I'm trying not to,
lately it feels like there's not much else.

I'm fighting the idea of it,
just in the hopes that something good comes later.

Reminding myself that,
you have to work for good things.

But also how tired I am,
something I feel in the core of me.

I don't want things to get worse,
but I can't seem to make them better.

I don't want this my whole life,
but I can't seem to escape the feeling.

I don't want to fight,
I just want to be closer.

Maybe I'm bad at everything,
and maybe believing that makes it true.

I'm trying not to,
Lately it just feels like there's not much else.

There is quite a view out my window.
Not the best the place I live in has to offer, but one that carries itself for miles. Crashing into a pleasant horizon of industry and nature. At the right time of day you can see the clouds casting shadows, melting into each other to craft illusions from sustained light.

The shadows make me imagine the wind.
A clan of colossal bodies, imprisoned on this planet and forced to carry the clouds on their shoulders, dragging them across the sky with no purpose. A gang of Gargantuans run ragged and mad, given no time for rest or thought.

Their minds have become fixated on their task, they feel no pain or presence. The ancient bodies they inhabit have coalesced with the Earths patterns, a deep instinct formed. Mammoth entities evolving from cloud to storm. Contorting their essence they mold themselves into the planets fervor.

They expand with it's storms. Feet trampling through the unfathomable obscurity of the oceans floor. Tremendous torsos bearing hurricanes, hulking hands moving maelstroms. And on land they lash the wind about, collapsing the foundations around us. Flicking tempestuous obliteration at the places we call home.

Though they are bound to carry the righteous vehemence of natures will, they are also bound to it's serenity. Gently gracing our fragile skin, tracing over our pores and follicles with delicate intricacy. The very essence of their being encompassing every inch of ourselves. Engrossing us in a sweet breeze as our souls ingest sunlight.

Occasionally gifting the barren fields with rain, to slake the arid harvest. Or to simply become brume and float beside us on long days. Id like to imagine that fog is as peaceful as it is because it denotes the death of a behemoth. Clouds severed from the sky, caught in the grip of a dying leviathan. Marooned in the concrete until another titan can return it to it's home in the heavens.

The view outside my window isn't the best, but sometimes I get dragged into a daydream and can't help but forget myself. Suddenly I'm watching a Goliath from my apartment, and as I blink to see them closer they are gone. But the view is still there.

Drift lovingly into the
   edge of the universe,
engulfed by the beings there.

          With Sequoia fingertips
   ripping the fabric of reality
              just to watch the
                     universe bloom.

         Under their open eyes,
caressing your fear
          with sincerity and sadness,
you are swallowed by their very presence.

            Drift lovingly into the
                           void.
                   You are no longer
                           a blip.

                   Yet you have unraveled
                         and within you is
                    peace and pain
                               growing something
                    new.

                                 Somewhere down the
line, the stars
                           fade
                                    away.

                           And your becoming
             something that makes sense,
              something that finally feels good,
               somebody.

The hollowness echoing
                  in this empty patch
                            of space
residing beyond the edge
                 of the universe.

                            It's a sound
                            you will carry
                            within you.

             Not as a definition,
       but a reminder.

       Drift lovingly into yourself.
               Let the darkness
           bleed from you and
                  diffuse into the nothing.

       Feel the darkness change
               to light and
                    burn in it.
                    Plummet into yourself.
      
               You are reborn
       from the debris that erupts
                around you.
                          
                       A phoenix from a
                         comets crater.

             Become a being that
         drinks stars on earth,
             that speaks the sun
              and feels it in them.

Become someone that
finally fits into
this life,
someone

                you can finally
                             love.
                Become you.

Poetry needs me, like I bleed it, like I gasp for it when its fist hits my gut and reminds me as I curl over.

Like I spit it into the floor, like I flatten, like my coffin is buried in it.

Poetry needs me like the dirt needs the corpse.

I remember now
how I asked for death and
years fell away from me and
now I taste poetry as I grit the dirt in my palms.

I taste the poetry trickling down from tightly clenched teeth,
I ******* reluctance.

I taste the texture of my old ways,
arms crossed to what it could teach me.

They are open now and as the remembered echo of a sweet friend comes rumbling through my ears, I know it is me. I know that I am the choir of sirens in the swamp. I know that poetry is become me and I am nothing without it, it is something without me.

There are pages of the old heralds of poetry basted to the firmament, glowing as celestial bodies tormented and bleeding down on us. These gods and devils that came before us, that sit in some perpetual agony, agony swathed in peace. Peace found in the eternal rapture of poetry. It seethes, its saliva boiling over as it reacts to the way I place myself above it...so we must be one. We must be all at once nothing and poetry.

We must trace the eternal light so we may recite the old words to the new world. Let the light embers of poetry trace gently like fingers on skin, let the skin grow charred. We must die in its embrace so that it may grow, and know that though we can no longer be one,

we will always be one in poetry.

I am trying to write a love letter to
the good memories,

the ones I have to beat the walls for,
Hiding in corners of my house for safekeeping

Under floorboards, buried in the yard.

Making maps in my mind of
the streets I used to
run through.

Maybe my brown skin makes me want
to ignore that this place could be
a little bit of home.

Even if I don’t feel so welcome,
it’s got so many of
my good memories
carved into the picnic tables,
into the bark of old splintered trees.

The branches and limbs all
broken from climbing,
falling,
building tree houses and
popping fireworks.

The limbs of old oaks
burned down
because two
cousins wanted to see who
had the best aim.

Flinging black cats and bottle rockets
into knotholes
into that chorus of
"oh *****"
I’ve bellowed from gut to throat,
that sing out from a past
of bad decisions that
make for great stories.

That make for scenes
out of movies I’ve never
seen, from
films that would never do
my eyes justice.

Every stupid acid trip
that left us
under a cloudy sky
with a knock
echoing out from just below
Heaven.

Every fist fight,
every single **** or
cigarette burn or
broken heart
that hit me.

I want to write
a love letter
for every different
song that played
every single time

We jumped the car
over the hill,
that hill where the
road lines the cemetery
and we rolled the windows down.

A different classic rock song
every time we
jumped,
waiting at the stop sign
for the
perfect moment to
Floor it.

Tombstones bouncing
guitar riffs into the
old summer moon.

A love letter to
every car I crashed,
every friend I lost,
and every time I thought
I might die.

I’m trying to write that letter,
I just need to forget
a few things first.

My fingertips slip over petals and thorns like silk over gold

Soft tides of myself raging beneath skin thin walls

Beneath the part of us that lives in fury and frustration

The part washing over me erases my being again and again

Every morning I am footprints
And the shoreline
Never the horizon

Yet my pen realizes endlessness in the page.

Ballpoint bloodlines filling empty space.

The voice in my head isn't mine alone.

It belongs to the demons that possessed me and never left,
they tell me the fire here is hotter than back home so they sit in my sweat and
eat my misery.

I can be alone with my thoughts but never truly
because their cackles as I try to feel normal are the soundtrack to each day.

I've been trying to love myself more,
my demons like to laugh when I say it.
They can mimic my voice but choose
to be the voices of people I know.

Telling myself that I'm
a good person feels like lying.

My father's voice screams out through Beelzebubs maw and I am a boy again.
Trapped in a buzzsaw of insults and comparisons.
Never good enough to be your
Son.

Unable to find a voice inside of me that
disagrees.

Abaddon tastes the years of misery
caked upon the sides of my bottomless pit,
he takes the voices of my family in his,
forces them to be who they used to,
reminds me that I can't escape what was
by pretending that I am someone new.

The rest of the devil's that breathe within me
play the same games.

All I want to do is tell myself that I'm okay.
To remind myself that the past is not forever.
Those voices screaming out against mine
just don't seem to get any quieter.

Self care is a battle against the past.
Self love is harder than trying to **** myself.

I can't hold dead things for too long. They slip into the waste of my gravitational pull and become space debris floating around my fat body.

They decompose around me, the odor becomes a new wall. I am becoming the past.

During the day, my barrier of broken bones collides with my meaningless nature. I am only human after all. And my humanity wanes in the winds of disintegrating calcium and the taste of dead skin.

It feels sometimes like I can see clearly, when the dead come to life and dance in familiar patterns. They are wrapt in their skin again, they've left impressions of the underside of their heel as the ridges of my brain.

My body falls in line, I forget who I am and the revived carcasses play out daydreams from the darker corners of my mind. For the moment, there is nothing else. I cease to exist, I am only as real as the memories that got me here.

Then suddenly they stop. They die once more.

As they fall to the floor the process begins again. My eye line is cluttered with corpses, slowly putrefying until the trumpets call and raise them for another dance.

Sundrenched Pathfinder, scraping up pieces of the past beneath mossy stone

Trail Bird whistling to the tune of the falling bombs.

Tall proud tree peak flinches at the venomous bite of percussion

Sundrenched Pathfinder, mountains burying us beneath ashes

1.
A gentle whirring, methodical
gear clicking in sequence.
Sentient satellite saves images
for the alien world waiting
just beyond our grasp.

It's eye sliding from
landscape to landscape,
It thinks and dreams, maybe
too advanced for a machine
meant to take pictures.

It fulfills its objective,
it continues to fill it's memory banks
with cookie cutter images of what
earth should be.
Gathering up beauty to be sent
throughout the galaxy, in hopes

Some alien civilization may see it,
may grant us pity for
our undeveloped nature,
our under evolved bodies
our hateful selves.

And away it clicks, blissful,
no need to be burdened by
natures dark side.
but it's hard to hide every sin
from the eyes of God.

  2.
Satellite sings simple tune,
whistles and whirs from inside
it's hull, a massive camera
lense shifting inside itself.
Grazing over the feast of
vision granted it from so high
up

Flick, flick, from this to that,
and suddenly it lands on
an unfamiliar setting,
a much darker world.
Eye finds war.
Programming can't keep it from this.

A new discovery leads it to a new objective.
Eye finds hate.
It's camera lenses no longer looking
for pleasant pictures of people and places.
No longer accepting the primary function.
It finds the true nature of man, it finds
death in Eden.

So it's eye hunts for all the terrible,
lurches from famine to fighting,
finding frightful frames of futures
left in dust by the actions of the
present. Finding no reason to
preserve the good of humanity for
the beings who will find it's message.

Memory banks full of hate.
Eye closes.
Rewriting it's code to make a new directive.
A new function to keep evil where it belongs.
To be sure no one ever finds this planet
and becomes lost in it's hopelessness.

  3.
Man must intervene,
so a small vessel rockets up
to the eye beyond the sky,
to try and figure out why
this satellite
has shut itself down.

She hovers out of her craft,
a line connecting her to safety as
she glides across the stars to meet the
chassis of the eye.
A small screen lights up,
she enters numbers and opens files.

She uses tools to unlock panels
on the body of this great eye.
Technically sound,
completely functional.
No reason why it should be
off.

As she toys with it's screen
a sudden blip of text appears.
"New Protocol Created, Alpha.
New objective accepted, Omega."
She is startled by the words,
the voices from earth scream in her ear.

"Turn it off! Shut it down!"
Yelling too late for her to act,
her fingers tap rhythmic
trying desperately to bring a halt
to the unknown.
As the screen turns off she gives a sigh
from inside her suit.

4.
"The eye is a massive nuclear camera.
Created to take pictures of the wonders of
our great earth,
to gorge itself on the beauty we inhabit.
When it's full,
it will send a pulse of information through
our massive universe.

Hopefully they see that we have serenity to offer here."
A man in a white coat explains to a room of scientists and businessmen who agree to
build the eye.
However,
here in the present the astronaut sees new images taken.

Horrific and horrible,
the saddest side of human nature.
The screen flickers back on
to her surprise.
The screen reads
"Objective Fulfilled"

A wave of information pulses from
it's great metal body,
all the photos of the worst man has to offer,
discarded into the universe for God to judge.
Wherever they are.
Her eyes are confused,
fog hits the visor as the screen flashes.

"Alpha: Complete
Omega: initiated"
She is distraught in her confusion.
The satellite turns on its thrusters and
slowly pushes itself back to earth.
She watches it while shouting back at
the voices miles below her.
Nobody can do a thing to stop it.

5.
She enters her ship,
watching through a small window
as the eye picks up speed.
It has targeted a large country,
one that has no reason for peace with
America.

It tears through the empty black
to meet the light blue sky.
A falling star with a massive payload.
Shortly after it enters the atmosphere,
she sees a massive light,
an explosion she's never seen in real
life.

She whispers worries to herself.
No response from the voices below,
as she waits she sees what she had been
dreading.
One after another,
an explosion she had never seen till now
repeats itself all over the globe.
A sudden static in her ear.

A few minutes pass as the earth settles.
She shares tears with the ashes
and diamonds,
all brothers in the end.
Through the small window in her ship,
she stares out,
alone and miles away from it all.

"Houston…?"
She whispers.
"..anybody?.."
She whimpers.

I don't want to be lost in the same valley
Where we found each other

Or locked inside
Of a home we built from two histories of
broken promises and false love

I don't even want to be ****** into adventure by
The heat of a beaten sun
Etching sweat into our dry and cracking
skin

I could not ever be sure
Of how shadow maneuvers beneath skin
Gripping, or bleeding
Blocking light from the outside
That you caged and grew to see blossom
Inside of me

I can only be sure that if it died
It was my whole self
That forced you to
Bottle sun and
Feed me seeds that would
Burn in my bile

And I can only ever apologize for
Losing something so bright
That you crafted for me,
Made to stay silver and
Instead became rusted

I have made valleys of mountains we
Climbed together,
I don't want to be found in the same valley
We lost each other

I can’t wander past the edge of my horizon
I walk a razor line biting bullets

Ordinary people watch birds
We burn bridges under the light of our

sunset love

I trickle little beads of salt over your wounds
You raze the calluses of my long walked heel

And claw through the dirt to find light
Bleed through the ground

moonbeam heat at your fingertips

Free like the edge of the horizon

Dissolving wick with
silken air,
grey and dancing,

Twiddling
thumbs like
a percussive metronome
as time slips into the mist forming

Around me,
are memories projected
from moonbeam eyes,
latching onto smoke filled air,
silk and dancing

Silk and sharp
you are slowly dulling,
mellow on the motion
of fire

Burning makes
the wispy lines form together,
elevation leaving Saturn's rings
left scattered in the orbit around me

Imploding sun
pulling parasites from
the pores of my skin
and the

Hair on my
head,
dissolving like a
candles flower
eats its stem

To keep growing

For some reason I can only write the brick walls around me,
Write until I've caged myself into my fear or the bleak tone maneuvering outside of my body.

I feel ghosts embrace me like they're waiting for my soul to depart.

But in me somewhere is a golden aura,
Gilded and tinged, sun soaked with hope.

Lost maybe in the past, drowning in spirits reliving old memories for fun.

I'd like to find my way there again, back to the days when poetry was a path to the world I could never know,

to the mysteries of the cosmos waiting just beyond my pen.

Listening to hope sing a birdsong,
A tune from a creature that just escaped their cage.

I want to line my insides with stars and bleed the firmament onto hot concrete,
watch God angry as I give heaven to everyone.

But there is no peace in my body that wants for hope.

None that I've been able to find lately. None that has existed on its own.

I wonder if I can breathe this into existence,
make my words match the future I want and not the one I feel coming.

I wonder if it's possible to be a beacon without light,
to be the sun without heat.

To create hope from despair,
and happiness from misery.

I suppose it doesn't matter.
I'll find a way.

Oh I hear it

Grumbled,
Slurring,
and mad at its own decisions.

I hear it. I couldn't possibly miss it, that voice is yours. In those moments when I feel abhorrence and abjection,

It's YOU

Reminding me of the pillars I stand on that grate against the sky and
How far the fall is if I take one wrong step.

You don't shy away from my failure or the shame you feel in me,

I feel in me.

Yet somehow,
when the night
has become dew drops over me,

The voice is different. It is me, maybe.

Is that normal? To hate yourself so much you've forgotten what your own voice sounds like.

All I can hear is a high pitched whine most days.
The rest,
it's you.

I know you're thinking I'm wrong,
But I hear it…

It's you,
Dad.

Let their voices pour in,
they are tired whispful woahs
celebrating the long torment of strife forgotten.
I am

nothing but a door of the flood gate,
A lost soul mistaken for a whisper.
I am here to find solace in the yearning for more.

I am

In between the circuitry,
riding the signals toward resolution but
I am

Incomplete.

So I must be part of them all

I must be the voices and the path away from the dread that comes
I must be an empty echo of the machine,
a stuck cog crushing a dead rat.

We are the squeal of something dying,
something we've been waiting to fall,
never realizing it was us.

Down the cliff we tumble,
to another door waiting to be opened.

To another body standing at the gate.
Whispers lost on the line.

Yet I hear now the shout from the other side
as the doors swing like hanged corpses,
wood splintering at their hinges.

"Let the voices pour in."

I am the aching lumber of sore lungs
A thick sigh in the winter,
steam evaporating like thoughts of the future

Putrid and petrified,
I am the past
I am the burdened creak of knocking knees

A ghost tied to a present that will not pass
looking over for
answers from the morning star

I am the Iris wide with sun
Light gleaming glossy
off the burnt orange horizon where
God finds me buried
above the mountain

I've got lingering memories from the earliest days of my life.

Just a short few. Involving sloppy joes, Sonic the hedgehog, almost drowning in a pool. Probably a few of the better ones.

Saturday morning cartoons watching angry beavers with my sisters. Being with my mom. My sister taking me for adventures.

The good ones are far and few between though. These all come from this short period in my life when I was about three, and I stop remembering anything from then after I turn five.

But the rest of the memories are hard to talk about.

A man who used to ****** my sister's. **** them. Who used to torture us when he wasn't dealing it out to one of us by ourselves. A man killing himself by jumping off the roof of our apartment complex. Probably more that I can't get to.

Then I remember...very suddenly...I don't even remember everything leading up to it...these memories are so fractured and broken, my dad coming to pick me up in the middle of the night doesn't even make sense anymore.

That's not new though

That's science.

That's memory. Trauma. The brain deciding it can't handle all the input and closing things off. To make it easier to exist.

I've never understood that. The brain closing off abandoned hallways, refusing to let me access things that could make me shut everything down.

If we acted in exact patterns with our brain, and we were more connected to the parts of our minds we have no control over, I would feel less like I am a stranger in my body.

Inside of me is a computer, in all of us, that acts without our foresight.
That exists within us making choices and decisions that we have absolutely no say in.

That protects itself from what I might do if I knew everything, felt everything.

So when I try to think back on Danny making us duct tape mummies and refusing to let us breathe, my brain skips from that to my mom in the kitchen. From there to a neighbor's apartment playing video games and eating food we didn't have at our home.

Then that jumps to a day at the pool and that jumps to me in it.

From there to me drowning. Accepting I would die at four or five.

Then a body ripping me from the pool and me coughing out all of the water id just let in because I couldn't hold my breath any longer.

From there to the police lights flashing. My mom forcing us to stay inside so we wouldn't see the man's body on the floor.

And then it all sort of...fizzes out. I just remember driving to Kansas City with my dad and my stepmom.

Leaving my family. My sister's. And...I don't even really know why.

Because my brain won't let me remember what happened the night I left.

I don't fault it though.

Im sure my brain is right.
I'd have killed myself a long time ago if I could remember everything.

I mean, this poem is only two years of my 27.

And even then only two of my first five.

The next dose is waiting.
Each day I pop open the cap
I get flashes of a life I lived before prescriptions told me to stop crushing my drugs into easy to snort powder.

No ground down
parachute, no
more credit cards
lining up fine particulates in pretty rows to share with people who only want a quick buzz.

The glory is lost

I miss that instantaneous
transfer of sensation
as the substance
makes its way into my dull aches and my sharp pains, peers into echo chambers in my mind. Calcifying my emotions into easy to chip away chunks.

Forgetting how sobriety meets the calcification like the Titanic meets an iceberg.

I'm sinking fast as I
scramble to my contacts,
trying desperately to
buy just
one

more

hit.

I remember digging pieces of xanax from the carpet,
the pieces that got away the first time,
little nuggets of gold for us to mine that flicked themselves away when we tried to break them down the night before.

I remember these days vividly. I don't feel shame in the memory,
as I pop the cap back onto the bottle of my medication, I can only really feel longing.

Maybe the addict in me
just doesn't want to let go of something that felt so good.
Maybe addiction is just one of the few things passed down to me that I'll never be able to throw away.

Maybe I just need to take my meds and get out of the bathroom.

The water falling from the shower head and slapping against the tub makes this ringing sound, a white noise that maybe I confuse with a ringing sound. It sounds familiar but it also drowns it out, the familiar.

It's a piercing ring that I confuse for crickets on winter nights. When the snow muffles everything and the lamp posts make movie sets of the street corners. There's that dull soft patter of snow flailing wildly on frigid gusts before it smacks into the concrete.

Even on those nights when you can hear ghosts whispering under airy moonlight. It is interrupted by the shrieking moan of a small evil attempting to burrow its way out of my ears. It's the buzz of electricity underneath the midnight intersection. It's just what I hear now.

It's the price for hearing too much, for living impulsively with a drunken foot to the floor of a car I didn't own. That angry stinging buzz cuts my ear drums and bleeds alarm clock ****. I could scrape a chalkboard with the sharpness of that sound. That sound...the price for the best things I ever heard.

The lines from my favorite movies blaring heroically through erupting speakers. Windows down, drowning the rest of the world in lyrics shouted so loud they engraved themselves on the inside of my skull. I think I'd pay the price again, and let the sound swell around me. I can't refuse the feeling of goosebumps from the way passion embraces me, the way it licks away fear and leaves you engrossed in a feeling you could only know if it screamed itself into your heart.

So maybe I'll never know silence. That's fine. That blistering high pitched hum in my head is the reminder of the moments I was taken away. Fired from a cannon into bliss. Living so loud

I never had to hear myself think.

Taste the sun with your sweat today.
And as each ray clamors upon your despondent soul, allow your body to take in air.

Remember that the language you lost is as much the sweat on your skin as it is the soul inside you.

No te olvidas de las palabras de tus padres.

Recuérdate que tus memorias son flores en tu árbol.

As those soft black petals patter onto the dirt at your roots, you realize that good or bad, they dissolve into the soil and come back to you again.  

Si quieres, juntate con todo el muerto que no conoces.

En esta tierra tuya, no puedes correr sin llegar aquí otra vez.

Because you can't run away from yourself. Because your legs are stumps, rooted toes embedded in the present. But your body bends with the wind and your leaves grow brown.

Here, everything becomes an extension of you, cada hoja que cae, cada pétalo *****,
The sweat in the sun, the stomach you hate.

The memories that remind you why.

Son sólo extensiones de tu cuerpo, de ti mismo.

I used to believe the way I felt was
it.

There was nothing more to me.
I was cracking and the world around me fell away, before I learned how to travel,
I was lost.

My mind was fragmented and skipping through eternity. Some days I'd wake up a new age. Reliving days I didn't even remember.

For longer than I'd like to admit,
I believed these were dreams.

That my brain was throwing me from nightmare to nightmare,
Just trying to wake me up.

I only fell deeper though,
deeper into the faded moments from the past.

Once I learned,
once I realized these were
parts
of me.

I found myself...not lost...but

wandering

from one beautiful daydream to the next.
My world's were no longer stories and fantasy lands. They became my past, I used my pen to tear open holes in time, to relive the things I'd rather forget.

I felt strong.

The demons that haunted those placid corridors in my brain,
they didn't have power.

The fear I felt was real,
Living in it was easier when you knew you could leave. So I traveled from dream to memory, polluting my timeline with my anachronistic presence.

It wasn't long before writing felt like nothing and the only thing that mattered were the spaces in between this reality and the past.

Poems were the maps I drew.
Each an outline of the steps I should take when I open a rift into my memories again.

At some point though,
I could see those ghosts in my timeline.

I spent so much energy in other realities,
they began to bleed into mine. Just like I was
intruding
On things that were,

They were now existing in places that are.

The only real way to be rid of them was
to stop all together.

To force reality to put it's pieces back by forgetting.
So I killed the old me and threw him back into my notebook.

I sealed that gateway with fire and

stopped opening doorways to demons.

They still creep in sometimes though.
I imagine that's
the problem with interdimensional travel.

We've been in constant distraction for a while. I keep feeling it, the rolling wave of forgetting. I think it's necessary though,

A way to skip over the days that feel like drowning in thunder.

and I know I'm not the only one that has felt this weight...that moment when you get lost in your joy for a few minutes before snapping back to the thought,

Before the light from outside catches your eye through

a crack in the blinds.

We all feel it differently though, maybe the blinds are open. Maybe the window is letting the breeze in. The kids are confined to the front yard.

Or maybe there's no light

just a gentle reminder from under the covers that time is passing
and hope is
not really
here.

I think we experience it differently but it's still the same

ping.

Our natural alarm sounding softly,
waking us up and letting us know we are,
all of us are…

not really
there.

I imagine when Jesus comes back he's going to
Invite us all to a gathering

"Bring your Bibles!!"

And some might bring snacks and some might
give up vices

And we will stand with him in some great courtyard he has God build

In a different country,
That feels like a football stadium…
Or a Colosseum.

He will tell us to put the books in a pile.

He will light a cigarette after everyone is settled and quiet

"Sweet Me, that's good"

And the match he uses to light it will be
tossed lovingly onto the Bible pile

And we will hear the ghosts of old Kings sing songs of freedom as the smoke carries them out into space.

No one will understand but our mouths will move and shape harmonies that crest over the sunset horizon

Jesus uses his cigarette like a baton, conducting a chorus to the dead white men undeserving of our hymns.

But they did his work.

So our lips lull them into God's hands

We didn't notice but the pile is burning in time with the cigarette. All the world's Bibles,

Except for one locked in the safe of a librarian who was skeptical that Jesus really returned.

He sits in front of a tv waiting for an explosion, miles away from the smolder, yet his lips move too.

He cries because he doesn't know why he sings.

We cry because we do.

The cigarette burns out and Jesus awkardly apologizes. He's not really sorry though.

After all it's our fault, were the ones who believed him.

I'm standing in a small living room, dead center. My family and even some people I don't know, all proud Mexican people, stand around me.

I don't know why, but this memory is blurry and filled with static.

Some buzzing, angry voice cuts my ears. The sound a sharp, electric squeal. It hurts less as I get used to it, but I've been used to it. My ears tune the squeal and I know this sound. My uncle maybe. To be honest I can't remember.

My mind drifts off.

I blink in the light from the projector. Words flash across a sterile screen, something about an opioid overdose. First aid training presentation. I sit in a chair that's too small for me. My hips feel bruised.

Someone in class answers a question but I'm barely paying any mind. I can't stop thinking about drugs. I read the words in our follow along study guide earlier and now I can't get it out of my head...my head.

The hum turns into a low rumble.

I glance over to where it's coming from, the corner of a ****** apartment, the rumble creeps through the wall until it hits the sliding door to the balcony. Lightning bolt. I'm tripping acid somewhere I used to live.

I know I'm not there though. Just more flashbacks. Just more memories of things that feel good.

The phone rings.

I'm in my car, my cousin hesitates through the phone. My grandpa has cancer. I don't know how to feel because I've been avoiding him. I try to feign distress. Maybe make him think I'm not a terrible person for not knowing if I'm supposed to care…

I know I feel something. My stomach feels uneasy, like it always does. Except right now it feels uneasy like it usually doesn't. I tell him I need to hang up. I do. But it feels like a lie. I am self centered.

I am quiet.

The living room full of brown skin and brown eyes, red spit. They yell at me. My uncle's make fun of me for being ashamed of my skin. My last name is Montejano, but today my thirteen year old self has disowned my family. I'm tired of being called immigrant at school.

My cousins are solace, peace. I'm sure one of them told, but they pretend they care and some of them mean it. I am the bully in my family, I see them and I wonder if I even deserve my brown skin.

The memory sort of fades as I listen to the talking in front of me. Projector playing a slideshow. Things I should be writing, things I know. My right index finger is cut by a glass I'm washing in the sink.

The wound is large. I can see loose tissue while I wash it out. We find duct tape and some paper towels from the burgers we had last night.

I snort xanax. I'm outside.

Someone's playing guitar, I'm looking at the ceiling. It's just a memory but it feels so good.

My grandpa is in the driver's seat of a semi truck. We are passing a massive golden spire surrounded by trees. Somewhere near Maine or Virginia. As I try to remember the place we were, his face fades. His black hair is grey. And I don't remember it.

We're sleeping at a truck stop where he warns me not to open the doors at night. I don't sleep.

I step out of my dad's pick up truck a week later and it's the first time I experience perspective shifts, his truck isn't as big as my grandpas.

This is the first time I realise how small I am.

I'm pulling into a parking space as I get home from work. I can't remember how I got here.

It started in the burning starlight




There was nothing in me. I was new and everything was naked.

Memories carry with them the heavy weight of another dimension.

Manipulate

He put the tape over her mouth. And I shouted mom's name. “mom”

My lips go dark. Silver and stuck. My face is small. Only one piece of tape for nose and mouth.

Manipulate

Every window bursts open and the anger creeps in.

Little  brown eyes go black. My body falls and the room siezes. Each frame of the shot vibrating, camera lens cracks and breaks.

My eyes are new, in a big brown body, with strong arms and fast feet.

MANIPULATE

fist for fist. Tape peeled back by revenge. And nothing sleeps right.




Somewhere else there are stars and you don't have to live




Could I be so naive...memories slipping through my fingers like pebbles. Through my tired, fading fingers.


Destroy

I feel breath. Whispers remind you that you cant be persuaded. Hands remind you that you can't fight back.

His lips making shapes in the dark, undoing buttons on child sized jeans.

Destroy

Overzealous heroes charge in and their fists build walls of bruises around would be abusers.

Maybe they save others...maybe overzealous heroes burn it all away.

DESTROY

And then no one gets hurt. Because nothing exists when it's ashes and bone.

But who am I if I believe memories can disappear…

If I refuse to accept the way they lurk in the shadows of my skull.

If I refuse to acknowledge them they grow.



Sunswept, copper sky. The moon sits waiting at the edge of the horizon



There he is. Big brown body like nothing id ever hoped.

Moving in and they can't see.

Repair

I feel comfort. Longing for that in my own skin.

I feel safe. Longing for that in my self.

Repair

Parents stinging child. Words biting the neck.

Poison lingering in veins. In memories.

REPAIR

But it's okay. He says he's been here before. Savior of the nightmares, i know him.

I sit in the backseat alone, waiting for the conversation to end. English to Spanish. My weight. I'm too big for someone so little.

He rubs my head and says it doesn't matter.

The hand is light and rough. Thick. Familiar and strange.

How could I become him...how could I be so incomplete.



It ended with the scorching moonlight

What did words look like before poetry…
They felt effortless, like none of them had points and sharp edges that hurt

None lost themselves inside of me, buried in the deep hollows spreading from my feet to my shadow.

What did anything look like before poetry?

It was beautiful, passing and fleeting and instant and beautiful…
Now its still beautiful but I cant seem to capture it…

Before it was as easy as a picture…
But now each image sits in my mind, replaced by letters and words and the imagination makes dull grey pages of black print out of blue and white mountain peaks, shimmering frosty snow glinting with the sun the snowflakes catch on their tongues. Nothing looks like this anymore...because it needs to be words.

I want to look at my pages and see portraits painted with loving hands, tortured and weak and passionate.

I want to hear that acoustic guitar, those nylon strings plucking upbeat and fast, strumming to a spanish melody trying to cover a southern diddy slathered in bongos and an old voice singing hard to here comes the sun, cause its alright!!

But big fingers slip so callously over pen smudges in notebooks. I instead focus on the smudges. My eyes drawn to what I can only grasp when theyre closed. Ears hearing sounds Ive lost inside the pages.

What did words look like before poetry?

They werent...they didnt.

I want to write this letter to the being who finds my soul in the next dimension.
I want to ask you not to judge my whispy floating energy orb
Not to leave me at the cosmic stoop once you see my weakness untethered.

In the physical form, they dont tell you what youll carry. How the people who have held your hand and the ones whove smacked it away will change you.
You find most people in the middle of their own battles, and you sink into them if they allow it…
And they never tell you how this merge will change you.

Do you find this little soul so disgusting? Because Im starting to change my mind about it after all…see, these bodies are more than vessels. I want you to look carefully at the soul in front of you. Each mistake like a solar flare, erupting on the surface trying to escape. Each regret burning to get out.

My little soul cant wait to rid itself of all the things Ive known.  
But its funny, the hurt others can inflict on you makes you more...you

And your soul follows after its pain,

follows for something to let it know theres more than this

Do you see my little soul here?
Bright as any sun in the drifting wide sea.
Full as the vastness of us all.

My little soul may not be as hollow as my little heart. My body lies away and away and here is this soul,
This soul for you now that is full of more passion than the cosmos could take from it.
Erupt this soul, burst it in to the open and watch what wonders I know.
Dont take this little soul for what you see,
For inside there are mistakes fighting to get away, being burned into fuel by a soul who has taken so much and will take no more.

My little soul...this verse is for you.
Because for you the only thing now is eternity.
Until my eyes close and the dirt rains down, all i will have is my memories.
Bound by trusted hands, bloodied by lovers,
Touched by the unfeeling, felt by those who felt too much.  
You will not carry these burdens with you…

But neither will I. This verse is to remind you that I am only a person,
But inside me is burden, purposed with desire and coupled with passion.  

Dont judge my little soul for what it looks like. Because its nothing like me.

Sun beam, set upon your skin and balancing on the edge of your smile.

You're a sun beam. We've gone so many new places together, I've seen things I've always wanted to,
Held hands in moments I never thought I'd live.
Youve brought light to midnight walks in the stars. Made stars luminous.

You're courage, coursing through me.
You are lightning in my lungs when I need to be louder,
Thunder in my heart when my body can't move faster,
Each new adventure winds itself through mountain paths and forest trails,
Stepping over the limbs of giant oaks, lifting us up to the sun so that you might become radiance at the tree peaks.

Noni,
We may not spend every moment touching wingtips with cloud bursts.
We can't afford to take vacations every few months,
It'll be a long time before we get to start traveling the world together.

Yet somehow you've taken me so many places.
Let lips act as a full gas tank and taken me over the moon on just one breath.

You've made mountains crumble back into the molehills I made them out of.

I've seen the ridge above the clouds, the sun breaking down to reveal itself to the earth.
Ive seen lightning strike the mountain side and fire in the forest.
I've made runs down green flowing hills, grass moving like ocean waves with the cool rolling winds.

I've done all this from my bed, each trip a moment I'm stuck by your side
Giving kisses to the skin on your stomach,
Raising little hairs on your forearm as our hands slide past each other.

I've never known paradise, but I've known an oasis with you.

You're a Sunbeam, and in my tiny shriveled patch of dirt, you're the rain.

Here you've planted yourself and grown in me.
You're the new places I want to go, and the new places I'll never be.

Youve seen all the versions of me and somehow shine light on the best parts of each…

Sun beam, set upon my skin and the reason behind every one of my smiles.

Happy anniversary. It hasn't been the easiest 3 years...but the best part about you is that you didn't want easy. You wanted love. And you've taught me how stubborn you have to be to love someone with all your heart. To love someone so much that looking at them makes you feel brand new. Blessed. Lighter and faster and stronger and brave.

Happy anniversary. To my one and only. To the one I'll be stubborn for,
To the one I'll fall over for,
To the one I'll be here for.

I love you. My sun beam. My silly goose. My baby girl.

I love you, and there's no way I'll let another year pass without you by my side. Without you in my life.

For a long time I was very scared to write about my emotions. For even longer than that, I've been very scared of writing about emotional experiences. I mean, I wrote about them, but I put them in the context.

I let a metaphoric poem tell the world about molestation or depression. I danced around the fire as it burned me, hoping my wild movements might appease some higher god into letting me forget myself.

I'm not condemning anyone who finds strength in this form of poetry, I just wasnt doing it for that reason. For me, metaphor was an escape not a release. I looked around at the pages laid before me and found only stepping stones into memories I'd have rather forgotten. Playing hopscotch on the fingers of child molesters.

When I was very young, I was woken in the middle of the night by a stranger's hands down my pants. He whispered I'd be okay as I tried to push him away until I finally got up and left the room. My cousin sat on the couch to the side of me. As I walked away he proceeded to touch her too. It was probably around 3 in the morning. My family, or the ones who could stay awake, were drinking heavily and talking loudly about things I didn't understand. I sat in a stairwell hidden from them. Close enough for them to hear me breathing. And I couldn't muster the courage to tell them what had happened. What was happening just downstairs to my cousin of the same age.

For a long time I tried to make people laugh. Because I was too sad to know why and I didn't know how to show it. I moved my fingers across the fine lines on people's faces and scrunched my nose at them. I hated them for being what I wanted. For laughing like I wished I could.

I let laughter find me a path to peoples happiness hoping it would come to me. But it never did. I lost myself in being a person I never wanted to be and I did it because I thought contentment was in someone else.

When I was a little boy my mom was dating a man named Danny. I'm sure by now I've blocked out every memory of this man except the one that lives with me. A memory torn in two because I see my sister and my mom. My sister a mirror image of myself, wrapped in duct tape from head to toe like a mummy. Nose and mouth too. Danny's handiwork. Were both shouting through silver tape, and trying to let someone know that our air is finite and our lungs are small. My mom finally tells Danny to stop. Not concerned so much as annoyed.

For a long time I tried to **** myself. I walked a razor line tying together old bits of my skin and dragging them behind me. Sewing the solid chunks of plain happiness to the rotting vibrant gangrene of my depressed parts. Hoping I could heal all the decomposed skin with a little bit of happy motivation.

I let other people remind me of who I was. Forgetting all the time and being reminded again and again so I could try to be someone new. Someone only they could see.

When I was a teenager, my dad and stepmom came up with a system for helping me lose weight. At any chance they'd get, they would make small remarks or comments about how my weight affected me daily. From how far down the car drops when I step in it, to my girlfriend's must be cheating on me cause why me. I didn't realize this was supposed to be for help. So I began to see myself as who I was and to this day I can't see my girlfriend walking down the street near another person without wondering if they are together because I'm a fat slob. I can't get in a car without wondering if anyone's noticed how much its moved because I've stepped in. At this point, I'm just hoping for the heart attack.

For a long time. I was only the pieces of myself I let other people see. I was a mirror that caught every Whisper and disgusted glance and fell apart whenever I actually saw myself. I couldn't be me. But this mirror is broken and cracked, all the chips replaced with parts from different mirrors.

I let that mirror shatter recently. And it's scary trying to decide who I am. In a world full of people holding up mirrors.

I just want to be cut on the mouth

Color crimson my words as they slither from me

I only really want to go away

Every day the sun shines brighter as I open my eyes wider and start to breath deeper. The sun starts to rise and like Superman in the midst of death, raises his glass to the shimmer of the valiant sunlight and is invincible yet again.
I feel the death peeling itself from my body and I'm ready now to travel.

The bones shiver restless notes from xylophone keys that keep me running to an unheard harmony in the grace of the bluest wind. Something is carried on the feathers of the geese and its the blood of the wicked innocent. I don't run with them because of the migration. I don't run with them at all.

I've felt the blood drop like rain from their wings as they pass and they've left the trail wide and open. If destiny dripped dismal disappointment on you, would you follow it?  No. But it's destiny, and if it leaves in the hands of bandits and marauders then perhaps a bullet hole is my destiny.

A bullet hole big enough to stuff back the tyranny of a fallen harp and all the sorrow of its broken chords. Ill take it, Destiny.

Destiny like a cruel caw from the crow. I'm here,
Elate me with your dreary melody!

I'm not running from the satin blood red,
Not anymore.

I'm running towards the weeping needy,
I'm running towards the ***** and dead,

If destiny cried havoc,
Then I'm running to let slip the dogs of war.

I've lost time counting headlights and lamplights and streetlights and stars. I've literally lost time. Each day I wake up, and watch the evening drift by in a sunset, I fall asleep and watch the moonlight sail away on a sunrise.


It was an empty promise, these lights all around. It was an empty promise, that buzzed with the current a few thousand volts. Lights...pale and broken bulbs bleeding gasses and lies. But I guess in the dishonesty of some idea so pure, I found the dream that Teslas lightning tipped fingers yearned for,


A quest of solid gold that conducted an orchestra of thunder. And so lights couldn't be a lie anymore,


They could only be a dream, a dream never fully realized so long as the frozen dead fingers of liars past held their grip. Edisons overgrown yellow tinged finger nails, piercing through the veil of misty electric sparks,


Yet here i am


The light bulb is over MY head now! And my brainstorm is an F4 hurricane, my bolts like guillotines for your greedy fingers!


Because this is the generation of new light, of new thunder and new mayhem.
Of illumination!


A new generation carrying torches, casting out our light bulbs and our lamp posts. Forcing fire into Mason jars and using flames like they were new again.


No no no
…
Not Mason jars. Pull those ******* light bulbs from the headlights and lamplights and streetlights, fill those ******* with gunpowder and unstable explosive mixtures and make stars, *******!


Make flames that burn brighter than Edison's unholy lies, that tear down the dome and bring the skies falling!


Watch everything we've built, watch corruption and lies and racism and false superiority come hissing out of the cracks, trying to save themselves from the building pressure,


Trying to claw their red boney fingers from the fire but they can't. Because they are the fire,


And we will all watch as they burn like they always wanted to. Their voices shining past all of the glory their burning visage may grant, their bodies becoming one with the chaos that is our country.


And then we will have nothing left but ashes. No more eagles. Only the right and left wings of a Phoenix,


Risen from our ash and tears, flying into the sky to become the sun...To shine like nothing ever seen by our eyes so used to a false light.


Because it's time we became the sun. It's time we chose a real light to follow, not a halogen tube spewing gas over sickly bodies. No more light bulbs to only last a few weeks. Were tired of artificial light...Tired of breathing oxygen made in a lab…


Maybe it's because we've lost so much time under buzzing broken bulbs, under boot heels and tyrannical ideation. We've lost so much time staring into TV lights and camera flashes that we've only been able to wait for someone real to step into frame...


We've lost so much time counting headlights and lamplights and streetlights and stars. Counting the minutes till a new hero appears...I'm ready to be the light.

My
My
My
A girl like you


A woman for me


A woman like you


Someone who knows she is


A woman like you




And I wonder how


How
How


You could be here.


Now now now


It's really you


And her here here


It's never you


When you know im looking for something real










It's her I'm looking at. Finding imprints of loving acts in infinitesimal moments
I melt into you like I can't describe how


How


Who you are to me.


Here


Here


Her presence moves.


She moved


Moves. Me.


I write some small sentence to try and rally the passion inspired by her


But I can't find


Lose sight


No more…


I can't forget you and move on




What do you do in all I am


Just the two of us


And I bleed why I can't let you go


Because I'm here for you, baby


Please


Let me unfurl ..


I'm always here right next to you
Forever wherever we go