6 months without you feels like forever
You are a burning ship, destined for drowning
Watch as you take the ones i love along with you
Trying to shout my way through the trance of your voice
The messages you keep leaving remained unopened,
Ive rerouted my veins, changed my direction,
But the thought of you clouds all my conversations
Its been so long since my blood has held you like a child,
Since your embrace has wrapped itself around my heart,
Some burning fever has left me with petty thoughts
Is it the bits of you that remain?
Or the knowing that this fight will and has always been
A back and forth between the rights and wrongs of my conscience

This blood fat summer has swallowed me whole,
Gulped down my body in one swift inhale,
Living with this pair of fists battering my surface,
One resting on my jaw, another on my gut,
Sleeping under shingles and tin roves,
Waiting for night to settle itself in,
While the others dreamt in their beds,
I wandered twilight streets with a bottle and a question,
Saw my reflection in a puddle under streetlights,
Wondered who’s face stared back at me
An alien memory clawed its way out from beneath my skin
Left a scar for me to remember
The boy I once knew

Ive sailed seas of letters,
Oceans of consonants,
drank from rivers of vowels,
I know that the depths of words
lies far beneath the surface,
Somewhere along its floor

Where has your heart gone?
Did it flee with the rest of you?
Fit inside your carry on as the
wings caught air beneath them,
Im tired of speaking in check points,
Ive been waiting at your gate for days now,
Hoping for you to round the corner,
Back to this most timid of loves,
I'll even hold your bags,
Come home soon.

After the towers fell,
My father went off to war,
12 months later he brought back the battlefield
We didn’t talk about it much as it just hung there,
Afraid of the left over land mines, we would tiptoe
around the room, through the kitchen, back to bed.
-
My mother is a bottle,
Empty now but the glass corpse still outlines her frame,
4 years sober, going on 5 after her brother click-clacked his way out of our lives,
I tattooed the day he passed on my arm,
1. to remember him and 2. to know that today is better than what my life once was,
-
I read somewhere that conversations are like knife fights,
Ive chosen my words carefully like dull blades,
So if I am ever to strike a nerve it won’t leave anyone bleeding,
I am afraid of blood.
I hate the smell,
the taste, the color of the stains it leaves,
The consistency,
I am afraid of bleeding,
I am too vulnerable in this world to hurt anymore,
Every breath closer to the minute i’ll break,
I am afraid to break and i worry about how many pieces I will leave in my wake
and if anyone will be there to pick them up and glue me back together,
Today I am happier than most days in these past years,
She has taught me patience,
All I worry about now is losing her warmth