When I looked at you I saw the world,
The way you saw the world.
Everything was shaded with the brightest yellows
And the deepest blues,
But all the reds were gone.

Looking away from you
I saw the blinding white haloes around the stars,
I saw the pink laces between different cells of my hands,
I can see the red ball thrown in the field of green.

I just had to look away from you.

Feeling like a stenographer in a cult room
Pulling an all-nighter, maybe
What are we down for now?
Lungs are getting painful and keep blowing out smoke
Even with nothing taken
Just because of the cold

Flick Flick

The camera flash goes off
Lower, Hum, Delete, Raise, Flash, Repeat
What couldn’t they find in the picture?
What are they trying to see through the flash?
My hands are pruning from the cold

Flick Flick

Awkward ***** on a Thursday
Everyone eyes a couple
Grinding and kissing
She’s coughing in his face
He keeps pushing her off of him
I’m wondering if it’s actually all just me
Shivering and arching

Flick Flick

Conspiracy theories
“The only way to win tetris is not to play”
“My sister’s drunk as ****; she’s drunk as hell”
Was I right?
We all thought that was the same girl
We all felt sad about the assumptions
But me; it’s me
My hands are cold

Flick Flick

“How long are you going to let him hurt you?”
I would do it too
Led away by a pitched tent
Mistaken guessed identities trying to place him
Is it really who I think?
I’m in crystalized vision

Flick Flick

“I just have love in my heart and I want to give it to someone”
You’re what comes to me
The bright star outside of Orion’s belt
Lower moans

I would look good in a cigarette wouldn’t I?
I’m not gonna smoke a cigarette tonight

I keep remembering that you have been the only one
That I could still daydream about being just a thought
In your otherwise always busy mind

I wonder if ever a tornado lands and you look for shelter
Only to remember that you once saw land upon the horizon
My own rusting tankard that looked like the shadow of oasis

I hope that you can remember what could have been on the shores of the Titanic
That all the years on the dry deck could have tasted less salty than the sea
And the exposure will feel so warm on your skin that it leaves burns

A road trip in late spring
With the street lights flying by
Over my worn out eyes
Lying lazily on the leather door
Forehead against the window
Racing raindrop
Time trials
The radio buzzes a melancholy voice
Low and long
The warmth of your hand on
Mine is all I can concentrate on
I know above the whirling lights
Stands Orion and Ursa Major
Who circle each other
Waiting for an opening
And we’re just driving right through the middle of the conflict
Acting like galaxies aren’t erupting into black holes
And the universe isn’t becoming smaller one star at a time
But even in the coldest part of space
There’d be your hand

You; accented by a melody of color like every time we explore the world around us
Underneath the purple sky with the streetlights turning everything orange like a Halloween night
Underneath a pink sunset where everything was gilded in golds and yellows
Even in pitch darkness with the distant electrical buzzing of the abandoned construction site
Where if any light did show it was through the glassless windows
Distantly they provided no guidance through the maze we were exploring
But still we made our way through
Dodging large holes floors up and climbing questionably safe ladders
We made our way to the roof and lit cigarettes to add our own small light to the firefly buildings in the distance
And that’s where I fell in love with you
You who aren’t my savior or my only hope in this world
But someone who I’ll carry the water for because I know you have the snacks
On whatever hike
On whatever journey
It’ll be us in the same pace
Side by side
And there’d be your hand

The Wainscot Weasel lost an eye to a fight with a bird,
But it’s what he did next which makes him absurd.
It’s because he fell in love with a fish in a pond.
In another life he might have belonged,
But his fur had no scales and his single eye swam with tears,
So from a distance he watched her swim through the months and the years.

A year is millennia for a young weasel to wait.
A year is a long time for even an animal to contemplate.
The sun lingered on the water, its surface filled again from the trees.
A collection of orange smudges then reflected the leaves.

The frogs have all croaked and new birds’ calls now echo,
And still sat a lonely, but quite happy fellow.

He followed her tail’s drag through the painting of his existence,
And finally he could no longer put up resistance.
He lowered himself to the pool where she swam,
And the Wainscot Weasel was never heard from again.

Are my feet too big for my body?
Because I feel that the gravitational force on it
Centers me too hard to the ground
And it’s hard to lift either one to progress

Are my hands unilateral of each other?
Because it feels like every time that I reach for yours
The other one reaches for an object to grab hold of behind me
Just to keep me anchored

Are my eyes too wide for my blocky head?
Because I feel like whenever I have a goal and a focus
My limbs swing wildly at everything else
Grasping for distraction on anything of interest

Life is a series of experimentation
Tests based on multiple observations
Sometimes of the same thing
And yet I still have questions that still need to be answered
And there are no 4 options to choose from
And even if there were
The letters would have disappeared from how many times
I’ve shaded the circle
Just to erase it again
And sometimes I try to look for a quick summary
Just a simple short answer question
But there’s so many different variations
And none of them fit right
So I end up filling 3 sheets of paper
With just one answer
Just to get no credit
Because your teacher wanted you to
Summarize
What’s too much for you
To summarize

Once I think I’ve found a hypothesis
I receive some data feedback that
Doesn’t correlate
And so this idea
Of what this is
Of what love is
Of what life is
Can never be really answered
Like a webster’s dictionary entree
Or by anyone’s own experience
Because like time
It changes and grows

There was a story of a famous cobbler
Who was visited by a demon
And he was forced to make shoes for it
And when it came back for its shoes
It mutated between an elephant
A mouse
A man
A dog
I don’t know how to cobble the shoes that could fit
So many forms
From hooves
To talons
To perfect pedicured toes
That’s how love has always come into my life
And yet I have felt it so many times the same
Like a squeeze not on my heart
But my entire chest
But how do you cobble shoes
To fit so many feet
While staying the same

It’s like trying to explain why you hate something
To someone who has no idea
But you have that idea
Because of jealousy
Or something that happened
Maybe too long ago for you to
Really
Put words to it
But there’s that feeling in your stomach
And your brain is mashing the eject button
Whenever you have to be close
To this disgusting
Terrible
Ugly thing
That people would hate too
If they only knew
The feeling you
Just have

Until you
I didn’t have that missing link
And suddenly there are words in my mouth
To explain
The evolutionary changes in my mind
Of why
And not how

My Lucy
Knowing that you see the same sky above me
With me
Makes the stars diamonds
You are the reasoning as to why
I have love
Why I try to love
Why I live to try
To love
You are the clips in my brain
Constantly cycling through
The wrinkle of your jawline when you laugh
The way your shoulders bounce
The way you kissed me on new years

You kissed everyone else there
But I had to blame my sore stomach
Tying itself in knots
On the alcohol
But it was the butterflies
That you set a fire to
In my lower intestine
And they were crawling
Up my throat
Choking me
With their wings

And when you finally wanted me
As I watched you,
Wanted you
On the same warm rubber
Of the trampoline
In late spring

But the same rubber
Was cool
The night that I connected your lips to mine
And the look you gave me was
So confused
And distant
We were all so close
And the heat was radiated
Piled bodies pressed together
On top of us
Around us
And yet you managed to pull away

I wanted to break that distance
But that dark night was so bright
And so vivid
That in my mind
The look you had
Pulled away
Again
And again
And again
And in the yellow room where
Everything was so warm
And loving and hard
When it needed to be but
So soft
Recalling that time is
So hard
Because while the yellow is
So bright
It hurts
And photocopies into my brain
Like it was recorded over the same tape
That took in the image
Of you pulling away
The warm yellow
Cut
Again and again
By your face
Pulling away
Further and further
From mine

I cling to those warm images
Trying to think of just those warm images
Why can’t I just think of those warm images
The smell and feeling of you lingers
Like the heart beats I felt throughout my body
I think of you
And not just myself in your eyes
I don’t think of how sad I was
How much I wanted your attention
To validate me
Call me a person like Adam’s animals
Claimed with names like labels
That one has to live up to
I just wanted to experience
Your presence
And that yellow warmth
I just wanted to watch you
As a painter
As he would paint with such a tired, wise, skilled hand
And learn by just observing how you take in the world
And repeat it in your own imagery
Your own beautiful imagery

And I burn
When I think how people have seen this
And scrape at the surface of all you are
To present you dirt
Where tectonic plates should be moved
To give you the yellow sunshine beneath your feet
And swirl around your hair
Like a halo
Just to see how beautifully you reflect it
And when you came to me
With balloons twisted around your ankles
I wanted to hold you to the ground
And be your tethering rock to the world
I loved you too much to say the right words
To twist our fingers together into knots
And lock into place what we could be
So I turned away and let you be pulled back
A memory lost to gravity

To this day I can quote all of lilo and stitch
Or homeward bound
And still they sit on my shelf
Only to exist
When I chance a glance at their titles
And certain scenes come back
In vivid Technicolor
Playing in the back of my mind
And like someone had ****** with the tv’s color settings
Everything is just so
Yellow

There was yellow in you
Soft and bright like the sun peaking through the cracks
Of a rainy morning
Where just in small trickles
I could hear you playing them through my hair
The promise of home in your fingers
As soft and gentle as the rain
But still making my eyes slowly drift
And my muscles relax
Forgetting where they started and yours began

You told me once you were scared of silence
And I can’t get that off my mind
I can’t understand
Because I can only find quiet when I’m around you
And it fits me like an old dog on a rainy afternoon
After walking all the way home after school
Warm and peaceful just listening to the breathing
Even and never stopping
Because that heartbeat doesn’t run on coal
But still it feels so warm against my cheek
And only when my mom comes home do I realize
Hours have passed by around that moment
And I had let go of how cold I was because the silence is
The time in-between
That melted that away

I understand the fear of silence
Or at least what disguises itself as it
The distant hum of thoughts
They swarm on the horizon of your mind
Some sounding like possible, probable, regretted conversations
And the roar can be so loud
Like an ocean, once just an idea
Now suddenly it tries to stretch its arms across your body
And you can only drown it out with headphones for so long
Before finally it’s crashing and thundering in your ears
And it leaves you feeling so cold and alone
And again it drags you back into the undertow
Of just what you don’t want to hear
While being so silent

But you make me want to listen closer
To that dull roar of static
Until it becomes a calmed, retreating tide
Swelling and receding to the shaking of my heartbeat
Until I remember I’m breathing the crisp air
Of a beach morning
And I can taste the sand
In my breath
The only sound left

Drag me into your shell, you hermit crab
Show me how your walls fix themselves into your spine
Forming your house, a conch shell
So instead of silence you always hear the ocean
To remind you of how vast the world is outside
While keeping you safe
In this pink cave
The tide rolls in and out artificially
While sand stretches itself between you and the actual shore

You took my hand and let me take you
To sink into the ocean up to eyelevel
And drown out all the other noises except that of the tide
To focus on the even rhythm
Of the water enveloping us
Just let your head fall back with me
And watch the sky long enough to forget that the shore exists
As the cold water digs fingers into my sandy scalp
They’ll thread themselves into your hair too
Assuring us there is no place in the world
Better than this one, silent moment
Together

Women throw themselves in front of it
With actual freedom
Faces are drawn out in wild arrays by it
Alive finally in abandon

Screeches shrill sounding
Significant in their speech
Shrill speech they screech
Not ever silencing
Loud
Not tempered but proud

It’s echoes
Of crackles
Echoing
Cackles
It’s complimenting
The women naked and needing
Complimenting

Feel feel. Feel
Warmed for the first
With their own voice
With their own feet on the earth
With themselves

With who?
With whom.

Autumn comes cold
Campfire feathered fathers
“You’re just young and becoming old”

With who?
With whom
Cut off at curfew

Passive apathy persuades
To find warmth away; Away.
Alone again I find myself today
Strong specter in silence
Soft snowflakes
Missing when day breaks
Sleeping songs
Slip into my headphones
Shutter slipping
Sound skipping
Everyday
Monotony
Every movement
Is extraordinary

Cold cuts crisp
like
Cracked lips
With who?
With whom
Cut off at curfew

Now nowadays new
Without you
I have myself to
Have myself too
Cut me off at curfew
With who?
With whom

On a chair
On a cliff
My back is straight
My arms are stiff
It churns
On angular
Axis
Gracious
Then Gaunt
Back and
Forth
Momentum
Momentous
Backwards?
Nothing
Just the chair
Rocking
Tipping
Anxiety
Anticipating
I flail before
Straightening
Caught once
Again
Always always
Hesitating
Again
I am coughing
Again
I am drowning
See me smiling?
It’s quiet
Screams sent
Screeches screamed
But only when
Slumbering
Silence kept
Returning
Is the Sanatorium moving?
Except the grime
My lungs secreting
Drowning
My coughs in my arm
There is no sign
There is no alarm
Just is
Is
Is
Rocking
Back
And forth
Coughing, stumbling
And finally finally
Falling

I flail before
Straightening

The past is the dirt hidden behind the *** walls like it’s not even there.
Roots have been dug dry by clumsy paws before, and a then the grimy, smiling face spoke true and clear,
“You'll only feel comfortable being naked in front of the blind without glasses.”
So please play off the naive smudges resting under my lower eyelashes.

I Lowered my eyelashes.

It’s when it’s seen in the right light angled 30 degrees above the left cheekbone.
It’s when it blisters outside and a mirage sits heavy on the empty road.
It’s when being is to be seen as a composting collection of freckles and scars,
But nothing kills weeds like seeing new flowers and thinking they’re bazaar.

They are Bazaar.

I’ve been used to skinning my knees with smiles to shake off the trauma.
It’s just a hurt, I know that it hurt, so why even bother!
Take it, prune it, and display it in a vase on the windowsill,
But I’ve tried, I’ve failed, and I won’t try again to make roses less hostile.

I Made Roses less hostile.

A dog is a dog and a cat is a cat because a plant is a plant and the sky is the sky.
The way I’ve been told is to radically accept it all to get by,
But it’s when you reach your fingers to the sun through your squint and the heat,
And realizing you’ll only feel as warm as the dirt that’s been curled under your feet.

Growing over your Feet.