39.
Sometimes i believe in a purpose
Perhaps, i just want to be important
Not for eternity,
just for a single moment
As the broken sleep,
Death forgot to thank me when I set her free.
Come empty and you won't need anything,
Believe in your own blood until your heart stops beating,
And then you too will be set free.
Tear down your towers and build bridges,
Your god is a fraud if you wrote the mission.
And the devil will die when he has no witness,
I 'm not broken, I am nothing.
I'm the vessel, not the poison.

And I didn't want to lose you, But sometimes I forget
When my prayers feel like they're just cigarettes.
They'll take the headache away, then turn to ash,
These decisions became bad additions to the equation
To subtract the idea between two people
Only to find the solution was inexplicable depression,
Not progression
But they bring me back to life every time I find a new light,
But then they bring up my past,
And I fall further and further, and further,
Until I'm afraid to get back up because
I don't want to fall again.
But if there's one thing I know about myself,
It's that I don't know anything about myself.

And my hands are not clean, maybe they never will be,
But they can still carry you home when you're ready to sleep.
And the only reason the devil's alive in you and me
Is because we disrupted him when he tried to fall asleep.

21.
You in the living room. You on a sunny afternoon. A breeze…seen when the curtains move. You by the window with both eyes fixated out. Blowing smoke out from your mouth. A cigarette placed between your lips. Moving elegantly through space. Striding softly, to the edge of the bed. Where I sit, you placed your body next to me. Mesmerized, careful not to let my words slip. Then you sit and you read and you breath. Slowly you cant help but fall asleep, and I cant help but watch you carefully. From the window where the sunlight frames your silhouette. I think of lighting fireworks, I think of pirouettes..I idly write down observations on the scene. Like do the blueprints name the rooms alone? Do we name them on our own?..You with a book propped on your knees. A breeze…seen in your coffee steam. In a seat right in front of you. “Is this science or is this chemistry?” I ask myself, “how do you do these things to me”. Thinking back to rules of poetry. It’s fourteen lines, the last two rhyme, what does pentameter mean? You in the bed-room legs bent at forty-five degrees. I write AB… AB…AB…AB.. trying to find your rhyme scheme. Hard not to think that about how. All of this imagery, now, could all just be a dream. Or reality, or perhaps something slightly in between. I look for objects on the desk with which to sculpt your image best. What would I name this could I paint it “Woman (reading)?” “Girl (at rest)?”. You live like lightning, yet you move like thunder. I remember it so well. Thinking about last summer. Like photos in an album. So we could look back and we could talk about them. How we started out as a mystery. Yet we were perfect symmetry. Confined to a party scene. July 4th in the backyard. Our emotions we kept a secrecy. Exchanging numbers between the subtle glances. They’ve written books about things like us. Things like summer romances. Things like the dangers. That accompany the thought of two neighbors. And you living all alone. With your apartment you called home. And a road of stairs leading up there. Day after day I’d ascend them. Then followed a set of carefully choreographed knocks. And how they made the chains on that door of yours unlock. I remember how I would laugh. At how long it took sometimes. I guess I have a problem. When it comes to things about the mind. Constantly thinking about things I shouldn’t. Like empathy, happy moments of our past, even death from time to time. You with your body laid carefully in my bed. Placed hip to hip. Morning was slowly coming in, our lips quivered after every spark after every little kiss. And although we were sober, there was a sort of harmony. What has come over me? That fire in your eyes. It Said “I felt electricity surging through my body”. I look for a reason. Something to explain the sparks. Something to give this feeling meaning. But found nothing. It wasn’t lightning when we pressed our lips, it was thunderstorms. But what explains the hums made when our heart skips? Then back to the present, time after time. Day after day. History is said to repeat itself, how the sparks never went away. Summer came as quickly as it departed.  I still remember watching you shifting your weight, turning the page, I can see it all there. A role in name alone. And I pause where I am for a second when I hear your name. Sometimes I think I see your face in improbable places. Do those moments replay for you? I mean do you sometimes feel the same? When I’m suddenly there and then won’t go away. When you’re sitting in the bedroom reading for the afternoon. When your laying softly on the pillow, dreaming about whatever it is you do.  Do you put your book down look and try to find me there? Sometimes I think of all rooms we have visited. How the spaces. In the memories you make change the room from just blueprints. To the place where you live. When we leave there. When we go from a home. You take all that you own but the memories echo. Yes, they echo. On hardwood floor in the living room. Tore the carpet the scratches below that we found. And the wine stain I accidently spilled once on the couch. How we got drunk and decided we’d still try to move it around. And that time we drank tequila for a night, how we laughed with every moment we stood up but kept on falling down. And I can’t tell what the difference is between the memories and the risk, the ones that we made and the ones that we didn’t take. They’ll still be missed, Still a joy, still a cool wind passes over me. Somewhat somberly, the imagery of seasons changing rewind and replay. Through every season you were still a part of me. I was happy that it was your image that haunted my sleep. They all conjure images. Vivid and descriptive.  Where you sit and you smoke in the sunlight aware that I watch but never for too long. And I don’t feel alone. Safe forever in an echo. This feeling will never go. Safe for the hums in the walls. We don’t feel alone now. Our hearts will live safe in the echo. This feeling will never go.

31.  
Funny what you think of after a collapse. While lying in the dirt the first thing that comes back is never quite what you’d have guessed.  Or envisioned. Nor assessed the second time around I digress. And they play back like a movie reel. Funny how things come harder the second time around. Were reliving memories, like watching movies with no sound. And if you could have, you probably would’ve. Said you’d check if all your limbs were intact still and then try to get out. But whats the point in running away? Was there a point to be made? Did I even make it? Now that I mention it. I believe ive forgotten to regret and repress it. And if the spaces are narrow. And all the walls begin to look the same again. Is there really a place far enough? Are there visions in the pavement, a beautiful arrangement, and sophisticated places. Where you could dwell on the past. But still remember why you hate it. This is wild imagination. Its purely entertainment im painting in color, but im running out of room. In fact, running out of time even while im just standing in place. Its like im drowning in the water but im standing on concrete. It’s the land beneath my feet.  Am I losing my mind? The equivalent to falling bricks. When you’ve got wings but theve been clipped. And they think you’ve got it all figured out. You know what youre doing now don’t you? You seem happier now don’t you? Why don’t you tell us your secret. Why don’t you voice your opinion. As if there was any secret at all to be kept, I digress this is the mess within my head ive tried to keep buried and or left for dead again. And this quiet silence is piercing. The silence is violent, how it drags you down with frigid grips at the ankles. Whispering “come home again”, “weve missed you for some time”. But you ran away for a reason, so why the hell would I ever come back? And then the flashbacks come, breaking in unannounced. The things ive kept forgotten for so long. The faces. The people whos names became blank spaces in my head.  I remember once they came in said, “You think this is bad? You don’t know the half.” And they laughed. It’s funny what things come back. The first things you see. How they sort of smiled like it’s only a joke but they were lying. There was something else inside of his eyes. All those secrets people tell to little children. Are warnings that they give them. Like, “Look, I’m unhappy. Please don’t make the same mistake as me.”. Because I guess im only a joke. And my life is just one big comedy. But nobodys watching. And ive stopped laughing along to the track. Because I gave up on everything. So why do they constantly visit me? Do you know what its like? To give up on love, well it hurts,to give up on everyone you used to trust the most. There are ghosts, and there demons, and they all live within the walls. In every room you ever visited. In every crack and fracture in lonely halls. So they speak out in volumes. And you try not to listen. So they speak up a little louder, from a hum to a whisper. And its sinister almost inaudible, yet it resonates so loud. It becomes so much it almost perforates your eardrums. Why are those old worn out jokes on married life told at toasts at receptions still? How does it never occur how easily people are burned? And how easily people are afraid to trust or want or feel or want to trust to feel? Speak slow, the echoes in the shadows know. They hear you in your sleep. And the way you shift positions in your dreams, the darkness peaks in through the windows as the light dismisses itself. Almost polite, almost embarrassed. Everyone knows were afraid. Afraid to feel the same pain we discovered a few years back and some days. So we want nothing to do with you. I was happy for once, I was doing just fine. My timeline was becoming redefined, and I could stand on my own without anyone’s help. Especially not the people who pushed you off the edge in the first place. Those who left you to drown in yourself. The very same people who tied your ankles to cinderblocks. The very same who promised you safer ground. And then the earth quickly broke away. Why they then offered you their hand in safety. You’re a contradiction, a manipulation. A fabricated idea of what it meant to have someone. I gave you trust. I gave you visitation rights. So if you believe this is about you, then perhaps the shoe fits. Funny what you think of in the wreckage, lying there in the dirt and the dust and the glass how you’re suddenly somewhere, in the desert, in the nighttime, and it’s getting close to something like Christmas. Something warm and familiar. An open ended idea of literature written about a time where things felt, and smelt much similar rather than simpler. Glance back, I remember how irresponsible id been. How pathetic I was to blame everything on people instead of myself. I was sadistic, and intolerable. Improbable and pathological with the things I spoke. How did I ever manage to expect to keep anyone around? When all I did was keep my mind occupied. Not occupied with anything but shallow thoughts of insecurity. When that summer ended we came back I was jobless still. I guess in retrospect I should’ve sensed decay. Then that day, how you said, “I just don’t know” and I promised. We’d rearrange things to fix the mess I’d made here in some way. And that goes in the same cycle. And that goes in the same way I lost everyone I had. But I guess in the end we just moved furniture around. Don’t you get it, your demons never left. The demons in your head never moved out. They simply moved the furniture around. But I guess in the end it sort of feels like every day it’s harder to stay happy where you are. There are all these ways to look through the fence into your neighbor’s yard.  Why even risk it? It’s safer to stay distant. When it’s so hard now to just be content. Because there’s always something else. Now I’m proposing my own toast, composing my own jokes for those times I stayed afraid in bed. But never again. Noone will ever have control over me. No one should ever be that deserving or ever so worthy. And maybe I’m miserable, but I’d rather run forever in the opposite direction, than suffer your jokes again. This was just a well composed reminder, to never leave the doors open for old friends