When the day will finally arrive
Into no ears she'll utter goodbye
Amounts of worth amount to waste
A useless soul disposed in haste

Mother Earth will pause not while
A final sigh leaves from her lost child
Devoid of hesitation, ponder or grief,
A mass of waste returns to its lodgings beneath

And when she stumbles to the gloom below
Faces that mirror hers will be all she'll know
A monotony of waste, pulsing in a vile brew
Beneath our feet and below our egoes,
One day we'll be there too

I let them hollow me out,
(I didn’t want the insides anymore)
They gutted my heart, mummified my soul—
(So I will not decay anymore)

I have sanitized
my humanity, and now
I am immune.
(It’s lovely not to feel anymore…)

Life as a shell
is an existence surprisingly pleasant
but I almost miss
that defective little mind of mine…
(But the memories do not hurt anymore)

There’s a strange feeling of soreness, though,
that aches where I used to have a soul—
phantom pains of discarded passion,
but thankfully I do not hunger
(I no longer have a stomach anymore)

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.

When I was young, I was told
that deep beneath our feet,
was a land I’d be sent to,
if I didn’t clasp my hands and speak
to an invisible man who lived in the sky.

I inquired softly what this land was?
They snapped, I’d burn and scream
in a cloud of smoke, fire
and a bearded red man would torture me
I shut my mouth as I wondered,
Why?

Shaken, I knelt by my bed and
apologized for myself—
my thoughts and humanity.
How would standing within these stained-glass walls,
I wondered, make me more a saint,
and how would a magic book
bring sanity?

I had a friend, once
that only I could see.
He followed me wherever I walked
in innocent company.
But they scorned my imagination,
how could I believe?
This silly made-up nonsense
that I couldn’t even see

Funny they said that,
because as I recall,
they handed me a Bible, and told me,
of some magic Jewish zombie
that saved humanity.

I bid you farewell, my dearest friend
So very sorry it all had to end
(I don't know who I am anymore)

I'm leaving you today
To keep it all at bay
If you see me, don't say hello
(I don't know who you are anymore)

I'll journey long, singing a song
Of what I'll hope to find
I'll breathe the air
And no one'll dare
To remind me of what I left behind

I'll remember you in fondness, I suppose
But don't expect much more
(I don't know who we are anymore)

From the marrow of my bones
I wanted to stare you down
Absorb your every detail
Witness your every movement
But with only the satisfaction
That came from flickers of a gaze
To negate your suspicion,
I looked away

I lost my faith in art—
So I burnt every unfinished creation
haunting me in this paint-stained room
to ashes.

I lost my faith in poetry—
And I stare at my 3am
Purgings of the soul
With a sigh.

I lost my faith in beauty—
And I don’t know what to look into when
I see your innocent eyes

And yet I remember how a painting
Can halt my every knowledge of reality
And yet in me there must somewhere lie
The silent fire of passionate words
And still I remember the warmth of your shelter
In the bitter winter months…

But I’ve lost my faith in myself—
And I simply gaze at this world in no direction.

He stares out the window
for hours,
that little stray cat we’ve taken in.
Watchful and serene by the warmth
of the daylight,
contemplating the sun.
His belly has grown plump since that
bitter December day, his fur now white
and clean—
And though we know he loves us when
the winter nights grow cold,
I can’t blame him.
The windowsill littered with fur,
As every warm, lazy summer day,
From out in the backyard you see
two curious yellow eyes,
trying to remember the smell
of freedom.

Superhero man
Defier of all odds
The world’s a symphony
A guitar chord
A melody
Everything is song

Buried away for all the years
Slowly, surely unearthing
Through the cracks
I see a familiar face
yet worn from the world

Sobered by truth
Flattened by reality
But in there somewhere lies
a glimpse of optimistic youth
That shines through
within every note

Music man, impossible man
Laughing in the face of
probability

Hollow-minded without a thought,
A numb mind assesses the world.
Amongst a static hiss of sound
Against feet untouched by ground
Demoted to the empty void of blue

An empty mind impotent of thoughts
A happy mind blissfully ignorant
An unconscious mind rendered numb
A dumb mind assesses the world

I locked my Heart up in a musty closet,
we assumed it wouldn’t mind.
It had exhausted itself to ruin, resigned
to a useless slab of meat.
My brain muttered the order to me, sighing
As it sat counting to its day of demise.
Wallowing in a puddle of ennui,
Decaying, incarcerated within
the dankness of the skull.

We suffocated my Ambition,
short after seeing the dull, hopeful light
Which was then washed away
by the blinding god-rays of the All.

We staggered away to behold the spectacle,
Came back astonished, undermined…
Our bodies were then withdrawn from us,
our existence reduced to molecules

We saw a speck of ourselves on the Universal Map,
Like idiots we stared in disillusionment
when we knew that all our feeble Eyes could ever see
were mere inches in the legend.

In your ’97 Mercury, that grumbles
like an arthritic old mare
at every cautious nudge
of her gas pedal, evoking the utterance
of “easy now, girl” at least twice a commute,
we’ll journey haphazardly
to wherever I-675 spits us back out.

With whiny indie music
harping cumbersome lyrics
aided by passion-silly guitar solos
blaring on ****** speakers, we’ll savor
the names of every exit
we pass by in defiance; accelerating through
sensible opportunities
to get gas somewhere and
turn back to obligation. Midwestern gypsies,
urban nomads, academically-disoriented
college students—whatever we are, reveling
in the aimless misadventures
of going ******* nowhere.

They raised us to pursue infinity,
we grew to embrace the absurd;
we press our handprints in the sand
and thank the gentle tide
for letting her shoreline’s scars
fade painlessly.

The sweetest scent her skin emits
Every serenity the plastic reflects
A trace of sunshine in the mist
And repressed desires of intimate flesh

Still trying to see you with these eyes too blind
Without a will to conduct such a simple mind
Clawed away to pieces when I didn’t want to see
The distorted reflection, of what became of me

With no arms to keep the seams together
And no warmth to suppress these childish fears
I will wander this barren earth alone
In all of fragility, and away from the tears

It’s a very conflicting feeling
writing poetry in high school—
the world overlooks us
as we sulk for recognition,
hoping that one day
long after we’re too dead
to get any kind of satisfaction out of it
that our words will be immortalized
and important enough to appear
in the worn pages
of some high school kid’s English textbook.

It’s a very conflicting feeling indeed
to hear every teenage voice around you
sigh in a collective groan of boredom
when assigned to read what every
grey-haired scholar calls
a poetic masterpiece—
the highest caliber
of anything you write could ever hope to achieve.

It’s the most absurd irony
that a poet’s world is a binary one.
If you ever manage to crawl out
of the black pit of mediocre obscurity, maybe one day
(long after you’re dead, of course)
your greatest ambitions
can be actualized—the literary purging
of your soul, the collective narrative
of your world view can one day be immortalized
as the dull assignment
some overwhelmed honor’s student
can suffer through.

I used to believe
there could be somekind of
god, when I prayed
for someone like you.
Now that you’re not all
a prayer was meant to be,
maybe God’s as reckless
and as ungracefully human
as the drunk of you
and the misfit of me.

I kept your birthday
written in my calendar—
in a vague hope that by January,
we’d be able to speak again.
The naked skeletons of trees
bear the white virginal blossoms
of awakening springtime,
yet if you stared serenely
into the wind, you could still feel traces
of a bitter winter’s frost.

I try to search your eyes by
bashful glances, you withdraw
at every opportunity we could possible see
a trace of humanity within eachother.

You keep me well confined
within your silent tomb—freezing
away any warm-blooded soul
that dares to approach you.
Woman of ice, maiden of
annihilation— shrinking
into some faint white sliver,
waning into the vast night sky
of oppressive black.
Spring has come
for the rest of us, but
the ice never melted for you.
And If I weren’t certain,
you would only resist the light,
I would have tried to revive you.

The newborn leaves, the hopeful
blossoms—to you they are worthless;
your heart as bitter, and fatally
naïve, as the bleak winds of January,
your convictions as stubborn as permafrost.

We always talk about those who
you will never forget as long as you
exist, but
I’m thinking of someone
who I’d never  be the same without
if you didn’t approach me
that one lonely night,
sliding into my life like
a lost piece of a jigsaw puzzle
all those years ago.

You are mortal,
regardless of how you choose
to go about it. There will be
an infinite amount of time
surrounding the beginning
and end
of your hilariously brief existence.
The universe will go on without you.

You are one
out of seven billion
humans, inhabiting a planet
we are slowly destroying,
orbiting about
an un-noteworthy star
within a dull suburb of
the Milky Way Galaxy—
one out of billions, by the way—
which is expected
to eventually collide with Andromeda,
flinging Earth like a ping-pong ball
into oblivion.

No matter what you have done
with your life, or
how special you think you are,
we are all
born naked
and screaming,
and defecate when we die.
You will eventually be a corpse.
Your beautiful
     animate
          breathing body
will decompose into something
revolting.

If it’s any consolation, your mistakes
(like your achievements) mean nothing.
What have you got to lose?
Don’t discard the fruit
blemished only
by one unsightly spot—
Let its juices drip
savagely down your chin;
savor the frustratingly temporary
sweetness
that will never be tasted again.

She’ll wander back to you again,
but drawn by the string
of ineffable instinct—kissing the sand
of your beaches still damp
by the routine of her departure.
Yet as she recedes,
you already ache her homecoming
as though longing for an estranged relative.

You count the years
by the bitterest point
of every winter, and
value your harvests
against the cruelty of the drought—
and even when she rearranges herself
nightly, by increments you’ve already calculated
by meticulous observation,
somehow good fortune owes you eternity,
even as it crumbles under the weight
of its own impermanence.

You’ve never dealt well with entropy;
all that came before you, which also happens
to survive you—an honorary god.
Stranded on earth,
you monitor your greying scalp as grimly
as you decry a darkening sky above you succumbing
to the certainty of winter, but
even she is ebbing, too.
You curse her departure like an abandoned child,
but she had never sinned against you—
that was your idea.

You mourn the day she repossesses
with mortal anguish,
yet you still find a way to forgive her
when she sends Dawn
to shine his light between the trees.

After the echo of our last goodbye has long since faded
And I’ve stripped this house naked of your every reminder
But in this old room, perhaps it is the exception
All throughout, your letters still litter my floor
Words written when I was still beautiful to you

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.

There’s a vague sense of longing
that provokes the heartstrings
of the soul, in an unexplainable combination
of warmth and bitterness. It begs for a name,
but no word has found a way
to render it.

I mutter the crude anthem
of a perpetual Lazy Sunday,
banking on the anticipated
accomplishments, that dissolve
in laziness, by the light
of Monday morning.

I tried to speak of society
(but my words of the world
have rendered themselves redundant)
I tried to speak of love,
but my body has grown stiff
and numb to any attempt
of endearing touch
(my heart much the same…)
And I’ve long and regretfully acknowledged
that I’ve been put at a distance from the world.

There’s a strange sense of longing,
tingling in my unconscious soul,
emerging, coated in dusty residue
from its time incarcerated in storage.
It beckons me to feel the provoking tingle
of the fresh and bitter morning air,
and all I can do is stare out the window...

The softness of your skin still itches at my fingertips
And your scent never seems to leave these sheets
How silly of me—to think you’d keep your promise
How silly of me—to think you’d ever return

Your thoughts are of another now, I’m not dumb
I still can’t help but wonder, what you’d look like right now
In this silent house that needs your voice
In this empty bed that needs your warmth

I know the tears I cry won’t be enough
And the words I write you'll never see
Lips sewn shut with screams that will never surface
A smile painted on and good humor forged
I know you can see behind my mask
Even though you convince yourself that I’m happy

I swear I dwelt alone
Amongst a million other faces
In a city full of every opportunity
I cannot attain

I suppose you’ve found a native-born foreigner
And you’ve stopped by long enough
to hear
A voice too quiet speak…

I’m not anything phenomenal,
Black jacket-clad with a caged-up heart
I suppose you’ve found a kindred soul,
Just a stranger in a familiar land.

Tell me again why you are here?
I’ve heard every other reason,
They all end the same…
Fifteen years I’ve lived cold
and alone
With patches of warmth that
Only faded away.

Would you mind staying here,
my dear only friend?
I have empty ears that hunger for
words.
I have empty hands that clutch for
warmth.
An empty heart that could use your
touch, but
A mouth so full, they stitched it shut,
a tongue overflowing with words.
A brain that defied them, so they
Called it dumb, but
Could you please stay
and listen?

Fire is only as warm
As chilling is the air around
Water is only as quenching
as dry is the tongue it falls upon.
Those who savor every morsel
And beg for every bite upon their knees
One can only taste the sugars of nectar
When you **** the flower dry
Of every sweet, salvaged drop

I never thought it’d be me
The naked doll of plastic
Tossed consumer to consumer
*******
***** bucket
Who belongs to everyone
Except herself
So, **** me baby
You wouldn’t be the first
Don’t try to please me, I won’t feel it
Just use me up
‘till I’ve nothing more to give

I've found a wonderful man,
everything I could have wanted--
one who listens, who tells me I'm still
pretty, even if I forego makeup and
revealing clothing.

One who straddles the fine line
of being chivalrous and never sexist,
protective but never possessive.
I cannot help but wonder,
what some recluse like me
could have ever done to deserve him.

Down to the details, even--
his shiny black hair, his innocent smile
(And I've always had a thing for foreign men...)
While I stumble as I walk, shrivel under the sunlight
and stutter on my words.

I've likely grown spoiled by him, and when I tell him
how much of a catch he truly is, he only says,
"There are plenty of other nice guys out there,
I'm nothing special."

Oh, Saleh, I could only smile, and
repress the memory
of what other 'nice guys' before you
have done to me.

In a world divided by borders and tongues,
where exceptions exist by chance,
little do we think of those we’ll never meet
that we would hold dear,
had we lived in their country
or spoken their language.

I spent Thanksgiving
this year
not in the blue-collar comfort
of my aunt’s house,
nestled somewhere
within a well-buried suburb
of a quaint, but un-noteworthy neighborhood
with walls decorated with Budweiser signs
juxtaposed against portraits of the ****** Mary,
where a football announcer’s voice plays like
conservative talk radio
in the background.

Instead, to save the labor
of my weary immigrant grandmother,
we dressed in Sunday best
and drove ourselves in
three well-packed mini vans
to some elegant hotel restaurant,
ideal for people-watching
from the gaudy, art-deco staircase
while pretending to be in the Great Gatsby.

It didn’t feel natural, though,
that beside a modest turkey breast
with cranberry dressing, sat a beautiful
cut of prime rib, carefully ladled
with truffle au juis–
nor beside a humble dollop
of mashed potatoes and gravy,
should there be salmon to die for,
and berries slathered with brie.

The food I nibbled
with bites of nervous guilt,
as the impeccably dressed waiter
exhaustedly refilled our water glasses,
nodding his head reflexively
to my mouse squeaks of “thank you’s”

What monsters are we,
letting these people work on Thanksgiving Day?
Grandma said, calmly, that some people
are just happy to be paid,
recounting
her impoverished childhood
in war-torn Germany—
that to simply muffle
the aggressive rumbling
of a days-empty stomach,
she and her brother
would ****** a handful of
potatoes from a government farm,
not many, but just enough
as she grimaced
at the ever-so-slight mealiness
of her rosemary-infused pork chop—
the woman who couldn’t afford ham
until she became a citizen.

We nodded quietly and
swallowed our privileged guilt,
washed down with
politely cut bites
of perfectly cooked salmon.

I know that once you escape the clutches
of your overbearing Arab parents,
it will be something of a rabid dog
unchained
running from the mercy of his master.

You’ll experience a bold new world
they tried to conceal from you,
(in both ends of the extremes)
But perhaps after late night meals of
canned vegetables and ramen, you’ll
develop the lingering taste
in your mouth
for Mama’s Kenafeh.

You say you’ll never miss them,
but somehow I know
that one day,
be it just when you step into your dorm
or when you’re thirty-five and
pondering how to raise your own children--
you’ll have the vague intuition,
that perhaps your parents only wanted for you
what they never could have had,
before you dismiss the idea as nonsense.

Looking for the lost prophets
that seemed to slip right through the sand
through the cracks of time…

My thoughts of you bring a warm sensation
that I shouldn’t have
You’re my Peter Pan, something to fall upon
when the real world is null and grey.

I still think of you from time to time
and remember how I felt
when I’d talk to you for hours and hours
About particularly nothing at all,
my mind said.
But my heart found a reason to be
in you
And then you went
from my little world
where the sky was always grey and
saw its first glimpse of blue
from the light of your eyes,
shining into me.

It’s a lonely existence when you think about it,
I’m surrounded and isolated all at once.
Is there anyone in this world
who shares these thoughts that
echo in my mind?
I still think of you,
but why?

You disappeared and came right back
So sheepishly, as though I’d never welcome you
back into my door, into a dusty house.
I kept a spot open for you, and everyday
I stared at the empty space that
needed to be filled
in this quiet house
in my quiet mind, that needed someone
to reassure me
that I’m still human.

I still think of you even though you probably don’t of me.
I thought those thoughts when you walked away,
and then you saw me.
You saw me standing there all alone,
trying to fill the spot you left behind
they didn’t fit, no one could.

I thought for sure you’d forgotten me, but
it was as though I saw the ghost
of you.
You were just as I remembered,
and when I told you
of that empty space I tried to fill
and that artificial fluff I tried to stuff inside,
you told me
of all of those nights
you stayed up
And thought of me.
How you’d stare at my letters,
all the things
I’d given you.

I still think of you,
But I hate to think you’ve left a second time,
third, fourth, fifth?
I lost track when I accepted,
that I was going to live this life alone and old,
my dear Peter Pan.

Hazy purity of morning
Beautiful uncertainty
Of the unblossomed bud of day

Walking down familiar halls
Searching for the face I love;
The clean scent of sanctuary
On freshly showered skin

I smile worth a hundred words
And keep my lips in silence.
Your hand in mine,
Our interlocked arms,
Together, you and I.

And as we go our separate ways
Our days unfolding the innocence
of optimistic morning sun,
we join again
in weary afternoon

The smell of your hair,
The hollow of your shoulder,
The light of my waning day.

And as evening ages, side by side
we sleep in nighttime’s shadows
before the sun awakens the sky
as we rise to the clear of morning.

Perhaps I should be sleeping
Midnight has long since passed
But perhaps I can stay a while
And think these thoughts of you

I still recall so vividly
Your broad smile and bright eyes
When I admitted that I loved you
Taking my hands, so small and pale
Within your large, dark ones

I still feel the coolness by the pond
When we stayed out till midnight
Staring at the water, hand in hand
Soul in soul
Pretending that we didn’t have parents
Who would scold us for missing curfew
Pretending that the serenity surrounding us
Would be eternal

I still remember your troubled glance
And puppy-dog eyes
When you said that this was goodbye
The softness of your skin, in our last embrace
Still itches at my skin

And it never seems to go away.

I still have your letters in my drawer,
The birthday cards your little sisters drew
The delightfully tacky hat on my coat tree
The condoms that we ended up never using
The shirt you lent me
When I wore a tank top in 40 degree weather
As we laughed at my foolishness
That you never took back
That I still inhale to remember your scent

Perhaps it is silly
That I still don’t think you should be gone
But I’d be harassing you to say it
And when I see you passing by
I smile and ask how you are doing

you are
the puddle after the rain
the love that remains
the last animate ember
in a numb and unconscious soul
and I can still smell the smoke
long after you’ve been gone

I think it’s the sickest
part of our wiring
that the things we
long for the most intensely,
with the deepest
and most poignant ache
of the soul
are always the things
we’ve already told ourselves
will never return.

In summertime I waited for you
Longing idly under August heat waves
I carried my disappointment through
Autumn, and kicked the leaves
that piled like clutter on the ground.
Sometimes I’d get a word from you,
A drizzle of rain in my life of drought—
But the water didn’t last long,
And all I had were puddles of you
That dried all too quickly.
In wintertime my soul would freeze
and the pain would numb away,
I’d curse the wind and count the days
Until Spring Salvation came my way.

No one born too far from Niedersachsen, said Oma,
ever quite captures their sing-song intonation.
Characterized by subtleties, like an umlauted vowel,
all non-native imitations sound inevitably as ******
as would a cry of “ello, guv’nah!” in a London coffee shop.

Her Plattdeutsch instincts neutered
by decades abroad, married to a son of Milwaukee,
her permanent, dormant longing for Salzgitter awakes only
to trigger hunger pangs of irreconcilable nostalgia
at the passing whiff of a Germantown bakery.

She taught me the word “sehnsucht” over lukewarm coffee
and a pause in our conversation: a compound word
that no well-intentioned English translation
could render faithfully.
It isn’t the same as just longing, she sighed— longing is curable.
Sehnsucht holds the fragments
of an imperfect world and laments
that they are patternless. How the soul
yearns vaguely for a home
remembered only in the residual ache
of incomplete childhood fancies;
futile as the ruins
of an ancient, annihilated people.
How life’s staccato joys soothe
a heart sore from the world,
yet the existential hunger, gnawing
from the malnourished stomach
of the bruised human psyche, remains—
insatiable, eternal.

Long enough ago, a reasonably-priced bus ride away
from the red-roofed apartment in which she babbled her first words,
a kindly old man in a pharmacy asked her
about her peculiar, exotic accent. Once inevitably prompted
with the question of where she was from, she responded only
that she was a tourist off the beaten track.

And when I pointed out, to my immediate regret,
that she gets the same question back here in Ohio,
I realized then that, not once, has she ever referred to the way
the people of her pined-for hometown spoke
as though she had ever belonged to it.

In our own vanities, we drown
And beneath our skins
the delicate insides rot

The world has divided in two:
Those who do, but shed the blame
and those who carry its burden

With plastic smiles rotting on our faces
And hollow words upon our tongues
The shield we bear to keep our humanity at bay

Why would we be deceiving
our fellow human beings?
Staring at eachother without seeing
Hearing our words without listening
Blind and deaf, mute and dumb
Numb to our world in its every essence

Love isn’t found in the throes of passion
under satin sheets,
Nor in the glisten of diamonds and gold.
Not even in the lips that tell you,
that you are their rising sun.
All that can be fabricated is worthless
when you find
that love is the silent voice listening
when you cannot bear the world any longer.

I once said I’d die without you,
and you without me.
I’ve been counting the months
since I’ve heard from you—
and the silence is still painful
But it dulls
by every day that passes
where I eat the words I once declared
with such conviction
that I’d never be just fine—
Carrying on my own life,
A you without me; a me without you.

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 Sun Maiden sets early today
An auburn beauty reluctant to show her face
The day is young, so scarsley noon,
Why, darling, must you fade so soon?

She finds her comfort in twilight's veil
Staring sadly upon her fraying kingdom
The withering rose, the waning moon
Why must beauties fall so soon?

So softly she fades
Into the premature night
Her burning eye and scarlet lip
Will dull to a lifeless grey

She will rise from her dust
And become the moon
My beautiful maiden, Why must you fade so soon?

Awoken so rudely from the bliss of a dream,
Some reverie it was, some reverie it was…
But from the vague traces I recall, perhaps it was a better place to be
Somewhere distant from here, deep into the abyssal sea
Nestled amongst the sand, away from the infertile land
Where no other faces reside than our own,
No other loves reside than our own…
But the sea, like our love, has dried into evaporation
Only an obscuring mist can reside
And you, and you alone, are my will to stay alive

We’re the glaring definition
of absurdity—everything
felt right when it wasn’t time.
Nothing
ever fell into place
under any sacred principle
of nature— we declared
our own laws
just to break them.
Like sadistic gods, we
established a beautiful world
and destroyed it, just to
fruitlessly reanimate
the salvaged ruins
after we inevitably
change our minds.

We dance to our own song
perpetually
out of time— and if any chord
happens to resonate, one of us
will always be
just one blatant
half-step away
from any satisfaction
of harmony.

You say what would fix us
is a metronome, but
you and I both know
that it’s awfully pointless
when neither of us
will ever stay faithful
to a tempo.

I’ve always had certain
thoughts
that manifest as forbidden plays
performed privately only in
a mental stage
I always swore
to keep unspoken,
unwritten and
eternally unprocessed
in hopes that
keeping it ineffable
and far away from explanation
would shield it from the
soul-draining burden
of legitimacy.

But the longer
I keep these things
an embarrassing secret,
and the longer I insist
that in my every thought
lies shame best kept suppressed,
the more I realize
that maybe the reason that I,
like every animate creature
stumbling through their earthly existence,
have come to condemn an abrasive world
for never understanding me,
stems from every human’s destructive habit
of refusing to understand the parts of ourselves
the world will never accept.

And what we never realize
is that we are the world—
sponsoring our own
oppression and feeling as responsible
as every snowflake in the avalanche.

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.

You and I grew
up by the outskirts
of their society, with no other
choice, but to observe…

We pretended to hide
from a cruel
and indifferent world,
that was never looking
for us to begin with.

Turbulently, we grew
into erratic teenagers,
pillaging our world
with a vengeance.
My youthful rage dulled
with the waning of age, but
you never ceased to seethe.

I stumble by a lake
to find you there;
flinging pebbles to break
the surface, distorting
the reflection of yourself
you’ve never wanted to see.
In the settled water I greeted the
uncertain face, solemn as I was
to share a likeness…
And hesitantly I asked you
what brought you here.

We both said nothing
(we knew you had nowhere else to go)
All we could tell the world
they stole from our tongues;
The reflected face distanced her glance
from you, an aloof and bitter woman
of the rest of society,
and beyond your bent knees
the water had never settled,
revealing cryptic shards
of a jigsaw puzzle face.

Yet in that water I had drowned
a part of myself;
my animosity, and pride
against a mechanical world
that never pitied me…
Your vengeful heart
stayed forever smoldering,
never forgiving a careless god
that let you suffer, blinded
by the walls surrounding
your lesser world.

The innocent child
Wide eyes stare into a world
So beautifully unknown

The sorrow of humanity;
Paradoxical in that we believe
that the grey in our heart,
the dull ache of the soul
is contained within our borders.
Mankind’s common blindness,
But perhaps the poets and the saints will see…
Exclusion of human sorrow within the self,
the universal human condition.

There is no poem here.
I still hold onto your
words made
obsolete by time
and damage,
clutching onto them
like holy scripture
in a godless world—
reciting what now
means nothing, distorted
by the stains of sacrilege.

There was never a poem here.
We killed the prophets
weeping, kneeling
with a sinner’s grief
at the ruins
of sacred places
we’ve destroyed.

Don’t make me put a poem here.
I can’t create anything,
I only rearrange
the thoughts over-ripened
by silence
I can’t suppress.