In the wake of November,
with summer in slumber,
the men in your head start chatting.

One feels inadequate,
a young boy scorned by a father who mistook rage for love.
"Sometimes I just feel so small."

Another performs,
measuring approval in laughs.
"Laughing at me or with me, it's still about me."

The most dominant smirks,
cigarette in mouth, leather jacket clad,
too cool, too tough, way too cinematic.
"Hey, kiddos."

And in unison they chanted: "We won't face our fears, we won't solve our problems."
Instead they all turned their blue eyes
to a new girl
who, with a camel crush in her eighteen year old hand and
insecurity in her walk,
cannot yet distinguish that there are
many not one.

"Hold me."
"Hold the applause."
"Anytime, honeybaby."

One day in a park or your bunk bed
she'll see
you're too afraid to be you.
After all,
that's why you couldn't love me.

Wine breathing dragon of sadness
Another loss to the gain of my madness

I hope everything is too quiet for you to handle,
My absence both too dull,
and too matte.
And every room too empty for just you and our cat.

•Don't be a stranger•
You try to confidently murmur.
But you already turned down my goodbye.
I don't know whether to be consoled by the ground or the sky.

Buried
But I feel spared.
Everyone tells me it'll be okay,
But there are certain words I know I'll miss that only your body can say.

paper thin hypocrisies

smoking and shouting smoldering “**** the democracy”s

if growing up meant going up

without the down,

i’d weigh you up

and shut you down.

but gravity’s a *****

and karma just knows

so we pick a flower

every hour

downtown and up the road.

"Your eyes look pretty in the light" they say
"Your *****'s really tight" they say

"I love the way you write" they say
"I'm only free at night" they say

You can see my ******* soul
I unleash it when we sleep
Together in tangled sheets

In the morning
We're never whole
Disposed news of a bruise to the ego
You cannot love me like an empty plan.

No.

Fluorescent classroom lights
illuminate the band around
your muscular arm,
but it looked better by the moonlight
against my sheets.

You use kisses as punctuation
as your exhale contstructs
smokey sentences
on lines all
down
my
back.

Turn around;
you just might find
some things you'd rather
pushed aside
than my legs open wide.
Just don't be surprised
if you need me
more than I need you.

Fluorescent classroom lights
illuminate the band around
your muscular arm,
but it looked better by the moonlight
against my sheets.

You use kisses as punctuation
as your exhale contstructs
smokey sentences
on lines all
down
my
back.

Turn around;
you just might find
some things you'd rather
pushed aside
than my legs open wide.
Just don't be surprised
if you discover you need me
but I'm just proof reading you.

Your home will shatter

Emotionally not physically

The wood panels still fused

But your security dissipated

Dishes still in the kitchen sink

But your routine in shards



You will pack up

Backpack up on your back

And down on the ground

In your new compound

You will attempt to create anew

And you will

But it is unlike before

It will never be like before



So you will try a return

You will, desperately,

Grasping for breath,

Ride your bike to that old gate

That old entrance to that previous exit



But I regret to inform you,

It is no longer your home

He might invite you in but only to see a new couch

Some other woman is in the groove

But it’s not even the one you once made

The bathroom will look the same

Same  portrait

Same book on top of the toilet

But a new towel hangs

And it’s no longer the perfume of your shampoo filling the room



I am so sorry but

You will feel like you are in a bad dream

Everything is familiar

Everything is yours in a no longer tucked away memory

It is still real if you open it and prolong it

It is still yours in some existence

Where that moment froze and never stopped

But it is changed

At the same exact time

It is hurdling forward as fast as it is still

It is as foreign as it is memorized

Everything is off on the same track



I am sorry but you can never go home

Every man I've tried to love,
shouts back as they trudge away,
"I ******* tried!"

When I'm drunk and heaving
repugnant half- sentences
in a parking lot
too stubborn to
crumple into their suddenly forgiving arms,
they turn around with the same
pulverized pride.

And I remain staring at the
confetti of conceding
under my feet.

How does it feel
to see me from a distance
in a dimly lit classroom;
my eyes, avoiding your glance
lit only now by the projector.

How does it feel
to see me wearing a shirt
that you once peeled off
and threw onto your bedroom floor

You're not there
to fix the cigarette
I broke
from his pack

You're not there
in my shower
as I kiss his soapy back

Stay away
for your own good
and for my good and his good

Stay away
with your demons
and I'll stray away like I should

They say that after the Big Bang
It was a myriad of collisions that began to form our universe.
Masses of gasses hurling into each other,
not to explode and dissipate
but to violently combine and form
the entirety of existence.

On one of the floating specks
Formed from those chemical crashes
I exist
Constantly searching
for something
anything
with which to collide.

Dark, warm bed
After bed
After bed,
Ingenuine, primal ******
after ******
after ******,
and I return to my cluttered mind
More unsatisfied and lost than before each orchestrated clash.

My biggest fear has always been car crashes.
Stories of dead families strewn across a ****** highway have haunted my nightmares since I could strap in my own carseat.
But they also say fear is love
and now at twenty,
I embody
Shards of broken glass
more than a walking soul shell
that mistaken minds call a body.

And as I lay touched and swollen,
with the taste of too many someones' in my mouth,
I think I might crash a car into a star and see if maybe then
instead of aching as a million pieces I become violently whole.

His name was slapped across my moving boxes
the last label and favor he ever gave me
But sitting in an empty room, clear carpet
Except for his sickly guts across one corner
(Second to last parting gift, yaking new year!)
I saw that I had
hit refresh.

All my belongings:
Bed,
Clothes,
Pride
Were puzzled into a car ready to never return.
So I
steam cleaned the stain and
swept each Newport fragment from the porch and into the boxes,
X-ed over 7 letters,
and plopped them down in the dumpster.

I used to think a clean break was an oxymoron
And moving on, a cliche
But in my new room,
even my mind is pristine
because no dust of our past remains.

Entropic threats loom and I told them to ******* from the start.
Shouldn't is transparent because it plays warning fair.
I tell my toes to move and they do.
You're next.

If we’re all gods creating,
then you’re your own heaven and you forbid yourself from ever getting in.

Asleep to the dream, why do we turn over in the mourning to pull each other closer, failing to fill in the blanks that sleeping life pencils in?

is that why you say writing a novel in one sitting is advantageous?
your **** would stick to the seat of your FREE sign-ed recliner and you’d never get up to buy a new pen

Let’s follow the dolphins to the middle of the ocean
and don’t let the Devil teach us how to swim

because the Truth is
we never wait to lie down and float.
but the light stands
whether our darkness sits
or dances with us at the show.

I’ve heard that phrase but it never rang true until I was ****** and trampling down a path lined by trees and the sky was lit by the brightest moon I’ve seen. I was cooped up in a ball inside my head, carefully pulling on strings to move my limbs. He kept colliding into my side, each time I hoped it would catapult me somewhere else, but it only seemed to result in his hand on my shoulder. When we reached the black water rushing underneath the bridge, I wanted to sit and think of all the sleeping fish and imagine a big but friendly swampy monster, but instead hands on my back attempted to rub my knots out. Knots are better bitten and undone, ripped out, cut. But instead I sat hugging my knees with his **** hands attempting to untie me.
But I can’t be unraveled by a stranger. One time in a dream “unravel’ was tattooed on the back of my hand. It must’ve been a message from Jupiter or the Egyptian god Ra, or someone or something much wiser than I giving me advice I cannot even comprehend. But I like to think, that last night it meant that you’re the only one who can unravel me. With just one look from you, no hands necessary, I could be assured that the world was right. The moon isn’t meant to cast shadows, and firecrackers are not meant to explode underneath my feet. The world without you makes no sense. The world without you is a nightmare I can’t wake up from. The world without you hurts.

When two flames 

burn together, 

the fire grows

and glows

and gives light.
When two trees

grow together

the roots grow

and intertwine

and give life.

When two people 

love together

the flame burns too hot

the tree towers too tall.

"If you love something set it free"

So you know how heartbreak

Scalds the inside of your skin

and your sanity too.

The one you lost

will always be your

Burning Bush,

a deity

sending signs from a Heaven

far away.

We can salvage sweet silence
And scream like it’s our last breath
Wander in the drizzling rain
And wake with wide eyes

I wonder if I lived in a submarine, if I'd feel like I was a part of the ocean.
I wonder if I know that I am a part of a world of perfection swimming in the waves of your sheets.
We never explore more than each other's shores.
The cold water's a sensation.

You drive me home
(And yeah we're half-******)
When the sky is pink
As the world is so much colder
Than the warmth of your sheets

Sometimes I think I'm just the
Concealment of your lonely boyish fears
(I snuck into your sketchbook
Where you drew yourself alone
With a black broken heart)
But even after I scratch warning signs into your back,
You pull me in just a little bit closer
And open up just a little bit more

The future of us is inside me
But your vision is thick in the past
A dogma of cyclical knots
Not only in the sinews of your spine
But the thread of our sky.
Terror to float then crash
Onto the cracked ice
You know so well

A taste is all you get
And all I’ll let myself get too
Like a little lick of luck
That tiny tinge of tenderness
Mere mesmerization in that moment
No longer near now
A taste is all you get

I am and will always be

Dead in love with a smoking gun,

A man too smart to save himself

From a showdown with his mind.
Shots of whiskey

Fire him into a 

Spinning scuffle

That leaves no damage

But to his heart,

Unable to beat for anything

Other than his own thoughts.

Love Is
Seeing that scowl on your forehead
That signifies a soft secret in your mind
I would never know
but you always
Whisper in my ear
When we're rolling around in crumpled sheets

We swapped cigarette scented saliva

And I swear

You seeped into my skin

When I bit your lip
And a single moan
Escaped your mouth
When you pressed your lips
Against my spine
I couldn’t remember
What was yours or mine

Words cannot do justice
Those moments when I know
That you and I
Are a you and I

You must take the wound,
Face it,
Squeeze it,
Bite it,
**** out the venom,
Spit out the venom,
Gather comfrey,
Dress the once wound,
Bandage it,
Let it SCAR (it is now a reminder in this phase),
LET IT HEAL

There's only one skip on the CD.
There's only time that is not absolute.

The barista spilled the milk and the customer replied, "Telekinesis, baby, telekinesis!"
The mugging was designed and I must tread with the iridescence onto the next track.

There's only one skip but it repeats continuously
There's no time because I like to say it's not real.

The director created a puzzle and the viewers play for so long.
The overdose was placed and I must sing with plithiness the tenacity of my favorite number.

There's only one skip.

Preachers have more plagiarized content than singers.
The old man I met on the sidewalk told me one of the Beach Boys locked himself in a basement and created his own fraction of notes, his own harmonies.
I create a thought to push my voice from my gut out my mouth into the air.
Now wiggling vibrations mingle with oxygen molecules and the place in space is rearranged.
I created traction.
This is it.
This

I could hear Insufficiency flee from me at The Thinkers Hour, when sleep is halted and, on occasion the rooster is already cawing at the movements of Transiency.

I rise higher, scribing longer, recounting our Divinity, the boundlessness of Love, and the hues that the Sun dusts over cemeteries and trains alike.

It is then, as matter scaling the skyling, that decidedly I sink into Rapid Ply Healing.

I’ve been sitting in the crack in the couch

tapping my feet on the coffee table

pourover in hands

left

right

must write

what can pop up in the sphere on top of my neck to make me spit out words



too many screens

after all the paper in front of me used to be a dead tree



too many sighs

after all I left the pain and got what I wished for



too many souls

afterall we’re just one mirror

Each Autumn we fall in and out of
Souls who
Lure us into a gust of changing leaves.

A familiar song
Strummed
Down our every vein.

Summer brings
Such evil things
That tear me away from you

The swollen moon shadows the smoky night
Tensions rise if you shout for a fight
Bruises seem exclusive
Until rumors need refuting
Testimony through retention
But are we fully comprehending?

Keep writing about that boy”

he told me,

but the writer’s block in me

knocked me out

and i woke up hours later to a sunless sky and rumored moon.

one time i foolishly tried to list my lovers in loose words,

you were mine at the time,

and all i could manage to write for you was

how you were like lightening and thunder in a burgundy sky,

and i haven’t quite understood it until now

on the roof,

blood moon overhead.

it is the violent and bleeding heartbreaks

that crumple us and our humanity

into small scraps of dwindling significance,

and illuminate the truth of existing

in a dream where

our souls can finally dance in the pain,

and the skies can feel love too.

Sleeping for mere ellipses

Bleary eyed beliefs breach
the sentenced structure