Seeing faded memories of faded nights
Lying on faded baby blue sheets
The inoxication of two styrofoam cups
Feeling heavy in hands made of feathers

Eyelids the weight of the world compressing onto cheeksbones dried on tongues of new sneakers
Float away
Away
Away
To a world unknown
The cartographer of your own mind

Pick up the next sip
Let it be your map
The thickness sliding to your stomach
The river to bring you home
Ferryman collects no fair from pain filled travelers

Close your eyes
Let the purple jungles captivate you
Your baby blue eyes are the way home

Call me a runaway

I want you to know
Being unrealistic
Being risky
Being hazardous
It's a lifestyle

I swore off the L word

I would've said it for you

Tell me where to draw the line in the sand
Between being a brother
And being a father figure

Sands of times
Life lines are drawn with a big stick
Theodore Roosevelt is smiling on a young all american clueless teenager turned young soldier worrying about things no others should struggle with
A 16 year old dealing with social rejection and seclusion
A 13 year old trying to find where holding hands stops and tongues meet
A 7 year old who has migranes daily from a father who never was

I can't drawn straight lines
A rocking chair watches the tides wash away a single phrase

Help

This morning I woke up laying on the ceiling
Looking down at myself
I look different
Not talking about when I shaved last
A 5 o'clock shadow of who I use to know
Frightened by what I see
6 more weeks of a frigid winter
As my bones chatter
They'll talk about the changes I've endured

I go to bed tonight on my ceiling
My covers look warm

Falling fourteen thousand feet
Has nothing on the feeling
Of being stuck in a moment of suspension

You took my breath away
Countless sleepless nights of thinking coupled with realism
I begin to breathe again

The air tastes bitter tonight

A cigarette filter dangles between the boney knuckles of my middle and index finger
Smoke rolls up my hand
My head falls to the back of the chair
I can smell the pollen drifting from the oak trees
They remember when dying for what you believed in was an easy decision

A cigarette filter hangs between my lips
Smoke rolls up my cheeks
Stinging my cornea
They have yet to see what it means to hold the hand of a brother you have never met
To watch his life become a folded flag

A cigarette filter lies in an ash tray
The smoke rolling into the atmosphere
The cherry red slowly fading
The filter has heard the worries of a soldier yet to serve his country

A pack of cigarettes lay on a bedside counter
Waiting to hear what more I have to say