I can see my life with you
the way we bicker
twenty years from now
you scrunch your nose
eventually the argument subsides
and you pull me into your chest, brush the hair out of my face
and tell me you love me
the same way you tell me now
as if this way of loving someone
is so profound
new to you
the look of shock
admiration
devours your eyes  
each time the words
come out of your mouth

Counter tops

Sterile, alcohol free sanitizer

Bare feet sweating

Sticking to the glassy

White porcelain floors,

Blood soaked rags in the trashcan

Peaking above the metal box

Sneaking looks

Mocking my pathetic state

The needle digs deeper into my right arm

Small plastic tubes tickling my shoulder as they

Crawl up to the small rack that

Follows me from room to room

The bag slowly dripping

Pushing weight

Bubbling inside my abdomen

The blurry molecules of light tickle the tips of my

static lips

my spine twisting

posture arching

Slowly I melt to an almost horizontal state

Craving a hand

The sensation of touch

To make an entrance

push the hair from my forehead

Or fingers to trace my back

And pull me upright

The flicker of fluorescent

While time perpetually lulls on

I do my best to grip onto reality

Drip

Into purgatory

Slipping from a sleep

“I’ll be home later”

I didn’t have time to grab shoes

He stayed in bed, peaceful,

didn’t even lift his head

Wiping away as I speed mercilessly towards the red lights

the rain slips through the cracks of the night

I let the four am turn into nine

And I wait for him

To make time.

It’s the way I feel you before you’re even here
the silent tremors that glide down my spine
as I quiet down
tighten my grip
and swallow
The desperate pleas I make with you each breath I take
on my knees
insisting that my life is worth more than
one simple mistake
retracing my week, trying to find when
I accidentally left the door open
and you snuck back in
pushing me back
driving manically
to the four am Emergency Room
blood stained floors
as you pull me from another
night of sleep
another day of work
another arm wrapped around my side
I won’t try to climb mountains anymore
just let me live until March 4th
The moments when the hospital room slows into relief
when the medicine finally kicks in
and the nurse looks me in the eyes as she
tries to tuck me back  into the
white light sheets
hoping that will make you slow down
wishing the warmth  would loosen your grip
she taps into my veins to catch a glimpse
at the way you dance around inside of me
clinging onto my lower back, poking your fingers
through every layer I have left
whispering into my ear as they ask me why
I was in the hospital again
Oh it was just a routine check-up
You pull me by the neck
force my eyes open
to stare hungrily through the glass you built around me
day in and day out observing
the pace the world moves in,
orbiting around me
on infinite time
on a clock that’s hand doesn't just land on
on moments between IV drips
on moments between
when you decide to pull me back into bed
when you decide to hold me down and cloud my head
for days
for weeks
for months
Flooding my mind with memories when I wasn’t filled with orange pills
when my insides weren’t leaking faster and faster
with each passing season
Kind of want to keep living
but you’ve promised to
stop giving me a reason.

curled over the table
I pull on the edges

his body always sat poised when he knew he was right

the way Whiskey used to spill down the sides of my lips
While they curled into a smile I did not recognize

His lips lay flat, a line parallel to the next
They don't move,
They don't hint
Or quiver

I feel the way the oceans rocks my body
The way the waves seem to control my hips when I can't even smell
The maritime air

I move out of memory
Out of nostalgia
Above him
Beside him
Keeping my eyes tightly shut
I follow a rhythm
As he pulls
Grips
Claws
I remain

Above water

I let lovers bite into me
Beg for them to leave marks
As they track lines down my back
I whisper dreams
Of a heart attack

They say I’m too dark
Try to illuminate me
With stories of their past heroic decency
bowing at the end as if
I was just another one
In their bed of complacency


                                              I can slow to down to the exact minute that
                                              They're slipping their jeans back on
                                              While I pretend to sleep
                                              it’ll hurt when I wake up
                                              notice blank canvas
                                              of freshly vacant sheets
                                              These lover's they get high
                                              off these informal goodbye's
                                              assuming I lay in bed awaiting their return
                                              with my trembling thighs
                                              they pat their own backs
                                              Slip in between the 4am cracks



                                   But they’ll never be him
                         And they’ll never kiss me like he did
          


They’ll never be the hands behind another broken lid
And the pain subsides quickly
Anatomically
leaving the iron taste in my mouth craving

                                        
                      
                            Hunger under the rising moon
                                     I wait in my sheets
                               For another lover to slip in
                               And dig their teeth into me
                                Knowing they'll be gone
                                              Just as soon.

I kiss him while our world burns
The playground we danced in
While rainbows formed under the awning of waterfalls
I feel his heartbeat
While it all turns to ash
The television blaring
State of emergency
But I don't hear it
I don't feel it
I curl my arms inward and allow him to hold me
the spaces we tossed and turned
Slowly mold into the shape of an urn
Evergreens crashing
He folds

The eloquence of something obtainable
when all you have is this dissociated, distorted reality
where you can't even see past your fingertips
He enters in
Makes you open your eyes
appreciate the freckles on your knuckles
The way your thighs feel
wrapped tightly around his waist

Enunciates how perfect it is to just be not make excuses or apologize
He slows the time
holds you down,
lifts you out
Let's you fall
Stopping when you start to drown.

Somehow my body
Still rolls to the side of the bed
You once slept on
And emulates the same positions we held each other in
I watched the trains glide past today
The small specks led to the northern part of the river
And the stars began to illuminate
All the spots in the city
Where you once slid your fingers
Inside me

I think I loved you
I think that this meant something
But it comes in these waves
Recreating the horrific storms of being
Caught in each time
You couldn't breathe
I held my own breath
And how can we stop drowning
If it's the same
Sedative sound?

I don't
See the act of missing
Nostalgia
It takes place in the center
Of expectation
But how can I expect
Anything
If the world lights up
Tomorrow?

Could have been anyone
Engulfed
The page tears and it's the way
He describes how I hold
Onto every passing moment like
I'm suffocating the life out of them

Could have been anyone
I sharpened my nails to the summer nights
I promised I'd spend forgetting him
Not falling

Loving every passing body
Except my own

Must have been the way he looked through me
Like he understood
The seconds after a casualty
A crusade of
Life when all you have left
Is the smell of roses
Right after they bloom
And naked bodies
Wrapped around eachother in a
Musty hotel room.

So I’m six feet under or I’m twelve feet above and there really is no in-between, the pendulum of projection but my heart is racing and it’s ten pm and the pavement feels safe, unrequited, like you are not here and i am not here and it all makes sense but it really doesn't because most of my days are spent rationalizing my existence to myself on this repetitive loop but then I feel something like love. I feel something like adrenaline. I feel something like, I’m hungry but I want a body pressed against me and I want to hear you say all the right things but I also want it to be quiet and peaceful and I want everyone I have ever loved to be on this bed with us holding me and saying all the same things too but I also want to be completely alone and stuck in my head creating something magical and once Im alone all I want is to eat an entire burrito but also climb a mountain and feel the fresh air on my skin and your hand in mine and how do I enunciate all of that when I feel like it is literally leaking out of my chest, my elbows, my knees and then there are these flashes of the one time someone died and all I hear is the gunshot, the thirty seconds between their final breath and the pavement but I also think about the time i ran down the beach naked and they just stood there and giggled, looking at me like the entire world was mine and how lucky they were to witness such a moment and I think about how lucky I was to live in such a moment and ******* I want to be able to rip it to shreds, eat it like a pomegranate or a mango or something that is sticky and messy and the flavor just stays on you for days no matter how many showers you take. I feel the way the bark felt on my barefeet when I used to scale trees and climb so high the tops of the tree’s would not be able to hold my weight  fully and they would kind of tilt and I almost died so many times but i didn’t and the one time i tried, i really, really tried it made me so ******* numb and I still feel that numb a lot until they love me or they leave me or I drive really fast or I chug the bottles i am absolutely not supposed to chug or I stand on stage and I tell my story over and over again and I feel like the entire audience is there with me in the moments I have lived and they are holding their breaths like I was holding my breath for hours and hours and then days and then years and when the story ends they get to breathe a sigh of relief and for a second i get to too you know?

We got in the car
And I said “head east”
He turned the car towards the desert
No questions asked

We wind through the smoke filled streets
While he pierced through me

Always joking that
He’d never be good enough
I laughed it off
Like he had any idea

Letting my eyes drift through the whirling
Sleep deprivation that

Feeling him provides
                                      
                                     Living provides

                                                                     Wanting to escape
                                                                      Always abides

Exhausting.
The last drips from the shower are plummeting down the drain as I focus on the slurping noise the water makes as it cascades down the old buildings plumbing. 
Exhausting.
As my lower back aches, my toes squirm, the pulsing beat behind my eyes hums along to the same rhythmic migraine it’s been stuck in for the better part of the last five years.
Exhausting.
The nervous tick of sweat beads down my back while my mind whirls through scenarios, ways I could have been better, ways he could be thinking about me, how soon this will all end because,
Exhausting.
Remembering the day I sat in the dim room
“Anyone ever told you, you’re bi-polar?”
The relief the explanation laid out in front of me,
the look of pity on his face.
“You suffer from years of PTSD, this is going to take a life time to conquer.”
Exhausting.
“With your chronic illness, this is going to be an uphill battle, each flare up will set you back.”
Exhausting.
“Of course, we cannot medicate you with your other medications.”
Exhausting.
“Please call the suicide hotline the next time you feel that way.”
Exhausting.
The way the same cut and dry of cold desolation their turned back screams as I play victim to a mental illness I’ve never bothered to master.
Exhausting.
As I play victim to a physical illness that never subsides.
Exhausting.
As I ride out the same perils each lover faces while they face me, naked, dripping, towel wrapped around my hair, gritting my teeth with a Iknowwewerejokingbutpleasedontcallmethat
Exhausting.
It’d be easier if I was dying, it’d ward them off quicker, give them a time limit they could count on.
“I love her but I can’t handle these mood swings, I never know what to say around her, I can’t keep doing this if this is all it will ever be.”
Exhausting.
As each partner holds a seance, brings up every dead lover they can muster and finds all the right avenues to trigger, poke, ****, promise, and be gone.
Exhausting.
I’m here, until your mania isn’t quirky, I’m here until your mania directly effects me, I’m here until you become a mirror to everything I fear.
Exhausting.

I ate the petals
One by one
The delicate euphoria of
Rushing hues from yellow
To maybe it's you's
I sipped the same wine
But somehow I
Was the drunk one
Rolling around on the floor
Whispering
More, please, more.

Here's where the sip
drips slowly down my chin

she elaborates on the fragments
some self proclaimed
elopement
between her own bitter desires
to distinguish any fire
while she sits like cinders
singing the same praise
he once made

alone in the corner
headset tangled
her mania ignites
it's a spark
where she once knelt in
parking lots
throwing trash over fences
she stands taller
her embodiment of life
smaller

you sing to her like she's shallow
she cascaded down mountain sides
before she bent to you
sang behind the musty moments
of lover's eyes
broke bones
to mold the same life

you claim is your rightful
and true

she doesn't even beg
if only you knew.

I am aimless in the typography of simple moments where the lines change and suddenly they’re asking from me. 

Where did I go? 

What am I thinking about? 

How do I feel?

The endless parade of the safest valley on earth. 

The way the mountain ranges hug the fault line and enunciate that I will be ok while they keep me sedentary, 

watching as the snow piles on the hill sides and melts away with each season, 

I became addicted to the fog

hugging  the ethereal realm of consciousness,

 unlike the bitter evergreens tickling the sides of jagged rocks,

lightly dipped clouds slowly secreting drops of dew seemed to delicately keep me at ease, 

calm my bitter, ever-growing disease.

you told me it would end the way it needed to

I thought those were the worst moments in my life.

somewhere inside I heard the senseless pounding of hope compromising  

repeating the same thick mantra of I would only claw my bloodied fingers onto simpler heights

The way the rings delicately sat on top of each other

how it steamed up the sides of the white walls

expected nothing less from existence when my eyes finally lifted

from the heavy slumber

how the florescent

at first glance

did not bring me to my knees

any kind of inspiring prose

or please

it just lulled me into

another moment where my

eyelids

begged for visions

of

from the highway you can see this one view

twenty minutes north of California

my hair is blowing in the wind, caught by the ripping shards of desert tempermant

the way you smoke your cigarette as if

any day one of them will be your last

succulent gliding allegory of the brutal

moments of leisure connection brings

while it rips itself from our absent moments

the sun is right above

if you listen closely

there is the song

slowly humming

the one i played

repeatedly for you.

It’s uproariously flashy
The effervescent decadence of a slip
Small molecular prism
Juniper berries
Sticking from the cream of freshly fallen snow
Yet I am gliding
Through the flattened streets
trains roar in the distance
Nostalgic melodies  
Tickle the masses between ears
As the sun dips
Digs it’s way to the eastern hemisphere
I wait
stuck
Fond by memories
Yet to exist on this realm
Continuously moving
Twitching the trauma away
Until I can exist in a formation
Other than decay
Under the drunken evergreens
With his eyes amongst the hues
Of dripping blue

I came in through the front door
You left the rings on the counter
Delicately one on top of the other
The boxes neatly organized,
A note on the chalkboard
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more”
Your blood still staining the floor

I didn’t breathe for a week
My body did not know how to eat or sleep
Felt you pressed against me
In the muscle memory

Laid in the tub
Wrapped my clothes around me
Try to absorb the warmth in anyway it found me
I put the ring back on
I erased the note
Listened to our song

I unpacked the boxes
Scrubbed the stain from the floor
This place wasn’t home anymore.

Ten years go by.
You survive. You find a way to create your reactions to trauma, you twist it, tangle it around every heart that beats for you. You bite your lower lip so many times that the scar sticks. You find the way matches, when applied to your skin feel safer than his hands did. You don’t let him win. You don’t win either.  You find the freedom in slipping away, you drink your friends under the table, you sneak out of the home after they fall asleep and you walk through the empty streets screaming his name, hoping he comes out of the bushes so you can finish what you started. You’re unarmed except for the empty bottle. Ten years go by and you jump into the way lovers make you feel safe, you show them all of your scars and you sit on the living room floor for hours - begging for them to place the delicate band-aids over each and every one. Some do, some walk out and don’t look back. You hold back physically assaulting several therapists because they ask you what you were wearing, they rationalize what was done to you as an act of your early peak into sexuality and that no one should be sexually active at that age, they forget you weren’t sexually active with the opposite ***. You wait five years, until your legs are up in the same chair, and they’re there, holding you down while you writhe in pain and no one really seems to be there to call but it feels the same way it did - but your family is two states away and all you wanted was a voice but they hung up so you swallow countless pills and wake up three days later. Ten years go by. You find the challenge in the sober moments when the fog is clearing on the north side of the mountain and you forgot to pack a lunch but you’re five miles in and you need to get back to your truck because the sun will set in two hours and you don’t have a flashlight and suddenly you hear his voice in the back of your head, the monotone pierce of realizing you could be anywhere and he’s still sitting casually on your shoulder. You wait seven years to slowly peel your victimhood off your skin, you sit in the bathtub and soak it through essential oils, apology letters written on soggy paper, words of hate, words of pain, words of realism. You respond slowly with moments of empathy, you allow others pain and trauma to top yours, you stop trying to push the labor of your life onto each heart that holds you. You hold yourself up, you climb slowly, you pedal faster, you feed your body, you whisper back each time he hits you with his voice, you say that you hear him but he has no power over you. Ten years go by, you take your voice and you allow it to lift others up, you take your body and you allow all the strengths and scars to be seen, examined, you take the vulnerable parts of you and instead of band-aids, you delicately sew in sutures, you show the ones who love you, the way you can stand up straight, tall, off the floor. You hold their hands and you grip into the power of ten years went by, he didn’t **** you, he tried like hell, but he didn’t **** you. You survived. You looked it dead in the eye and you forgave it, you pulled what you could from it and you moved on the best way you could. Ten years go by. You find the beauty in your trauma, you find the roses overpower the thorns and you celebrate. Ten years.

Let’s just stand here, **** on these hard lemon candies and watch the evergreens turn to ash.
once stone etched
Molded by the cascading
ever flowing
torment of a river
that had sprung a leak
Millions of years ago
Now man made, clad iron.

I don’t know you.
I don’t love you.
I’m angry with you.
I’m uncomfortable around you.

We stand hand in hand
The ash engulfs each lung
As if our cells had prepared for the event
We keep breathing

Dim lights of the train receding  
I ask you my insecurities
You muffle your ignorance
Displeasure

turning
Looking at you, as you are
A sore in my
Psychiatric dismantling
The one time
I forgot
We existed after
The ones we love
Disappear

Do you remember that day?
We laughed at mortality
Danced wine hungry
Eager for another story.

You said I was not old enough to feel the weight I did, as I circled loops around you. How could I know the ache?
You asked over and over again.

As if the the deed of grief was written in your palm, no man could touch where you had been.

I smiled and told you that you were too old to be treating poison like pop rocks,
Popping each pill in your mouth and forgetting to swallow.

Had we laughed that night at the idea that I’d outlive you? Or is that just the way I remembered it when I watched them bury you?

Maybe the golden rings of disabling
The drip of muffled unorganized thought
Scattering through rooms
Will inevitably disappear
Allowing the graceless act
Shuffling our feet on abandoned low tides
Peaking at each rising moon

Somehow hope gives weight
To the rationality that nostalgia will re root itself in present where the slip of fragmented parrallels will reverse
And I will get my body back

I just want to hold you
I don’t want your hands to tender each
Purple sore even more
I just want the pulsing to stop
And drag your body back down
To the hard wood floor.

Does it haunt you
The way it haunts me
Standing on the shoreline
Two am it’s freezing

Salt in my lungs
You cannot see me
Held on too long
Watched the tide go out
We did it all wrong

I pushed you inside me
I watched the fire spark
At the hint of lightning
Brushed the hair from your eyes
In a mania that was almost frightening

I didn’t know how to trick my pulse
Slow it down or look away

All I really knew was I wanted you to stay.