Hi folks.

I'm revamping some work and moving any of my future work to https://aheartmovingoutwards1.wordpress.com/. Thanks for all the fun, HP.

i'm absorbing the pain of your lacerations -
the tattoos of your mother's screams
etched in between your knuckles.

a canvass,
whitened and deeply dented,
takes the form of wordless, celestial aspiration -
the manifestation of release from an invisible prison.

your clanging tin cup on the bars asks for logic -
in response,
the uncompromising transmission sits in silence.

your mind does not deserve such a fate.

under opaque bedsheets,
a reversal in perspective unlocks the gate.

a house divided may only stand
if division negotiates with gravity
in blind faith.

my conscious,
a spec on the corner of the Polaroid lens,
a heart lost in the reeds of dampened circumstance,
a hydrangea blooming in an untended field,
meditates upon itself
like a child lost
in a superstore.

--

an ocean wave mimics its predecessor
only to fall victim to aspiration.

what will crush upon my tired bones
as they chase sunsets
in a similar search
for meaning
?

sunlight,
sunlight,
sunlight.

beacon me home
like the smell of goodnight.

i'm always half-blind
& always in denial
that i'm half alive.

it wouldn't hurt
to trade the coffins in my mind
for memories of your blonde streaks
& white fists for black lives
in coffee shops
around the corner.

why am i buying all of this free art,
anyways?

your nose is in the books,
your heart
in the
right place.

you're the design left on the windowsill
after a whimsical,
impulsive,
condensation-initiated
doodling session.
- - -
timeless,
preserved,
and
limitless
in your reach.

in fractions of rotations,
it is filled with sun;
it is shrouded by clouds.

it is fleeting from my fingertips
like my former layers
of skin.

it is the meeting of the lips.

it is measured by minutes
& diastolic response
in this life,

by the depth of irises
& ocean currents
in the next.

a cracked slab of
concrete
knocked
on the front door.

"i ache of
tread and
winter
wind."

it shuttered,
turned a frigid purple
(by
winter
solstice),
and looked
at its watch.

(5:55 A.M.)

another repetition
of an engine revving.

another star
brilliantly,
silently,
waving
goodnight.

another coffee cup
becoming
hot
and then,
becoming
cold.

her tongue danced like the swaying maple,
ideas transforming to light,
a monarch pushing its iridescent chest into
tomorrow.

it is enough to soften a man's heart.

the song,
unheard from time to time
(the dark clouds plugging my ears
as crows huddle on fraying, telephone wire),
echoed as the stone at the base of the waterfall does-

(she is untouched by water
or human intervention)
.

it is the warm recipe known by heart,
the compress for a broken foot,
the wind chime surrendering pre-determined agendas
to Spring's affirmative intuition.

i got scared.
i burnt my tongue just to taste-
the hymn of an elixir with no destination,
a tear with a purposeful procreation and a
meaningless infatuation.

you were on my mind like a wired, chided alpine of lovesick honeybees,
and i've felt nothing but ancestral pain in this echoless house of mirrors.

i am a laundry basket hanging from translucent puppet strings.

this flora bellows,
so engulfed in Western culture that it forgot about sheltered lieutenants-
the deafening tenants singing of
"just one more,
just one more,
just
one
more
.
"

i am no more worthy of the stratosphere than my raven-shaped nightmares,
but i'm orchestrating a perpetual plea
for my fingers to bend
into a less misshapen crescent.

white coat covering solemn ground,
my palms are both cracking and mending,
my eyes both rapidly cycling and softly meditating,
my mythical equilibrium both scratching at the surface,
and tucking itself in for the night.

--

somewhere distant
but not far,

your lungs are the lantern in my attic-shaped heart,
maintaining a hushed illumination
and a delicate snowfall,
euphoniously humming a reliable tune,
foreshadowing cozier winters
of hope and comfort.

often in days where the sun,
in its highest hierarchy,
still refuses to warm my feet
(stubborn
&
engulfed in charcoal
),

the colorless kaleidoscope behind my eyes will become a photo album of the purple-red hue of waterfront nimbocumulus,
jade scrubs not yet bloodied,
and the tea kettle sweetly whistling,
a collective hymn only conjured by your
ambitious,
bashful
cheekbones-
an antidote comprised of scarlet tablecloth and ballroom reverie within the smallest bones of my wrist.

in this auspicious daydream inexplicably affixed to reality,
i watched a cackling crown absorb the ultraviolet in a stale, forgotten parking lot

--

as rainbow plumage replaced black,
i thought of your modest palms on my vacant chest,
immersing the colorless into the radiance,
adrift
and unafraid.

in previously dining with sultry, elegant fire*,
i was a gazelle with its neck bit to the bone-
breathing,
but not alive-
a fractured coffee table melted into a morbid pool of cheap, liquidized steel,
decimated via hazel iris communication and spilled wine.

my skin,
ablaze,
took the shape of your hip-bones,
outlined with red lace and childhood scurry-
a grey ghost changing weightless piano symphonies into expired canned goods,
dented to the severity of hairline fracture.

--

band aids eventually peel like browned, dampened leaves in the sorrowful days of autumn;
scar-ridden skin does not dance into the fading sun to never return,
but rather sits on skin like
wet newspaper
and whiskey breath;
it creeks a screech of attrition in your throat like an unhinged screen door,
the splinters down-pouring into esophageal tissue like ash.

re-dressing the wounds must not be a death sentence,
as the gauze is the clock-tower,
perched in the center of town,
striking noon.

it took far too many rotations around the axis to realize that a wounded, passionately bursting ***** behind a protruded rib-cage was not an expiring hourglass,
but that third degree burns could be the infinite list of ambiguous maps i've yet to navigate.

--

with the passage of ambivalent and nebulous suns,
i can now unravel the bloodied, endlessly flawed fabric to the newly optimistic idea of
her favorite peppermint tea,
her January habits of leaning on the sizzling pellet stove with sweatpants slightly too thin,
her perseverance of the books like a Nobel Prize winner.

but so help me,
if your are one more to pour gasoline on my dinner plate,
i will light the match myself before i allow you to complete the unfinished canvas of my curious skin.

the world is not a stopwatch.

-

yet,
my gaudy lenses consists of entrapment between two copper hands,
one slightly more deprecating,
one slightly more omnipresent-

but we're surrounded by curious skies,
not a dome comprised of the middle school locker room and the sundress that rainy Sundays begged you to twirl aimlessly in.

in these crevices of half life when I can undress the assembly line to its barren tremors,
i breathe in a light spanning counties worth of mountains and mom's chicken enchiladas.

here,
there are no stifling, expendable hands.

there is the first sip of snowy December espresso.
there is my favorite fleece blanket resting on your ambivalent shoulders.
there are endless timelines of the homeless finding shelter and your roof softening the unyielding razors on my skin.

the copper will always find new ways to imbue itself,
but for now,
my breath will carry on for several spring meadows
and remember all of my forgotten names.

voluminous birdie,
color in the forgotten gray of my hand-me-down ventricles.

sing to me like mom after my wisdom teeth,
and sweetie after my knees forget how to meaningfully breathe.

your flight cannot guarantee a destination filled with rhythmic syllables of your brown-eyed reverie,
but the wind itself fuels thoughts of days colored rainbow when my eyelids grey the trees like losing jackets in the snow-covered weeks.

you cannot fill an upside-down jar.
you cannot crack a polymer designed to turn its back to the lukewarm winds.
you cannot convince the grounded child to climb mountains in light of fatter wallets and brighter pale ales.
for the only mechanism of my flight is a unreachable cove-

an unquestioned, unbreakable, unconditional love.

---

fly North,
fly North,
fly North
--
it is too cold here for your feathers to shine.

--

--

-

i'm always lost in these riptide battles of moral attrition,
they're ripping at the sinews,
at oxygen,
oxygen,
oxygen.

what a colorful faucet to pour into our broken pieces at waterfall pace-
and yet,
we harvest buried wells like vengeful widows-
we eat our own by closing our eyes and we let it erupt only in the lightest of shadows.

WE ARE GIANTS IN THE MOST MAGNIFICENT LANDSCAPE.
waning the barren night with cracked palms and open cabinets,
lighting matches to the sky-

finding light towards the meaning of ink on blind skin,
the fading crests of falling waves,
and the lining of hearts too terrified to belt the hymns of the broken days.

with cracking fingertips,
we will clasp the fleeting shore
with euphonious oceans of foliage in our periphery.

the bulk of the evidence:
the dust bunnies in the largest eyelid-corners,
the aching deltoids of the early mornings,
the limbic system of deteriorated thread and fragile glass-
suggest a verdict of dancing with customer services and inhaling the fumes of the daily commute,

rather than opening up hearts like delicate, antique quilts.

the discrepancy is not an evident ideology-
it's pulling the plug,
or attempting conversations on transgender rights with dad -

nothing is certain.

thus,
my cellophane heart will backflip,
my shins will swing and splint like
dull firecrackers-

patting backs of mothers who will not see their sons again,
pushing change while kicking up the sharp rocks,
running marathons i will never finish
because
my heart,
a skeleton with a rusted cape,
screeches my least favorite record on an endless loop.

do not stand there with a bloodied blade in palm and deny your tectonic collisions-
perpetually convergent.

the cracks in our palms not products of birth,
but of rebirth,
of whirlpool concussion,
of night-time demon chants-
our stomachs both steel and starch.

i sense no longings for statues in your ambivalent pupils-
only condolences for the outcasted gargoyles.

you've taught me this value of illumunation in the moonlight of nights where the yellow center-lines were pale-hued and tear-stained.

in these fearful beds of cotton and thorn,
you are the blood and gauze,
the bent mirror and the authentic starlight,
the unknown cave and the trusted headlamp.

your feet are muddy as hell and you're giving your favorite meals to our darkest parts.

my words aimed down the scope as heated blankets feel more like frostbite when hurriedly fired.

what if benevolence is not an adequate source of heat when the power lines topple?

when these ideas run rampant, they are an uncontrollable current-
a social trend picking at gnarled vines of dead skin,
a pair of open eyelids constantly looking at the only two pictures of you still saved on the cloud-
the remnants of your sapphire eyelids cutting my brick femurs like passive ash.

what if my words immortalized your fluttering agility-
a glass universally unbreakable?
what if the punctuation composted your faith like fresh coffee grounds in a drought-stricken garden?

would you aim once more,
or would the circuit breaker gather dust?

i'm warmly lost in the absence of that aspiring red light,
as your heartbeat is still a stabbing pain in the side of my gelatin femurs,
losing visions of the rigidity necessary to live this life of ambivalent autonomy.

--

steel strings and fibers of teeth eating this flesh like a false promise of love,
i am a windowsill covered by a nebulous, translucent shade,
clothespins existing simply to taper my eyes from the pain.

the stars take no mention of this cynical cycle of self-doubt,
for they're lighting our hearts long after they've burnt out.

and your hazel kitchen recipes are hanging over the paint-chipped railing,
giving meaning to this heart,
a blood-stained peach in constant mourning.

break this furtive glass,
there is no light pointing home,
**directionless map

the space we each hold as the single brick missing from the tattered foundation is neither an enthusiastic lightbulb, nor a wounded elk, rotting to the sound of the birds.

it's my favorite portion of dinner,
the determined phone cords wrapped around my weightless ankles, and the child in my head skipping stones on a purple, moonlit lake

we are uncomfortably wet grand-masters of the sandpaper landscape,
making sense of that nameless, empty space.

i'm losing myself in your hazel portal.

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

fingernails, the endless target of fear, blunting the intensity of your golden-gate conscious,
bear enough of this weight to mortalize Atlas.

the pathetic, monotone static in my head is a train barreling towards an unfinished bridge,
my cynicism a pew destroyed by debris,
my outstretched hand a burning bible.

in my back-alley existence,
you are an ocean-wide coral reef of altruism and hope,
beaming with enough passionate hue to feed the starving.

i am twiddling my sprained, charcoal thumbs out of rhythm,
selfishly consuming your complexion like a leech

the lava-blended departure of the sun is not metaphysics,
but a pinpoint target into human hearts,
both empirical and whimsical,
both light out of my ultraviolet perspective and the asphalt hurricanes of my cortex

~


bursting to the window,
it BUCKLED.

she battled the nimbostratus with 7.4 billion souls on her solar-flaring side;

I sat idly by, desperately attempting to cool my tea and fight the demons on my shoulder.
The battle was a chainsaw pitted against a watermelon,
a senseless,
lopsided conflict.

(is the deck stacked or
are my shoulders only temporarily
disfigured?)

despite cinder block extremities,
my skin is still more mesh than concrete;
these summer nights were meant for picket signs
and bare feet.

as to perceive image without light,
I swam against a salty, magnificent current.

the anatomy of your enamel is a gregarious combination of sunshine and pouring sweat.
Queen Anne's Lace is lining Prom West like a gospel chorus,
and your violets are screaming an unheard passion.

my hideous self-deprecation is a mute, static television signal in your ever-glowing radius-
a presence growing slowly and humbly, yet erupting all at once like a plentiful vegetable garden-
tomato plants, rosemary, and your Grand Canyon-eyes of brightness in full bloom.

it is here where your adjectives become potent antihistamines,
where these action words are soft fingernails on my scalp,
where your histories write textbooks of moon cycles and tiger lilies.

your palms on my chest and lips on the soft spots,
your amber irises are the key to the city.

I will dance with this infinity-
with each crack in your palm and rose in your heart,
under these golden, Northern streetlights for
the rest of time.

--

dreams are elusive ghosts,
but every once in awhile I will find my the dimples of my back grazing the frigid Hudson,
the treetops seeping into my grayscale skin like lotion.

it is within this reality that I may briefly forget the constant screech of your tired bones,
a relief beyond the sensation of any ****** or chocolate cupcake.

reality is not such a simple plot-line.
rather than spin you on the dance floor like a lavender goddess,
i'm punishing my liver for existing.

this is where my naïve psyche meets the memory of your golden shoulder-bones-
where my broken, bitten-down fingers feel your unyielding flexibility and stark vulnerability like sandpaper Hallmark cards.

it is a true talent to seep the modest current without searching beyond the horizon-

for the air feels like tar without anyone to breathe it with.
----------------------------------------

this sultry tease of summer,
skin peeling off of leather and cracked heels on the dashboard,
blisters on feet panicking like geysers,
this oxygen resembling cinder-blocks
slightly more carefree -

imprints of crinkled toes never left the passenger seat.
the bags in your eyes were unmined emeralds-
my bones shared strict resemblance to anvils,
and I was too ******* high to inject these sullen thrills.

the new car smell never comes back.

my stomach is no longer a carnival at the sight of freshly opened eyelids, only a dimly-lit, mold-infested dungeon.

may I begin the Spring cleaning by sweeping your eyelashes off of the leather?
or shall I leave your grace,
along dried crumbs off screaming green dopamine,
in the creases?

always,
always,
always
passionate visions of my chest smashing through the windshield like a steel-framed freight train,
fueled by every damning item on this laundry list of self-inadequacy.

salvage yards cannot simply exist as ubiquitous rows of lost souls
------
there must be hope for the hot season to melt away the rose-tinted skidmarks burning my irises.

Sunday newspapers continue to gather fragile New England snow on the curbside,
a stomping ground for purgatory, the home for these roller-coaster thoughts.

i'm not much for small talk.
my clothes are always inside out and i'm raging losing battles with my steel-toed tear ducts-

steel, as
grunting is a masculine expression,
and so i'll lift weights,
but gain no strength, just aches of all of the intimacy that I've never allowed myself to emit or absorb.

a soggy sponge,
a rotten oak stump,
fallen leaves-
a childhood meal coming back up over the fists and the heaves.

counter-intuition,
the alcohol binds the seams;
tear ducts are dams
and everyone needs a method of additional reinforcement.

numbness and empty-mindedness aside, I'm
still a make-shift dumpster lover,
hardwired, disassociated hinge-sucker.

too sensitive to open the window blinds or morning newspaper,
there is still no muscle definition, only
liver damage.

wilting,
every seed is a perennial flower-
roots embedded within aortic dreams;
bursting dandelions are just defined weeds.

we're not compost,
just pawns of propagated watering cans,
soaking in messages so malevolent that
eugenics becomes an assimilation heuristic.

seven-billion shells in
six summers of no shade,
six winters of dancing with devils and self hate,
six seasons of victims hating the victims just the same.

sharing a garden-bed to enrich each other's soil,
fallen petals call for tearful hymns,
not a body count.

the backs of my eyelids are kaleidescopes-
blender-mixtures of the crinkles of your nose-bridge,
panic attack lullibies,
and waterfall tear-ducts,
the scent of mixture so ripe with potential that love personifies itself
as unlimited clean water in Flint.

in your indefinite (permanent) absence,
it is a sensation not painfully unsterile as a homemade tattoo,
but not quite as pragmatically satiable as a common itch.

it's
hiccups at the podium,
sore legs moving into a third floor apartment,
a fender-****** in the sweltering seduction of summer.

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

your hemorrhage-generating image is a permanent stain that blends in just well enough to wear.

numbness, my old abusive life partner, trickle down my spine and gush outward like a broken levee.

stay up far past a reasonable bed time to think about a reality where purpose is more evident. work, work, work. learn the circuitry of computer programs that will never solve world hunger. listen to sad songs on the drive home. empathize with roadkill.

float above your body. smell the surroundings and mimic all of the textbooks you've read on active listening. grin and nod while your mind transforms more and more into pile of melted wax. become nauseated by the stench of your own life. let it seep into your bloodstream like a rotten batch of dope.

think about death. think about death during breakfast. think about death when the sun goes down on an uneventful Sunday afternoon. think about death during ***. think about death while getting drinks with friends. ponder why this earth decided to play the role of an impolite and overworked host. feel sorry for the sun for having so much responsibility.

cry until the faucets allowing your tear ducts to stop are broken. let your dinner become play-dough. be a gracious host to the parasites in your mind. swim with them like the dolphins. lose grasp of why waking up is so important. swallow whiskey like saliva. promise yourself that you won't drink four tall-boy Pabst Blue Ribbons on a Tuesday night. drink four tall-boy Pabst Blue Ribbons on a Tuesday night.

hold numbness while it cries in your lap and promises that it will change-that things will be different. allow it to feed you lies like someday you'll enjoy the sunrise and someone will realize that you're not too broken to love

rip skin off of limbs. try to make it another day.

my bare feet and the nose-crinkling tickling of sand-
a contradictory image,
for I was taught to never run with scissors,
your image a rusted blade in my femoral.

my heartbeat and the blithe tide have flirted in a far less than parallel existence,
heels rotting, feet grinding down to the ankle-bones
in the softest fashion,
like a dying rose in vase
in a cubicle too small.

I've inhaled these beaches before.
white dresses have lit up the July wind like lavender candles,
sunsets and barking labs scalping distant couches,
turning my broken back into your expendable canvas.

your birthday has escaped me,
and the tattoo on the back of your sandpaper neck is a static television frequency.

the rip-tide is welcoming me for dinner, filling my lungs with my favorite dessert.

abdomen muscle
sores.

floating inconspicuous,
intermittent,
along our constant wavelength of nullified measurement.

swallowing pills that were made to be my mistress,
it's shattered glass that hasn't yet numbed this instant.

everything is just a leg waiting on a shin-splint.

horns, hollow-
ly followed by a public service announcement

you do not exist in simultaneous intersectionality

YOU GIVE US CARBON DIOXIDE,
AND THUS,
you are DEEPLY ENTANGLED

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

a web, spun by an anxious,
poison-cursed arachnid
holds us all by the finger-tips,
pressing each of our infinite, six-second *******
together.

gravity ensures that when the silk can no longer bear the weight of the world,
the rose-tinted lenses will shatter-------------
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx­xxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx
****
x

violently,
our brain stems will rot
alone.

my cerebellum is ever changing,
but in my head there are always vases breaking like a drunken father in an angry fit so that my isolation is never vacant;
my thought patterns are shattered, blood-stained glass.

a furious saleswoman is grasping my hairline at the forehead and pulling the skin off of my scalp from behind,
her friends tying my hands behind my back with rope that is much too tight,
ensuring helplessness over my tumultuous oblivion.

in younger years, when my bare skin touched the cold porcelain, i would dance like an underpaid bartender on a tight-rope, and return to pockets of heat like nuclear winters.
but now i cannot find the energy to stand in the shower, and
i'd liquidate any inheritance from my last names and deepest loves to transform my thumb and pointers, molded into the shape of a magnificent pistol, into steel-

my fingers as a gun do not disintegrate my limbic system like a homesick child. i'm not capable of accomplishing any act of substance without outside assistance, explaining why every lover has looked into my eyes and seen enough thunderstorms to run and hide as fast as they ******* can.

i'm not sure there is a finite amount of broken clocks to convince me that time does not stop for anyone, and that for every vaccine you bring to their doorstep, there are seven more dead friends just outside the reach of your eyelids.

we keep our hands busy. we shift positions. if we can hide from the cosmos, we can quit biting our fingernails long enough to win Nobel Prizes. if not, we are pushing boulders up mountains, disguised as grocery stores, office parties, football fields, television screens, and pieces of paper just like this one.

there will be many more Nobel Prizes and one day, my hands will turn to steel. the final chapter of thunderstorms always contains some sanguine symbol, a motif mirroring soothing rain.

An ocean away from the Ivory Coast,
my feet are too clean and my mind is too *****.

i'm so far away from this euphoric, ruddy discharge that my bed has transformed from a lukewarm boulder into all of my favorite childhood memories-
the unconscious a candy apple,
your dreams a sugary topping.

there you are-
wavering like a flag torn piece by piece from the wind,
savoring my tears like a glass jar,
gleaming ubiquitous affection, yet stoic,
unaffected by the blistering mantle-heat.

this ocean is my hospital gown tied so tightly that i can no longer breathe in your deepest fears and swallow them like morning coffee.

this ocean is my mother, choking on soothing words, repelling suicide with optimistic rhetoric, neurons firing in a tone so hectic that silent meditation is an inaudible conversation.

this ocean is the anti-depressant that ***** on my skin like a vacuum, dr. nestling his blindfold like an infant

this ocean is my empty home, abandoned, lost in the noise.

someday my feet will be ***** again,
and i'll feel your unyielding warmth like quarries in the summer,
dropping all of the noise and mending with what matters most,
where i'm blending in with infinite shades
of the Ivory Coast.

sixty-eight cigarettes on the desktop-
ashtrays,
an absent post-filter prediction
shouting to the leaky ceiling tiles,
America, you've taken it all

marks on the wrist-
no freshly-fallen feathers, but
locks on every door and
allocated times to eat,

QUIET,
I SAID
QUIET!

i always want to be forty miles north of here where
the drugs are taken under my own free will and
there's an amp for Ringo's snare.

oh, bureaucracy, why do the men in blue transform my glass ceiling into linoleum?

the flagpole is not an adequate target for this diatribe-
this transparency is marching me towards a four-point restraint while I sob for the intersection(ality) of Route 2 and 116
and sixty-eight cigarettes
to inhale a Franklin County sunset in
symmetrical harmony.

sleepwalking for one more hour.

sleepwalking for two decades with a protruding gut and
eyes as buried deep as petrified wood,
i’ve dug up a treasure-
a realization, if you will.
everyone will leave when they see the ice sheets on my bones.

a feather without a breeze,
a storm of acid rain,

wind currents in hibernation,

gasping, treading, begging for a direction to open eyelids,
sinking,
sinking,
losing oxygen-

marathons,
pockets filled to the brim with stones,
i am drowning as far inland as a swimmer can be,

i am a cold, cosmic dot and one hour will not burn enough energy-
my brothers and sisters in the cold, i am
one hour further away from leaving this lonely, unforgiving, jagged, racially segregated and
factory farming piece of terrain that has worn down my bones without ever using a blade.

one hour closer to the next heartbreak, to feeling my heart as a vase dropped down the stairs of an apartment complex, friendly enough to feel its walls in my soul like fresh lipstick on my cheek, apathetic enough to leave the shards under the jungle jim for weeks.

one hour further away from the dishonest dream of my grass-stained bare feet, no nails in tires, and mom singing to pop radio while making chicken-
one hour more distant from broken pencils and dad’s empty beer bottles. drifting like a poor, lonely cloud given the horrific gift of conscious thought, i am one hour further away.


sinking.

one more hour of frozen tundra,
i am waiting for daylight to come and pass
as a sheep without wool,
dying much too slowly,

for one more wretched,
godless
hour.

a crossroads-
my fingers are drooping like dampened socks,
as I am changing like a
kitchen table hardens over spills and
senseless childhood arguments.

i’ve forgotten how to breathe as my lungs strain more heavily,
as drains reject water in hypocrisy and your image haunts the table like an apparition with no social courtesy.

the mirror has been less and less friendly. my hair feels like styrofoam.

i felt my worn-down sneakers attract the wet leaves like magnets in another New England autumn. i wondered why they didn’t repel me like logic, purpose, or your daisy-shaped palms.

we fight and bleed to stick to the bottoms of sneakers but winter will come and lovers will pass,
as any breeze will tell you.

march 9th, 2016
five dollars an hour,
copyrights are not ensured agoristically;
minimum wage is ensured by those who ignore the hazel in Yemeni eye sockets,
ribs barren.

October 22nd,
i cannot afford the heat anymore.
i only get drunk so that i may eat ***** without hearing your hymn,
screaming into my ear-plugs like evolutionary theory.

Northampton, Massachusetts-
i wore sheep under my eyes and grey on a heart-sick scalp;
we were all dying and my cerebellum was a private-eye detective, searching for color in a world so plastered in binary that orange and Green-Rainbow never sang emotion in G major.

I am dying, too.

reciprocity is the least common denominator of "I promise to think of your interests later."

August 2016,
my hair is silly putty and this couch has transformed my spinal column into haplessly frozen shoelaces,
tied together.

snowfall, 2016,
i love every single Yemeni and
the cold stings like index, middle, and thumb grazing lit firewood.

yesterdays-
where there is no curtain,
there is no cloud.

(it's always a longer drive on the other side.)

the flight back won't accept a round trip;
we are never quite right in the mediums where we work too much to eat dinner with our families. the coffee *** is whiter than walls, unexplored, unadorned, stunted from existing morally well-rounded or mature.

the prison industry complex is my backyard with pesticides growing green grass and tides rise as my greatest fears of inadequacy hide like colorblind fireflies.

i'll do what i can to survive.

i'll eat so i cannot read but
rather
surmise
so I can't taste oxygen like
a velvet sunrise,
hiding my yesterdays by maksing the destination of my drive,
simply a dichotomy of blood and
first prize.

i'm not inspired to smoke cigarettes because i'm always trying to get in shape but every finger i lift is a freighter's worth of dead weight.

i envy their lack of conscious thought;
i **** them in my mind for the disparity between their capability for labor and apathy towards the thought of an imaginary savior.

faith means believing what isn't there. you held me tighter when i told you that i don't wear seatbelts because i'm always dreaming of dethroning lamposts and kissing trees on the side of the Pike. foliage is far more gregarious without all of the gore but you said that you'd stay forever and your ghost sits on my shoulders like a dump truck full of ashes.

i don't know if i've ever written a full paragraph without dreaming of this pen sprinting through my chest, blood like nectar.

drink me and feel your potential dissipate like dust bunnies.

you would have stayed forever.

lie to me again and tell me that i'll wear my seatbelt someday.

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?

status binds us and we are
cutting off limbs with
flat head screwdrivers.

do you hide under the covers like i do?
does the Vicodin block the heat like your air
conditioner?

billiards and midnight jogs do
not swim like professionals do,
but they keep my memory from defaulting
to all the chairs you placed jeans or
leggings
or a hope for a swift removal of pain
inside of a safe with
fingertips stronger than narcotics.

a pass code for purpose is a pig in flight;

we have maps but we will not ever understand how to read them.

i'm afraid there's nothing left in the tank but fumes and false hope.

aluminum is not a friend, it's a recyclable material that contains happiness when the world turns a blind eye to its ubiquitous pain and i am only a scarecrow in a field full of bodybuilders and terrifying childhood memories.

it's all too much. the emptiness is only invisible when the music bruises my ear-drums or when i think of how your lips and teeth felt on my bones. the band-aids will fall off but your words are branded like factory farms.

the worst part? i'm a sketch left on the easel in an abandoned schoolhouse. i'm a half-assed mannequin. i've translated the seasons into colorless cycles in cyclical misrepresentation. astute observation leads me to believe i'm the product of a meaningless procreation.

shutting off my eyes doesn't feed all of the starving souls who actually want all of this oxygen, and we have false hope that some of these fumes might turn into rice and beans and
the love we've always wanted

but never swallowed.

the ideas we forge are figments of our ideal reality,
flirting with pieces of firewood that haven't fallen victim to
slugs
and a winter too frigid to ensure development.
fireplaces are
visual, only
visceral in the right
heat.

why should we assume that the temperature will ensue the continuity of rivers? why should the dry creeks,
unseen but
unsipped
be simply sighted as resting grounds?

who ever claimed that sawed-off tree stumps or broken windows were casualties?

rhetoric is a vase made of steel and it doesn't give me any of the realities that i breathe in like
my sisters without water,
holding on to hope.