Did you know,
They told you
That people were made of star-dust?

You reminded them you knew the composition
Of your molecules
Your carbon sitting in your bones like blue marrow

They reminded you of lotus moths
And bioluminescence
And the horseshoe ***** you found on your birthday

Cause you're the East Coast baby
With your West Coast dreams
And she's on the TV

Your China queen.

It's been a long time
since my hair has grown long and
I have called you mine

Perched upon the peasant’s altar
Anomalous, conglomerate, anorexic, and onyx
The concubine’s cake with the Oxford comma,
Communal and picked and eaten at by little birds

Nominal trauma oozes visceral
****** and break
Sever and break
Steep walls of amorphous clay
Congeal to the walls of the willow

Exquisite and infinite, infidel
Flight
******, Lo, light of my life,
Long hair dripping with whiskey

if i really could
i'd cross-stich your name on my
arteries and veins

in the vaguest sense
you are a forest fire chewing
the trees in its path
then turning and wondering
where the greenery went

You smelled like beeswax
In your yellow sweater when I met you
On his bed

Such bright eyes
Big sister, big dreams
Told me to follow mine

So I did

And I climbed mountains

But I should have stayed behind
The coffee and the *****
Lemonade summer on your breath

I saw you waste
a w a y
with bottles in your teeth

You should be full
Like Sylvia
but-

Now everyone is skipping rope
And crossing finish lines
My sister, blonde haired beauty

She's still waiting at the gate.

i'd like to live in the geometry
of your body
like the cut of your kneecap
and the planes of your cheek
build myself along the rays
growing from your fingers
like so many smokestacks
the dodecahedron
Platonic in my orbit

Harmonic suspension, first-chair, and gold
This is the sound of the end of the world
Sweaters of steel-wool and spring revolutions
The strings in the weave are beginning to loosen

This is the sound of the end of the world
Too late to be evening, time uncontrolled
The strings in the weave are beginning to loosen
He lies in the bed, skin becoming translucent

Too late to be evening, time uncontrolled
Dark rising deeply, sleepless, and cold
He lies in the bed, skin becoming translucent
Throat full of something too thick in the moment

Dark rising deeply, sleepless, and cold
Skin stretched too tight on his hopeful skull
Throat full of something too thick in the moment
He watches twin sunrises bobble like ornaments

Skin stretched too tight on his hopeful skull
The blue on the Earth has become its own pulse
He watches twin sunrises bobble like ornaments
Caught in the gravity of something immense

The blue on the Earth has become its own pulse
Gradient gray like the ***** of sweet candles
Caught in the gravity of something immense
He pays tribute to God in his newspaper tent

Maybe it's the moment
Where I realize that everything I've got myself in life
Is exactly what I deserve

Because I'm all long-hair and she's glimmer
And I'll never not be jealous
(Let's not lie about the human condition.)

I don't like the taste coffee
But I like to pretend
For the warmth of the cup on my hands

I don't like tea without sugar
But I drink it black, anyways,
'Cause that's what artists do

I like you
But I'll never say

She's got her own unique
Perspective on Humbert Humbert
The great gentleman
Who killed the savage polar bears of the Arctic

I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand
Because tied charm and sweetness
In her little frilled socks
Is more than boys can offer

So, let's talk about our demons
And the glasses on your nose
Because one day she woke
And was suddenly grown up

I'm really really sorry
I don't love you like I should
Or hold you in the ways
I told myself I would
But I'm no good at promises
You knew that from the start
Though I know I'm still responsible
For someone else's heart

Baby, don't worry
I'm queen of your little heart
Ozymandias

once the anchor on my soul
(kept me full and tethered down)
now i start to drown

i feel you crawling up my spine
into my ear
round my bumped skin

whispering
tightly to my brain
you touch all of my vertebrae

maybe it's just me
naked with the crumpled sheets
under me
(it was not you who made me bend)
they all ask me why
i couldn't care
(it might as well have been)

slow ride in blue morning light -
glinting off your shoulder -
carrying the weight of last night -
we lost ourselves if only for a moment -
ago I realized we're older -
than we used to be
(I ate my own insides -
slow smolder)

I am neither poet
Nor writer
Nor artist

And I will protest
With broken breath
Until the day I die

Because the words on the pages
Of the masters - all ink and tea
They were the ones who taught me

I am not alone
That I am all skin and organs
Holding in a thousand-million stories

But, I am not a poet
I am not sublime or dark
Or different

I park my car like everyone
I pick at scabs
and I sleep in late

I am not a poet
And, really, that's okay.

Today I put a Tylenol PM on my tongue
And let it sit there all bitter and blue

Not for any reason, really
Except for memories

Like the book I read once that said
Sitting in bathwater as it drains

Must be how it feels to die

Today I prayed and I prayed
To a lower-case god
I don't think that I believe in

I asked him
Or her
All the aliens above

If maybe you could drop your glass
for maybe just a little while

And I waited
(in the silence)
And I prayed and prayed some more

they were silent
But they told me
That we are on our own