Well I don't believe in a god but there's gotta be someone to thank for all the ***** & all the shows & all the friends that make the pain fall right out of my skin

I can feel your skin
Beneath my fingertips
Between my lips
Only your skin
Can I feel

I can touch his skin
Beneath my fingertips
Between my lips
But
Only your skin
Can I *feel

I listened to your heart beat for two hours. You lifted me and moved me closer

And the butterflies, they followed

But this feeling cannot last. Like a glass jar, teetering at the edge of your mahogany coffee table. The hardwood floor taunting it as it shakes violently back and forth. We are gasping deeply now, trying desperately not to fall. Not to break.

I can feel you holding on with all that's left in you. You're turning my hands black and blue with one last desperate grip but you can't keep your fingers folded over mine forever. It'll be over soon.

For as far as this goes
Just know
that
I wanted you
With every inch of skin
That holds my bones
I really wanted you
And I tried
As hard as a backward thinker
ever could
But all these late nights
and salty tears
Will get the best of me
The horror of this is shifting closer
Shadows in the darkness
The light cast from your eyes
can't save us this time
Oh but please
Don't run
Let it wash over the sheets we lie under
I want to be together when it hits
I love you
I'm sorry

Hold your breath
And let it go

I wish I had a typewriter
That a blue jay liked to rest on
Like power lines in pretty paintings
I wish I had a typewriter
That dispensed music notes
Incrementally
Like leafs from their trees
on an Autumn's evening
I wish I had a typewriter
who's letters shifted spaces
Rearranging themselves
into poetic little phrases
I wish I had a typewriter
that grew from a bud
And blossomed like a poppy flower
I wish I had a typewriter
that collected dust in its place
atop an old piano
In my faded pink guest bedroom
I don't have a faded pink guest bedroom
I don't have a guest bedroom
I don't have an old piano
I don't have a piano
I wish I had a piano
To grow old with
And a typewriter
To keep us company
In a faded pink guest bedroom

And with so much to say
I can't help but to cry
She sees the tears in my eyes
And puts her hand
cold & firm
on my shoulder
Her phone rings anxiously
She looks at me apathetically
"I have to take this"
And walks with conviction
To her office
I melt violently
into the soft comfort
Of my bed
All that I'll have again today
And
I just hope
I hope so much
That I'm never as important
As she is
I never want to be too important
To care

Like rain you washed the blood off my skin
Like rain you cooled the cruel summer's heat
Like rain you calmed me into a peaceful sleep
*Like rain you trickled through my fingers
And by the morning you were gone

I don't need god because I have a pillow top mattress. It's always there for comfort in the back of my mind like a reason to make it home tonight after an 18 hour shift.

Forgiver of all my sins. It cradles me to peace, even on my most evil of nights. Omniscient and silent. It knows what I've done and it knows how I've felt. I've wept into it. Wrote poem after poem while sitting Indian style atop of it. Chosen lovers and tasted their skin all over it. It doesn't ask questions. It just holds me gently and mends my aching bones until I'm fast asleep.

You will lose yourself chasing ambulances around these busy streets looking for a soul that aches just so that you can heal it and you will tear your hands to shreds picking up shattered minds off these ***** floors just so that you can sort them all back together. Embrace your own pain before it gets buried under the weight of a million other's.

Warm apple
& pumpkin spice
Its mid summer
but you're still burning
Fall scents
You bury your head
in your pillow
and twist your body,
all wrapped in sheets
toward the wall
beneath the window,
"It still smells good
so I dunno... whatever"
You're always laughing
at the most
insignificant things
and making eyes
with inanimate objects
like your guitar or my notebook
You say you fall in love
with the art I make
and then you kiss my forehead
and twirl my hair
between your fingers
You're the only one who really cares
to consider
all of my rants and hurried scribbles
'art'
Most of them have been
about you
for the past year or two
I wish I could still
show you
I know you'd pour
your eyes
into every word
Underlining all of your
favorite parts with the
tip of your pointer finger
& choosing one stanza
to sing like an other one of your
pretty songs,
strumming your thumb
against the page like the
strings of your tired guitar
Just like you did
on that patient day
last summer
Lying in your bed
Counting ceiling tiles
and making homes in each other's chests
I miss you

It hurts to exhale
       It aches to carry
It brings me to my knees
I can't find relief
No cut is deep enough
to drain it from my veins
It is resistant to razors
And to blades
A love
So deep
So heavy
So...
Here
To
Stay
Even though you've since
Gone
Away
You left it in me
To carry alone
So
*******
Deep
And
Oh
So
*******
Heavy

Hate your body
Hide your body
& most importantly use it sparingly
Wear your skin tight over your frame
Throw up your insides until the mold fits
Be the gender that was appointed to you
Sleep inside the box
And love who we say to
Because that mind is only on rent
We are the owners
The extra thoughts that you think are just visitors
We'll make sure that they don't
Stay
And hey,
Always remember
We are everywhere
So don't you dare try to get
Away
Oh but you musn't worry your
Pretty
Powerless
Designer
Skull
Because you will thank us one
Day
Yeah
We'll kneel you down before us
And for your sake you will *******
Pray

You called me from
the last intersection
on your walk home,
"the street lights look exhausted
hm and the sky is missing
more than a few stars...
oh, but how are you?"
I always found it cute,
the way you make the change
from obnoxious
to pensive after ten o'clock
I always liked to love
you the most
when the morning was
fast approaching
I'm okay
I mean I've been worse
I guess I just feel a bit
like the sky
tonight
And the line fell silent

The only fear of love that I am capable of feeling is fear of one who does not love at all.

I fell in
Love
On a couch
After a few hours
Of steady
Lust
I fell in
Love
On a couch
After a few months
Of steady
Grief
I fell in
Love
On a couch
After a few years
Of steady
Friendship
I fell in
Love
On a couch
With a boy
I never could
Quite figure out
I fell in
Hate
In the same
****
Place
Two years ago
This date

None of this is real
We make it up as we go
But on rare occasions
Two people may find their scripts
Melting into each other's pages...
Different endings of course
But for one moment
Two minds have conjured up
The same situation
That they wish to live in
At this very moment
Three AM on a Saturday night
In the summer after long shifts
At different jobs
We find ourselves reaching
out for a similar cause
But
None of this is real
And that's why the ending never seems to make sense
To both parties
It's as though our director is missing
And the choreography is always
Right off cue
We're just a bunch of amateur actors
And actresses just trying to feel something real
But it doesn't exist
We are not in love
We are bored
And we are all just pretending
Some of us have mastered it so well that we forget it's just a game
But we're the ones who hurt the most when the curtain falls
And we are left with nothing at all

We sit silent with racing minds
And speak up with nothing to say

His voice is lightning
It shines its pretty light like
a flickering candle through
the Earth's darkness
Just before it strikes
with a bitter surge of violence
And your left confused
So jaded by its ups & downs
that you lock the doors
at a light drizzle of rain
or a small gray cloud
With every reminder of him
You build your walls taller
with steel and stone
Oblivious to the fact
That not every pretty light
In the sky intends to strike you...
To hurt you

I am becoming this place on the repetitive view of hard wood floors and perfect coats of tan paint. I can't breathe in this place on the gentle scent of Vanilla Artificial Smile Lavender & Midnight I'm an Entitled Brat Blossom.

The moments of fresh air I am granted taste like expensive cigars & Polo cologne. I'm choking. The only rain drops that I catch are champagne as it bubbles over and splashes at my feet.

Sitting for the second I can get on a ***** set of steps, I am day dreaming of my ***** friends all nestled into the same basement smoking the same **** from the same dealer covering punk songs and talking politics like true anarchists. I beg with my manager... Please. It's been months since I've seen my family & you know if she cared at all I'd be headed straight home into the land of misfit teenagers.

I am the most self aware when it rains
This pit in my stomach grows
deeper than the blood in my veins
And I can feel every inch
of absence that lingers
in the space between my fingers
Parallel lines of exhaustion
and depression fall into a figure eight
And at the point of intersection
you can find me buried
in too many years of self-hate
Begging for a case of amnesia
to take these memories away
Or at least a shot of anesthesia
to ease the pain if only
for a single comfortable day

We're all addicted to breathing
Most of us prefer oxygen
But some of us really dig nicotine
I happen to get the most high
off the scent of his skin;
Autumn leafs & incense
With an undertone of a skunked forty
And dry blood like rusting metal
*I hold my breath when it's not in the air

There are people who just want what they can't have. They're the people who are always searching for more.There are people who just want exactly what they have.They're the people who always look bored. There are people who just want the thing that hurts the most. They're the people who
are always finding new ways to feel pain.

He is all three wrapped into one chaotic mess. I thought I could take a piece of his broken skull and replace it with peace from mine. But I tried for six years and I just couldn't make the exchange inside of him...

Well, I guess there are people who just want to feel okay but don't know how. They're the people who are always looking for the brokenness that surrounds them just to avoid the brokenness that grows inside of them

I am that person

Everyone's bumming cigs tonight
I've been bumming love all year
If bumming is using something that
doesn't belong to you, maybe bumming
is all I ever really knew how to do
You said I had to be good at something
Well there you ******* go
I'm pretty good at borrowing every limb on you
I drank so much *** tonight
That I curled up in the dirt
And waited for you to come cradle me
You can stand collected in the corner for the rest of the summer
But the look in your eyes
makes it pretty hard to hide
how sprawled out on the ground your mind is too
I'm in love with everything tonight
And your drunken slurs are just enough to get me by
I don't wanna think about 9-5 tomorrow
Because I don't want to resent every ******* here who doesn't know what a hang over feels like in a 90 degree restaurant
I can't figure out why misery is so lonely
So irritable when it can't find company
But if you don't ******* lie down next to me in this ***** yard
I'm going to climb right out of my skin and melt into this tall grass
I said I'd be counting the stars tonight
The second that shift was over
But I didn't calculate that face down is in the wrong direction
And I've been living face down for a while now
My friends are always making instruments out of their finger tips
I'm listening to them strumming solo cups and singing 'god is dead' around the beer pong table
I'm always making weapons out of my teeth
Here I am again spilling the contents of my skull all over your lap like I promised I wouldn't
I said,
We're a family
I really think that's true
And it's okay that I hate you
Because all families are misconstrued
Well,
I don't usually know what it is that I'm saying but I do know that I'm usually too drunk to be saying it
And I do know that I'm sick of the faded cigarette smell that lingers over the skin of my hands
And I'd drink bleach to kick the taste of liquor that lingers on my tongue
Because no one else can sense it but I am a grimy bar from the inside out and that's not what I said I wanted to be when I planned my life at age three