It's a place where I lose myself
A palace, a chateau even
It's where my eyes ache
And I become a heathen

It's a leech, it suctions
To my leg in my left pocket
I defeat its functions
When I cease and lock it

It's a place where migraines spawn
Where I am a wandering fawn
Alone and heartbroken
Waiting for a word to be spoken

But there isn't a single one
Nothing uttered from my tongue
Just a device that becomes
My leader and my god

Its function is to reduce
Me and to produce
A captive bone bag

Let me hold you and use you as a tool
With you by my side, I'll take you through school
But that's the least of your functions
Prepositions and conjunctions

You're an adapter that's making me change
The soul that was direct can now engage
As streams of alternating current
Making the seldom the recurrent

You're petite while you get your chores done
You've got a palindrome for a name and a smile that knocks me out
You're the subject of my quick fantasies
Where do you go, muse behind the counter?
When you're not making coffee for customers
Do you harbor refugees and protect them?
Do you vote for fascists in Novembers?
Does your heart break like mine does for American colonies?
Do you ever dream of the people behind other coffee counters?
This account of the muse behind the counter is best left untouched
Untainted
While you're those thousands of centimeters away from me, that's where you'll stay, in dreamland.
I notice your beauty involuntarily
It clamors at me
You spread one message about yourself throughout the world

"I am beautiful"

"I am human"

I hope you believe it too

I have no other option but to agree with your smile
Which demands my surrender and I succumb

Muse behind the counter, do you love yourself?
Do you admire the beauty which is so evident to me right now?
Do you hold up high hopes of the future,
And pray for justice to come?

But the truth is, I do not see you in my fantasies
I see reflections of my desires
I see expressions of expectations
And they happen as involuntarily as my admiration of your beautiful bun
How it reaches taller than you ever could!
How you don't know I'm writing about you right now, as you put another pastry in the oven.

Star that drifts farther and further apart

Where goes thou with my wanting, waning heart?

The many years light takes to get to me

Have worn me down, I can no longer see

The bright brilliance of your shining red light.

Where goes the space which lovers lofty make

When their separation comes swift in sight?

Does it disappear with the time it takes

To build the union that passed far away?

How it passes and how we go astray!

We hold our breaths in want to make it stay

But we must exhale as our lights red-shift

And our stellar bodies begin to drift

Lest we lose our light and our bright array

You've got a white scarf, but it's unreliably so
I could count on it to be white for many years
Until last year, when it didn't quite resemble snow
It changed colors, and brought up many fears
Like will you make it til tomorrow?
and will you still be here?

You used to wear it like it embodied majesty
Like you were a lion and it was your mane
Curling around your neck and screaming of divinity
I know that mane better than I know your name

(buddy)

The leaves will change and your scarf will too
Your head will bump mine, and I'll bump yours too

I'm running from my thoughts and the truth
This might be all for naught and tomorrow you
Will be here still, and I won't have to say goodbye
To your scarf, your mane, our collective life

Maybe your heart will still be kept in mine,
Released only when our heads collide

Your personality is truth
Your personality is you
I try to ask others to be like you but they can't
That plight is wrong and an ineffective chant

Your heart, your personality, your truth
Will be held in my heart regardless
of whether or not tomorrow I see you

And I do see you.
For a while there, you were hiding behind your disease
But now you're able to come out of your shell with ease
And now I can have another collection of moments with you
Your personality
Your truth

And you are truth.
For a year I thought you were gone and that the next
Moment I saw you, you'd be descending into a grave
You would be gone and only accessible through memories
Your truth
Your personality

And you are personality.
It pained me every time I saw you, thinking I wouldn't see
It and how you walked and how you cried for water when
You needed it. I'd trip over you, and trample you, but you
You are truth
You are personality

You're here today, eternally in my heart
You're here tomorrow, and when we are apart
A year down the road, and a plethora more
You'll be in my heart forevermore

The part of me that you bring out will never exist again on this earth
And your white scarf will never be seen by my brown eyes
But I can hold you here
Right here in my heart
And you can pur
And I can contemplate when you'll bump my head again

Here it comes, and it comes like a flood
The day we wash, we've washed with blood

It's covered in red, crimson, and scarlet
It's when I'm a *****, a *******, a harlot

Here it passes, coming ashes to ashes
Chocolates fill up our stashes and stashes

We give them in eros, love, and romance
Then we strut, sway, and dance

Around the questions and inquiries
Of will they be? Won't they be?

In the end it equals zero and naught
Leaves us in pain, disdain, distraught

One day we'll recover, unite, and heal
When the pain isn't hidden and concealed

Come down, calm down, and finally descend
Your high horse is at its exit, its death, its end

Who am I? What am I?
It's been a while since I cried
Am I a brain on top of a body?
Just processor performing code?
Well, who wrote the code?
Who wrote it?
It's been a while since I was I
I'm not a brain, I have one
I've got hardware put there by Someone else
Who am I?
I'm a computer running software I didn’t write
I'm a soul interacting with a body, a brain
Whose health I neglect on a reg

What am I?
I'm a decaying accumulation of skin
And blood and bone and neurons
I got neurons in my heart
And that's a good place to start
The heart is the mouthpiece of the soul
My identity gets ******* in the whole
Idea of my performance
And my influence
Like if I sing a song badly, my soul takes the hit
And if I lead my partner astray, the whole of me is ****
The whole of me is ****

There's holes in me
But who put them there?
I combust in small increments
My skin flies off in perfect circles
They're fragments
My heart, it's hiding behind these explosions
Hiding behind them because it causes them
Because my mouthpiece is expressing my hate
My lack of love for myself
Hate is just a word we put on the shelf
It's like darkness and coldness
Describing something through absence
Darkness; the absence of light
Coldness; the absence of heat
If hate is the absence of love I might
Just be the one who beats me
Who defeats me
Who carries my heart, my brain, the rest of me
Tied around my neck on a string that I pull through
Like my body is in captivity

I'm privileged to honor this body that I didn’t make
I'm greatly gifted a brain to maintain
My heart, my body, my brain
They shouldn't be strangling me
They shouldn't be dragged through the dirt
They should be a part of me

I am a soul
I have a mouthpiece
My heart is my mouthpiece
My brain is my hardware
That rusts and which I expend

God help me love me
And Who I am
And Who You are

God, make it so apparent to me in my falling out
That I am a part of the three-legged stool
To Love You before all else
To Love everyone else
And to Love myself
Help me see You accurately
God help me
God help this American switch culture
I am not a machine that functions at the flip
Of a switch
I am a soul, a CVT, a cable that climbs up and down
Depending on the speed of the wheels
And decelerating is okay
And (not but) accelerating is wonderful

I do not go 60MPH because I flipped a switch
I go 70MPH because I climb
I climb
God help me climb
And to falter well
And to suffer well
Humble me in my faltering suffering