
By the flash of my fingers
No longer taunted by inhibitions,
Trying to scream the butterflies cries,
For their wings so same
Are cutting me up on the inside
Like no butterflies before.