Sure I'll try to find the nearest exit
No blinking definitive red and green signs
No airplane marshals
To give us the big hint
Of if everything is right again
hoping the night is capable
of falling in love
with the same ******* alphabet
and this is it
My soulmate standing in the midst of an empty doorway
Eminent impending death two steps behind her
Take my hands with you
Take my appetite
because it's been 5:44 my whole life
and I'd trade the ground beneath my feet
For whatever it is that you've saved beneath the sole of your tongue
I just want to love something unfathomable again
I want to stand on the brink of one million feet in the air
Asking if I'm high as hell or if hell is just this high
As I trip face first
Into a great gaping puddle of electric blue pulses
at the tip of my fingers,
Now is a good time to end it
now that we can look now in the eye
And call it then.

This is so sad I say
As I proceed through the same tunnel
A kaleidoscope ride
A reflection of city lights on too-tight walls
And too-quiet places
ABAB
my favorite sequence
when echoed and regurgitated
a mother bird
Consuming her own eggs
In a backwards kind of nesting.

Heaps and heaps
Of glossy cotton fields
The way you look at a photo under red water
After its taken its own time to wilt
In its antique frame
Where pretty words
Can't mean pretty concepts
Thinking I finally understand
What a ******* breath feels like
Getting trapped between two lungs.

Shooting up out of my skin again like these slick trees
Rich gold spewing from my fingernails
From seed to out in the open air
I’ve never been this close to the sun before
It’s amazing to think
What the brushing away
Of a little dirt can do
When condensed to astrology’s standards
Big enough to get lost in
Rigged enough to get stuck on
if you define the birds-eye view of a mountain
as being shoulder to shoulder
yet heads miles apart
of running from an avalanche
burning a trail through snow
just to please both devils.
I think I’ve loved hard enough
To keep two hearts beating
Even after being incinerated
And operated on once more,
I swear I could still make them shine.

Flowering in my hand
The godforsaken darkness of this bedroom
I stand for waves of consciousness
Although my only accessibility is to be seated
And to let the walls and the dry waves beneath us
Cushioning the air like newly wedded palm trees
All savory and nearly serine
Minus their little tatter tantrums,
Decide what is allowed to be easy on the ocean ears
And what is a blue-dusk silver shattering storm instead.

You jump in once
Your body all made of hands and feet
And the communal clatter of thanking God
Soaring your way down the only descend
After making allies with the butterflies
Making pockets in clouds
And does anyone know how to spell home
In embroidered lace pink
Or can we still go in head first?

There is pretty
bubbling
a faulty science experiment
on the verge of the most compliant shade of peach
blanketing itself even beneath the dirt
of my fingernails.

Daddy can you open this?
Because spoonful’s of
Mommy can’t
Never sat well
on the tip of your tongue
nor the bottom of your stomach.

The click
Resonating in my ears like a clatter
of spinning off the head
Of a bottle of red polish
Black clouds of acetone
and nights worth drowning
in salty tear-duct rain
spill over your fingers flawlessly
the way you wish pretty would
on every square inch
of your not-pretty-enough.
But pretty is all sealed up
In the same transparent plastic wrap
That clutches each brain stem
The way grubby clawed tentacle-men
grab your ***
choke every dose of ill-met
red lipstick mirror encounters
from you
and every you
ten-years in the making.

You look so pretty
on the outside
but no one wants to see
your landmines
zip modesty up to your neck
every morning
before you leave your apartment
to enter a circus
the confines of impending death
each man and each billboard
equally a lion
but please
for the love
of your ugly-*******-face
ugly-*******-face
ugly-*******-face
be pretty
hold white teeth to your skull
and your skull to a fragile pair
of rose-meadow-shoulders
remember to ignore the thorns
relentlessly.

Pretty is easy
as a puncture wound.
Pretty is the only green light
In one thousand miles.
Don’t be a girl—
You’ll be okay.

Something of youthful cut grass
blading itself through a crisp March
as to guide crickets into breaking their backs
so that eyelids may kiss pillows in matrimony
so that the smell of the approaching summer
in its fleeting Shelby Cobra
driving so smoothly when running away
but leaking a trailed gallon of purposeful gasoline
when trying to get to the other side of culpability.

I dissipate fragment by fragment
into the dark
equating to pollen that has had its day
as satin-skinned camellias
in a swift breeze.

A tongue swollen with nectar sweat
the wind strokes its fingers through my solstice hair
drunk with humidity
enticing sleek branches
to swoon with the cadence
of sweltering heat.

and here i am again
at the intersection
of pedestrian language
& old wives tales
swallowing gum
like 7 year memories
opening umbrellas inside
cause i can't seem get away
from all of this rain
i ******* with my left hand
cause i was told
back in highschool that
"it feels like someone else is doing it"
it gets me wondering
about the difference between
losing you and finding out
that some one else found you
or my sleep
or lack thereof
its starting to tear me apart
i keep having this dream
where you are in
an unfamiliar body of water
trying to wash my poetry
off of your hands
or the one where
something happens in my chest
every time you sit
on someone else's bed
i'm tired of feeling like something you've misplaced
but don't have the heart
to look for anymore
tired of you saying my name
like you're trying to bury it
i'm tired of wondering
if you can tell the difference
between the absence
of my voice & silence
the other day
i almost started sobbing
at work when a woman
asked me about
our equipment
i was explaining how
things come apart
and almost mentioned your name
it made me think
of how you used to say
things like "what would you do
if i showed up on your doorstep
one day?" now, i haunt
the windows in my house
i don't leave for weeks at a time
i sit on the porch like the dog
you didn't shoot behind the shed
the one that refuses to die
until you come home again
i told somebody once, that
you didn't even know
what my voicemail sounded like
i wonder if they thought
it was because you
are so important that i never
let it ring that many times
before picking up
or if you dont know
what it sounds like
because you've never called
you can't be the ****** weapon
and the search party
i'm tired of all the seats
to the ferris wheel in my chest
being empty
tired of your voice
being the one i look for
in abandoned places
that one sound i beg
to bounce back
down vacant hallways
i just seem to stand there
in all of that quiet
like someone looking for a mistake
on an eviction notice
so i guess the hardest part
isn't letting go
it's forgetting
you ever had a grip
in the first place
and since you've been gone
i wonder if when
you pushed yourself away from me
you used your left hand
so it felt like someone else did it