A thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail
takes at least five months.
In five months:
a fetus is the size of a papaya,
a small home has been fully renovated,
2,450 dollars in rent is paid if you live with three people,
Swahili has been learned incompletely,
the grief of a dead high school teacher is finished,
a person sinks in, gets comfortable,
the planet has turned its back,
Loestrin has travelled out of the system—
who’s to say it’s not just like the Appalachian.

I’d like to make a rope out of my hair
tie it from Georgia to Maine
sail a two-pound apology all the way down
to make up for the places my body will never make it
because five months of footwork
is too long to stop nurturing a life
that is not worth living anyway
but this way
I don’t have to lose.

You are the blood that runs warm beneath my skin.
You are the notebook I haven't picked up in so long that it's cold against my pinky finger.
You are the tears that are so close to spilling, so close to ruining this petty pen and paper and word ***** art.
You are waking up when the sun is still rising and there is still a smile on your face because you think you're still dreaming.
God, oh god.
You are everything unimaginable and I want nothing more than to leave it at that.
You are the failed attempt to scribble down every fast-paced thought through blurred eyes and an even more blurred heart.
You are never even thinking about giving up.
You are 200 miles away.
I am skin and bone that will soon turn it's luck to dust.
You are inside of me, you are my insides crumbling.
You are every feeling so large, so real I think I can grasp it.
You are the words, "Keep going. Keep going."
You are a million I love yous I wish I could have screamed.
You are the only way I could possibly wake up on the right side of the bed.
Hell, I'm not much for expressing the dramatic pros I've hidden in my heart.
But I cannot put words into any simpler form.
I love you.
I love you so much that everything else is so small when I look at you.
God, I love you so much.
I just hope you know.

I swept the pink dirt from the grounds beneath
the apologetically heavy
saturated grass
pursed my lips and blew it
into the cloudy cushions of my blushing hands
then swallowed it all whole
one single gulp of its chalky séance
sliding down a dry kind of water slide
slipping itself around in its flamingo floatie
almost-falling from the grooves of my throat
spinning in the fuzzy nostalgia
of the circles it made around my feet this morning
one thousand times over
zooming speedily past the burnt oranges
and half-hearted blues
again and again
leaving crystal-clear pentagrams
in the split open wakes of dusk
all of these tiny little pleads
these gloomy promises
dissolving themselves into pale ashes
dipping their hair into a thick murk
taking flight with two feathery and forbidden
midnight arms
spread only to rebel against the wind
or maybe to hover
tower
One million feet—
above your scary-big shadows
small as ants from up here.

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.

I try to lose my thoughts but they spit themselves back in my face.
I guess there's a million reasons why I shiver even when it isn't cold.
I've been postponing this for a while now.
But you can't hold back for too long when something is screaming for you.
I can feel the flight instinct disrupt my body.
Fear is the most petty element, sleeping with love every night
corrupting it with it's infectious hands, darkening the pure.
I loved you for too long, and as of this moment, always, it is never long enough.
I tremble for the day that "I love you" struggles to slip through your mouth.
When you wake up and the first thing you do is bite your tongue and taste me trickling to the back of your throat, I won't be the first thing on your mind.
The ceiling won't remind you of me.
Your eyes will open, and somehow you won't be on your back.
You'll be laying on your side, something will make you realize why you can't love me anymore.
I'm trying to stomach this.
It takes all my strength to not dedicate this to you.
This was almost created in slow-motion: the definition of what time feels like without you.
My skin is so lost without your hands easily guiding the way.
Please don't forget about me.
I'll bang down your door till my knuckles are ****** before I let my name escape your sighs.

Cupped in the belly of my palm
this grit-ridden
hand-held cave you gave me
right at three years
appearing on the outside like pale skin
after leaving sunscreen an oil spill in the pool
and burning
patchy and bronze
although I took silver
each time your voice rose a flame
in the gust of its crescendo
the gemmed insides of this Earth piece
looking too much like the shards of glass
that would explode iridescent
in fist-fights with paper walls
fragments gleaming like ice crystals
daring their toes over the edge of a roof
leaving accident’s name a mosaic of wine
all over the floor
and my jaw hung open
as wide as the geode’s
only its jagged teeth shimmer
rather than break
when in opposition with force.

This rock-body knows rock-bottom
replacing softer limbs
that had once retired themselves
like scissors that fit right in with my hands.
I am trying to relive a good day
the beach right before my eyes
this jewel-thing beaming white under the licks of the sun
glimmering like the salt of sand
and solstice iced over the delicacy of sea itself
reminding me for the last time
of when you were nice.

I swing my arm behind my back
and give this geode a fair chance to sprout bird wings and fly
make its place
amongst all other
shiny ocean fixtures.

He is next to you
and he is real
and you have never felt skin so warm.

You've never been held like you were really meant to be here and you've never held yourself and you're afraid because never have you ever felt so in place never have you known a home like this and in the backseat of his car and while it's cold,
never have you felt so alive.

And skin on skin has never felt so alike and his inhales and his exhales have never been anything but the world's greatest mystery or a rising and setting sun or a room filled with nothing but moonlight that you've been dying to solve since the day you heard his laugh boom and boom in your brain like an avalanche ready to melt ready to **** ready to resonate forever in that bright part of you for the rest of heaven knows how long and I guess that means until we make love again.

His body: the entirety of every single spec of his being, is praying grounds.
And I will worship every spectrum of the all reasons I love him until I can tell you just what I mean through every word I say, without blinking an eye, without breaking a sweat, by only accomplishing the impossible.

And when you find that you love someone else, more than you love yourself, please realize, that that, is not love.
You are only halfway there, and you are not caught in his repertoire of thunder
of thrashing lacking oxygen under layers and layers of the ocean and wanting nothing more than to be side by side
until you find that you are in love with yourself too.
Until you can stand still in a tsunami and still speak the words, "I am not there yet, but I am okay."

He is beauty sealed in flawless flaws and even these I fantasize about.
All of which I can recall like the back of my hand but I know his better
and I want you to know I think I love you more than anybody has loved anybody and I will
always,
as tenderly as I can,
when our dreams come true of soft light through white bed sheets highlighting the patches of hair on your face that you hate so much and your lack of a six pack,

Know that you are lacking nothing.

Because you are everything.

You are every last droplet of beautiful in this world
you are every single ounce of hope that lies deep within me
you are so much of the sweet that I want so badly to grasp in the throbbing palms of my loving hands
needy, only for you,
and I would not have you any other way.

I want you just as you are, as purely as I can have you, for as long as I can.
I want to make you know that you are, in every form, the most entirely breath taking human being that has ever graced this existence of ours.

In a vow to you:
May my pulse never run cold.

I have found love hidden between the low valley's of your perfectly high fingers. Love that I thought was lost at sea, and would be much too drenched anyway to bother to be found.
I have found love in the dark universe beyond your mouth and with teeth like stars, I think your lips are mouthing "I love you too", like pearly gates, voice like velvet ropes, pulling them either closed or apart.
I can almost see your skin light up when I grace my fingertips against your bare chest.
Cold, yearning to be warmed, if only by one small hand. As if my fingertips are the keys to unlock years of quiet defiance.
Our hands fit perfectly, I think that means you have the key to me too.
You are so soft, so tender, I am afraid that if I beg to caress your delicate face, you just might melt below my warmth, but I am a puddle of melted snow competing with just brewed coffee, and eyes all the warmer.
Thank god, thank god, thank god.
I am frozen solid, and somehow, you've thawed me all out, and didn't just mop me up.
You are so beautiful. Sometimes I just want to sit with you in your car. Just look at you. I want it to rain hard against your windows, on your roof, and I want to kiss you even harder.
Want thunder and lightning to cower in the strength of our lips.
I will just listen to the rhythms of your breaths until I've figured you out.
Until I understand what makes you smile without even flinching.
Until I understand love.
If I could possibly be any closer to you than we are right now, I'd be a glacier, transformed into faint summer rain.
I'd pour and pour and pour, if I could wither away with you.
"Won't you just hold me, just don't say a word."
Suddenly it is a desert in here
and my ice cube walls are coming down quickly.
You are less an inferno, more a kindling fire, to a shivering soul.
You are the only one who would never burn me down.
Thank you for being my only source of heat.

We all question what hot blood would feel like
Running down our necks
Rusty stains shaped like an arched back spine
a lower case n all for nothing
taking the skull in your hand like a poison apple
watching as time speeds by
as history repeats itself
catching wind in fish nets
and lighting them on fire
to mimic that dead body trapped in the back of a truck scent
that plastic kind of I love you
wrapped up three times.

Glass is seeping through my fingers
stealing a free ride on ice cold blood
these window panes are asking for forgiveness
while your front door is seeking revenge.

You cannot walk quick enough into the abyss of the night
before it swallows you whole
roaring back with a rigid teethed grin
and a kind stab to the back.

It is cold as hell
if your heart were to freeze hell over
I am dying slowly
thank you for loving me at least once
at least when both our lips were lost
and our hearts swollen with patches of frigid deep blue
the same way it seemed
every time we kissed
you'd leave sweet frostbite

You are frozen solid
yet somehow the only way I can keep warm.

I wonder how long it would take for my father to notice the cuts on my body or for my mother to notice that I sleep too much and when I do,
dreams don't come out right they come out left and sort of backwards or inside out or black and white they are never grey,
but always real.
My dreams show up in my reality and I can't wonder too long because 321LIGHTS

It's gone.

I wonder how long it would take for his touch to infect these pages
and leave stains that soak through to where he last grazed my scars.
I Don't Know If He Did.
But I think he did.
I remember the way they felt,
and I remember imagining what they felt like to him.
Maybe like acid.
Probably like 3 long years of looking at me like thin fragile shattering finger bones,
or the spine of all the books he never read.
Then why do his palms feel like a remedy
I haven't found out about yet.

Blank canvases that inhale and exhale
with motives to live.
That's all we are
painted by Biology
a gamble in the darkness of who wins the lottery of appeal.

Sometimes we are created
using the best paint brushes
a stunning color palette
other times we are thrown together
extemporaneous products of failure
slapped on with crippled fingers
that lack inspiration
deprived of just the right shade of beauty.

I am a sculpture of proof
a hurried project
nose recklessly placed on the center of my face
cheeks not rosy enough in the frigid winter
disadvantaged with an artist who must have mistaken pink for blue.
My body is an accident
worn with tears after erasing and retracing
time and time again.
My past is scattered with ugly ripe bruises
maybe from tussling too roughly with life.

My soul
is the only thing
that is not of Biology's creation.
Soul is something I have dug deep into
with two frantic hands
before pulling out a heart beating gold
swollen with optimism
warm with love
spilling with kindness
stronger than beauty.

I am perfect
because my soul
is louder than my body.
I am beautiful
because never mind Biology's snide remarks
I am flawless
because despite my luck
I am a work of art.

When the thought of missing you hurts worse than being stricken in bed with your hands behind your back and a stomach full of an anxious history, filled with a marked up calendar of therapy dates,
that is when I will miss you the most.
The thought of missing you is pumping heavy venom into my heart.
Thinking of you like this, with an empty mind, prompts me to think of what it will be like, two years from now
when I am still stuck laying in that same
grieving
position.
I cannot move without you,
and I cannot bear to imagine my days and my darks without you holding my hand and guiding my blind ways.
Because what am I without the love of my life?
And exactly how many miles apart are our fingertips before they can touch?
When I roll over in the dead of night,
I expect to find your naked body to hold,
but all I discover grasping is another layer of bed sheet.
I miss you with a vengeance.
I miss you so bad, all I can taste is blood in my food.
And you are not even gone yet.

We give our weight to the ancient decay of this familial brick building
the blades of our razor shoulders just barely grazing it
all as a part of our clever façade of ice cold leaned back sunglasses on our heads attitude
cool radiating off of the sparse, tattered patches in our jeans
the walls still warm from the sweltering July heat
the moon watching us quietly, red in the face
the night still simmering in seventy degrees
smelling of dust and trash cans and our extra-large cerulean slushies.
She sets down her roller skates to divulge the little treasure she had been hiding in her pocket.
Do you want to try one? My mom let me have a pack.
In this uncertain instance, I decide that cool is greater than safe,
as I chew my lip and dart my head around every corner
to ensure that disapproval isn’t lurking somewhere in the dark.
I gradually slip one out of its snug packet with a shaky embrace
twirl it between my fingers as I watch her light one on fire
uttering and stuttering: are you sure we should be doing this?
attentive to the way the tiny embers glow and dance off the tip each time she flicks it with her chipped nails
the smoke turning pink from the neon sign that flashes above our heads
and I’m not sure if I’m sick with anxiety or sick with chemical vapor
as we cough until our stomachs are empty
and the street in front of our feet become drenched in blue.

We would both end up watering our roots just to see how far they could grow
how many miles they would stretch even from the dry dirt of our little Southern street
then drown them so that they would rot and forgetting would be easier.
She would end up in Washington state
where she would wear out her bright yellow rainboots
and I would end up surfing the wind of the Midwest
and we wondered how we could have gotten here
how our miniscule seeds could have blossomed into trees big enough to cast shadows.
After adulthood had kept us apart at more than an arm’s length for a few weeks
she would call me on the phone at one a.m.:
I think I found the one
her voice fluctuating like the sound waves of a child finding their first Easter egg
I would kick my feet up choking on my laughter and letting my tears have free range like we were twelve again
when we would sing our own rendition of “Chapel of Love” in Mrs. Peters’ class everyday
our biggest worry then would be tying our satin bows in our hair just right.
We would talk until dawn
until we would drift off into the dark of sleep
the white noise of the other end of the line still breathing into our ears
dreaming of pixie sticks.

The sound of her body collapses onto the floor
as if she forgot how to fly
waking both of her parents as one treks the speed of God up the stairs
and she wishes the fall would have snapped her neck
that the flush of death washed over a face didn’t have to look so gruesome.
Before she could re-tie the noose into its perfect donut with slick and hurried fingers
her dad flings the door open and you’d think he left a hole in the wall
or a hole in her chest in the way he says
what the **** do you think you’re doing free-falling along with the thick saliva
foaming from his lips that were swollen with sleep
although he hasn’t slept since.
The first time she did it, she apologized
but this time she was only sorry for unstable ladders.  

At recess that day
I drew lilies on my hand with her sparkly pen and I realized later that I had lost it
as if it had grown shovels for arms and buried itself at the bottom of the sandbox.
I shriveled up my tiny face and spewed tears all over my dress,
I hadn’t known a greater tragedy,
but she said she liked the lilies on my hand better than her pen anyway
as the ink bled and into sweat and faded into something watered-down pink and abstract
she wrapped a medicinal arm around my shoulder and told me it was okay
that everything was going to be okay.

I want to get home so that I can sleep for 17 hours with my mouth hung open so wide you’d mistake it for a black vortex where planes and people and boats and Ameillia Earharts go mysteriously missing and it petrifies the **** out of you that these things exist on this planet if you think about it for too long your eyes beady and blending into the dark of your bedroom or I want to jump out of my window and die or run up and down the four flights of stairs in my ****** apartment complex until I feel the muscles and tendons and ****** pink strings in the meat of my thick thighs burn and come to life and the fat rupture and break apart beneath my skin, or maybe I can just run a regular marathon but that’s so ******* boring that I would rather gouge out hollows between my ribs with a spoon because why the **** would I want to run in a straight line, I want to run up and down and zig and zag and left and right and upside-down and on my head and with my legs ******* behind my back and at the speed of light like the energy-never-dies organism that I am, all that I am really comprised of, the bare bones of what this body is broken down into in actuality, except I swear to ******* God I better die one day

If you've ever broke out into hives, you would understand what it would feel like to be one.
If anxiety has ever stripped your veins,
If inspiration has ever lacked the blood leaking from the depths of you that explode like title waves against rocks, you would know what it would feel like to be stung.
I've realized I haven’t been aware of transfixed rage and clenched hands trying too hard to hold on to something that loosened its grip a match and a half ago.
The fluid in my liter told me it was never really meant for cigarettes; all they ever do is deteriorate.
There is blood covering my sheets and evidence to cover up my gruesomely blank eyes.
Everything is coming back to me and it makes me wonder why I've ever given up.
They say that words sting and if bumblebees killed themselves after hurting someone else they’d be a lot more like me.
This is ripped and crumbled paper in the form of a mental breakdown.
You have composed me of jolting pupils and false accusations.
I’d rather be writing in my journal.
I’d rather be scratching down illegible ink marks than doing what I’m doing right now.
If you can hear that, it’s the sound of windows breaking.
It’s the sound of your heart forcing itself to shatter
It’s the sound you make when all you want to do is become a drone to vivid darkness and a loss of senses.
I would be a lot more like bees if their venom could actually put the living in their suitable graves.
I am substituting pain for pleasure even when I feel nothing at all.

I don’t want to be a bumblebee anymore.

Layers upon layers
Of not only sheets
But hands
Limbs
Bare to hairy legged ratios
Creating symphonies of friction
Laughs outweighing *******
Clanks of teeth forgetting the catastrophe
Of love over lust.

Innocence is better preserved in a glow in the dark jar
Stuffed with children's movies
Until heavy-lidded two am’s
Versus using creaks of beds
To drown out the white noise
Of are we really happy?
Buzzing in our ears
Like gaudy flies with lightning blue wings
That we wish to swat away
squish between the two of our lips
until we taste subduing blood
or better yet
disguise the insect in a pretty costume
and play pretend.

I’m trying to grasp the concept of your hands grasping me, and there’s light in your serenely contorted sweat;
Bulging veins pressed against sweet warm delicate mouths exerting a mass of please, and please what?, and a quiet commotion of soft tongues making love, fighting slow and easy for something like a longer I love you, maybe, or another tight grip towards a vulnerable destination, where angels live in the whites of your glassy eyes, but I just want heavens doors to slam shut.
I might be the devil and I demand: “Oh please dear god”, but my body is your only savior and getting on your knees to worship a little never hurt anyone.
I ache for your touch, till your flames are still
I am swimming in thoughts of your ice-made skin, and I am satisfied with hypothermia
Beg for you to watch me choke on my breaths until you can write a whole new list of tasteful sins on my naked flesh.
I want to swallow you whole, want to melt away with you until we deliquesce into one.
I crave you
and me
a few hundred tick-tocks full of skin on
tender
post-possessed
skin.

The existence of love was never a belief to me, sitting on the shelf right next to God and happy endings
collecting dust and fragments of all the times I thought, "I don't want love to be real, but I think I love you a lot."
Imagining what it really means to be held and to be blanketed with a warmth that is warm inside and out, without being harvested in a ***** cold, dying out like bare trees in the December seasons, that shudder and shake the chips in their shoulders until the sleet can fall off.
It's like walking until you reach a point in the road where you don't know where you are, where you're headed, why.
And it doesn't matter in the slightest.
There is nothing left to say than I love you, and that I don't believe in ghosts.
But you haunt me even when my eyes are closed and my ribs are moving in slow motion.
I wish I could kiss you even in my after life, and if heaven exists, I'm going to look God in the eye and ask him why he didn't give you to me sooner.
And then I'm going to tell him that all I've ever wanted was you.
No golden thrones. No pearly gates. No velvet beds.
Just satin skin wrapped over the bones I hold so dearly, as close to my heart as I possibly can.
I don't believe in love.
I only believe in you.

Dear,

A lot has changed in the last year and a half
since the day God decided to scoop you up from our ember-warm hometown
and swallow you whole about sixty years earlier than any of us would have ever prayed for.
We would have all given up our one gold-embellished chance to write the center-spread
ecstatically collected our own blood and sweat and knuckles met with writers-cramps
if that meant watching wrinkles sprout permanently across your forehead
roots of trees burying themselves into the grooves of your smile lines.
We would have sacrificed all that hard-earned pain
that stain issues one through four
and that old putrid-beige colored couch
that we hated so much but clandestinely found comfort in leaning our heavy heads on still
in the crook of its homely, familiar shoulder
thinking that we were Shakespeare's apprentices
through fluttering eyelids
creating clusters of words that had to have been New York Times worthy—we were sure
although we knew the furthest we could really go is the furthest your laugh could carry across a room
and that's still pretty far—we could all spit shake and swear—
because I can still hear it sometimes all the way down here
where each tendon in my body is capable of feeling solidity
where I am haunted by uhtceare, wondering if you're too cold
where halos don't exist outside of dreams
not even when the sun is a cracked egg and dripping onto tables, the roofs of cars
not even then is anything brighter than the whites of your lively eyes
and I think you'd like to know that we're still thinking about you
that I can't think about white anymore without thinking about the vulgarity of bathtubs
and your hate for poems that include contractions—I'm sorry I've let you down
but I think you'd like to know that I've finally stopped having nightmares
and even the thinnest-skinned of us all, you know which one,
has been able to convince himself that the embrace of the Earth
just isn't the place for you anymore
that you've already outgrown all of us at fifteen-years-old
and we're sorry for not believing sooner that poetry can save the world.

I am tired of waiting for December
with her white teeth and prolonged visions of lace veils
to get dressed
put her makeup on  
before taking the long road back to me
weary of her indirection
as if she can't remember the short way
as if she wouldn't drive 200 miles
guilt heavy in the trunk of her car
for being so far away
just to steer clear of me
because you can't build a fire
in the middle of an ice storm,
or her cold shoulder all the same.
There is no use in laying in the sun
when the possibility to thaw
is below 0.
I am tired of missing December
each time January melts away.

I've got to fall in love again
like my whole house is not a home
when I pretend it's empty.
I have to fess up to this glutinous weather
using my hiding places to expose me
until there is no where left to hide
no rivers
no puddles.
This water is cramming itself next to me
a stranger on the bus with his hands between your knees
swimming up to my chest
a fetus awaiting its abortion
as a mother whispers that she is just fine
the sound wave first dripping through windows
until vulnerable enough to burst
then leaping at the chance to degrade it to its insecure shards
devastation scattered across my carpet floor,
this water is the second guest occupying a room for one
beneath these covers is where hope resides:
invisibility and the falsity of survival
this deluge is kissing every surface of my habitat
elevating me to the very top of what is my home no longer
an opaque angel
or a suffocating hell I cannot decide
its riptides part nature part me
as my lungs warn me of heaven on the other side of this roof.
My clothes are soaked but I am still trying to keep my feet dry
as I pull the blanket tangled around me closer
cover my face, condemn the light from coming in
in fear that there is none.
I don't remove my eyes from my indifference
splashing blindly to find the hand of calm amidst the thick liquid demise
a sadistic game of Marco Polo,
I do not hold my breath
like I did as a child;
I just let all of the small dams in my body break
and ignore the flood in my mouth.

Poems are like cutting your skin because thick words turn thin and human ink is shed and racing blood wears cold.
Poems just trigger more poems like trying to crack a razor out of its shell.
Razors are always the quiet girls,
or the Ghosts:
Dead human souls that feed off of other peoples "Hard times!"
A date on a page can be as tempting as a dark street with a broken lined scab.
Everyday for 30 and only one empty space has the courage to change.
You want to take that pen
We all know you do.
We know you want it running circles underneath your hands.
Define wrists without wet pillows and your brain in it's angry stance.
Try to imagine a place without him.
Skin is a cigarette.
Why don't you take a drag.

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.

Daybreak dawned seconds before the bus gave way to my body
a mercurial collapsing of wheels eating gravel
I now know what is godsent:
to have eyelids like a light switch where nightmares ebb darkness.
Did you hear the dogs barking straight towards the dim?
Cyclical guttural growls
like rewinding a cassette and playing it all over
while mourning the stretch between three and five in the morning.
Between each stone-cold silence
stood the whirring frequencies of a circuitous scratching on the walls
all white noise and stark black pen.

Halfway through dusk  
we settle that it must have been the sounds of Cerberus
begging each voice that drags me by hair through hell to stay
as each night I scrawl an escape route to stability.
I hoped that it was those hounds of Hades
who were operating the vehicle
that skimmed just over the brim of the outer-layer of my skin
but denial takes a weak form in the passenger seat.
I claim ownership of the wheel
death-gripped two-handed
falling short of hitting the target
a day-in and day-out ritual
where I remember
that repetition
can ruin

When I was seven my mother broke a glass cup against the ground by accident
my bare feet taking the plunge.
I cried for an hour when the blood continued to gush the way it does
as my mother bandaged my wound
that is what it meant to me

until I discovered that my hot breath on a cold day
would encourage me to write words
invisible to the air
until it was against glass
until my fingers carved into the condensation
"I love you", punctuated with an off-centered smiley face
that too soon descended to frowns
when he would ask

"Where'd you get those scars?"
"Got mad. Threw a glass."
all up and down my arms
using my worst enemy
and my best friend
to get by with the skin of my teeth

parted slightly
paired with a not-quite-there expression
imagining better days materializing
under the roots of grass
personifying trees
executing what I could only dream of:
Sweet peppermint lips
rough stubble corrupting soft peach fuzz
branches restoring their shape
only with interruption
when a teacher would drag claw marks down my desk
"Do you agree?"

she spoke, on your first day back from winter break
but honestly you did not know
you were thinking of me
200 miles away

behind glass again
the same concept
of being so close
but so far away
of our palms pressed against each other
with only a sliver of clear distance between us
just enough
that we couldn't feel each others skin.
That's probably what hurts most
more than any amount of seeping blood
accident or not
piercing cold
nostalgia out a window.
Whispering good-nights
accompanied by glitches and lags
just wanting to be a part of our sweet conversation
a crack in the system
never so large as now
feeling the warmth of my laptop
wishing it was you.
I try to decide differently
find an angle that will bring me closer to you

your eyes have always engaged mine
through somewhat of a double framed looking-glass
taking them off so I could see you more clearly
so that there was nothing stopping us
even if my face would blur together
in strange triangles and squares
hazy colors and faded motions
you were still seeing me
much better.

Until I reach the big red "X" on my calendar again
I have to fight through 2 layers of glass
to really find you
without ever touching you
the best way
the worst way
I've always remembered.

My hand has forgotten how to fall into bed with pen again
after the tenth year in a row of seeing a lake in the middle of road
it throws itself down in a thud
to plant half-moon flowers all down the avenue of tight flesh
but it had to learn how to walk again
or at least beg its way through the thick of the dirt
after this pyretic dry spell
that lasted longer than they'd agreed.

They used to share a queen
treated all dingy apartment flooring
like royalty
and my right hand
took the right side
closest to the window
then changed its mind when it rained for a week straight
and everything for three miles was grey,
the chaos settled between black and white,
and all that scares me,
because when my stomach does knots
it's only infinity
and when it flips
it goes ******* nuts
and you were so bored you started counting specks of sunlight,
each meant something big,
like the end of the sting in your step
while all of the opal-winged embers
that turned my fingers gold to the bone
were snuffed out under the rubber madness of my shoe
left me with just blue and stiff and lonely
missing that the quiet creaking in each knuckle
when my stomach empties itself out on the desk in front of me
and I decide I have nothing good to say.

Flowers sprouted from my mouth
Orange roses
Yellow marigolds from yours
When we kissed for the first time--
What a hybrid we made.
I was too busy dissolving in the scent of young love
Fickle on my tongue
To taste any blood.
I plucked the stems from their safe haven
And the linger of your lips
I planted them in their new homes
Little glass vases
Dying faster than they could be cured
withering, crunching away
one sickly petal at a time
because they couldn’t recognize survival
couldn’t grow in a home
that was a house without you.

Flowers can last weeks without sunlight
From my experience.
All they need is a dark room
And hope that the sun will return
And they will breathe as the days breathe
Follow its daily dance
But do they blossom
Or do they beg?

Grow old with me
As we’ve grown young
At the early hours of the morning.
Can we sprout limbs in bed
Climb to our highest peaks
Find hollows just big enough to hide our wounds
Can we strip our bodies to the bone
Unwrap our skin to reveal gardens
Plants born of rainbows
Can we kiss to nurture
Laugh to tend
Litter love as seeds?
As I break from my hinges
Soil turns to dust
Crumbling beneath your feet
May I still ask:
Will you grow old with me?

I've made it a habit to set fire to the things that I love
And you, I love the most.
For you, my old words have thrown themselves at purple flames
and drowned them out with inferno tinted tears.
We are creatures of habit
and I may have made a habit of myself.
What if I don’t want my habits to reek of sitting in showers
1. have I washed my hair yet
2. the water has run cold
3. I have already showered this much today
Confusing sunrise with sun set
1. has it already been 24 hours
2. am I awake
3. how much time has gone by, how many sun cycles have I wasted
You are only sleeping with tragedy, when you become this sad, for this long
But what if I want my habits to be nothing but repetitions of you
Habitual skin and bone and scent and love
But love is the hardest habit of all to break.
I hope when we are finished, I am still in one piece.

Before I begin, I need you to know, that if I could, I'd love your body in oceans.
I'd let you wash over me.
I'd leave meteors on your body and scars that you wish you could make tattoos.
With every stroke of your thumb against my cheek I am withering.
You are dusting away at a face that could be smiling if only we could sit in silence.
I am not much for speaking, not one for touching.
If all we accomplish is looking at each other, that may be my biggest achievement.
If my lips could crash into yours, if 400 degrees could melt them together and then settle under the bridge of heaven, I would say yes.
I would kiss your neck like it was my last meal.
Feel your skin like it's going extinct.
Inhale the scent of your clothes as if they may burn to ashes.
But I am not going anywhere without you.
Everything we've discovered together might as well be lies
as pretty as the eyes you witness the world through.
Time is up.
I've never been good at endings.

You, you are wonderful, spilled across pages of wonderful.
You, you have been torn sheets scattered across white crisp blankets longing to be accompanied.
You, you are hope tied strictly around index fingers.
You are a carefully sealed envelope thrown carelessly into mailboxes empty with everything but void.
You are precisely applied lipstick smeared on pursed lips,
nervous the red will smudge off your skin and become permanent on someone else.
Scared that, even if you kiss other people, the red will always stay.

I have found that I, am all but shorelines and beach waves and sandy toes and yours.
I am poised fingers stacked inbetween one another,
strategically trying not to place a hand on yours.

There's a myth about a boy with lips so toxic he takes a year off your life every time you kiss him.
I called him cigarette boy.
He was like a liter.
A matchbox that wouldn't light unless you struck him the right way.
It's almost embarrassing to remember the way he made me feel.
He made me feel the way I promised myself I never would.
I am an icebox.
He thawed away at the cold.
I am a puddle at his feet.
I can't figure out how he did it.
His hair is much lighter than mine—his smile so much more warm.
He reminds me of the way honey melts when you stir it in tea so hot it burns you.
There were 3 incidents that I knew he would not be going away:
1. Imagine holding hands with a ghost, a loaded gun.
2. Being lifted up in a flash flood, letting his love drown like a brick.
3. I felt like a soaked bouquet of flowers, and his eyes would not stop convicting me of love.
His eyes were the survivor in this aftermath of blood and war.
He had to leave me so I could grow.
In the end we were so invincible.
We had to find something else to mourn about.
He apologized for every kiss with more.
When my time was up, he asked me to tell him a secret.
"I'd kiss you a million times more knowing your lips are the death of me. I'd sacrifice this last act of selflessness to you."
Lace your veins with my vengeance.
I'd come to you every time.
There are no voices left to be heard beneath my skin.
He was an already published novel that refused to have an end.

How much time passes
between inviting the sun to hunch in the corner of my room
canary and screaming for the world to stop orbiting
and suddenly it’s night
and you realize it’s been seventeen hours since your body has made a request to move
knees pulled up to chest empty and heaving white
every bone in your body an orchestra of creaking
soundly against the crickets leaping off the fourth floor of your balcony dingy
the background noise of your dreams
blood the scent of pennies ripe in the air
smeared here and there
across all things unwanted
where apologies thrive on eleven cold dollars an hour—
you never asked for this.

I am better
at tallying each shade my room turns
because it has nothing to do
with the cerulean in my face
and this is the only place
that I allow warmth to be subjective,
when it’s breaking through windows with hatchets
instead of being waited on
watching the mouth of my wall clock nailed shut
frozen in a minute and speechless,
I have no desire to dial an ambulance
bear witness to the whirring American frequencies
of heads turned 180 even during the scuffling feet rustling rush of rush hour,
I’d rather hear the ringing in my ears
of each ghost that has ever followed me back home
quaking in translucent skin.

I heard that three a.m. belongs to the devil
I haven’t tested that theory since I was seventeen sacrificing and surrendering
but I do know what happens between the hours of thinking without doing
wanting without acting
the bed a fort you are asked to hold down by that hefty feeling
in your feet that reside two blocks from where your legs used to be,
and there is no path filthy with orchids,
when dark is just on the brink of waking,
but you can’t tell the difference anymore.

I once knew a boy
who perceived the darkness in me
as if it was some benign escape into light
sweet and warm
almost fireworks.
Little did he realize--
fireworks are explosives too.

I once knew a boy
who lit up more houses than he was invited to.
He was a match in a fire place
the slap of a broken flashlight against a palm
a candle illuminating barely visible text
and a scorn of "I never asked for this."

I once knew a boy
who was so bright that he burned the sight out of every eye that looked.
He would apologize
remainder of green-veined eyelids
stuck in its trap of reincarnated ashes
held like water in cupped hands
wrinkled with healed burns,
lacking time.

I once knew a boy
who I promised would never become a victim to the account of my life
that I would never let his most used adjective become "once."

I once knew a boy
whose hands shook terribly bad
when I asked him to load my promises in his mouth
and hold them to my head.  

I once killed a boy
who played with fire
before accidents could replace me.

The only thing I’ve ever been able to see without squinting through bad eyes has been ugly
and stupid
and worthless
each adjective another bullet to the body of someone who is already dead.
I left the bullets where I thought they ought to be—right where they were—lodged between vital arteries and anything dangerous; they were equally acidic beings occupying the same profane space.
I allowed my skin to grow over them as much as it rioted.  
I wanted to remind myself that they were a part of me now
that the least I could do was let them be
the way I had never been.

I have always been a non-believer,
naturally a very-much-believer slipped into my line of fire the same way the sun peeps its shy face out of grey.
But it took more than prying me out of my pad-locked shell to make me a believer too.
It took swimming the length of the ocean to find me in my shell first
then slaying the eight-legged monsters that shielded me from all things good
and every time I unwound the bandages in front of you that encased my wounds
inflicted from the sour tentacles of the beast you had to fight away
I expected the sting of your fingers fresh with sea salt to sting like hell
but you would remind me of how often you wash your hands
only not after touching me--
never after touching me.
I wasn’t familiar with the smell of flesh without it being doused in sanitizer;
The mess of my pain was just more dirt on their skin.

You were my savior
the only hero ever willing to carry a dead body with the same caution as someone who could still thank you with their lips—not cold.
You were red wine and I was holy Sunday
gnawing at the body of Christ
but you learned how to consume me still
without just swallowing me whole
instead savoring even the most overbearing bites of me that reeked of its expiration date.
You taught me how to let myself be consumed by something other than ugly
and stupid
and worthless.
You taught me how to let myself melt in the warm safety of your tongue
that vowed to speak of only sweet things.
But trying to recall that lesson was quieter in my ears
each time I urged myself to complete the daily routine of supplying you with a special pair of scissors
expectant that you would dig deep into my body
like everyone else always had
knowing that the gashes you created would heal slower and leave scars uglier than scars inflicted by the hands of anyone else.
I pushed my already-open cuts in your face
shut eyes and gritted teeth
awaiting the familiar feeling of the people you love
making their marks
in the center of your back.
But I watched your mouth form something that I didn't know could sound soft, something like "n-o", the first no that ever sounded as sweet as a yes.
No new stab wounds,
no tearing of tight flesh.
All you did was re-stitch me.
You caught my blood in its vanishing act.

With every stitch I watched as past words lost their dictionary meanings
ugly: beautiful
stupid: smart
worthless: worth it.
You drug me out of my grave and took the time to dust me off the way no one else had
hushed the knives in my own hands dripping in my own blood to fall to the ground
spoke the magic words that opened the gates of my chest so that you could squeeze the life into my heart again.
You took the eyes from your own skull for the sake of making a better scenery out of myself.

I don't have to squint anymore.
I can see "worth it" taking form of "worthless" miles across the street
and as you place your petal hands on my head and tilt one last time
I am watching myself do the same.

You are the chills that make traveling down my spine its hobby
when your breath slides itself temptingly down the pattern of my sweating neck
and both of our names become a slurred chorus of too-close puffy lips and rolled back eyes and soft writhing hips being spoken over each other with more crescendo each time and louder and louder and you know my fingernails have always thirsted for your skin and my tongue has always pleaded to be a part of you and
my breaths have refused to do anything else than inhale your exhales.
The windows of your car are perspiring like us and I think the temperature is rising high enough for everything to explode.
I think this moment was always meant to happen.

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.

I am at a slow standstill with realization huffing down my neck.
Do we ever have the opportunity to tell them how much we truly love them?
Countless wishes don’t tally up the way real actions do
ones we sit back and merely hope will arrive
so that we may go on for hours the way we yearn to.
But in honesty, that is just not real life.
But why can’t it be?
Why don’t we see people sacrificing a few minutes at work
for a few moments of kissing on busy streets
ignoring the daily routines scolding us from all four corners of our brains
to utter words more precious than time.

Hatred could come very last as your gasp claws for heaven
so I change my mind.
I am here
I am now
replicating the saccharine agony of love as candidly as I can.

I know you see it pouring from me
and I pour
and I pour
and I spill as thoroughly as I am brave.
I pour space and time continuum's
and still
for you
I cannot pour enough.

I believe strongly in infinite strings
that pull definite souls closer to each other
but I did not feel that tug the way I did
until I met you
when I thought two planets were colliding into one
a new solar system was being bent to match your eyes.

There was one single moment
that stood our sorely amongst all other magnificent ones.
I remember accidentally cutting my thumb
the wound small by size, not by pain.
I told you it hurt.
You kissed me.
I didn’t know the pain went away until you stopped and it returned.
That is exactly what
loving you is.

The only difference is that moment was temporary
while we are permanent
scars on blank canvases
ashes impersonating dust
what is engraved in my skin when it is you.

I have looked so widely and thought I had loved so deeply
still not far, not wide enough
as I was just scratching the tough surface,
this is more than butterflies
and better than death.

You cannot be summed up in pronouns
nothing short of wedding vows
for I who is so methodical
craves to live illogically with you.

When you are doing absolutely nothing
is when I adore you most
when you sit there
with nothing in the world but you
is when my heart cannot swell greater.
You, in your simplest human form
is etched into the core of my soul
where you have dug up far beneath my chest
things that even I have let reside in its own dust.
Your purest version
is when I love you primitively.

Although your grand endeavors are nothing to reckon with
and their end would shave my heart to its gruesome core
I love you, when you are hand to hand with me and you do not know it
when we dance in my driveway and somehow it is not cliché
despite the fire in your eyes and the glimmer in my throat
longing to entwine with yours.

When your voice cracks
your hair does strange things
those icy veins that layer the bones in your fingers
on the front of your hands
your golden eyelashes
when you are absolutely unaware
and the consuming happiness that moves me
when I lull you back with
“Baby? Are you awake?”

Darkness warmly embraces your face
like the milk of your naked skin
when I know you as a whole
muttering prayers down the spine of your back
dousing your worry lines with kisses I wrap in bauble
and the amount of times I’ve almost stopped making love to you
to write it all down
but could not will myself to so intensely
that I sacrificed letting such sacred things like good ideas go.

But I do not clutch to regret
when your skin is meant to be upon mine
your voice a legality when harmonized
with the type of laughter that only prevails
when you can no longer breathe
and you realize
you,
are in love.

And if I could freeze this moment in time
paste it to my walls with forever  
I would.
I would make an extra copy
just so I could organize it in my filing cabinet
label it: Love. The life in me. Him.

He, is the heart to my heart
the soul to my soul
replacing your birth name with Love
the name my universe knows you a whole lot better as.

I have come to my conclusion,
as your lips clasp the tremors of my heart
one more time.

No poetry
no words
no existence
has the capacity to compare the love that you are to me
the love of mine that you hold.

At my least is this,
so that my undying love will not halt
after this poem signs its period:

You—
are I.
Speechless
impossible.
Piecing together
overwhelmingly
all that is love.

I am crippling away at the thought of not being here next to you without the slight of your smile against mine
And I realize now that I have taken for granted every moment our hands have accidentally touched
And your smile still brightens my world and there is not much light in it at all without you and without you
I think I’m driving down the wrong side of the highway without my headlights on
Without you I think I am a pen that has long ran out of ink and at this point I’m just scratching away at scarred paper.
There will be no time to heal when I don’t want to heal when I’m not with you.
I’m trying to learn how to be my own mortician with all this alone time.

Curling up next to an existence that is teetering on a tight rope
cheek to cheek and chest to chest with a tombstone that wants to show you how to ballroom dance
a blind date with your last breath
intimacy with death if you're brave enough to let it remove your clothes
it shakes you with an awakening jolt.
This is when everything should come to a slow motion slide show
of faces and revelations that have made you who you are
flashing before you like lightning in a rush for work
too blurry and inefficient to satisfy your last moments
like those snowflakes you'll miss savoring on the tip of your tongue
and everything else worth taking your time.
The seat belt tries to save itself tightly between your rib cage
it doesn't hesitate to invite death to your speed of light funeral.
Oxygen has given up at this point
choosing flight over fight
you are one millisecond overdue
there is no time to choke out your last word
or at least think your last thought
when one strong leap of faith
jerks you to the right of the one way road
leaving the 18-wheeled demon behind you
screeching to a spark inducing halt
tires hot for your blood
breathing fire to warm your deathbed
your body stills the world.
Slamming into the front seat
18 years as your airbag
did not hurt as badly
as wishing that lightning quick luck
would have struck out.

A plastic spoon trembles the way something so ashen should
sustaining the weight of a mountain of coffee grains
pointlessly arching a stiff back until its head can grace the cold counter
to evenly distribute the pressure of Everest
or to satisfy itself with the snapping of an artificial spine
like if it couldn’t be a knife it didn’t want to be anything
like she was born hungry and I was born an empty plate.
I contemplate how the smell of dirt and coffee ring in your nostrils the same way
thick and Earthy
like last night
digging up the soil and leaving it to bake beneath our fingernails.
She pours me a cup as if I’m staying for much longer
and despite the milky fog
I gulp the liquid in my mouth and let it boil between my teeth
smiling the whole time.

I try to remember this bed and how her skin blends right in
how coffee stains and blood stains and bleach can all hum in unison here
and the springs laugh every time she tells a joke
and her tank-top trails off her shoulder longingly
like it’s just seen something opalescent skirt around the corner of the room.
She dips her fingers into my hair briefly
asks what time my flight leaves again
asks if I can stay
and I notice how close the ceiling is
with its top hat and wand
to severing my chest in two
so that half of me can walk out
and half of me can stay.

We drag each other to the door
once half passed five is blinking red in our faces
screaming at us from every clock in the room
and how dare I take the time still
to leave lipstick on the side of her face,
in case she forgets,
with the sunrise rushing me out,
but when she lets the door open
and the air welcomes itself in,
chomping at nothing,
I don’t let go of her hand.

She puckers her lips like they sting
from kissing strangers with cuts,
smoke melting out of her pouty-mouthed O’s
the window it escaped from
either cherry at the cheeks
or consuming the air
until it soured
like a bad storm of slate
clouding almost everything,
in hindsight,
before ground coffee black and hazy brake lights type rain  
once my eyes turned into a two-sided mirror,
and I became a new element,
and as much as I wish I could have been quartz,
as much as I wish it was beautiful,

-

It’s been thirty-six hours since I’ve slept,
the little black specks that decorate my life
blue lighting up my face
that is otherwise a broken bulb
at 200 kilowatts  
reminding me that I haven’t learned a **** thing
from laying here for five hours
but I haven’t learned a **** thing
from letting my blood pulse in my ears
and fishing for a breath
either.

When I have bad days,
it’s written all over
the wrinkles in my forehead
the folds around my frowns
all reading in glossy black ink:
“desperate to be dead very soon”
and I try not to think about
the way deer get caught in head lights
with dead expressions
a bulbous streak of white
like a firefly hitting a bull’s eye
like lightening striking God into hearts
and their soft brown irises.

When good days arise out of the comfort of the dust
I try to think of the way tall wheat
hovers over fields like awkward pearlescent angels
or fairy lights
and I love that alignment of the two universes
like it was the birth of the first thing that ever mattered to me
and the cobalt butterflies meet me in the middle,
the center of my stomach,
and I open my hands
and make a little space for you.

My sister howled with the dogs at the end of the street
her teeth looking more canine than theirs with her jaw-hinged open and her gums shining
as she became every house in our neighborhood
fingers woven into a chain link fence around her ankle
as if to create a barrier between the throbbing and the cool stroke of the air.
I couldn’t decide if her ankle looked broken-hearted or dumb,
slumped over like it was on a bus, snoring and dreaming of the stop it had just missed.
The sky slowed down to melt into navy and rosy tie-dye at the same rate as her ankle, although her face got there first
and I swore I heard the sidewalk crack lightening into her bone as soon as she landed,
I brought it up every time someone knocked on the door or dropped a dish until she wasn’t there to bring it up anymore,
but her hands always kept steady when she said she never heard a thing.

In the car ride to the hospital my skull trembled at the high frequency of my sisters screaming.
I crossed my fingers that she would stop, but not too tightly
remembering that ripe carrot snapping into two sound
acutely aware that I had never felt my own bones living in my body until now
how every pothole made them tingle and catch fire
and I sat ghost-still until we got home.    

I am a spread of limp appendages on a cold metal table when I get my first piercing.
I imagined that I looked a lot like my sister when her ankle fell apart
or each time she made sure to draw out her goodbyes as our mother fell apart.
The piercer clamped down on my belly button with an instrument that looked like something you would use to snap stubborn lobster legs
my belly button dangerously residing only a few skin creases away from my rib cage
skin seeming too thin to protect bone when in the process of perspiring,
like paper that has soaked for days.
I hoped that rock won against paper in an alternate universe.
Breathe in he said, like my sister couldn’t that day,
breathe out and it was over and I was closer to understanding what it felt like to have a bone double over
but I knew this wasn’t it
it wasn’t even close.

When my sister died
I tried pulling back my pinky until it collapsed in exhaustion from fighting back,
but I couldn’t finish it off, couldn’t put it out of its misery.
I wanted to know if death or a bone breaking hurt more.
Sometimes my body flushes with the thick shade of shame at the thought
that a shattered pinky could hurt more than the empty spaces,
that I would trade my sister’s dead body for the safety of my own,
that if I hide from broken bones in the soft confines of cushy couches and toddler heights,
then what does broken feel like when it defines more than limbs.

Pain is a little misunderstood
wanting so desperately to be love
disguising itself in death
heart ache
blood shed
within wars
your dining room
your happy place.
It just wants to be noticed somehow
a kiss and a gushing pulse throughout necks and lips and wrists
or the same limbs being reduced to pieces
slowly
behind your dark window curtains
underneath your sheets
at your empty breakfast table.
If pain wasn't human
it would be a ****** bruise
in a constant apology
to new packs of band-aids.

You've given me pieces of you that I have learned to never accept and maybe it’s because they’re sharp or maybe it’s because I can’t keep my hands from shaking long enough to explain it to you.
You've given me a reason to be blind, you dared me to never open my eyes but when I asked why, all I saw was you.
If I shut my lids tight, there you are, fireworks of green and yellow and blue. Only if I open them slow enough. But I am never careful.
Do you feel that constant heaving in your throat too? It must be Gods hands wringing the life out of you.
I don’t want to say I love you anymore, but I love you so much. I can’t handle it and I don’t try to swallow too much all at once.
I just let it spill and drip and burn whoever, I can’t say that I care.
All I can attempt to do about making you leave anymore is to make you stay.
I try to steady my pencil and remember how to write your name over and over again on my notebooks till they bleed with my eyes closed and my fingers inside out.
I want to rip your chest apart and I don’t want you to ask me to return what I found inside.
It’ll all be broken anyway, you won’t want it back.

Alarm clock kicks exhaustion into gut immediately as it sounds
University student jolts into day still dark
20 years later body still too daft to recognize shrill wake-up call as prey rather than predator
US kills Russians in Syria strikes
How to get ready in under ten minutes—life hacks you won’t believe: leave without locking the door, forget to brush your hair, and more
Five reasons breakfast is the most important meal of the day
Trump wants to replace food stamps for impoverished Americans

Snow in the forecast for the next three days
Why is vitamin D important for our bodies?
Sleep deprivation: a student epidemic
I’ve had panic attacks every day for the past three years—here’s how I’ve coped
Accused killer says victim hired him to do it on Craigslist

Want to know how to budget as a college student? Stop buying Starbucks
All she has to do to claim 560-million-dollar lotto is make her name public—she refuses
Signs that your friendship is coming to an end
Lions eat and **** suspected poacher
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These are the victims of the Florida school shooting
Binge-drinking on college campuses and escapism: the dangers of drinking to forget

Declinism: is the world actually getting worse?

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?

Beautiful is something we either never take enough time on, or always take too much.
So *******, with a pearly white smile on my face.
Because today, I will write about something beautiful, and I will remember the way it begins with the letter “you” or “why” or “you are the love of my life.”
And you are, there is no will, there is no way, of denying such solidly factual things.
But lightning never struck twice in the same place where I come from, and if we grew up in the same neighborhood, it might be easier to understand.
Pretending that love is just a thunder storm, and flickering lights are just temporary, is nothing but a permanent thought.
And you are tattooed right on my brain stem.
So if you are going to take me in your right hand and pull me close and let your eyes fall slightly until our lips are doing the same
please think about how many storms have turned into hurricanes
and how many hearts a hurricane can ****.
I know, this was supposed to be beautiful.
But mainly, beautiful things have to be truthful.
And the truth is not always pretty.
But you are breath taking
I think that is why there is still an ocean between us
but I am willing to drown.