They say time heals wounds. I’m still waiting for the time that hearing your voice won’t make me feel like there’s an elephant in my throat. I’m still waiting for the time that seeing your face won’t make my heart scream for you, ripping its own seams in the process. I’m still waiting for the time when passing you by won’t make me weak at the knees, won’t make my spine shiver and my lungs suffocate.

They say time heals wounds. How will my wounds heal when the knife is still in my back, when the bullets are still in my chest? How will my wounds heal when whenever I remember to live, your memory pours salt on my cuts? How will my wounds heal when you haven’t even returned what’s left of my heart yet?

They say time heals wounds. Does that mean that I won’t see your face whenever I close my eyes? Does that mean that I won’t find you in every song I listen to? Does that mean I’ll stop hugging myself to sleep at night, feeling homesick for you? Does that mean I’ll be able to love again? and how will I ever love again, when I often find my soul wandering in the places our love was born, searching for you?

Tomorrow, the phrase
“I love you”
will belong to yesterday’s lips
my feelings for you
will belong to yesterday’s words.
Soon I won’t remember the chords
of your madness
or the taste of your sadness
sitting on my tongue like chocolate mints.
So in these last few weeks
we pull at the strings to rip
at the seams of us with ****** fingertips
cause in a slice of time
your name won’t belong in my rhyme.
You’ll be another past lover
that lives at the bottom of a shoebox
shuffled together with the love letters
of other men who swore themselves to me.
When my daughter fingers through
the pages dedicated to your eyes
I’ll softly remember you
throwing rocks at crooked pottery
from ceramics class. I’ll remember
that dark December and
your flimsy reflection through tinted glass.
I’ll remember what it felt
to be young, naïve,
and madly in love.

When does it stop
When does being lost in translation stop
When does the reality of temporary become permanent
And reality a finality of time
When do shadows stop eating at the nothingness of everything
When do the questions stop and become the answers
When does relief come
Or does relief just falsify into a cast of the illusion of okay
"When does it stop?" I ask you.
"WHEN DOES IT STOP?" I scream at the shadow of your profile in the depths of my painted wall
And my skin feels tight as it is suffocating my shackled veins
"It doesn't, does it?" I ask you.
"IT DOESN'T, DOES IT?" I scream at my shaking hands full of fury and broken glass
I said I was sorry, that I didn't mean it
You said I did, you said I did
You said it was okay, you said it's okay, you said it's okay
Okay is nothing but an illusion of this fragmented world
It's not okay.
It's broken, it's fury, it's shackled and turbulent
It's glass in my palms made of tiny pills
That cut my throat as I swallow you down
In hopes you'll love me again.

You find the reason to everything and anything because
it makes you feel safe, but I
--can't kiss you without you
wanting to tell me that
my eyelids flutter because my eyes
get dry and they need to protect themselves from all the
pathogenic **** that flutters around me but I'm
really just trying to get a better look at you,

why don’t you let me look at you.

Then I begin to cry and you say why tears are tears,
and that you wanted a “simple life” with me  but
youre too busy identifying the complexity of things
that you can’t even feel because they lay within your heart, not your hands.

I’m right in front of you but your
voice begins to raise and you speak the science of presence
and you tell me that i’m your soulmate because your subconscious doesn't always feel so alone when i’m standing right beside
you and that you need me to survive but you
can't always kiss me because you’re too busy saying that the reason why
I think you taste good
when you kiss me is because
we meant are for each other.

While I’m in your arms you begin to analyze
my paragraph of life and how
it fits so perfectly beneath yours.
But then you rearrange your words
and place some in between mine
and then I realize I’m the just the loosely placed parenthesis around your
syntax of life.

Champagne tears
Ruined my dress
Dressed to ****
With a smile
To match
Deadly forces
Are within me
The devil speaks
Like he's beside me
I always tremble
Tried not to stumble
Upon the hands
Of trouble

Drank from a poisoned cup
Which had no effect
Thinking I was saved
By my own God

But my sinning
Wasn't too holy
And my sins
Ultimately
Killed me

Slowly and surely
My addictions
Set me free