Right in the center
Between my brows
The third ajna eye
Calls out to the crowd
Consciously choosing
Who to meet
Consciously moving
The world ‘neath my feet
Consistently bruising
Ego’s covering,
Shell so battered
It’s nearly shattered.
Hovering like those
Sacred birds
Iridescent wings
In my dreams
Answering to nature’s
Haunting calls
Answering to future
And destiny’s pulls.

We stop our faithful car
Halfway between both
National parks
Because the scenery
Was too gorgeous
To quickly forget.
We sit down near a cow fence
And you pick me a flower
And place it in my hair,
And I can tell everything
With you is about the scenery,
The message, the emotion.
You’re an artist that never
Turns away from the canvas.
You never turn off the appreciation,
The evaluating, the creating,
And I want to kiss your
Tired eyes,
The ones that must dream
Exhausting things
All night and day,
And now there are tears in my eyes
And they sting
And it’s because I realize
How draining it must be
To be so beautiful.
You make me realize
How similar we are,
I see myself in you.
Everything to me is poetry.
All the double meaning
And metaphor
Gives me context, gives me life,
Helps me make connections.
It drives me absolutely insane,
Being an artist at heart,
And then in a twist of fate,
That turns out to be
Exactly what you want.
Now we’re weeping
On the side of the road
Somewhere in Idaho,
And you love me,
And I know it,
And it hits me hard for the first time,
And I’m an artist
So I want to feel it all.
And we talk about love
And our fears about death,
How we’ll always be artists -
Me, the mad one, and you,
The sad one, and we laugh,
With tears of every emotion,
And we want to drink them up,
And it’s like time doesn’t exist
On this abandoned highway road
With the unforgettable view,
The unforgettable me,
And the unforgettable you.

I don’t want to start this poem out with uncertainty,
But it’s instinctive, you see, and I’m not sure why I’m here.
You ever feel like that?
Returning to the same places, the same people,
Half of them passively accepted, not chosen.
That’s what I feel sometimes when I traverse across a page
With a cursor and impulsive fingers racing across the keyboard.
I’m just a traveler and yeah, I guess there’s glimpses of destinations,
But I don’t have a map.
All I have are my past footsteps.
Collecting pages in the breeze, greedily grasping.
Yeah, there’s no getting off this ship.
This is a place I must return to,
Like a mother’s grave.
I tread lightly, with dignity, knowing there’s purpose
In me arriving and visiting, but sometimes not finding the words to say,
And my throat dries up like a bird’s nest.
At least my fingers are active, they dance.
I come to visit this sacred place, so that when I do visit
The inevitable gravesite with daisies in hand,
I can leave a piece of me that’s a little more permanent,
A little more solidified, love in a glass bottle.
I might not get off this ship, I might very well be stuck in that bottle.
A treasure tossed in the rolling ocean,
Lost in a sea of oblivion.
The waves continue on in their cosmic, rhythmic dance,
Until they, too, forget their purpose.
Until that day, they dance.
Like the planets in their certain spirals.
The world will dance, meaningless, absurd,
Unquestioningly.
Dance how you see fit.

I don’t want to write
Like anyone else.
I want to fit into my words
Like my fingers fit
Interlaced through his,
Made for each other
By some strange design,
Some string of code,
Some higher power,
Something, somewhere,
I cannot control
And I cannot see
And I do not think about,
It just fits and it fits right.

We stitched a patch together
On my flesh in the shape
Of a cartoon heart.
I would have your heart,
But only a caricature of it.

I’d approach you the first year
As much as you’d approach me.
In that year, you’d stitch me more,
Kissing and caressing me with your
Passionate gift of language.
I asked you to make my stitches
Tighter and more numerous
With your luminous promise of love.

The second year went on like the first.
Less dialogue acquainted me with
Thinking of you like clockwork, like records,
Your sickly, gangrene patch
With familiar stitches from your own hands
Attached to the flesh on my arm,
Reminding me you were there.

On the third year, I drove through the seasons
On a tank of memories I called love.
I sought to find you but my tank was empty,
I walked and took a train, then walked some more,
Towards your hopeless direction,
Only to fall upon my face and become a bust,
Like a watermelon hitting cement.

As time ticked on, I’d say words here and there,
As yours grew fewer and fewer.
I grew used to your ghosts,
Gave them all names.
It’s only just now that I realize what’s been done.
It’s hard for me to come down and sit in this
Cold room with cold ghosts.

It’s only from this moment
That I’ve begun unraveling
All these threads.
I’m not sure what my skin
Looks like underneath.
I undo what’s been fastened to me
Day by day and wince in pain.
So this is what it’s like to breathe.

Caressing the void
With honeyed fingertips
So that when it
Swallows me whole
It does so gently.