I'm cool with how cool you're being about us not being cool anymore.

I'm not afraid.
I'll do **** near anything I deem worth doing,
but I won't do that.

I'm not restrained.
I have no struggles with refraining from unleashing the feelings I'd rather not contain,
but I have none left for you.

I've already killed them all.
You're dead to me.

How could I have thought that there was anything to gain from you?
All you've ever done is remind me of the things I lost.

Without the internet I wouldn't know
what fruits and veggies go in the high-humidity drawer and which go in the low,
not to mention which ones get refrigerated or not.

I wouldn't know how to get to anywhere I've never been before,
or how long you're supposed to soak dried beans for.

I wouldn't know how to cook an omelette (the few I'd tried before looking it up came out as chunky burnt egg-pancakes.)

I love omelettes.
Thanks internet!

So you found yourself in over your head.
Bit off more than you could chew.
Stretched yourself a little too thin,
then what did you do?

Sent out a veiled cry-for-help to a friend,
knowing full well it was a torpedo.

Hello house.
Hello TV.
Hello couch, (you lazy ***, I bet you haven't moved an inch since I've been gone.)
Hello dishes. I suppose you're dry by now. Let's get you back to where you belong.

Well hey there toaster. It's about time we cleaned out those crumbs.
(I never thought I'd think this, but even doing menial chores right now is kinda fun.)
Whoa there fridge, what'd you say we take a trip and fill you back up?

Oh bed, how I've missed you so.

It feels good to be back home.

There is a place where just the shape of the door that let you into it is the stuff of nightmares.

There is a state of mind that can accurately describe the intricacies and outricacies of what it means to be insane, but you'll never remember how to describe it. (For good reason.)

There is a plane where the trees can actually communicate with you,
and by god are they mean.

I'm sorry about your floor,
and I apologize if some got on you.
I just can't hold it in anymore.
Could never digest this -
I had to spew.

Been taking it in for years.
Way too many to count.
A regurgitation of the regrets and fears
came pouring out of my mouth.

I'll clean it up.
Don't you worry about
that.
Just hand me a mop.

There's no going back,
though the smell still makes my stomach turn.
You'd think I'd know my limits by now,
but it seems I'll never learn.

I'd prefer to not ever wake up instead.
Please God, won't you please strike me dead.
I've given you plenty of reason;
we've never been friends.
I can't take it anymore.
Let this be the end.

I don't feel so hot.
That's to say, I don't feel too great.
Do you mind if I go up to bed?
It's all of a sudden got so late.

Because when I think about you, it hurts,
yet I can't seem to stop.
I think about you all of the time.

Do you know what I'd like?
For my mind not to go haywire whenever you're around.
For my blood not to boil at the sound of your voice.
I wish I didn't want to die when I hold your stare.
I wish I could go back in time to before I even cared.
I hope one day you have children
even though you can't give birth,
and I hope one day I can think about you without it having to hurt.

I like it under this tree.
It makes me feel free,
I can say and think funny, silly, or sad depressing things.
I can just be me.

I want to sing,
I want to scream
at the top of my lungs.

I want to run full speed to the end of the sidewalk
and keep running after the concrete is gone.
I'll throw open my arms
to embrace whatever beauty I find waiting beyond.

His phone was full of pictures of the most random **** because every now and then he'd get into a mood where everything looked beautiful.

They're meeting in laundromats.
They're meeting in bars.
They're meeting at stop signs, grocery stores and parks.

They're meeting at that new hipster restaurant downtown
(I've read that their noodles are to die for.)

It's happening all the time,
all around the world,
right where you live and everywhere beyond.

Young hearts intertwine at the drop of a dime.

Lonely hearts march on.

At some point you will have ridden all the rides.
Sampled all the options.
Tasted every entrée.

Your life, an archive of reviews
compiled into a guide
that led you nowhere.

Love love love love love love love.
I live to love and love to live.
I'm in love, right now, with this moment,
and everything.

One look.
A stare.
That's how this all began.
To end it,
I swear:
I'll never look at you again.

It should come as no surprise.
Everyone who lives, one day dies.
Whether it's by freak accident,
Or an elongated courtship with
the agents of death.
Why then,
do we always feel so cheated when
we take our last breath?

I hate you for the right ones.

Future hermit reconciling his (albeit short-term) commitment to a career in mass communication.

Every obligatory conversation, every concern to extend the web of networking, every not-so-subtly coerced public interaction feels like an embedded knife being slowly extracted.

How exactly did I allow myself to be contracted into something so antithetical to so many aspects of my own personality?

What in the hell could have possibly possessed me to do such a foolish thing?

Foolish me.

I knew what I was doing, though whether or not it was out of some well-meaning ambition to round out weaker abilities or just one giant masochistic way of up-ending everything in a giant '*******' to how I'd been living remains a mystery.

Forcing myself to live a life outside of my comfort zone, I find it exhaustingly, unendingly -and altogether understandably-uncomfortable.

Am I learning something?

Undoubtedly, but I'm not necessarily thrilled about the insights that've been endowed on me.

Oh you Salingers. Oh you Brandos. You Plaths, DFW's and Garbos. You Fischers, Goulds and Hughes.

You lonely and abused. You gray, black and blues.

You at least left legacies before retreating into solitude.

Yes, now that - this - is a mood.

You know, I just realized I've never asked you about you.

How do you spend your days?
What do you do?
What goes through your head when you hear something like this?
Does it put you in a similar mood?
Because I can't help but wonder if we'd get along well,
mellowing out to the same tunes.

Then I remember why I never ask.
Because these moments mean so much.
It's too much to lose.

It's not your fault.
It's not your fault.
It's not your fault.

While embarrassingly unprepared for it, the forces that be occasionally sweep me up in their infinite mystery,
like a reddening leaf freed from a tree by a sudden gale.

To float through the air of a seasonal gasp that ends too soon,
only to land in a stream that flows too quickly for me to catch my bearings.
The tale they tell of it will never do for the real thing.

It's such a rare and unforeseen breeze that ever brings me nearer to you.

How I wish that it would blow more often.

I'll deflate myself to gas you up,
because my end state is devastation,
but you could be happy/healthy/etc.

___
1. Verb
2. Adverb (must end in "ly")
3. Adjective
4. Noun

The music fades and the lights go out,
and she's gone again,
like so many times before.

Silently beckoning me to follow her into oblivion.

Beyond the stage and behind the curtain she waits,
to **** me into one last escape.
One more moonlit escapade over forbidden landscapes with the sweetest of fruit clenched between her
teeth.

To ride carefree and reckless beneath the trees that shield us from our cruel fates' twisted shine.

Once again and for at least one more night,
I am yours and you are mine.
I can feel your pulse keeping time with mine.
A whole universe out-of-whack,
but here's this one thing synchronized.

"It won't last,"
she gasps, with an arrow in her back.

It never does.

My body juts forward with the impact,
and I hold her close one last time,
one more one last time until the next one,
as she whispers in my ear:
"Find me, my love.
Find me again."

It's one thing to not look a gift horse in the mouth,
but it's another thing entirely
to admire the horseshoe as it knocks your teeth out.

Sing the hit from frozen lips through clenched teeth on a stage made of swollen hips.

Anyone can be a star if they try hard enough.

Swing a hit into the tender ribs of one who sung without conviction.

Not just anyone can make it.

(This is what you get.)

Take it on the chin then grow a pair while squatting in the place you grew up afraid of.

Anyone can get there if they try hard enough.

Cave in on yourself as you realize you've spent your whole life pretending to be someone else.

(Someone you thought you knew.
(Someone you're not.))

Fly a kite painted with the face of the person you've come to be,
then let go of the string.

My brain is awash in budding friendships and cephalopods.

I think at this point it's safe to assume that all of my favorite ones are those who develope intelligence on their own, spineless or not.
Less of a social impetus than one of sheer simple survival.
An adaptation to life-threatening and serious impacts.

And the awkwardness invariably involved tends to tickle me various colors.
And the people who judge might as well be a den full of sharks, bodies going taught at the sense of fresh blood.

They can all **** right off.

I'm not the one to see how you'd warn them off. I'm more interested in seeing how you'd react to fun.

What would happen if one of your many limbs reached out towards one of mine?

Would our color-changes clash,
or would they match?
Would we play off each other until a new spawn was hatched?

It took millions of years for us to find the courage to leave our shells.
Now we're out here constantly shifting/adjusting/conforming by ourselves.

Would it really be so crazy for us to occasionally help each other out?

All my hopes blown away in a cloud of smoke sent up from the bathroom floor.

Heretofore forever to be well and constantly ignored.

If and then there is a justice to the semi-constant roar,
you'll find me waiting with my shades drawn down against everything that causes war.

That's not to say I'll go away on some single-sailed white ship.
My flag is not the kind of flimsy rag to get shattered by the wind,
but if and when I climb back up from these jagged steps that broke my back,
I'll carry you all with me.

That's a promise and a fact.

I find myself longing for something I used to be able to do when I was half my age. Something that now seems way more complicated than it used to be.

I miss lying on the floor of a dark bedroom, staring up at the ceiling while listening to songs on vinyl.

Such a simple recipe,
one would think it'd be pretty simple to recreate,
but they'd be mistaken.

I miss lying on the carpeted floor of my best friend's bedroom, listening to beautiful songs while watching her ceiling fan spin slow circles in the dark.

Sometimes, we don't realize how rare certain ingredients are until we find ourselves without them. Something that used to seem so abundant, so easily accessible - now gone. Long gone.

I miss lying on the carpet next to the one I thought I was in love with, the tips of our heads nearly touching, feeling tempted to just move my hand over ever so slightly to grasp hers, while listening to her records in the dark.

Such simple things that used to seem so close.
Now, so far away.

The first five days:
a whirlwind of old friends in new surroundings,
indulging in old habits with the occasional mumblings of,
"I'm proud of you man,
this is nice."

On day six, back in the stix.
Kicking it with the fams up to their same old tricks.

It's hard to say where my heart is.
I've always suffered from being adventurer-sick.

All I know is that the planets have finally aligned in such a way as
to allow me to walk down the streets I grew up on in the way that I haven't done in such a long time,
the way in which I learned all their names.
The way I grew up attempting to escape their grasp.

Now here I am, for the first time in years,
rehashing the past
and its dreams,
and its tears.

There's always someone waiting in the corner
with only shadows as company.
A blind spot in our vision.
Breath we convince ourselves to be wind.

Nebulous shapes in the darkness,
eyes playing tricks again.

We close them and rub to erase any trace of a glimpse,
only to look again and be enamored by figures moving in light.
We gawk wide-eyed, panting, grasping out as far as we might.

Truth is, I'm just a charlatan who's gotten very good at pretending like my opinions are wisdom when they're really just a bunch of after-thoughts regarding dumb decisions I've spent my whole life making.

A truth was told.
The world wasn't ready for it.

A truth was folded and filed and tucked away for a later day when it'd be needed.

An urn was molded.
It was turned and kneaded and glazed
and filled with the burned ashes of a truth the world never needed.

A tour was organized.
A collection of scholars in things eclectic and obscure
observed things they'd never been privy to before.

They took notes and wrote essays for graduate programs they'd never be accepted to.

They wrote about deep-seated issues that drew connections from me to you.

But they never got published.

But then and when I fell again,
I know I should have said something,
but I didn't.
I stayed silent instead.

The little chitters of charged words crying like a chorus line,
whose notes echo off chimes of crystal.

The shakes and jitters of hot nerves dying,
with eyes homing in like a missile.

Tiny critters curled up tight in their respective chrysalides,
awaiting the day they sprout wings.

My current state of mind is electrified,
but oh how the body sings.

The funny thing about finally finding what you've always wanted is seeing how long it takes for you to lose it.

Omoshiroi
is what I said, after too many seconds of staring,
offered up as a solution to what seemed to be causing such confusion.
This was before I'd learned the word sukebe, which, in hindsight, would have served better.

Nonetheless, she agreed. Omoshiroi, hontoni.
Surely, an interesting turn of events, indeed.

Youthful, virile energy, at this time of day, in this kind of place,
with one such as she, with such a wizened face.

Omoshiroi, she said, after I came;
partly in relief, partly in disbelief.
Iku, iku, iku, she'd said, while we were in bed,
and I still wonder if
it was just flattery.

omoshiroi,
she said, once again, as the elevator took us down,
her cheeks turning red.
hontoni, I agreed,
before walking out into daylight
pondering the limits of vocabulary.

Some people can love
people they don't even know;
people who can be awful and selfish and have hearts made of lead.

Some people can still love these people;
People with hearts made of gold,
whose shine blinds them to the negative judgements they'd otherwise find in their heads.

These kinds of people are great.
Every one person who can love anyone,
is worth at least ten thousand who hate.

They're pushing you to do it-
To finish what you started.
They're giving suggestions and making edits.
Performing audits.
They're saying,
"Maybe if you just changed the wording here, the theme there, the meaning throughout, added more heart to it."

It's clear, and to be honest,
They care about it more than you ever did.

Meet me in the place where time and space end;
Where aether dreams split at the seams.
That's where I live.
That's where I'll be.

When this scene is rended by inevitability, and everything that could be, is, and ever has been bleeds together in a tapestry of shreds.
That's where I've been.
That's where I live.

I hope to see you at the end of it all.
We could hold hands, and stand tall.
Our shadows elongated and melted in Styx.

The king and queen of oblivion;
Swirling in flux, unfixed.
That's where I am.
That's what I've been living in.

We'll rule over all of this nothing when you get here.
Over all of this emptiness that weighs infinite tons.

I'll meet you in the depths of this pit,
just as soon as you come.

When I lived alone,
my biggest battle was leaving home
to do the things I had to do in order to feel some sense that my life was my own.

Talking to you
is just some necessary evil that I feel obliged to do
in order to feel like I'm part of the world.

Because the alternative is
a certain kind of insanity that I've
spent the last decade trying not to associate with.

To put it simply,
I don't want to end up like my parents.

And I do what I have to do in order to convince myself
that loneliness is not my fate.

This reminds me of home.
The smell of wet pavement and damp grass,
the sound of a chirping toad mixed with rain dripping off the rooftops and echoing down storm gutters.

If I close my eyes and take a deep breath, I can almost believe that I'm back in the swamps.

"Hey, can I ask you a favor, please?"
I said, to the most supportive members of my family.
"Sure,'" they said.
"Feel free to ask us anything."
"Here," I said, handing over my pack of cigarettes.
"Please get rid of these."

"Gladly."

It's an odd feeling,
being proud of someone for completely removing you from their life.

I don't care that you don't care about how little I care about anything.
I don't even care if you do care about how much care I'm taking to show that I don't care.

What I'm trying to say is that I don't care, okay?

Did you hear me?

I DON'T CARE AT ALL!

Touch my subconscious and I'll love you forever in dreams.

Please no more cheddar,
I feel bloated and old.

Scarfing down mozzarella with a sick stomach groan.

You're trapped in the restaurant
missing your home,
while I eat grilled cheese and soup all alone.

Some of us are too stubborn to acknowledge when we've got it all figured out.

Knowing what's best for you doesn't always mean you know what the next best thing to do is.

Some of us know too many words and not enough meaning,
and we get all tripped up on the semantics.

If I could, I'd stop writing stanzas that begin with ******* like,
"If I could,"
or
"Truth be told,"
or,
"Truth is."

Because **** me dude.
Seriously, I'm the worst.