We are stories told
through carbon bonds and
the smoky trail of cigarettes—
the distant chatter
from porches and balconies,
caught out of context
in a moment of humanity.
The faint light of
illuminated apartment windows,
inches parted curtains
unveiling another segment
of infinity.

Overlooking the lackluster glory
of Fairborn, Ohio
from the balcony of a student apartment,
the smoke from her cigarette vanishing
like the sweet impermanence of mortality,
Alena stares. Too pensive
to tend to the nearly-falling ashy tip
of her Camel Silver, our conversation stagnates.
Bonded intimately by
growing into the stumbling result
of our respective ****** childhoods—aching
for the familiarity of disaster— we find ourselves pondering
the answered question
of why we’re repeating history.

The street is nearly empty; the traffic sleeps.
Sparsely spaced cars
cruise on by like gypsy travelers.
8am is for commuters—a sensible time,
but 3:30 is for the lonely. A time to uncover
what daytime banishes
to the subconscious—
the peak time for catharsis
too inconvenient for civilization.
When insomniacs stare restlessly at ceilings,
and when the desperate tearfully pray;
when procrastinators type frantic essays,
when the chaste *******, when the stoic weep.

And then of course, there are poets like me
half-drunk on seven dollar tequila after working the night shift,
cultivating my loneliness. I can’t finish
your story for you, Alena, but I will say this:
there is a reason why advertisements
repeat their names a mind-numbing number of times.
They don’t necessarily think
you’re stupid enough to assume
their product is superior for that reason,
but they’re relying
on that one moment you’re rushed
into a dilemma, too frazzled to think.
You’ll reach for whatever name has been
shouted to you the most
just because it’s familiar. Of course,
that’s a terrible reason and not grounded
on anything sound, but something-something
caveman brain that evolved to escape
a ******* mastodon rather than
perpetuating poor life choices,
itches for familiarity.

And though anyone who says we write
our own stories has never looked beyond
the microcosm of their own apartment window
(or realized we don’t own them at all)
no one was ever prepared
to make any decision with consequence,
so of course we **** it up. But at least resist
the dark temptation of habit
like a type II diabetic before a chocolate cake.
We are stories, and the rest of infinity passes us by—
it sounds daunting, I know,
but I’ll be willing to bet that the bulk of it
is just the familiar perpetuating itself.

The benefit
of challenging anything
too comfortably established
isn’t so much
some clichéd grand expansion
of one’s worldview, but rather
a well-warranted reminder
that anyone claiming to have found
any conclusions is very likely
full of ****.

I love you dearly, humanity, but
you discover the world
like a toddler discovers his own foot,
and cling
to obsolete sensibilities
like trying to justify your belief in Santa Claus.

And you hate what you find
when you look too long,
because
you say that you discover the world
but what you so stupidly, so humanly
overlook is that the world bears herself
with no inhibitions, and even though
you can’t see everything immediately,
it’s all there; she has
nothing to prove to you. Yet the mystery
you so excruciatingly choose to maintain
is that even though the earth bares her skin
unashamed, you find her ****** absurd and
clothe her blatant body
in preconception, tragically dedicating
the decoding of your existence
to finding out
what truly lies beneath.

So perhaps, humanity, you should
embrace those who **** you off,
because you cushion your soul
with every reason to distance yourself
from any realization
that there is no inherent parallel
between every finite question
and the eternal answer,
unsatisfied with
the tantalizing ellipsis
the universe leaves you, and that the very fact
I even formed a sentence
is punctuated
by my mortality.

I want to write a letter to everyone
who ever made me question anything, from
the nature of the universe to
what tastes best on toast, because
this is the only way I know how
to say thank you—thank you for not letting me
stay the person I was at
any moment when I thought
I had come to any conclusions.

And even though
I spend most of my thoughts
creating answers that are only to terminate
curiosities too abstract
to even be a question, I’ll admit
that I try to tie things together that
don’t even have strings— and I sulk
in frustration that I can’t even find them,
things that don’t even know
that they should exist. So I take my
pencil of imagination and draw
lines between everything and end up
with a blueprint
of some hypothetical reality—because
we say that we discover the world
but what we so stupidly, so humanly
overlook is that the world bears herself
to us with no inhibitions, and even though
we can’t see everything immediately,
it’s all there; she has
nothing to prove to us. Yet the mystery
is that even though the earth bares her skin
unashamed, we find her ****** absurd and
clothe her blatant body
in preconception, tragically dedicating
the decoding our existence
to finding out
what truly lies beneath.

I want to thank everyone
who has ever ****** me off, or negated
any idea I’ve held too dear, because
you get me closer to realizing
that there is no parallel
between my finite questions
and the eternal answer, and the very fact
I even formed a sentence
is punctuated
by my mortality.

You’re just the kind of person
some lost adolescent would go home
and write a ****** poem about
at 2am in hasty cursive
scribbled on stained notebook paper
wrinkled from careless handling, using your being
to bring some riddle of the subconscious
into an acknowledged existence— and then
destroy the evidence, rendering it
undiscoverable to humanity—like everything else
she ever kept
too embarrassingly close to her heart, because
when she was a little girl the adults in her life
told her that there certain parts of yourself
you always kept private
that are a no-no
to show to anyone, and those
perpetually invisible parts
are covered by your swimsuit and your stoic reserve,
the eggshell guarding your psyche—that if anyone
forces themselves in with enough effort, you’ll break
all over them
and stain their sacred feet
with your messy insides that never
seem to go back in
once you’ve released them,  which will
leave you eternally wishing
to retreat into that perfect little immaculate white shell,
undisturbed by your own humanity.

I deprive myself of glances
I would love to take of you, but that would mean
that at some point you would
grow suspicious and
perhaps conjure the ESP
I seem to think everyone has
whenever I have a secret about them I’d rather
they never figure out—but I have to admit,
you’re beautiful.
I wish there were words
precise enough to explain exactly how
I just ******* love
how you stare at the world
with a poet’s wistful empathy, peeking
discreetly through the one-way mirror
of well-guarded sensitivity,
eternally wearing a gaze reluctantly masked
with an adaptive weariness just
transparent enough to expose
brief silhouetted glances
of vulnerability.

You’re just the kind of person
I wish I had the courage
to let into
my psychological fortress
constructed with every accumulated brick
of accumulated cynicism
that materializes
from living in a world that
muffles every voice
it makes want to scream, even if
no matter how old I become I’ll
always be some lonely kid standing
outside of my own person, eternally yearning
for somewhere safe enough
to have a broken shell.

It’s empty
here—and I do not mean
empty as is usually implied
regarding the barren apartment of any
minimum wage-earning college student
having just stumbled into society
from her mother’s house.

Naked walls stare dumbfounded
at their lonely inhabitant, itching for the embrace
of some picture frame
to kiss their forsaken skin, and soothe
the subtle damages of time,
embellish their existence
with purpose
lest they confront the world
bare as they were born into it—
     but that is not the reason why
it is empty here.

I like to think
that time will collect itself
like my fondness
for useless knickknacks—and will eventually react
with experience to create the byproduct
of familiarity, and thus
I can finally call
my lonesome apartment
‘home’— but the reason
it’s empty isn’t because
of naked walls or unfamiliarity,
or even because you aren’t here.
It’s because there isn’t a ‘you’
to even be missing—I abandoned
the house haunted by every ghost
I have ever called ‘you,’
and let my walls bear nothing but
the naked plaster of
an empty home.

Dear Mom,
I know I shouldn’t have been
snooping, but when looking
for some socks on a day when I was
still living with you and had neglected
to do my laundry, meticulously paper clipped
in your drawer, I found a 26-page document
that made my insides curl
when I saw the name of Dad’s mistress
printed blatantly on the front cover.
Yes, I looked through it
(and I know I shouldn’t have) and I don’t know
what made me more disturbed—the fact
that you took the time, ink and paper
to look up the woman who
destroyed your marriage
on public records,
and neatly annotated the highlights
of her messy divorce
prior to meeting Dad—or that this
26-page monstrosity sat innocently beside
his old Valentine’s Day cards,
still painstakingly arranged by year, mixed in
with your daughters’ decade-old crayon drawings
captioned by the loopy letters of a child’s handwriting
next to little plastic baggies with worn edges
containing baby teeth,
the roots yellowed by age and decay.

You never let anything go, do you?
You hold time captive by the wrists
until the soft skin bruises, and even when
it finally jerks itself away, you still manage
to sweep up every speck of dust
its presence
left behind, and store it
perfectly labeled in your archives
like some neurotic historian,
where you think your daughter, who was
only looking for a pair of socks,
would never just happen to stumble upon
this hoarded material record
of every ******* thing
that torments you.

I want to write about *******.
I want to write about everything I’ve
ever been forbidden
from thinking—I want to ****
everyone, I want to be everyone.
I want to lick up the salt
of your sweat, and bite the supple skin
of your beautiful neck,
and I don’t give a ****
who the ‘you’ is in question.
‘You’ can be anybody, any soul
throbbing with the grit of
humanity, who’ll rip their decency
wide open and stand naked and
unrestrained by the starched collared
shirts of everything that civilization
has taught you about how
people should be.

I want to write
about something that terrifies me, and paint
it in permanent ink across my chest.
I don’t want to find clothes that fit, and ****
finding a moral tailor,
I want to be naked and free and feel the wind
sting my winter-chapped lips and
whip my hair against my face,
and I’ll burn every metaphorical rulebook
containing anything I’ve ever believed
while dancing around the fire.

And I realize this poem (if
you can call it a poem)
doesn’t make any *******
sense, but neither
do you and neither do I.
We’re all confused and ***** and tragically
beautiful little ******-up creatures crawling
this earth knowing only
our ridiculous little ******-up lives.
And I can’t really tell you anything
you should always take seriously, because
one day you’ll die and **** yourself afterward, and
so will everyone who ever knew you—so you might as well
not care about being naked because we’re all pretty ******* ridiculous
running around in suits we’ve purposely designed
to never fit.