why can't you all stop lining your pockets with gold-studded fleece while every ounce of creativity in the lower rungs of the ladder is dubbed "crazy"?

i don't want it to slow.
my brain is my friend.
keep her alive.

keep her ALIVE.

halting d2 receptors is not a cure for shorter-cut sleeves-
it's a pharmacological disease disguised as a dreamer in heat,
as a simple lighthouse in a tree with no leaves.

i can't
let my name change
i am not broken
NOT
scarred and
only temporary because
it's all done behind a curtain,
anyway.

i've left no spare rooms for unrecognized pain-
the echoes of vacancy are reflective of my woeful naivety.

as i drift further into galaxies in my dreams, i
will soften like damp Styrofoam
until i
sink.

go back some steps and paint the rest the colors they were meant to be.
parasites preventing psychology-
absent sounds without answers, potential apart metamorphosis.
the mistakes were easy,
splitting monochrome apart of the omniscient wind.

and they never learned anything.

I couldn’t escape the quiescence of ontogeny
descending east or west in our
oblivion as nothing-
these spider webs bury dead
under my intuition
ashamed of my own decisions
refusing to light,
but the flicker always subtle in the night,
aggressive how I wanted to make it shine.

we’re butterflies with broken mirrors,
scintillatingly self-reflecting that our deepest fears will never resonate with
the man under the bridge or the
child in Idaho or the
part of my father i never want to see in myself,
but always will.
hand-crafted maps fade because we’re told to abandon
caterpillars
as if this growth was a virus and not a blessing disguised as
thousands of glass shards unlocking doors.
I wanted to know more.

I couldn't think where my mind begins
it shifts back hollow where I started
blonde curls lost frivolously among the pile of careful maple leaves
you should’ve tried to understand while you
blurred the sharpness of this image,
shades of fuschia indecisions  
evading a dream,
incomplete sets of glass menagerie fog when I fall asleep.
shuffling the shutter, parallel to the stress it put me under.
a life repeating its first day,
continuing cabarets
confusing caves in sheep
crystallize
an endless disease.

flowers don’t communicate in binary;
your daisies were fireworks,
mute mutilations of my morbidity,
simultaneously transforming
sheep from tangible reality.
as I felt every strand of indifference-

IT ALL COULD HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT.

but
our faces yield yellow hues in
both pines needles and piles of
orange maples.

ashamed of where I hadn't  been
because of the person I have yet to become
knowing what I will never be.
It was strange to see me as a human being
amorphous
feathers drifting incomplete
as crows without grief
circling aware
predicting what I could not escape
luminescent highways miles from fate
time spent
in the essence of these transgressions
pardon me gray.

what can i call colors i see,
branches of the trees from Polaroid memories,
or dreams of what the world should be?
where can i find these answers on this endless canvas,
this bruised, mountainous landscape,
constantly hammering away against our wars with self-abandonment?
what’s the spectrum where
trees and
everyone you’ve ever known that’s felt loss
can sing in harmony?

trapped in my mind,
hope is destiny when it's not in our plans

running out of time,
the colors will fade as limbs grow thicker

footsteps erase.

mirrors adapt.

I felt your breath and smoke like
adjacent trains.

------------

I lost my heart in the war between
what took place in normal Syrian towns
(just like the ones I learned how to read in
and the ones I danced through your hair like
asymmetrically curling waves in,
and the ones where
I saw love die like a
half-lit cigarette still burning)
and  
what your skin looked like when the wind blew off the sheets so softly that mice could have ran marathons-
where shrouded shadows cleared vision like your cornfields of tightening nerves,
forever unwinding mine.

It was hiding in between your teeth and all of the other places that were too brightly shaded for me to sun-tan under,
where
you are sixteen acres of magnolia trees donning the darkest leaves that forests will ever see,

and we mirror each other's company so tragically.

----------

Inside,
your fireplace warmed our souls like
Phish Food
and whatever chemical reactions occur when love overpowers self-loathing.

my brothers,
carried by storms,
aren't keeping it warm
anymore.

far away enough from five pizza doughs per plastic bag or purple keys to a locked unit,
your multicolored hair lights up a coffee shop on days where thunderstorms keep the paper from being delivered.

"she's a sweetheart," the woman in the turquoise blouse says
to her wife,
noting nothing of stains on her apron or
the colors of California strife.

wildfires have lit your eyes for ages, parts per million of the cyclical, ecological division. anything hazel will fade into oblivion with enough self-doubt.

when you've tied your last sweatshirt around your waist, I will hold you through the memories of the wildfires, passing out on the bathroom floor, losing her, the lies that your mother told you, and when you flew just far away enough from the ocean,
but too close to the sun.

it scorches with agonizing pain but i suppose we all have to stare into the sun once more after our eyes have been burnt badly enough to burst.

on top of a mountain, dressed
in purple and frozen in December air,
we were flying through western Oregon
with our shoes in New England and our
hearts in the forest.

you would shake when I saw your skin,
turner both softer and more rugged as I reached your bedrock,
eroding like sea glass when you showed me what
makes you tug tighter in the dark and
sob at sunrises.

your tears were velvet garden shears-
I don't remember how much blood there actually was,
just that it poured out of both of our bones
with a symmetry that my eyes never spoke of,
and that it still stains the skin of myself
and everyone I've talked to in the last eight months.

you are a ghost under lampshades,
like a florescent fairy in love with tying
the night sky into nooses.

you are libraries,
volumes filling viles with memories of moments when
the darkness left your bones,
only if for the flicker of a flashlight in the backyard or
of a match,
giving me minute fractions of eternity
to see your disposition light the sky larger than stars.

you are teethmarks in my skin,
scrubbing with salt and white
body wash and oatmeal without sugar,
warming our endlessly evanescent December.

******,
filling the ceiling with blue whales and
mountain ranges,
i am a stain on the map in your backseat,
buried under used napkins and neglect,
while your wings take you back
to Oregon.

every day the drywall grows in size and in impact,
reminding me of rooms that i haven't
lived
within,
like a candle swimming in the salt and
band-aids.

sleep,
ephemeral heat is
a dream where
the inside of my eyelids are not monsters,
where paint brushes bring color to garages,
where i don't drink until numbness,
and where your hands continue to guide my skull
from the ground into the clouds.

you all told me i had a place here but
why have you all left?