I see all of the darkness
All of the light
Your eyes are complex
Deep blues, calming greens and creamy yellows
The base of our Earth's natural colors
Oceans swirl round and round
Collecting all of the colors in the universe

Your eyes twinkle
Full of hope

Expression with sadness
Pain has always been your best inspiration

Endless threads
Stringing together
The "last times" of this year
As "first times"
Slip
Through your fingertips

Three years pass

I had been dreaming
From the first night we met
Wondering
When your lips would melt into mine.
I am glad first kisses
Often lead to more.

Our souls may float on by
And blindly slip  
Through the broken cracks of our futures
But love still remains
In our tingling toes,
The tips of our fingers
Every goose bump
Reminds
You and I
Of every second spent

Reflect
The light of our history
Onto the fresh pavement
In every shining city
Until the polished view of the world
Dissipates
We are left remembering
The colors in each others eyes
And the unmistakable feeling
Which leaves us to wonder
How long it has been..

If I ever get addicted to cigarettes,
it will be because of you, Mike—
the screenwriter and smoker from Miami who I met
amidst the gentle crashing of the calm waves. It’s not
that I needed to smoke to accent the stars,
already so powerful in their summer sky without haze, but
I did need the smoke to accent you, Mike, to
hear about the time you climbed a mountain
where the air was so cold and the wind so fierce
that in your tent, your body created an atmosphere
dialectical in its warmth and surreal rain. When I
cough up phlegm in the morning, I’ll be thinking of you, Mike,
and as that brownish yellow glob slides
down the thin metal drain, I know I’ll think
that if I get addicted to cigarettes
because of you, Mike,
then it won’t be such a bad thing.

And when I opened my eyes, the whole
of the night sky was white-washed—even one hundred
and five miles wasn’t enough to keep the lights
of metropolitan Columbus from blocking out
the stars. In my drunkenness, there lying
by the lakeside, I perceived the three-dimensionality
of space, and at first, I was awestruck by that vision,
but then one of the stars started shooting, as the astronomers
had predicted, and with my mouth still wide open, I realized
that the shooting star was just a moth, and not
the dust of a comet. The three-dimensional vision I’d perceived
an illusion, the picture dissolved, and there I was
again basking in the two-dimensional darkness
that even one hundred and five miles couldn’t make black.

I have a sinking feeling
That our lips smashing together
Was closer to a car crash than romance.

It was beautiful in the moment,
As your heartbeat gave you away,
But the aftermath will be a mess without insurance.

For I don’t have the currency or wit
To pay for my emotional recklessness,
And I fall victim to my own mouth.

My drug addict cousin
didn't show up to our family dinner tonight.
My uncle drove around the block in circles,
I think hoping that she'd gotten lost. But unfortunately
she'd gotten too far lost for the easy resolution
of a trip around the block.
Her name is Hannah. It's a palindrome,
I explained to my mom. It reads the same
front to back as back to front. There's darkness
on either end, and some people call the middle part
light. My uncle is like
the stereotypical cool uncle, always
telling jokes, making puns, but
he didn't even smile tonight, and instead of "knock knock"
it  was "well I guess I see who's there, and they punched
me in the ******* face." It would be better described
as a faint red glow, that middle part. Life. A candle
burning on both ends, palindromically pulsing
from 'H's to 'N's. And my uncle,
left dealing with the puddle of wax.

Isnt it strange to think
We are whale’s heaven,

Because this isn’t heaven.

My seventeen year old friend snorting 4 too many pills isn’t heaven,
His mom kicking him out for trying to leave forever isn’t heaven.

It seems strange for heaven to go against gravity,
And that we are up for something else’s down.

I think we have it all backwards and heaven is in the ocean,
Floating in a weightless paradise void of broken people

Because this isn’t heaven.

I am the queen of ill fitting jeans
of infected piercings,
of thinking that blue is green,
of uneven eyeliner wings.

I am the princess of pleases
of hellos slipped through voice cracks
of drunken apologies
of forgetting to text back.

I am the countess of chaos
of a thunderdome of possible tragedy
of making too many plans
of avoiding gravity.

I am the duke of drunk texts
of fizzy lemonade drinks,
of lingering regret,
of caring too much about what you think.

I am the queen of ill fitting jeans,
of ruling my life with a clumsy grace,
of being a storm without tea,
and I'll reign with a smile on my ******* face.

how the flowing
wind squeals at the
sound of your
concrete smash. fool,
the wind may carry
you on Her back,
but your  infintismal
against the screeching
yelp of Her translucent
lips. that fire smitten
jungle howler will
blow your face off.