For reasons unknown
to myself, I quest
for the currency of emotion, searching
for pain or euphoria, two faces
of the same coin, a clink-

this worn coin that always
tastes fresh, fed once more
to my hungrily rusted
slot of a mouth, brings me

back to life, spasmodic and laborious
at first, until my joints
grow oiled once more with use. I am

a moneygrubber, searching for something
I never can hoard, this token
that will let me blaze
and step more quickly, gracefully. I am

a liar, telling myself
and others I long for an easy
existence, painless, and that

I am strong. I wonder

why pain and euphoria
make me feel so
uniquely alive.

held by the
throat, some days I want
to breathe, some
days I
don't

Unlike then
we lay (t)here, adjacent
but utterly sepparated.

You laugh
in the rain, feeling guilty
for laughing in
a graveyard. Tiny

white flakes are
falling, swirling, sticking
to your clothes. You

have not seen snow in
years, you won’t see snow
even now, you realize as
you watch and these
colorless specks

don’t melt. You
are not seeing snow, what
you smell is not
by chance. You squint, seeing
the ash settle

on the graveyard: the rows
of crooked markers, green
and overlapping
with age, like a giant’s
rotted teeth; your friends;
and their solemn faces. Maybe

this time it is wood
that they are burning, but you
cannot forget when
human beings were considered no better
than fuel.

I want to
shake you until
your teeth rattle
in your head and scream
at you until
my voice
gives out and hug
you until
you stop
thinking. How dare
you try
to leave.
Don't go.

Today is beautifully dappled
in warm sun. I smile, in
pure reflex, turning my head
to the right, where one of you

usually walks, waiting for you to catch
this glint of light and reflect
it back to me like the most beautiful
of mirrors I
could ever

imagine. Inadvertedly,
I have turned and graced
only a tree with my smile,
which immediately droops,
a flower, wilting,

neglected. I am selfish
about these shows of my happiness, as
only around you
are they not rare. I walk

to those who may hear
the laugh that I will pump
out of the rusty bellows

of my lungs, a layer of
paint over the browning and rotting
carcass that was my day,
white and dingy, and just a bit

off, to those who know to look
closely enough. These

are not those. I miss
your companionship as much
as I long for the girl
you all know, the one

of (un)apologetic lightness
and seething darknesses, the one
who often has no need
for melodramatic poeticness, as

around you life is not always
troublesome enough to catch
on the heartstrings, twanging
and plucking them into devastatingly
shattered, glimmering
song.

Trees
grow out of moss
graves, roots
pushing their way through
bones. We
would all like to think we are
forever, but
trees will grow for so much
longer, through
the shards of our
skeletons, long
after our fragile eternities
are over.

I am studiously blank
(I am trying not to feel)
Around you, I can't think
(you make it hard, and alien)
Of anything at all to say,
(my words are not worth anyone's time)
Not when you will turn
(and maybe you're right in doing so)
Away from me, I can't let myself
(if I leave myself, who is left?)
Let you see any of my feelings
(they are too tender, right now)
Or my pain, not when you would
(maybe I will tell of them later)
Rather be blind.*
(I understand.)

I used to value sleep, but now
I find comfort in soft darkness
and a secret, tentative happiness
in the quiet
of an abandoned house
and a sleeping world.

I used to love the smell of mornings and the crisp coolness
of dawn. But now,
I find myself (in)
staying up late, writing
words you are never allowed to see.
You rise with the sun. The mornings
are yours.
Take them.

I used to try to talk to you, but now
I find relief in my ink flowing
like water
and my words on the page, where they can breathe.
Where I can breathe
because you're not stealing
all of my air.

When I say
"you took the words out
of my mouth," I'm
not saying you said them
before I could. You
took my words straight out
of my mouth, newly
hatched though they were, and
locked them away, you
imposed a ban on my lips
and my pen. I
try and tell you how I feel, but
the words to do so, you
stole, too, and so
I -

You said the way everything
is so broken between us is
kind of pretty, like
a rotting flower. Were we always

a flower? Building up to those few minutes
of beautiful blossom, just waiting
to live out our potential, hoping
that we could miraculously last longer than
our alloted time, knowing

we never would? Were we always fated
to this slow withering
and pulling back, each returning, folding
into themselves, wishing
the clock would run backwards? You said

to dust all things return, and we
are trying to delay
the inevitable. All I know
is that all the tears I have shed
will not regrow this flower.

You wove us into
a safety net, for the sole purpose
of holding you up, when you
could not do
for yourself. I
am not accustomed to following
the instructions of any, not
usually willing to follow
blindly, almost never one
to bend my naturally firm form
for others. For you, I tried. I
tried, but I am not
so strong or flexible
as you seem to think. Be careful,
there are holes
developing in your safety-net.

Looking in
to the gas chambers, I expect
to feel something, anything, but
no, I am traitorously
empty, as is the room.

"Having friends
is so hard."
Suddenly you,
next to me.

Looking around my room
I see the plastic stars
I pasted up so long ago, and remember
a whispered wish, a quiet idea
of how everything
could be ok, back when
that was still
seemingly possible, back before
bitterness tinged my smile, and I learned
to be cautious. Looking around
my room, if you look
closely enough,
young handwriting
on one of the plastic ornaments
which adorn my walls
and ceiling, reads-
'I wish:...
"under the stars."
Be careful
what you wish for.'

I am perfectly fine I
am perfectly fine I am
perfectly fine I am perfectly
fine and I
won't have to convince you
because you won't worry
if I don't leave.

Two people cannot run towards each other blindly
without colliding at some point, maybe breaking
each other just a bit, cracking all the boundaries
we have built for structure and protection in this
confusing world. I understand that you need
a bit of time, to teach yourself to either become
watertight again, or to at least appear so, or maybe
to live with these small vulnerabilities. So hey,
I'm opening my eyes. I'm not running, unseeing, at you
(r core), anymore. Take your time, take some
air, learn the feel of you(r walls) once more. I'm
walking carefully, now, feeling my way around
the painfully invigorating reality I couldn't see
before. When you are ready to see me again, I will walk
to you, and meet you halfway. Until then, I
am just waiting. And that's something I need
to teach myself to do, too. And that's
okay. I know that if I see you again, our eyes will be
clear, and our smiles honest, and our fissures healed, or just maybe
they will have become another essential opening, to let
the other in.

How do I tell you
I find it kind of wonderful that
when I say
"I'm going away for a bit"
you instantly know
it's because you're reading
something I had written.

I find it kind of wonderful
that once in a while, you
let me help you-
even though I'm inept,
and not usually there
when I would most like to hug you.

I find it kind of wonderful
that something you planned,
took the time to plot exactly
has blossomed into friendship
as stunningly unprecedented as you are.

How do I tell you
I find it all kind of wonderful
and I'll say this a lot, but
when I say "it all"
if you read between the lines,
you'll find your name.

I whisper the same reassurances to you, gifted
to me by one(s) who I once thought
would love me for longer than I
could ever count. Softly whispered
in your ear, layed before you
is the greatest gift I could try
and give, and a promise to myself
that I will not fail as he did, I
will be different and not fail as
they did, I will not follow the leader(s)
down the egg-shell fine trail of
broken promises. I will not let myself
let you down.

All my life I have
dabbled in telling people precisely what
it is I need to hear, and tried
to convince myself the words I planted
in their mouths came
to them, unbidden inspiration, sentiment, however
you want to call it. All my life, I have
hated how what I need
is false, lies, trickery, never
true. All my life
I have wrestled with acceptance
of how my needs never coincide
with others' words. All my life, how
was I to know that I could never
prepare, never ready myself for
the shock of you
saying what I needed
to hear, unasked
unprecedented.