You walk like your shoes are made of coals.
Restless,
dancing on your toes as you waltz
between the window
and the kitchen.
chiseling a weak smile between sallow cheeks.
You're wiping loose strands of auburn from your lips,
tucking them back into your greasy visor
and praying for 2 a.m.
And by the time it rolls around,
and you have been sick from the smell
of angsty undergraduates
and overcooked, pre-frozen meat patties,
you could collapse in the parking lot
and let the snow bury you till spring.
Marching across the lot,
into a grimy liquor store
purchasing your poison at a questionable bargain.
supper that warms you inside out,
takes you blissfully to sunny dreams,
leaving you in heap on the kitchen floor
every ******* morning.
Moving through your woozy wake-up call
of sprinting to the bathroom to surrender your shame,
and wipe away the traces of a cold night on a linoleum mattress,
your fingers slipped
while you attempt to piece together this china-doll visage
that you shattered every night
and the curling iron caught you on the neck,
a perfect metaphor for the day-in-day-out
that roasts you on a spit,
slow and searing,
wrinkled and
wrung out into the flames,
crisp and blackened
like the very meat you served me
between stale bread
this evening.

Don't succumb to our fires,
not in a place so fried by it's own hand.
Take your tips, little lady,
and climb aboard a Greyhound
Use those legs and skip to a different coastline.
breathe new air, kiss a new shore
and roast over the fire
somewhere with better *****
and a nicer view.

Today is the anniversary of someone's death,
Someone mourned by widow and son,
Someone who's legacy has faded into the ether:
a man, a woman,
a child.
And what eulogy is spoken by grieving tongues
for the dead who's legacy
has evaporated from memory?
They have died once
a breathless body, cold breast,
and once more,
when their name,
a devise of their mortal anatomy,
is spoken for the last time.
But they are remembered, not by name,
or kindling memory,
but in the fear of darkness,
the prayers to our ceiling and
the bitter taste of sadness.
Spirits reflected by the very anguish
that ripped the facade of life
from their throats.

We fear death for two reasons:

pain
and
forgetting

I saw you
at your
lowest point;
your miserable
wallowing worst,
pitiful and *****,
sorrowful and shamed.

and I
still
love(d)
you

I gaze into the mirror
where I have seen so many faces.
But I still haven't seen
my own.

.
.
You write because you're lonely.
Not because you're out.
You write when you sit alone,
and the gears in your head wont stop turning.
The words in your mind wont stop knocking.
You don't write at a party,
with a beautiful girl
spread in your lap.
You don't write at at dinner,
By candlelight with your companions.
you write when you're gazing at the stars.
When you are determined or bored.
Or apathetic in the mire.
But you write and you don't stop.
Because it's in you.
And it wants to be let out.

You're the ink in my pen
and my reason to let it flow.