“Breathe, Exhale, Breathe”

I had the words to this poem
In my mind at some point
Before I breathed them all out
One at a time
Uncontrollably

I’m trying to turn on light bulbs
By setting the filament ablaze
And drying my hair with a blowtorch
Doesn’t seem like such a bad idea

If red is the color of fire
And blue is the color of water
It’s really no surprise that
My favorite color is purple

Inside my mind there is a lake
Clear, calm, undisturbed
Reflecting the unmoving clouds
In the overcast sky

I walk around with my head down
Hiding under an umbrella
Pockmarked by the bullets
That it didn’t block
It never lets the sunshine in
Only the rain

If people are so scared of the cold
The heat, the rain, the hail
The storms and the snow
The wind and the night
Why am I terrified of the walls
And the ceiling in my room?

If I were drowning in the ocean
Instead of screaming for help
Or swimming to the nearest shore
I’d probably try to run away from the problem


I’d never want to be a cartographer
I drew a map of my mind once
It’s a little circle in the middle
The rest scribbled out by permanent marker
For the places I haven’t explored

There’s ash on my hands
From trying to dig out the memories
That weren’t set ablaze
By the thoughts in my mind

I don’t know where I went
It’s somewhere mixed in
With the rough carbon copies
That I keep for reference
In the depths of my subconscious

My mind’s eye has gone colorblind
All my thoughts are black and white
The grey reprieves the monotony
Until I start to think about it too much
And rip up the canvas

On days like today it feels like
I fell asleep behind the steering wheel
Years and years ago
And slipped off into an unpleasant dream
Where I’m still alive

Life is beautiful, ain't it?
Even with the splinters on the plastic table
And the trail of cigarette smoke
That only blows westward towards the sea
But still manages to curl in ribbons around my fingers

Even with the empty glare of the fall sun
Filtered like water through the haze of Los Angeles
Caressing the blanket of foliage
That wraps suburbia in her deep sleep

Still, the cracks in the  porcelain sidewalks
Are the ashtrays for all of our dreams
In the obsidian dust - sterilized fallout
Life is still beautiful, ain't it?

The streetlights march like soldiers
Berets raised to an empty cause
A forgotten dictator;
He left like the sun

The clouds sit on balconies
Listening to the eulogy
Read by the soft spoken wind;
It whispers unspoken wishes

The lowlight like limelight
Against a backdrop in decay
The paint peeling;
The ceiling damp with rain

I sit and drink the air above me
And so the ground beneath tells me
In hushed breaths:
"The shadows will soon belong"

The trees are ticking
Winding the soil beneath
The leaves flutter away the minutes
The branches point to midnight
The roots flung against the gears
Centuries grinding to a halt

As I drift on the edge of sleep
Where my desires and reality converge
Like wet sand on the beach
Left behind by the receding tide
To either fizzle out slowly in summer's sun
Or be blown dry by winter's wind
Bubbles of foam seep out from beneath the grains
They form thoughts, and then they pop...
Silently.
Does a bubble make a sound when it pops?
Do we care about the demise of such a fragile object?
Aren't our lives just like a bubble?
My eyelids flutter open and closed
Micro-sleep is only a term that constantly awake people use
If we're supposed to sleep a third of our lives
Where does the difference in the estimated time go?
Moments in this wee hour of night or morning
Where I'm drowning in a sky of my own thoughts
Am I really alive?
Or is this a lucid dream?
The answer is unknown
I'm already asleep

Sipping lukewarm coffee
On the second floor
Looking out the arched windows
A neutral, crisp winter morning
Trees all but filled with leaves
Their shadows painted against the tan canvas
Of the buildings across the street
I could be in any town right now
And nobody would be able to guess which
A glance across the table
Confirms you're not here
It really doesn't matter what town I'm in
As long as we're both there
And there's two story coffee shops
For us to sit down in on mornings like these