we've fallen short of grace-
is this a choice?
do the sounds under our skin that emulate doors,
pieces of dense wood,
being the victims of vigorous passive vindication,
cry out of
desire
or
necessity?

no one answers.
no one can-
no one.

to suggest such a static solution simplifies abundance and ignorance and when screen doors remain idle,
leaving holes for wasps, spiders, and
beating
hearts
to emulate chromatic symmetry between pasta,
soft noodles,
and softer irises;
of bed sheets and donated couches of past lovers-

to flood apartment doors and grated gates without mercy.

the paradox lies within the absence of sound when we knock on screen doors and no one can ever hear, not even
ourselves.

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.

i wish that someday i'll be a shelf full of items that can't be replaced and not just a dresser full of perfectly good socks that have never been worn.

there exists validation in shoulders to rest on, but there's muscle there that i just never wanted to work for, and i think that's why winter binds me like a vice.

i didn't ask for any of the plants or pretty girls but i am enjoying my time away from the sauna and the microscope accordingly.

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.

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.

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.

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 think sometimes the drugs wear off
too early.

Sometimes,
she gives me hope
and sometimes
she gives me enough
coffee to
keep me up for weeks
and miles.
But miles down the road
isn't really what matters yet.

Don't disguise this as
a call, a
morning song
of pain,
or anything
I've thrown away.

This is the same
shovel I'll dig
my own grave with
if you jump down
and play
in the dirt with me.

Don't leave it
to rust.

Everything will always depart,
except what you want to leave.
And what stays
cannot bear to look you in the eye.
Because it knows it isn't welcome.

It just wants a home
to tear the walls down.
It just wants some flesh
to tear the soul out.

But who are you, friend?
Is your purpose to teach
something that earthly knowledge cannot fathom?
Or is your purpose motionless and hollow?
A boy sitting in the rain with a frozen gaze,
and no coat?

They say you must be a part of me,
not all of me.
But no matter how bright the days become,
no matter how many times you love me
(If anyone could actually loved me.),
you hold on with your bruised fingers
hopelessly interlocked.

The truth that I can't tell
and won't tell
(because I don't want to speak it
just as much as you don't want to hear it)
is that I actually hate me
more than I hate it.
Because while it flows through me
arbitrarily
like a black fog floating in the breeze,
I am sentient.
I have the power to stop it.
And I can't.

And so I must welcome it.
And once I do,
I still don't believe it will look me in the eye.
Because there's nothing to look at.

I can't say
my voice has been stolen.
Only frozen.

Somewhere between
the solidification
and the crystallization
was a frigid realization.

Sometimes the magic just doesn't happen.
at the 32 degrees.

Sometimes sciences takes a back seat
to  the once-broken, since mended knees.

The mind will fight
but the pen still scribbles a right,
or a wrong,
or something recyclable taken away yesterday.

Now-parallel incomprehensible darkness.
with a voice once frozen.

The light will relentlessly hide
as the rain will inevitably fall.
The frostbite will blacken,
but
you
will
stand
tall.

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.

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.

There are eyes that confront,
but there is no remorse.

Brown carries a negative connotation
and so the story carries on.
There will be eyes of this coloration,
but rarely a tale of happiness.

The theories behind formulas
don't take emotions into consideration.
It's kind of a misappropriation,
if you think about it,

We spend lives following
sequences, patterns, developments.
But we're only becoming dense
as we're hollowing.

I wish to love
as I wish to breathe.

I wish to love
as I want to believe.

This unreachable constellation
is a similar misappropriation.

I am a ball of yarn
hopelessly tangled
and
ignored.

You are a seamstress-
weaving optimism
and pragmatic emotion
for the forlorn.

I'm fueled by
cheap cold cuts
and cracked cans
of beans,
of beers,
and being below
the line of uneven
distribution//////

retribution.

There's a bit of execution
in the way a anti-institution
peels of its mask
and reveals revolution.

I don't know why the prism
is cracked
but
the shattered shards
glimmer & commentate
why we
can only see shades.

There's an anchor.
It's pulling me
closer
and
further away.

I am thankful for media chips,
and memories of lips;
of still mornings,
and warm warnings.

I am thankful for lightning,
for every bit of string,
a feeling of self-autonomy,
and the stars I see.

I am thankful for the hope,
college and all its dope;
for your hand there,
and the wear and tear.

I am thankful for this noose,
and my ability to tie it loose.

My gums hurt-
the toothache is hard to swallow
when we
mend the broken bones
with the loose change in the couch
and the buttons from
worn out cargo shorts.

Take standard biology,
an ideal economy,
and authentic authonomy
with a grain of salt.

We can't find or feed
while we bleed.
It seeps from cortexes
into yesterday,
into today,
into some
puddle
huddled around the fire
for warmth.

We melt just as the ice cubes
in your lemonade
on days
where
nostalgia has no
tranquil, oaky shade.

Stand at the length of lions.
Its breath is about as tolerable
as greed is swallowable.

While these dreams go hungry,
we feast.

While wolves
eat our spines as meat,
we are sheep
turning yellow from the heat.

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
?

Snowed in, and towed out.
Pitter patter of the all about.
I'm about to burst;
the seams told me first.

But I won't hesitate,
I won't take no for an answer.
If they freeze me in and tear me up,
I'll just write about her.

You must realize that your place
is wherever exists your pace.
There's a hope
wherever I do find this scope
that I'll be able to understand.
And when the thought of rebuilding
forces me into the cold,
just give me your hand.

For me to look apathetically
toward the cracks in your skin
would be nothing less than a sin.
Your bruises outweigh
the most benevolent aspects
of any sunny day.

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.

Let's return to where I was when my tongue wasn't so hollow. Where the pills weren't nearly as hard to swallow. To think so deeply is both a curse and a blessing, and there's no wound dressing for nostalgia in negative space. But when I scrape my knee again can you lend an ear? I think I feel it coming. I feel the past flowing through my veins like a sharp shot of dope under a dimly-lit causeway. The grass of the lawn that I used to play on is starting to grow on my back and seep into my scarce serotonin, and I really need someone to regularly attend to it. Mow it on an altruistic sunny day with the kids running around you and laughing. Pull the weeds out when I end up staying past midnight working on the file reports for all the others that can't seem to find their authentic reflection either.

I'm back there in the woods. There was something about the fragile, half-broken branches lying on the ground that made me feel understood. I don't know if it was the demeanor or the distance. I couldn't hear the angry screech of an eighteen pack or decipher the blue from the black. It was the furthest thing from my favorite noose or the truth of the love around me cut loose.

It was the days that my brother and I would congruently comply. We'd go into the backyard and have no foreshadowing of tissues scarred. We'd run and we'd laugh and we never looked back. We'd continue into the night because we didn't care that we couldn't see the grass stains anymore. The obscurity of the look on my face could perhaps explain why I have always blended into the background with such effective camouflage. When mom did call us in to shower of the dirt, there wasn't yet blood on her shirt. She smiled, and I remember her smile so well. So little to say and so much to tell.

The funny thing is that he wasn't around back then either. He was trapped in a time long before the doctors detected my first pulse. Somewhere in this streak of gray hair and emotional despair was a feeling so strong that it was drinking itself to death to reveal its true colors and stillborn brothers. But oh God, how I loved Christmas morning. Under the array of strings of lights and the daytime not seeming as lonely as the nights, there was not a hostile bone in the human body. There was simply a long forgotten innocence filled with cinnamon buns, coffee that stayed a little warmer than usual in the Kureg, and the cats rolling around in the piles of wrapping paper like they were the ball-pits at the McDonald's both ways down the street. It was the clack of a controller. My favorite friends beating games in one night and sleeping over. It was wiffleball  games right after the nights where I'd two whole boxes of Mac and Cheese. It was sledding down the tallest hill in town on the days where the ice held your head up high and didn't need any praise, or even a reply. It cared nothing for the size of the nails on my feet, my favorite band on repeat, or the broken wooden bridge between my amygdala and frontal cortex. r

But then I remembered that those days exists only in two places: my memory and my dreams. Was I in a hopeless daze in the middle of the street or did I have my favorite fleece blanket for heat? As the crust in my eyes slowly broke away at the seams, I received my answer. It was a fate that seemed equal to a vicious and malignant cancer.

I was awake for another day. The humidity of my dorm room danced across my skin like a bead of sweat anxiously running down the back of my neck and spine. I remembered the concrete line drawn between this world and the one in my head, turned my body so that the morbid did not seem fully dead, and connected my foot with the frigid ground and didn't make a sound. I had two grocery carts and a porcelain tub full of responsibility, yet I found myself frozen and void of mental mobility.

I didn't know what to say when I started my days anymore. So I brushed my teeth, remained mute, and walked out the door.

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.

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.

A brief, but passionate inhale.
Who would have thought,
of the autumn in her eyes?

A sweet, delicate voice.
A beautiful sound to detect.
And never forget.
And never regret*.

The stud of a nose
Her own clothes and eloquent verbose
An unheard of strength
That she shrugs off like dirt.

And she knows of Dad.
Because she has been there too.
Not just for the smell of *****,
Or for the pain of just one bruise,
But for the depth behind
A clenched fist
and the struggle for eye contact.

It was 6 AM.
In the autumn.
And things just happen.
But see,
it wasn't just a thing.
It couldn't be.
The way I held your hair
And hid it safely behind your ear.
And accepted the kiss
That my fear could not initiate myself.

It was the blue,
And the blonde.
The black of the beanie,
And the spots of the sweater.
It was the look
and the smile
and the inhale.

And then
it was the stars.
And the stone wall.
And the Boston skyline.
It was the teasing.
and the alcohol
and the spot by the river.
And it was autumn in her eyes.

It was heaven in the trembling of my knees,
and in that kick in the shin,
and in the brownie brittle,
and in the passionate kiss in the room upstairs.
It was hell in the uncertainty.

And as the time will pass,
We will attract or repel.
Naturally.
And where this ambiguity chills me to the bone,
I find autumn in her eyes.

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.

There was a beginning.

I was stringing.
There were threads,
but there was something simply dead.
I can't say I had any idea
of its permanent location.

What are we to say of any deceased?
Is there something to observe
about those whom have failed at living?

But it's the ultimate goal.
If a pearl exists within the oyster,
it breathes nonexistent
persistently.

The difference between fear and sadness
is some blurry line.

If happiness is there,
why do I not cognisize
what it takes to epitomize?

The oyster sits.
I will wait.
Life will hate
at altruistic bait.

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.

Depression? Sure, that's tough.
But honestly,
all I ever wanted was to be enough.

Each moment recalled.
Each late night, computer-installed,
with stunning fireworks,
and a missed train, stalled.
She was just always so
appalled.

And when I do recall,
some stupid trip to the mall
or the seventieth missed call,
I just can't think
of anything else
but how I hate
your vicious attempt to assimilate,
your inevitable success,
and that honeybee yellow dress.

How I lost all of those years
wiping away all of her livid tears.

A knife,
or just another unwashed dish.
The leftover fish
had her looking more
like a side dish.

And watching me
slowly disappear
with a conscious clear.

Even the malicious robins will find rest
as the kindest worms hope for the best.
But to be eaten up and tossed back down,
leaves any earthworm broken,
anxiously wishing to drown.

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.

--

--

-

summer is for holding hands, not smacking skin that's already excessively bruised with metallic rubber bands.

they don't help me shake off the nausea when I look in the mirror when a page becomes an ocean and a kiss hurdles over death to help keep the torch from giving up, from bleeding out and from gasping oxygen one last time and then realizing there's nothing left in the tank.

the woman behind the mirror can see me; we operated on such dependency that I couldn't even see you on days where I needed you the most. i never felt her hand meet my hand, certainly not with desire, at least. i try to hide my scars in discretion, like on the inside of my cheek just past where my top lip meets my bottom lip on both sides, and behind my knees where the tendons connect the big bones.

but when hide and seek was the game, you didn't ever even care to look in the obvious places, like behind the curtains where my ***** white socks were visible from rooms away.

the inside of your cheeks are so beautiful: i think they always will be for as long as we co-exist with the stars that created us. i hardly ever dream, but when i do, i'm singing to you in every pitch i possibly can about our static buzzes, gravity reversals, funeral rehearsals, and only temperature change that scientists can't agree on, which seems to always correlate with my entrance or departure into all the rooms in which I could breathe the same air as you.

empathy should be a plateau to rest on, not a mountain to climb, and so the winter is warmer and the days are shorter.

i'm not holding hands with anyone until I can take back the canvas that you laminated my fingerprints on to when you ripped them away from me without ever asking to do so.

What a florescent, evanescent adolescence.
If only I could see.

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.

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.

What do you have to hide,
some beautifully broken side?

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.

The seasons are finally changing,
and while I didn't expect your heart
to escape,
you fled,
just like you said you would.

Just like I knew you should.

I act like you had a choice;
there was never a word self-spoken
where my loathing manifested itself
as an audible voice.

Rejoice in free will
and affinity
and freedom of choice.

You forced winter to thrive,
but I hate you for thoughts
and an urge
and emotions
where self-hates and reality merge.

You forced winter to thrive,
but where green should arrive,
I am unheard.

You are blooming,
and I am unheard.

The joy you provided me
transports me to
floating fossils,
swollen tonsils,
and hearing aids
that kept you within an ear's length.

I remember water;
I remember the way that making blood colder
was an antidote to growing older.

When you grew old,
I recognized that sandpaper shows
beauty in rigidity,
and even the tough

show fragility.

Taste buds and rewired pathways
helped write the book,
but nothing will ever parallel
the compensation,
softness and
comfort
that sandpaper provided my skin.

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.

--

red lights
are not near sights.

I am told for color
shows meaning-
blue gleaming,
magenta
beaming
and a hue of orange
reminding me that existence is
okay.
For now.

How do you see color?
Is it that which stops you,
or that which sets you apart?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'll always have this feeling on my shoulder
and this stench on my breath.
What you never knew
was just how bad it would get.

All I wanted was reciprocation-
eyes that actually cared,
hands that actually struggled,
and a laugh that rang genuine.

Something is just missing.
Always has.
Maybe my affinity to anything
was violently torn from me.
Or maybe it's just my fault.

I'm late, per usual
(I'm anxious,
yet not worried).

Concrete lines combine
to form
shapes, polygons,
and
anything you want them to be.

I want to help and mend
and repair

but

poison lies where kindness
stops despair.


it goes on.
The routine will sing me
the sweet swallow's song
of my fingerprints,
and of how they
parallel the hearts
of everyone else.

I'm late, per usual.

I won't
believe what
the swallow sings,
nor will I
accept what
life brings

until I've blinked enough
to dissociate.

..

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.

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,

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.

a month is passing
while your tongue is losing grace.

When you stand in a cornfield,
you cannot see your sisters,
who lie on the other side,
enjoying the butter
and smiling.

Time is passing,
and closing my eyelids
does not erase your faces.

I haven't had enough to eat today,
or in weeks.

Keep looking,
keep tasting.

A month has passed.

While your faces lose grace,
I will tear the stitches
off of the straitjacket
you threw on the back porch.

--

I love you.
I am better off without you

.

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.