A meadowlark call, a brief marked stall on a structured walk.
A couple blocks more and the forest adorns the river and the rocks.
At this stop the wind has not yet been blocked, and it wavers on with the scent of crinkled leaves. 
  And just as it had begun,
the moment ends as the pathway bends.
I know it can be found and felt again, if I'm able to release and retrieve.

No *******, no poems. Nothing to hide behind. I remember listening to this Modest Mouse song, freshman year of high school. I had 20 bucks of **** **** socked away in a ps2. I had so many deep, but not intricate feelings. Maybe these are the best kind... It was a year of a fresh new start. I felt like the outcasts in all the halloween specials and ******* I had watched, as well as this tragically different being. I started hanging out with E. He's an indie wrestler nowadays. But back then we mostly smoked our cannabis, made jokes about historical events or political agendas. We were in a video production class. The class let us roam in and out and off of school grounds, missing other classes even. It was perfect. I met the older kids, we'd drive around, I just remember it now as sunny and a little chilly. I even lost my virginity that year. It was a train wreck of a relationship. Two people trying to hard to be older than they were. She was a senior then and had just lost her father... I still wonder sometimes if she's okay and I don't know why. It's not romantic worry, it's not hoping for reconnection, it's just a sentimental anxiety. It was a time of friends, running in nature and crunching leaves with my cross country team. It felt right. It felt so good to be old enough to be the freaks and the geeks all rolled in one. I didn't know then in 5 years who I'd be. I didn't know those people would fall away from me. My fitness would fall away from me. I wouldn't go to the library high with E anymore, shooting nonsensical politically engaged videos, full of bad hidden jokes and nearsighted irony. My sophomore year E stopped attending high school. We stopped talking so much. I haven't seen him in 3 years now. And only then it was a quick hello, his hair has grown so long. His eyes didn't look rebellious but lit with hope anymore, they didn't race. He looked older, real-er. Our momentary grasp on time and reality gave through the cracks in our hands. Now I sit at university. Barely scraping together classes for some mod-podge video art minor. Sometimes I feel like I like film because it reminds me of those old times. I still have fun, I still have experiences that ******* away, and at only 20, I'm sure I have many more to come. But I still can smell the cars and the schoolrooms, feel the trails and the weather, and taste the air and the packed lunches, from half a decade ago. I peaked in high school, and I'll never belong anywhere as much again.

All the natives strike up a match.
They watch, they dance.
The night blends with their flames, vibrant and young.
I follow her pine-scented hieness,
A dream of a girl.
And to bed I lay alone,
And to sleep I cannot fall.
Even with the bottles counting more.
Anchor to the weak and weep to their chief,
I've waited long enough in my own apathy,
Masochism poetry for small-town sympathy.
The line has ended,
And jump I must.
I'm trying to edit,
The parts I cannot trust.
But a night with you,
Bourgeois and red and true,
Might soften the blow,
And from my sullen head,
Imagination could brew.

Drink, ****. Poor. Lick, sensual fits. ****. I'm lifted like a arobatic wind, and drifted like a scattered garbage bin. I'm long and I lay verisimilitude to your crude oil painting of a Dubloon, your family ruin, treasure. I bring pleasure and distraction in a measure I can't measure up, too. I'm falling asleep on kin's couch as I dreamed I touched you. A canvas I placidly transit in my dream fallace. But I, I am I gilded knight, a sanctioned right, a shortened night. Why in hell cant I spill a little, content with being the **** for once, at the expense of my happiness, I choose constants.

Windowless, shadowless, fluorescent a room and schoolyard scent. A lecture on earth's composure rumbled on as thunder sounded when I need not know where my toes were. Terrestrial topography in the row marked 2 or 3. The hierarchy of "figured out" and inane diplomacy, but I was feeling fine. I was sitting alone and still and looking at the morning faces. I left spaces left and right so I could swallow my mind and wrap up tight in the vacuum allowed. The collided waveforms hit my selective ears. I'll see you next week. I'll see you next week. My knees are weak and I'm writing the words I don't know how to speak and writing the rhythm, the subject I so often treat poorly, write off as a cliche archetype made for the gullible, penned by the phony. Yet I can't wait. A nervous anxious wonder I can't shake, like a beautiful sun gliding over a closing wake with the wind on its back and a ship to take.

Do you think I could fall away with October's leaves. The wind hits calm but true, the sun wakes for its bouts in the noon.  What's a campus fall to me? Do all these people know I see them? Am I a veiled expectant? An invisible crutch, my panning stare raising their arms there and back again as they follow the surveyed lines the pathways provide. It's prolonged smell of mud that takes me back. But ahead there's a campus fall. Equinox fear me not. I am not holding you to fate. I won't shiver or shrink if you miss the date. But I fear, oh what a pair, the campus and the fall, an anxious wait.

Sip sip chug
Wipe it under the rug,
When it forms a lump
Try to stand
And jump
jump
jump.
It's dizzy in here
It's worse out there
Sip sip chug
Lean in for the hug,
When it feels too tight
Try to walk
Take flight
Fight it
Fight.
Sip sip chug
Keep your look smug,
the love in their blinks
Maybe try
Don't think
Think
Drink
Chug chug chug
Wash down Wash
Away
Ride the wave
Stay in the car
Stay stay
Sta-