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.

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.

Wise women and men who have written books have always told me to focus on the light pouring from stars that kindle constellations,
but my eyes refuse to ignore every single bottle cap from the thousands of beer cans I've torn off out of a fear that I'll always scratch the backs of those who need it and that no one will ever return the favor.

My hurricanes will make no difference if the forest has already burned to the ground,
but moving my eyes upward into a sea of stars has been dulled by a neck brace that you embraced boldly when you broke every jar in the cabinet and didn't even think about helping me clean up this mess that turned my dreams into a reality where I wanted to learn from those that have read books and affixed my eyes to the constellations you gave me right here on Earth.

One day,
the thousands of metallic memorabilia reminding me of every hair I ripped out of my head over shattered glass will transform into seeds that will fertilize a field and yield a forest that anyone who ever needs tree for shelter can fall asleep within and dream about love without strings attached or knives in their backs.

I've removed your blade and recycled it,
transforming the blood from my spine into the stars that hold hands with all of the other bright lights composed of the pain that has defined your lives and then helped you shine in a constellation full of flowers blooming from fractured hearts.

We will watch from the treetops,
together.

when I close my eyes,  there are deaf ears.
I see nothing,
my friends.

i have not asked for this agony-
waking up and
filling my nervous system with consciousness,
a sugar-coated term for fear.

and we see enough.

there are good dogs who bite out of spite,
from being curb-stomped and
laughed-at
and killed,
and then there dogs that will just bite.

the ability to perceive is the equivalent of watching you and anyone you've ever ****** on the bed that we never made.

none of us have asked for this,

but we have it.

Endings could be happier if we didn't spread the impression that death was to be avoided at all costs.

Sometimes, there are
dream of days when
trees aren't so hollow.

When I do not wish to live,
how can words leave a mouth
for actions to follow?

I will rot.
I will live
for hypothetical thought.

Nothing is real,
and the rain
will leave me  
to lose bones
and wither away
like a calendar
left to rot
with hypothetical thought
and empty plains spanning
light years
in length.

Just give me it,
******* it.
Give me the strength
for a collapse
spanning light years in length,

She marches to no beat-
a purpose seemingly incomplete.
If she challenges her every breath,
is she not obsolete?

I can't say that I don't understand.
Weaving  bruised patches on a quilt
with a jagged stone in each hand
is enough to fill a riverbed with blood.

With such an affinity to this bed of rocks,
who am I to judge?

But you.
There is nothing more to hate
in agreeing that you hold such a fate.
If a smile is the only emotional currency,
how can you not shine brighter than gold?

She marches on against the current.
She wades in the winter wanderlust.
She is a beacon of cerulean light,
and a cup of warm coffee
on a red eye flight.

The ice sheet that covers your bones
is the warmest blanket
on a winter night.
If the gate is ever open,
I'll never cease to highlight
your tranquilizing, infinite light.

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.

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.

There is rain
and it is Saturday.
But that's no excuse for shame.
Nor is it more of an excuse
to watch self-inflicted wound
run loose.

I think of the sweet
crackling of
a summer treat-
branches burning,
newspaper receding.
THC,
butane
and stems of
a neglected yesterday
meeting.

But today is what's to be missed.
There are floods-
even on the weekends.

I am a floating hoax;

I will always be
a box of half-peeled jokes.

To flourish within this exposed state
is to self-paralyze and re-create.

But the nerves just don't want to listen-
that's the biggest part of the condition.

This explains rain on Saturdays,
absence within summer's crackling,
and hollow bones
floating like stones.

With luck
my torn skin will reach the ocean floor.

The echo of such a collision
will resemble my
inconceivably
indifferent
indecision.

I am bound by
two brick strings
and a
receipt
of red ink.

There is nothing
about the future that presents this.
Only that which has occurred
to a stomached stirred
preventing any glimpse of bliss.

I'm only calling
the names in the distance.

There's a shift of relevance
and it's delicate.

Those who can't record
the revolution
are too busy
lighting the rooftops
ablaze.

I haven't seen July in years
and yesterday was no different.

The same birds
loving
and
resting before migration
violently pecked
at my skin.

The flesh never breaks,
and the engine never takes.

I never look at the sky.
I've been told there is beauty
in flight
and feathers
and people.

But I would rather stay inside.
Walls contain the chirping
from the caring
and I can sleep
forever.

the picture is falling so far down that I lost track the last time I had any chance of grasping it. How long does it take for a fist to form? how long can the drop be after all? it doesn't seem that bad. but its so warm up here, its so cozy and jagged and I seem like I love it. everyone else does, except for those who cared. The funny thing is, no one cares. No cares if I go to class or if I smile or if I finally jumped. we would all just continue on driving and laughing like there was somewhere to drive to. Sometimes I think about those days when they shoved snow in my face and I remembered wondering when it was going to get better. everyone always said it was going to be better. Now I'd do anything to get frostbite on every limb. I'd tear myself piece from piece if I realized what life was going to be.

I recently looked at a blank white page with the word "information" written on it.  It made perfect sense to me.

a
silver-lined,
acute and astute
reflection
tells me that the
veins in my forehead will never replace
everything you've exhaled
to deserve a place to
rest your bones.

The cloud you sleep on
will never return,
but every drop that has pierced my skull
stays to sting,
singing sharply,
so that I may see color
once again.

--

Listen to the sound of the clock.
Does it beat the same for you?
Days are passing by and I
Would pay handsomely to miss the view.

The winter soon approaches
And the leaves even depart.
And who's to say for sure
If we really hold them in our heart?

Listen to the sound of your heart.
I don't understand all of the commotion
Perhaps a kiss, a touch, and unrequited feeling.
The logic just never seems to dictate that senseless emotion.

Because who's to say that love
can overcome all of the fear?
When nothing in this world besides confusion
is set in stone and crystal clear?

Listen to the sound of your head.
Does it puncture your mind with sorrow?
Even when the torches light the way for me,
I can't seem to illuminate tomorrow.

Who first decided there was a purpose?
A poor idealist who failed?
I suppose he hoped for better days.
For lovers and dreams that never bailed.

I grow tired of dreaming.
Because life is just too pragmatic.
I'm older and just that more beaten down.
It's just becoming so traumatic.

I'll take mind and matter
to erase the glass that will shatter.
It's not about what he or she said,
or the dollar sign on your forehead.

It’s care.
It's in there.
Somewhere.

It's somewhere in between
my best friends
and our fifty inch flat screen.
It's Always Sunny or Halo?

It's somewhere right beneath
this broken layer of myelin sheath.
You are enough. Never forget that.

It's somewhere above, up there
where your pensive graze
meets her passionate stare.
Don't ever change. I love you for who you are.

And well, it's somewhere in here,
when the blisters on my fingers
match the ringing in my ear.
I am not the imaginary enemy.

Before you close your eyes,
remember that what you see
is not what actually appears.
This is not solipsistic;
this is the passion
that will illuminate your years.

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.

I'm scared that
I'm picking off
pieces of decaying skin
without anywhere
to
put
them.

One day,
I think my
excuses for
waking up to
stars
turning their heads from me
will run out.

One day,
the last of my flesh
will dissapear and decay
and the night sky
will gain a star
burnt out
before ignition.

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.

I never had enough time to
open myself and dance with you,
nor could I make dahlias and sunflowers shimmer in the reflection of the light
while you danced in circles
without me.

--

I can't wait to see what 22 has in store for you.

--

I just don't want you to think that I'm ready for anything.

Words and green jeans of
the hazel-stained dream scene
showed me a passion for humanity,
but love is just warped titanium,
and minimizes intimacy for polyandry.

You told me this was not your plan,
but
you drank and
drank
and you grabbed me inside out, knuckles tied to insecurities so tightly that bruises turned black and blue into a hue of comfort and confidence and everything that I needed.

You were the answer. You were my anchor. You were the alternative to the smoking gun and everything that I've lost a drive to attend to over the years.

I will always remember the smell of smoke,
your sweaters forged from low-hanging clouds,
and the seemingly fully-shadowed tunnels in my organs that you accessed and lit up like a sun longing to burn forever.

on another hand,
with my shoulders squared,
winter will not freeze my spirit
enough where I will believe in you.

Close the curtains.

It's not that I'm not ready to see the crowd yet, it's that they've paid their hard earned money to stare straight through me. This facade doesn't have to be; the curtain call is nothing to see, and the shadows have always provided such well-articulated shade.

A facade. A facade.

A charade. We are all poor players, but do we symbolize the dreams of the wealthy?

Or does it signify nothing?

There's no applause, and suddenly I'm no longer there. The senseless tension doesn't deserve determined attention. Besides, there hardly ever seems to be retention or a momentum that carries us easily into the next sunrise. At least, that's my most honest surmise.

And I can't say it's a surprise.

So visualize-there's a hole in your heart and it slowly gets patched by white marble from the dam. ****, what a thought-so much calcium carbonate and still so much relentless nausea accompanying dendral rot. I've had just about all I can hear on the subject of everything not falling apart.

Are our hearts so ephemerally wilted or permanently jilted?

I understand that I've had no filter. But you need to understand how sick I am of winter.

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.

--

--

-

There are cliffs and
there are
ledges.

South of gravity,
cavities release color;
cataracts shade
what is too unconscious
to discover.

DO NOT
(under any circumstances)
fall.

Do not blink,
or allow hearts to accelerate in order
to decompose
like a token;
like a rock
interwoven
with moss and
history.

The bottom-
perhaps the best view.

I bleed, I ache, I pour;
I imbue a morbid yesterday
on your plate for dinner.

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.

We are all pieces to this puzzle,
but there are more heartbeats
than there is audible space.

There is no mark on the skin of an outlier-
just a universal instinct to reach higher.

We'll all keep reaching for the right fit.
What happens when realizations
of isolated chairs
and echoless rooms
reach consciousness?

Will we stop reaching,
or blindly ignore truth?

Will we accept broken limbs,
or feign eternal youth?

To float or to sink-
is a truly blind way to think.

Arbitrarily,
there is universal fit
and there is
unison.

There must be a way out.

Because one time,
there was just water.
There were
just molecules.

How they fit together so
anatomically.

And now
how can they divide
so promiscuously?

It's as if the door
has been sealed
with the visions of future.

It's as if
there was never
any way to be sure.

There can't be.

Beg, borrow, and steal.
There's many ways to conceal
the distorted image
life has shone
mystically.

This is all a mystery.
I don't know if audible waves
are what the ocean brings.

There are only things.

There are only those
who sting.

And for those that blindly sing,
there are only things.

why does your ghost weaken me when I don't even believe in it? why do I ache more after Klonopin and ice packs than before? how would any answer you avoided, articulating blank space and bleak dreams, unspoken, yet, aware of the ephemeral life span of the sun and every tear and bruise from genocides all the way to flirt-induced nudges, help our sinking ship fly? there's so much pain that our brains could flip on their backs, take a picture, and lose the ability to sort out the original prints from what may actually matter.

you saw everything, and then me, and then everything again. you're climbing trees that I wished you would have pushed me out of. you're shooting rifles that i wish most people would shoot me with, the rifles you jammed with a cork but now **** with enough force to cause ripples that hit the little broken bones inside of my chest.

for awhile, i think i forgot about bullets. whatever you feared brought me back to this bed and now the sunflowers in my eyes are metal, cold and lost. i'm still trying to chew them, but it is so ******* painful that my vertebrae can't stand each others' company.

i'm so far off of the third rail i think that some electricity might do my head some good.
i am a blind lamp post.
i am a diving board made of bricks.
i am gum, chewed.
i am waiting for an eighteen-wheeler in a train station,
wishing velocities could combine to hit me
as hard as you did.

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.

sunrises and roosters have shown us beginnings since we were taught to walk and to be efficient,
but no one showed me how to gravitate away from darkness when soft skin swallows me whole and spits me out as truth in a poorly designed disguise
through molars,
through holes and
passion that I feel with every aching pain I'm told isn't actually real.

blood is real and bruises can't be healed with gauze and work ethic.
we're doors and we don't have hinges. we are not stones, even when ******, we are capable of productivity and love and forward progress.

the solution to over-depletion and unheard screaming was to erode together, but now i'm sprinting back and forth between pecuniary poles and pockets with energy that sunrises or roosters have never given me;

Green eyes
and velvet pastures
just weren't enough.

My greatest surmise
is that faucets
just didn't emit the right temperature.

The puzzle pieces
were just some false expenditure-
some meaningless adventure.

I don't know why roses sting.
There's just always a reason
to ignore the sun.

There are
daisies in fields
and
two lips
that won't align.

As honeybees,
how can we predict the right fit?
Pollination
is so much more
than a one-night stand.

There are supernovas in indecision.
There are apathetic nights awake.
that end
muddy
and wrapped around telephone poles.

The hand that will pick,
nurse
and water
will be
a hand slaughtered.

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.

there's no instruction manual
for the day that cotton and
broken ceramic sentimentality
both lose their argument
and the bedsheets bleed
a blood better resembling magenta
than a dream-filled agenda.

there's no escape when
night time travels
come to an end.

there's nothing to knit.
Enough of the yarn
has covered cortexes,
capitalized on insomnia,
and nullified touch-
the only common sense.

it's common sense
that bruises don't heal
by applying pressure.

and brown eyes
and blue.
formerly, there is
underrated hue.

(If underrated could ever encapsulate oceans and the stars giving us light abundantly and concurrently from millions of years away.)

i unravel years as I lie
not sleeping,
reading up on different methods
to stop the bleeding.

of all of these shades of vibrant blue,
I choose the one that is brown,
but true.

i see these shades in unison
and when they inexplicably combine,
they are you.

Life is tough but death creeps
on you like a spattered image of
your yesterday's self
on the concrete
mixed with paste and oil
and buried under six feet of cemented soil.

And when we can we are able.
And we assure apathy
is a right and not psychopathy.

We are able to identify with those
who do not feel.

All of my voices have told me to shy away.
They don't truthfully know what to say
when dying leads to something far more gratifying
than any euphoric rush of ephemeral dopamine.

We are unseen.
We live in dreams.
We touch with enough distance
to transform an absence of rust
into decay and indifference.

The path ahead is limited.
Lying six feet underground
is not adequate recreation,
nor daily transportation.

And so you ask my preference,
I'd choose my comfy bed.
But for repercussions rampant,
I continue to walk while dead.

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.

I dont' know.

There's so little difference between
frowns and freckles now,

It's like stepping on aluminum
cans ripped opened
by cigarette smoke
and my attempted assimilation
have manifested
some profound sadness.

There are no butterflies in the field.
There is no text on the line.
There is a coyote
working the lines
until dawn breaks,
shaking my world yet again.

If only the power would give.
If only the can had no bottom.
If only there was never a romance
of egg and *****
forcing this ringworm
of a human being.

I have dropped my value.
I have lost my voice.
I have lost my fingerprints.
I have boiled too soon.

I have taken a heart
and I have chewed it
dry.

Even the wounds die.

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.
----------------------------------------

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.

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.

A hero is,
someone who uses four letter words.
And her sundress
requested far more than
four measly words.

Her answer was not my question.
but what if I never wanted to ask?
Could I have shriveled up my eyes
into a spirit hiding in my flask?

(Join us in tragedy,
and end us in comedy.
Leave us
in such ambivalent irony.)

But we had our times
and our guts were spilled.
I (don't remember any pollen)
that Spring) don't often remember Spring.

I can't discredit
how crooked you bent me.
But you played the most crucial part
in folding my fingers and toes
into the shapes that should be.

I love you.
Enough to draw this picture
in perfect, negative contrast.
I don't want your reflection looking so grey.
I love you enough to hold your hand in public
I'll tell you behind a screen,
but only if you ask.
These gifts show affection.
The kisses worth the lists.
Hindsight is abysmal,
because there is no dollar sign
on all the damage that this put me through.
I love you enough to follow,
enough to put myself behind.
Enough to look up the knot
and choke myself blind.
I love you enough to lie.
Enough to say yes.
Sixty miles.
Gone.
I love you enough to lose it all.
I give my demons a ******* excuse
why I can't hang.
And so they escape unsolved.
Why didn't someone tell me?
The further they ride away,
the harder they are to understand.
I love you enough to write this.
I want to pay an earnest tribute.
I want to know it was all worth it.
The black dawns
the aggressive swans
Your role as the queen
and mine as the pawn.
If they all blame it on you,
they are wrong.
I caused this.
You just tagged along.
You just loved me.

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.

and the sun
will only be seen in dreams

there's no light under trees,
but my eyelids have been pinned open
by a selfish seamstress
and scarce serotonin.

My arm first seen on shoulder
Kevin and Jason,
colored suitcases,
and two leaves
visible on a broken clover.

A molten cluster of
grotesque villains
inside the head
of the woman
who claimed to breathe in mountains,
but lived in photo albums instead.

She's always arbitrarily weeping.
Maybe that's why I'm never sleeping.

It's when the eyes of the world are closed
when the tornadoes of altriusm emerge.
While conscious kindness does exist,
its appreciation sounds more like a dirge.

A soul tirelessly torn to pieces
will erase widespread fear
and bring the dormant soul
alive and aware
of every changing season.

the sun
only exists in dreams

but the stars
will illuminate
everything your eyes will ever see.

there are always victories in splitting threads and in being swallowed whole.

dark, warm,
blind,
reborn.

ONE plane ride, ONE bag of disguise, and ONE ocean more blue than the last,
do we deny our hues and fly, sit and swallow the sky, or
fall into dreams?

stay on the path of blue and fight for what is true because none of us have any ******* clue what lies on the other side of that pill.

sweaters WILL unravel.
there will always be another forest to explore,
imploring denial of bark, branches, bereavement;
leaves will only leave when they want to leave,
never because anyone else says so.

Shamans say that the eagle eating me in my dreams represents a readiness to plant seeds-
our forests will never touch the same ocean again,
but they will both grow in sweet sleet,
in sunshine,
in love,
in hate,
in promises broken and kept,
in love,
in love,

Who are you
to tell me the verdict
of a case
held within a suitcase
enclosed by vines
and repression?

I suppose it's somewhat
of an obsession,
if one can be so apathetic.

It's not pathetic.
I understand a panic,
but when the sirens sound,
would you even care?
Would you sit me down
on a slab of cracked concrete
and be able to caulk and sew
anything that would seep?

Or would I be left at sea?

I suppose one without emotion
cannot feel empathy.

So with my lowly, unholy,
hollowed-out chest,
I lie on the melting asphalt
pooling
and
always becoming warmer
to sweat through
another fever.

, and so weather patterns are not correlated with (mis)trust because there is collusion.

V. Conlusions:
Any meaningful exclusion will compensate restitution.

Material, though, wears thin as your heart wears my skin like your favorite shadow.

Plants don't operate like this because they have common sense.

She stared at me and said "it's all right"
but she was not right.

She told me about the haze.
She told me about darker days.
She told me about my terrible self-esteem.

She doesn't know.
Push and flow
and gregariously go.

She doesn't know
Push comes to shove
and I infinitely disappear.

We all long for a disappearance.
So a companion will exit,
but I will self-medicate.

We all long for a disappearance
So I'll keep the safety on
and remind myself to wait.

My favorite outfit
was when your heart laid restless on your sleeve-
a paper mache
of a dream I desperately

DIED

to achieve.

Our senses merged in snow,
and before light,
we were buried-
shrouded by a part of you that
had
died.

Every sound you echoed
made marrow leak lazily to
a concrete road constricted
ambiguously,
with hazel
and green,
and the blackest
******* BLACK
that my marrow will ever manifest.

--

Wear your heart on your sleeve.
Without love,
death is the only achievement to achieve.

Tonight the stars have reminding me of hindsight,
of the alternatives to drinking milk and of why I hated myself for so many years and then stopped.

I could never feel so comfortable lying on my back while rabbits and leaves filled my veins with an ecstasy that a past self could never cut or swallow into sedation and then oblivion.

Maybe purgatory still lines the ground that my shoes constantly conflict with, but if you are my nothingness then I have suddenly found everything in absolutely nothing,
or maybe it's in the way that death chooses to hug me whenever I am around you because she has always strangled me with enough force to destroy villages and any spec of a hope that the rope in the tree in the oak tree in my back yard was not my final destination in your absence.

this place is the softest of fabrics that kept me alive when my legs were bleeding out in a cloud where thunder and lightning yelled all of my failures directly into my eardrums while I froze to death and was left to rot.

They mostly leave forests to burn
but
I will pour hurricanes for you.

I just want
existence to thrive.

Breathing is affected by
my lack of left-handedness
and
my inability
to experience emotion in any pragmatic method.

Drown me
in the sea
of instability
and broken
dreams.

If there's a fight every day,
does any mind exist to stay?

I've been thinking of overgrown vines
and broken stone walls.

The air just doesn't
taste as green anymore

How can anyone deny that?

The urge to connect,
combine,
transform,
touch
and ascend
is not to ever ignore.

The only happiness I know
comes from memories
of vines and stone.

So-
here are my limbs.
And there is the moon.
My only request
is that you don't untangle
the overgrowth
that makes the bond possible.