our stuttering lungs
fall short of Breath
fluttering tongues
with bodies pressed

ease in and out
life and death
but where is death?
it's in our hands.

we must be pressing around it
pushing it down
somewhere between us
it is infinitesimal.

grasping to unbutton your jeans,
i am the fingers tearing through the keys

and long shifts at boring jobs
mean red trails on my back

tonight, it is the blood of the first bite that i crave the most.

slipping into you, just through the door
(and i can feel it now)
having broken the code and spoken that language
with my body, from its heart
with my searching fingers

with fluttering music

knowing the great adventure that lives inside you...

I've got
a really bad cavity
But I'm
Not terribly sad

you are only as free as you are death,
you are only as ******* as you are
pointless.

you do not have rights,
you are mine, solid, fixture
for a moment

you have zero rights, Dis
and you are all mine.

you are the era and the time
names carved in trees of flesh
works of art as if made by an insane savant
taped around
half finished plots
all on the ground
crumpled up
and beaten down

i am a twisted failure
a breathing bleeding heaving wreck
and i've got another name
carved in my flesh

you are the era and a stubborn donor of love
i've been like lonely deserts
you plant your flowers in my toxicity,
scream.

What they think about me doesn't hurt,
I'm on top.

Take this pill, **** in this cup,
Labels, stigmas, words.

But what they think about me doesn't hurt.

What they think about me can rattle and run,
I'm virile
I'm a real one.

Oh...! what they think about me can rattle
and run.

What they think about me isn't fair,
But I'm there.

Waiting for my chance
To show the air I'm fair.

What they think about me isn't fair,
But I'm on top.
I'm virile.
I'm *there

I look to stronger people in my life
For better ways to hold myself.

I'm a spoiled rotten whiner with a melodramatic tongue,
Trying to snare my sloppy thoughts in lazily spun nets and throw them on the fire inside me.

You could read it on my face sometimes and catch it in my speech,
If you were really looking for it,
When I pause and my engine shakes briefly
Trying to find a smoother if not happier track.

These stronger people
They have tools I can study and take to my shop
Make blueprints and integrate into my machinery.
I want to be a better human,
Smile in the face of adversity
Make myself efficient and spur others on their way to heaven
And contain my personal catastrophe.
I don't want to atrophy.

sweetie pie,
it is time to go to bed.

daddy is not telling you
a bedtime story tonight.

we are all out
of Love!

you see, the sadness you feel in your heart
is just like the deep empty blackness in the sky
in between the stars

right now

there is no point in bedtime stories,
honey.

you can cry until you tell me
daddy is right.

the blackness goes on forever
and all the bedtime stories have been told,
if i told you one you would just grow old,
and die

My sinews are torn,
My veins a pulp
A mess of hair and fragments of skull

I did this myself
I wanted to be
A human once,
You disagreed.

But you and I, we curled into
A single string
And pulled it through
We're one and two
And three and more
We're everything
And ever more.

And strange arrived up to a stop
Here riding on a moment's top
Abstracted, pinned onto the wall
Life became
Something odd
That's all

she's got amplifiers
the return investment
the few focused phases i could take
and crack a money pinata.

social hierarchy
mechanics i possess
i see what happens
when i obsess
and when i undress.

she's got crazy cities
slums and starvings
unheeded code of conduct
and weathered paladins

i am one of those spillovers
but i could congeal and correct it
they judge me falsely all the time
so what might i assert?

I wish that
You would die
So i
Can go on living
Happy,
Fed.

Bizarre how time rolled up into a pulsing sac of flesh,
Fate's knocking at the empty sky for an explanation and finds itself graced neatly there,
I am just a weird knot of time
Go for it
The buzzing everything tells me...
Will this to happen on your sliding breath.

And my breath, it slides
Like a small child learning how to ice skate
Soon I will be twenty-five
I'm getting a feel for this and I'm working on the finer points...
It is taking some time.

I watch you flit around,
Flirt around with different forms
It is neither here nor there,
This whole affair
But you do lay claim to some import

These are the things I absorb
And whether they live or die there,
Well i guess it's neither here nor there
But I'd sure like to fly east
Until I melt into the sun
And drip drop my love onto the world like a soothing nectar.

We'll have heaven for dinner.

We'll give our extra souls to the needy,
And we'll give them health, and food, and clothes.

I'll stop whining, you'll give the form of a woman
And we will spend Time
We will talk about the strange new world after quantum physics
We will make music and watch variables change
We will get tired of questioning form itself

Everything will be perfect.
We'll have heaven for dinner.

And when we are done,
We'll have Hell for dessert.

Melancholy found a home in me like I found a home in the world.

He works his job, drinks his water
Eats his food and pays his rent.

He is one of my most loyal tenants,
But I am the lord;
That's not what I meant.

He's a handsome man,
With smooth motes and good sense.

Running like a cool river
His pool is the profound blue of my life
And probably my favorite color

Because he is easygoing;

When he comes he comes
And when he leaves he leaves
Painting my eyes
Paint on my feet

scars are lipstick you can't rub off
carved and gifted, we can't love down
the world, the dove, the gun, the crown.

the claw that teases blood to the surface
the maw that pines for your innocence,
it cannot, will not, eat you up.

everything is so full of fruit,
which is why the world is full of ****.
get over it,
sang the roughened root.
the foliage sang
such softer songs.

Dawn is yawning,
Its yellow is mellow
You're the chartered martyr.

Whatever.

Time's plot is plodding,
Your heart is nodding
Off into a wakeful slumber.

Whatever.

Then,
Out of the blue
The vein you're in dilates
Your Icarus skyscrapes
The chemicals swim
And the ocean
Is awash
With color.

Whatever, whatever.

Whatever. Whatever.

Whatever, whatever
Whatever whatever.

when life forgets itself
you're floundering, rambling on and on
splayed out for the world to see.

you're turning a deep shade of red
the cheeks and ears fill up with hot blood
and there is just no right answer inside the body

the bitterness lingers, even when you laugh at yourself
you feel wrong, and silly
and you cringe at yourself

all the moments like this become one
and in self reflection, you wince.

it's not something you or anyone else wants to handle
they take a pass, you sink down
you experience suicidal thoughts

a seed of hatred for the world is planted--
do not water it with your blood.
find a way back to balance
make a statement of love in the universe.

You pour springtime in the river each year
And then dose me with summer,
You live up on the ridge
And one day we'll meet and I'll trade in my fear

And there'll be new words for "ridge" and for "death"
I'm absolutely positive.

You float flowers downstream to my eyes
These things don't simply happen
They're fated and wise
And the winters are empty and dry

And I'm sure as my breath,
I'm absolutely positive.

And you love me with tangerine skies
And the seaside is marvelous, light blue and white
The clouds billow up with the tide
I'm absolutely positive.

And you wrote me a song for my death.
You said love isn't obvious, off with your head!
And you laughed as you pushed back my hair
And looked straight in my eyes.

I'm absolutely positive
You can't tell a lie

I'm so, so positive,
Why.

The slightest touches give way to the deepest swells,
Flooding out the fractured hells
In so many minds
Across the world
Like rock and roll could save your life.

Incessant strife, take this knife
And cut yourself loose in the open air
And feel the thrill
Of winds of fate
A note I found by heaven's gate:

The moment's yours
So treat it well
Ring that old and broken bell
If here you're found
Then there you stand
Coursing blood inside your hands

She looks for me in the howling lust
A garden of life, held together
By its own beauty and by the holes torn
Into it, with all the winds rushing into the great black nothing
Behind the canvas

But she cannot find me,
I am somewhere in between everything
My love is a hummingbird relishing springtime
My love is a relic at the bottom of the sea
My love never was and my love will always be

I found myself at an impasse
With holes in my brain
That echoed her nature--
Remember me for the flowers I sent
Before we made me hollow.

Charcoal brings me wednesday
The taste and feeling of it
I am well-loved but bitter and dry
Touch me. Touch me. Touch me,
And I'll come alive.

I was born with a tangle in my line
So twist my nerves
And slash my eyes

What if life was different?
Then we'd be the celebrity center
Of the universe
For now we're just a botched trick
A messy job
A shattered eye to pass on by.

I need a lair because I'm evil.

Typety fingers and flappity lips
The wide gaps in my logic
Are hot holes for working demons
Working their way in.

A desecration of creation,
See beauty bend to the will of Satan
literally, the enemy.

It's all too much, I don't deserve this!
I never should have gone to jail!
I don't get a good amount of sleep because of these randomized drug tests!
I have such a negative association with this house!

And so to stabilize
I need a lair
Then I'll be cool

I need a lair because I'm evil,
Take it like a fool.

The fields are fertile,
The air and sea are clean,
And you and I have much to do here.

Look out and away from the sadness inside you.

Provide for the tribe.

Carry your dreams in that crazy basket til dusk calls us back to the sea.

She sits
In meditation
For reasons you are here to
...Devise

When she awake,
I died.

Divide, divide, divide.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

Arrive and decide.
Inspire and ignite.
Arise behind her
Katholic eyes.

words are the proverbial stones of the temple
the walls of the church are strong
the walls of the church are opaque.

are they words, or are they photons?

they turn on leviathan. the black side of each word
erects him, gets his tail wagging
and right at this very moment a maelstrom
swallows the sea.

that is the cost of words. of action, emotion.

turn over the temple! O Christ!
their meaning is their own undoing.

Oh! You've
stricken me so
seeped your songs and hot words
into my bones and blood.

And I do find it pretty odd how
Someone that I've never met
Can stir my stomach up like that.

But they do, and together we go
And together we grow
When I go to your shows
I feel like I belong, a little spoken for
My favorite songs...!

(Pomodoro for the lady,
Veal Marsala for the young man)

(I hate riding the bus
to meet my P.O. every ******* Monday.
2 years? $38,000 Really!?)

(I have yet to play a single show
and I'm 22!)

(I'm so nervous. I really hope this works out.
Sometimes I can be really good on guitar and
vocals.)

(I feel like I'm getting close. I'm
much more confident now!)

There's no devastation for me there,
And I need not compare,
Only be the one I am.

Beautiful music will leave my body,
Of that I am completely certain,
Circle drawn and close
The curtain.

The crooked-toothed,
Filter-born demon speaks
Into my left ear

Saying, if we all **** ourselves
What do you think you are seeing
In the world?

But I don't think it's so.
Worth ignoring, he is weak.

And I can spell "capable" backwards.

Oh, you send out little shoots
Oh, we're all just screaming at the sky
But you're a giant and they sound like cute little cries

Oh, and you're not wrong
But oh, just look at your big toe
It could turn me into mush and you'd just wipe it off and sigh

There's a big rod of silver
Reach across the sky
I've got a gold made from liver
Isn't that why?

Isn't that why we stay up too late?
Me being me made you so great.
'Cause I needed you
Not to feel alone
When I die, solid stone
To stand upon.

When she feels ready,
Nature draws the cool blue element from my blood swiftly and gorgeously.

I have tried to do the same
But I struggle hard, and miss the vein.

I beseech her at night
Digging hard with thoughts of Might
Then drawing back
And let cooing music overtake me
With quiet hums of meditation.

I let the red betrayal banner blow, concealed in my moonlit cloud
I let the navy river swim
And bubble all alone.

I let the morning light begin,
And pull it all the same.
I let the song come tumbling out
Like stones from heaven's gates.

There is nothing worth singing in my head
For now,
It is confounded
Blocked by crudeness
Percolating the next flash moment
They are waning,
I have noticed
For now
But the dynamics of life are mysterious
And I am a weird guy

wrote about a feeling i used to know,
became i a very special piece of dust
upon the windowsill
until
was i introduced
to a gust of wind from outer space,
and we courted each other for time eternal.

and in the next life was i hiking in the rain,
from a good vantage felt i thunder roll up and through my belly
Appalachian thunder
drip drop beads of water, flowing through my brows and lips

don't know what i used to know,
but there you are, your blood is in everything
i only dive into your body over and over

and you're like a page that got stuck
as the winds ravaged a book of symbols and pictures.
sweet subjective antecedent,
tell me what the world means, means.

I have certainty about me,
even when it doesn't seem
To resonate so well
Throughout me

Elements forsworn to construct each other
By negation do arise within me
And they become me.

And what will I become?
All that is around me!
Anything abounds me,
Even my own death!

An observance which is sure to cease,
Esteemed by one human being
Called "truth" by him, and called again
Just to call! ...Well yes, I would oblige
A certain deconstruction
It truly seems required.

A notion were I even to fight,
Ride my bike and exercise,
Eat salads and believe in my... self
Tout God's music as my own
Just the same, well...
I would die.

Not the one of flesh and bone.
The one whose steel legs pick the world clean,
Clean as American washing machines
The one whose banks are fortresses of power
With all the rats orbiting around them
With the best rat home you'd imagine

The one who made good and evil your brother and sister,
Manifest dragons biting each other's necks
Scales flashing like neighbors and corporate logos

Mindful man trapped in a cultural cell,
Vicious man with reins in both hands.

Not just the world cascaded from them,
But the actual cave inscriptions and fossilized love of generations,
Their ***** deeds and misgivings,
Evil experiments and slave-drivings
Their war-mongering and capless greed
Their style and their flicking tongues.

Don't be so mesmerized by the screen.
Don't be so naive.
Know your mother well,
You won't always be so green.

Contradicting veins.

I cast my eyes for demons so many times,
They hardened
Now haunted by pareidolic images
And drawn out, false conclusions

Faces in the forest,
In the bricks and in the rain.

Or maybe sometimes, it just happens.

And where emotion used to rebel,
I stop there to consider.
That maybe I'm a fool for it
I see a bigger picture

But something here was always right
I won't grow old and bitter
I'll trudge through with a battered mind
Til I cannot any longer

Write
write write,
I do not read
Despite
The fact I understand...

Most of my life

Has been spent listening, adjusting!

Write
write write,
I will not read
I'm right
And when I'm wrong

You'll come for me,
And that'll happen either way! Ha haaa!

So yes,
You're cool
Because you stayed
In school
I left
Because the world is so insane!

So set
Me straight
And if you can,
I'll wait,
Or... I will try
To carve out my fate! Ha haaa!

I remember meeting the girl behind me
in poetry class.

I remember fingerpainting with Jeremy
and loving her
in the grass
by a stream

I remember hills and cold and wine and you

I remember dim-lit rooms

I remember your sister and your parents and your redone bathroom
The hot tub and your dogs and the bed in your room

I remember the traced hands and writing
Under the drape hanging above your bed

Your things were in boxes
But not you, not you.

I remember the singer in your band,
and the drummer in your band,
and your friend from high school.

I remember taking your benzos.

I remember losing my first apartment and moving back home.

I remember that Panic! at the Disco show:
Shut up and dance with me

Moving back to be close to you

Comics and friends, books and loose ends
Arguments and apartments
And dog sitting weekends

I remember me asking for the beans and you spilling them
And trying to hold the beans down
And getting way too mad over them
And throwing your fish at your house,

and driving to Florida and back,
it haunts me.

I remember what it felt like without you around

I remember sending a picture of you
that you said not to send.

I remember saying things
I'd rather not have said.

I remember being blind to Tara and selling my guitar
And cutting myself and arguing with my parents.

I don't need the perfect summer daze

I don't need that song you played
I don't need the things you said
About me
I don't need going to France

I don't need getting engaged

I don't need holding you up with strong arms

I don't need to dominate your ****** desires

I don't need to get dizzy and dance around beach towns,
I only knew you for a year

I don't need to be your friend but I'd love to be your friend
And I could
But that's never going to happen

I don't need that one last word
before we both are dead

I don't need to envy you anymore,
I don't need you
I don't need to compare everything to you
But I'm not sure if i can stop

?
I don't need your legend
So why did it pierce my heart?

!
A year is not that long.
And fear is not an art.

Soggy thoughts of human currency
Faulty braces to hold up my face
Years coming too fast down the assembly line.

Accusation-men with electric rods restrict my motion
Tears I buried in the pit of my stomach
Faulty braces holding up the sky
That... eternal smile

I know the evening news has you on edge

But I swear to god I haven't given up my pledge

It's a work uniform, a work uniform
and shoes
So heavy in my backpack

I am riding my bike to work

It's not a gun

Shuffles awkwardly, buffeted by headlights
The highway won't slow down
It's break time and he is getting coffee
The leather jacket tucks in his body heat from the cold
The stony pit of his stomach wrapped in doubled skin

She is an unknown
Professes her love to him
And he is just uneasy
He wears it in his eyes
The mind running through scenes and places it shouldn't
He is like a ***** cell unsure of *******
Shaking too much for love's vacation

Instead it makes him tremble,

Maybe I'm better off alone.

magnetism.

that's how i rationalize the heavy whirls i feel in my heart

it feels like little storms of plasma
are playing on its strings

i remember how it felt to be in love

i am in the gray and brown,
in the dust, with the shadows
i am... a failure.

i searched his name on Facebook
wanted deep inside to see
if you were still together

i got my answer, cut the tethers
now i sit in my parents house and remember
how it felt to be in love

and it hurts,
because i don't like how it tastes
the lonely sky hangs like
the ceiling of a warehouse.

i miss the girl's embrace.

the heavy whorls pulsing my internal organs,
it cannot... cannot be the gulps of hell
it has to be the reason
i fell in love with someone else.

tendrils swirl from me and collapse
licks of lazy flame lap at the ether
for now, i feel defeated
doused by the dream-killing waters of eden.

no law says my body will find its cove,
only its cure
i want to dock my vessel in your shore
the fine and smooth skin of your sands
feel the ecstasy of your thin blonde hair running over my face,
hold onto your hands.

*** you in my sleek and emotional way
put pure desire in you, watch my fire in you
one weekend we'll have our earthly heaven
but for now,
i am a lonely boat.

Folly
comes in many flavors.

It's a teleological fantasy
This is getting out of hand
To love sweet Dis
Was all I could think

With purpose draining out of me
With purpled eyes that barely see.

Ah, purple! The color of royalty!
This fair spring air is choking me.

Each bead of magic,
Faetal symphony!
I lost this poem
Unto the sea

And you and I were just a dream
I'm self-defined,
Eternal reach.

It's wishful thinking
Western life
The rigid machinery of social constructs

So where do I place my limbs
So that my heart and head swim?

East coast shoulders
Chip and wear
From carrying the blues, on and on.

That music swells us up
And pulls asunder.

It's the bold and ancient
Sound of thunder
That reminds me of what I should be

So how do I stake my happy fate
In the loudness of the modern state?

East coast blues
the Lansdale average
I guess they're right, and that's just life.

So find a warm spot,
Hold the night.

What is it that gets you off the most
About me?

Destiny has pulled us tight at the waists,
Your flames are fine, and hot
The taste

It's the way your eyes, those jewels of fate
Contrive heat from deep within me
Your voice is cool, an ancient friend
Of inferno's roar
In the deepest hold of my body

Do you like the way
My body shapes the fire?
You called it here
I'm watching your altar
Reach higher and higher

Until your face curls with the tension of ******
Until guitars scream in your head
Then the cadence is reached
And the lights fall like angels,
or stars
to the ground.

I have learned to wax my apples,
A simpering salesman
Awaiting your final visit.

Business could always boom,
But I just hate waxing apples--
I leave them naked by the bushel.

I sit down on the couch in the lower-level den of my house
and I think once again about all the things I don't know.

I'm thinking about
The back of my head
The bottom of my heart
The backs of my hands

The top of my lungs

I'm thinking,
Okay. I am just a man
And I need to figure out how this body works best for everyone
I don't mind it, let's just dance

Misty moon
Light sharp through the glass
Window standing over the piano
Midnight finds a shadowed man

The digits limping over keys
They paint in rhythm, a beautiful melody
Nocturne-- darkest navy with twinkling white
Swirling black like pools of night

Up rises a wave of that heavy ink,
It sinks
When quelled
by periwinkle breeze.

The man, the grand, the coffee
Table--
The moon, the breath of Gabriel--

There's no such thing as me
Spawning such brilliant memories.

I swear I've lived it all before
I have been noticing things.

But you say that makes me sick,
And I don't disagree with it.

I guess you could say
I've been noticing nothing,
Nothing at all.

So there's no such thing as me,
Why even write about it?

Spawning such dark memories,
Why burn so bright about it?

But we've gone critical now
We are just chemicals now
And now there's no such thing as me
At all.

And now I'm nothing at all,
At all.

Sometimes I pretend I am the essence of all that's good to be,
One with this work of art we breathe
And I look down through the clouds
From the moon,
And through them watch myself struggle to find sleep.

I watch the artist struggle there,
Swatching shades behind eyelids
And turning time for me.

I watch a seed in the soil
Work its only way
To me.

I see the broken part of you,
Which is like a shattered glass
Spilling black blood between everything
That spills into the night sky.

You don't have to pretend--
But I think I was always
Somewhere between.

Has the forgotten life of you
appeared outside your room?

The monsters that we fear as children,
the death in far corners.

it is very real

You appeared outside of doom,
but it won't be long,
and your head whirls round.

the grim cosmos devours us all,
fool

and the monsters just mature, just age with us
folly

the very cold and forgetful universe
your own complete absence
visits you in nociception and negativity
but you will find yourself again
you always do.