The men I date
The places I live
a song I humm
don't know the lyrics to
I forgot where I heard it

You say give it up and come to me
I say yes but I can't leave

Is it my pride
Is it because you're too close to a young child's daydream

All you see
Is pretty
And good enough for me

I need a place to hide
And that isn't in these mottos that were forced on me

Friends and colleagues saying the same **** thing

There will always be you and me
In a sound
In a smell
In a new woman to pull the trigger

You're a liar,
You can't hate me

I hear the faucet dripping and the mechanics of the blue collar work trucks
Intervals of silence and speeding spinning tires and old brake pads

***** and worn slip resistant boots
Soot and divided revisions
Under eye circles unaware of the cycle
Botched circadian rhythms

Allegorical authority in my observations of worn hands and steel temperaments

Toast it with a beer can at 8am and proclaim I am the one who is teetering towards them
But we are them
The grown ups in the grind
We ******* grew up my friend and time applies to you and me
Are you who you thought you would be?
You are the complacent adult
The enemy of dreams

Secrets we share
Because we like the Cohen brothers
Love Torchys tacos
Because people gossip but don't care

When your mom dies I'll help you clean her house
I'll drop everything and come down to be with you

I'd leave  my life now but then I'd have no stories to tell you

Remember in the summer when we would steal swims in random apartment complex pools

Texas sunsets
Bright and fading
Just like you and me

We had to skip town again

All these courses for you in  grad school
All these cities for me to rethink

Sometimes I'm fatigued and my mind and heart can't settle on a single person or thing

Palpable memories
Remember getting high and listening to fugazi
Just like you and me

There better be an ashtray at the end of this rainbow
The record is spinning static
       Room key has your name left with it
The bayou chattering like the immigrants tray full of ***** wine glasses

Nobody is coming for you
Turn out the lights

I warned you
Even crying babies have to say goodnight


The hallway lights start to flicker
My feet no longer touch the ground
I wander out into the empty twilight cooridors where lowly Cajun girls were found

Nobody is coming for you
The water  splashes room numbers throughout the hallway
I can't remember which floor I'll find you
My number is up anyway

Run to catch the train
Porous metal sound grinding
Needle drops

The strings creep
tunnel wind sweeps like the first note of the
symphony

Sonic upheaval
Your subway trash
Spending all this cash
Submersible weasel

I'm out of breath
My cheeks are red
I look like I'm 25
You're looking at my phone
Convinced I lied

My bag is checked
I'm on the next plane
I say I'll be back
But what if I never see you again

How angry would you be
How hard did you fall
Racing through the turn stiles
Gotta make last call

I dropped my gloves in the pub
All the mementos you keep in your closet in a corner on the floor

All this upheaval
Your memorabilia
People are just people
You collect them like a hamster like there will never be more

Darling
Caress my burdens
Watch me float away like the smoke from the cigarette you just bummed from the trumpet player

My wit will dissolve with the tidal wave of dopamine

Your friends laugh at my jokes
Later tonight you'll see another side of me

I'm really tired
And your eyes are cloudy

I'm apprehensive  because you're being so nice to me

I really loved the picture in front of the tree
I really loved how you got down on one knee

My smile closes like a heavy velvet curtain

My eyes are the ticket stubs of something certain

Darling
Help me manage my burdens

Speak easy to me
Set me up at Sutton's
Bar tender's chipping ice and watching the foam rise to the top is something

Stand close to me
You always tell me I'm pretty

Let's head to a diner
I've had too much to drink and I'm being ******

I've had this cough for weeks
I've had this smile since we met

My body has been run ragged
And my heart is outside of my chest

And I always have secrets
And I always have my romantic greed

I don't care about money that's why I haven't got any, but I need love that bleeds

I take you down
Recommended daily dose

The controversy stands
Friends and family say nothing now
I avoid their eyes because all I see is they know


I've been unhappy now for years but didn't give up hope that if you're loyal even after massive **** ups together as a couple you can grow

They just don't tell you that you could grow into anything and not what you hope

I've been on the road awhile
Hardly see you these days

Even when I was around I barely saw you after I moved out

Silly me, not much has changed

I didn't mean to, but I met a guy

He is everything you use to be to me but better and incredibly kind

He said he wants to marry me and I want that too

But how am I going to tell you

You're self absorbed
I worry about you

I think you thought I would never really  leave

How am I going to tell you
That I'll always love you

But I'm no longer your Eve

I had gotten use to being lonely
He was like I god I couldn't feel or see

Lost between the lines of doctrines never meant to be understood but only for people to pretend to read

I felt my heart get heavy like a water balloon

Get set
Get ready

I'll be lighter than your empty hands soon


He said marry me

I smiled skeptically

He ran down the staircase
He moved me across states

We woke up early in the morning
He promised me all of himself and all the love we would make

You've got a palpable penchant  for being a legend
And guilt will start planning my  grave
Rock n roll
An article to fit the cover and first page
          
          You want a ****** poster already

 Battered comedians wearing stripper glitter,
marching to an imagined white powder      cathedral
  
You wanted the life
You wanted fame for a wife

A seedy hotel managed by mold and off brand gelatin
Shut the **** up
Instability is what the limelight is selling
Shut the **** up and save me

Behind social media
The secrets no one knows

The love that's shared by the hands that daddy issues uphold

The wreck-less sacrifices of greedy needs
Please hide our endless affection from a callous coliseum consumed public and save me

I'm glad that I woke up this morning
But I'm tired of feeling alone
Like I'm a monster who isn't worthy of having her king or her throne
I'm glad I have a sense of humor and people love my smile
Even though I feel worthy I haven't been in your eyes for awhile

Do you really think it gives me joy to feel
Like an old toy you just keep around

Did you really think that you could keep staying out all night and  that I would just sit around

There was a time that I needed you
Although I may still
I want more than this
More than asking you to feel a way you don't or can't
It gives me the chills

If you think I'm an evil ***** there's no point but i still try and explain
I know you've been in pain but you aren't the only one

You aren't dismissed
I know you tried but it's too late

I was wrong
I'm sorry,
but I also have a choice
and I can't be your  entertainment while you wander the streets with others

No I prefer to be alone

You aren't who you thought you were
It's got nothing to do with being tired

You aren't who you thought you were
It does t matter that you were fired

What's your job if it isn't your passion
What's your passion if it isn't a religion that you've succumbed to
A ritual cloaked in the guise of a miracle to  hide yourself from you

So tell me, between the ****** whispers, who the **** are you?

I'm away a lot more than I am home and when I'm home the happiness sets with the sun the first day I'm back

I know my life in my hometown is over
I don't have new memories to make because too much has already happened here

You call me a run away
One foot out the door from the beginning


You come off derogatory
I'm getting tired of you comparing me to my dad
He isn't that bad

I'm angry you haven't asked me to marry you, but most of  my actions show that Im bored and done with wanting that existence
I attempted it
I ******* failed  
I'm not going to wait to make you dinner like I did
That's ******* over
Besides, who gives a ring to a run away?

But I do miss you
I call everyday

We talk about how when we are together we are happy and relaxed

But I can only stand that relaxation for a day or two
I stomach the familiarity then Im ready to leave town again

Yet, You are my anchor
I come to you when I need to stop what I'm doing

I need your love to feel like me

I don't want this,
I wish I could cut myself free,
but I am the ship and you are attached to me

Euphoric depression

I'm lying naked in the bed and my roommates aren't home to see what they think I do when they are gone

Floating in my head
Tip toeing through my typical and boring concerns like most American women

But there is a place I can go for just a moment

And what happens in my  brain gives me the chemical energy to get up and mime my thoughts in public

Quiet black and white parade of my scars
Disappears between my second beer and the noise of excitement  in the bar

How much you loved garlic salt on your pizza
$5.00 thin crust from the frozen aisle was pushing luxury.
Reliable Red Baron $3.33

You started to clean after I moved in and began to organize
I remember all the dust collecting on your VHS collection. Never mind it was ******* 2008.

your white and black cat, Flava flav would scratch at the bedroom door every morning

Who gives a **** about these memories except you and me...

Edit

Treason

Extra hands on my body

Confusion manipulating my character

Midnight arguments

The dichotomy of loaded words

And smoking ****** sweetness

Creativity scattered like cheap confetti
On ***** gas station asphalt

I was your prosecutor

Between painfully vulnerable kisses and abandonment issues

Stubborn lonely people with delusional detours for ambitions

I was the exotic poet to your Tom Waits

the **** alternating between affection and suitcase packing

Cindy Lauper's video and my impressionable little girl mind

23 years later lost in its transcendence

You are not my mirror

You are not my soul mate

You are just this one guy who cares about me

I make inappropriate jokes

You make me laugh

You make me cry and I think of my father

I lie just like my mother

Between the fights

Stained sheets
You shout
Private expressions
Your perfect mouth
Inside the models of ****** parents we replace in a new generation and ***** about

I need you

I cared more about being cheating on than examining my love

That was yesterday

Today is just a minute difference on a clock

That clock has changed more than me

I look the same

I run the same from pretty boys
From hasty thieves

Run in circles around them making myself dizzy

5 years later
One brilliant  man
Patient
Mending chain link fences
I'm a lost *****
But my love
even on the brink of the risky newness of unknown  in love
**** over the good looking ones
I stop and go home and lay down on your chest
I go home to Cumm and go home to rest

Bent on a wave
Lives to claim
From my rich tongue soars
Confirmations I want to score
A scene
A day
Sturdy hand shakes
My head is swimming and I'm able to float only on horizons
Though down beneath
Water shut off valve to the sink
Sounds of water whipping  against my little girl frame and life jacket
My fathers yells
I grab the rope
Wicked laugh to echo sound scopes
I loved you as deep as the ocean goes and like a layman at the beach I will never know the ocean floor

He walks towards me with salamander eyes
Approaching my reptilian thighs

Lofty aspirations set aside
People have many plans that don't coincide

Throw away

Go away

Masochistic to lay one's faith in  an animalistic embrace

Petty sacrifice

I need to sleep
I refuse to weep
my bed  blindly hugs my shape tonight.

baseline
on my mind
heavy steps
heaving dust

trying to write the track that I dreamed I would when I grew up

disembodied screams of friends
from playmates to first dates
exes prey and pretend

My manifest,
Yeah, baby
I confess,
granted, I think of you less and don't look for you anymore

You, sunk to the floor of the sea
Your lovely presence sublimated by me

Yet, this notion
the unidentified urge we share like waves washed onto the beach from the  bottom of the ocean

Dumpster diving on canal with your Louie knock offs
Headed uptown where the boys get their rocks
Off a man who is lean and his pants look like sinking paper mâché

On to the golf course
He hides her phone call
A behavior called " laughing off chow mein"

She's south of the torso and belt buckle intersection when the words sound like sirens

Purpose poached in moments of fighting
With  every argument your vocabulary hunches over a little more and I can clearly see in your eyes you sense you are dying...
"Sadness, My love? "
             You are only 22,
             A small jump to his 27.
             Belly up, but find  a new *****.

I am a knock on your door

You open up and I sneak in

Ill put your life on the market

Snarky teenagers to target a holiday demographic before fully developed  concepts begin

Your backpack and notepads house your sins
A man that's tall and gets caught in the calls of women to distract from the purpose  of ink pens

You're too ***** to be great

A ****** is a dead end

And a vortex for survivals' fate

Explorations of vanities' intellectual alternative gate

Finger to lips
Icing to lick
Smiles come with drips

Heavy words can be syrup or iron ores
Either way they are anchors

Never mind creed
Love can feel like a chore

I got my hang ups
I got my fists
Hanging on to phrases that chap my lips
And destroy my finger tips


People should point at something
Like they are certain

I thought I would by now have to rely on one person
Only human nature to count on
Like a ******* I want my cake too
No icing left
I need something new

Walk under the trees,
Look up to see me

Clouds are majestic eye to eye,
But it feels better to stand tall

Look at the lines in your palms,
There is no adrenaline rush if you don't fall

I've got a dream to believe
Not treble clefts inked sleeves

Though I am someone you want to appease
You don't have dirt on your knees

Though I am everyone and everything
Alter egos exist

Choose me or find your name on my
On our
No, on  his
On Lucifer's list

Got up to turn the pages
Let up so I can burn my wages

I spend time like Its money and I am a Forbes CEO

Just when I think I can supersede myself the confusion begins to glow like an expected sunset on the drive home

I smile at an elderly woman leaving a tacky hotel wedding in a wheelchair, cheap dress draped with an oversized man's coat

It's cold in Philly
And the sharp bending wind whips my soul

Like a favorite eerie  movie I inevitably watch again we fight on the phone and you say it's everything that I've done

I sit down with my coffee and smoke a cigarette

I don't gamble with numbers - but the chances I get

Far away in a jet soon to tel aviv
banks' charge conversion rates for currency

the door opens and closes
the places my heart goes when I remember you have to say yes before you can learn to say no

Your reassuring hands
Hands of almost strangers
Your rapid steps
Decided problem solving in the midst of task loading
No barriers except my new friends protecting me like I was in every family photo
I didn't even know you were alive and had names six weeks ago
I will not be able to explain to my own family or loved ones, much less, to anyone
how you a Jewish red head,
a southern brunette,
and a Chinese  girl have treated me like I was your own blood after knowing me for a month.
This isn't a poem
This is just one person absorbing my recent experience
They said that  we would be bonded for life
I know they are right
We are the lucky ones

My sentences are forming on the remaining rusting hinges of over exersion
Awake - if my open eyes  and rote memory skills constitute my presence than I was with you guys for the last 14 hours

Please go now

Too many people in my room

Conversations strangling the beauty of a human voice

No wonder we like a talented vocalist so much

One person discovering the pinnacle of their unique interpretation of sound with emotion

Such a delicate process to find the balance that other people can escape into
Tonight there is nowhere to escape to


Instruments and a quiet place I can write- a rich palette to draw from -
interpret -
I really do hope this something I believe in is worthy
- I'm not sure I will ever be a mother but I have projects manifesting inside me-
their slow birth and evolution is fulfilling
Although ...
tomorrow.... I won't remember writing this, but ill sweat the subliminal loneliness that comes with a practical and self sufficient artist's patience.
Surly and divided
decidedly sweet,
you'll see the smiling me rush through the hallways
Are you spinning yourself in the echoes of many girls with  high heels on?

Cross over the current
First sunshine is sweet
Melting the perimeters of the week day's bleak-
Unforeseen boredom
King pin of the worse men
Chess pieces go flying off the overturned board
You are the headless horseman
You the controlled one
Parodoxically manipulating the reigns

Sunshine is gruesome heat
Make it to the shoreline and scrutinize your bludgeoned feet
Condemned carvings of ivory pieces waiting on you to cheat

Hotel room a/c fans faded red curtains
Lamp shade mutes the generic glow
Side stepped your way into something so certain
A dance no one  means to learn
Yet,  everybody knows

Yeah, you used to want something and you lost it in your lover's eyes
Fatal to acquiesce
No you can't acquire the original wonder you gifted him the year he said good- bye

You were too young to fathom
Now the monopoly houses in the suburbs look like geriatric wards

Easy blueprints to dispise
Cheap siding to realize

You dream of nothing
Your thoughts aren't your own

I promise that I won't wait
There is nothing I would change
The parts of me that I don't know
City to city
Continents and languages
One  woman alone
I promise you nothing

P.s. you can have my bones

I'm 26

Just the ******* children of economic hitmen

Will we have the strength not to give in

Now that we are apart

My blood
My oldest friend
Brother I've missed those songs for too long Again

Ill watch you walk

I'm 31

I don't know you now

Your disposition is stagnant
you don't inspire me

You chose the road

I stayed in one town to reevaluate my perspective  and create new seasons inside of me

Another year gone

We hardly talk

My suitcase packed

Ill be in Zurich soon

But first ill look to you in the bay

No matter what you say

You are the other half of the moon

Meet me in the city.


Ethiopian food on Haight.

Amoeba records

Your finger tips feathered from the cold.

Hurry up.

We are getting old.

Sleepy hollow eyes
Don't tell lies

Don't leave your needles in the toilet

Lifeless empty seat across from me
Starvation is the only meal an addict can stomach

Just around the whitewashed suburban corner
Your body heavy on the living room floor

Your perceptions bleeding
between societies' imposed guidelines to being
and the worlds they have  never seen before

You are the threat
Set against
my southern heart

Every time I think I'm ready to settle down
A new distraction comes along
I am ****** forlorn and lost


The girl who wears lipstick and is witty
You only care I'm pretty
The melodic memory of my mischievous laughter echoing in your chest.

I don't care about money
I care if you're funny
Please hold me close when I am naked and need to rest

True, I like to wander,
but I am my father's daughter

I  can't fill my journals if I don't live my life
The rewritten and worn
The sentimental and scorned
The possessive poem's wife

Two voracious insane/timeless innocence

entitled clarity/ You promise deliverance

You lean across the door/I won't back down from this war

Underneath the guise of a handsome man looking to score/the name of a boy who was buried by his father's love of ******

You are really good at this.

I know you're right.

I belong in your arms if even for a moment.

Your body making demands of my smaller, but capable frame.

Don't pressure me.

I am better at this game.

Even in never never land freedom is divided.
I am the trophy of a boyish man.
Two storms collided.

As I fall lightly through the sky to the earth,
You kiss me violently and like a ghost and disappear into the universe.