I once dreamt

Of a child beneath a tree, in a field off the edge of a small farm.
Small farm that owned large landscapes, and passing by through the freeway were the sad broken horses. All the beasts of burden that were more burden than beast, and they dribbled blood from their noses and they limped when they strolled.

They passed in one lane, while the cars passed in another. Fast ferraris and hot wheel model look alikes. Breezing by barnyards and dead horses trying to live with blinders on the corners of their eyes.

This little boy sat resting under a large tree, filling his lungs with horse heaves. On the side of a road looking out across the fence that separated his land and his curiosity.

And I couldnt find myself in the dream, I was nowhere. Floating as a molecule of oxygen, painting the scenic ocean of grain and land, exhausted by the proud sun ray filling the eyes of a boy under a tree. And I continued to wonder how long the boy would sit. If he would stand and run and fly away in to the sunset, into the moon setting, before the land was dark and crisp in its perfect way.

Never once did I wonder why the moon was dissappearing with the fog of the sunlight. And why the stars would not shine here on these never ending hooves, on these tire treads bleeding steam into the air.

A leaf drifted onto the boys lap and i found myself, watching the sound of the wind pull moonlit tides of grass and grain towards the boy. The sunlight placed it's fingers on his tears and dried them, wiping them away.

It was then I saw, this boy was blind. My final moments as the leaf in the wind, falling by the side of a boy. Then falling on his shoulder, and i witnessed death through thousands of green soldiers, rustling through the static of the air and closing their eyes on the floor.

The horses still clopping out of tune. The cars not slowing down. It would be pitch black soon. And I'd come to realize this boy, through collective images of falling friends, drifting deadmen.  Like a puzzle, I saw, he was lost. And could not find his home. The sounds betrayed his ears, and the pitch black was not silent, as the last bit of light sunk away beyond the horizon.

He was here, in tattered rags, his eyes were blind and he could not hear past the road. The sun and moon would burn his tears away, but in the dark his eyes would water the roots, his skin would tear and become the bark. He could never go home, but he would always be needed.

My eyes closed in the dark, his eyes remained open all the time. Somehow, I found we were both lost.

I was the wind, and he was the earth.

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.

these bones are twisting
underneath the
  last bit of breath.

                 anxious panics and patented problems,
we created.

     and the lost souls arent really lost.
they just got there before us,
                                                    we dont even know whats out there.


The Problem is that we havent figured out how to get away from this sentiment. that were so human, and yet, we arent.

human is such a vague term.
it exists for all of our physical properties
that allow for mental turmoil and confusion.


                 i think if it were up to me,
                 i wouldnt be happy but id be less insecure,
                 id count my blessings and live right now
          but i guess,
                 i could do that now.

Being Young Is Such A Luxury.
-P.S.

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

It's not something in the way you move. If i didn't know what it was, I'd feel silly.
It's everything in the way you strut for me, that walk along the tree roots that finds its way glancing back at me over shy shoulders.

I find it in the way you talk to me, reminding me I mean something to someone who speaks with the subtlety of a star. Muffled in soft lamp light.

I think it's always been in the way you sing, and how you send subtle vibrations through the air to become one with the reverb from guitar strings.
The way you make fine lines dissappear and melt into me, the way your angel kissed fingertips glaze my skin with touching lullabies.

It must be in your toes, that glide over my shins under warm blankets.
It's in between us, when we lie so close, not something that holds us apart but a warm magnet that pulls our heart beats closer to sync.

It's got to be in the way you laugh, that makes me laugh.
And of course it's in the way we laugh together.

It's in the soft giggles of rainy Sunday mornings, opening my eyes to your glow.
It's in the way sun light kisses your skin, and the way moonlight kisses your soul and lights you up.

Goose,
It's not just "something" in the way you move. It's all those pretty details in the way we hold each other, that pulls passion from patchwork memories and interwoven breaths.
It's in the way we hold each other, that makes it feel like our heart beats are trading stories with each other, matching tempos and beating reverie from our thoughts to our lips.

I know what it is. And I've only tipped the iceberg.
It's in the secrets we share,
That are always there.
Like our favorite stars,
Always and Forever.

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.

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 sat in the backseat of a car with time slowed down around me, I looked at the trees passing by,
Outside the windows I watched the rolling landscape swirl by. Winding away into the mist of vision, like paint stained water down the drain.

Little birds chirped when we got home, their sounds slipped away on the wind and were replaced with squeals, with screeches and cries.
Inside I heard the walls creek and moan, fingers digging through the wallpaper, clawing through plaster and hard wood.
Hands, reaching out to pull me away, and I ran.
I ran through my home, it was not mine anymore. I could feel it.

The bushes outside of my home, on either end of my lawn blazed violently.
The trees shed their leaves, draped in snakes chanting hymnals backwards in dead languages.
The birds suicide bombed my home.

Inside I saw through the windows, the world consumed in red. The sun, a fragment of the rage I felt consuming me.
My fingers could taste the light, my fingertips felt the red dawn through the vines outside of my home,
Scurrying down rabbit holes and scattering dead easter on the lawn.
I saw my distorted reflection in the mirror.

I felt the burning in my body, the burning from my skull,
My palms bled,
My eyes bled,

My body was another form, a powerful beast in control of the sky.
I heard the fragments of red planets falling on the human horizon.
I felt the souls of wretched divinity failing and falling and flailing in the fires.

I was the daytime,
And the night,
I was the beginning,
And no end,

My name was all,
My name was yours.

We were fire,
And brimstone,
We were damnation.

I would **** you.

My spotlight fades and the crowd explodes.

Inner ear thoughts question my presentation and I wonder if my stance was too shifty. I wonder how my poem affected you.
I wonder if it rippled through the wrinkles in your brain as brightly and loudly as the thunderous applause under hot lights.

Tantalizing the open door of your bigotry I find my words sliming at my feet. A puddle of what I intended absorbing itself back into me. I feel it rush in between my toes, injecting itself into my veins and feigning euphoria.

My fingertips glide through the air with the high from my poetry gnashing around in my skull. But it's not a gleeful bouncing of anxious excitement.

The pounding in my head is muffled by the compliments. The sound of all my strife, drowned out by the burning visage of my ethereal form.  A spectre of me standing on stage.

And as I find my seat, and the clapping dies. We see another ghost on stage,

The light shining past him. And his words all plaster themselves to the ceiling and begin melting from the bulbs. Dripping down slowly on the audience.

When it's finally all dropped off the ceiling, the crowd will be gone. And none will remember how a rainbow of words stained their plate glass eyes. They blink and it's washed away, drained into the sewer of passing ideas. The water reflecting angry Facebook rants and precious moments with loved ones.

My eyes see god in the spotlight when the microphone sets before me. My words are only made for the light, they fade as they make their way up to god. No substance to carry them as they dissipate.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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.