My kiss burns like a brisk day in fall
When the leaves all change
And everything is dying
But apparently it’s beautiful
Even when plants are going to sleep
Because the world needs to be different now.
My kiss burns in the way a shelving unit is frustrating
All the instructions are in Japanese
But you took high school Spanish
That should’ve helped
But it didn’t
And neither will the IKEA hotline when you call.
My kiss burns like an empty room
Where there’s just one naked lightbulb
And the light is too harsh
So you squint a bit
The walls are white so there’s not much to see
But there should be.
My kiss burns how empty tuna cans smell
The whole room reeks like it
Your roommate judges you for eating it
But you’re too poor for real food
And cans are fun to open
Though you really need pickles with this.
My kiss burns as badly as middle school photos
When pucca shell necklaces were cool
And baggy t-shirts hid the fact
Yes, you are a girl
Comb your hair
Because this moment will consume your memory.

You’re the closest thing that I can’t see
Dust and smoke and rubble all around.
My mind reeling with things almost forgotten
My head, my head, it sings with delicious pain
Running forwards and backwards in the sunny day.

I am safe on a park bench.
Children play around.
But when I look up, all I see are bodies on the ground
I hear sirens in the air
Coughing fits in the distance
I am alone in the midst of persistence.

Sing to me nightmares of the future
Breathe in me the solitude of the present
There are blisters on my feet, calluses forming proud
And yet I know the past nips at my heels urging,
“Find him! Find him! Take him as your own!”
But I know, I know the moment he’s mine the world loses hold.

Who am I to take this sweetness for myself?
To condemn the world on a brink of war
Because I don’t want to be lonely anymore?
He’s been lonely for so long too, lonely and singing and reminding me of the blues.
I can sing the blues because as he walks past me
He’s the closest thing that I refuse to see.

Your heart is a clock; each beat a tick closer to midnight. But what happens at 12:01 when the world doesn’t stop and the clock’s run out but you keep hearing it beat and beat and beat until there’s just a melody? Just a melody floating in space, no time to guide it, no heart to keep it, no body to dance with it? What happens when you’ve perished but are timeless, half life over and radioactive all at once?

I’m sitting on a shelf with an old expiration date and yet buyers are still looking, still considering. I could go. I could move today, right now, this second, with this breath. But I am not now ripe, yet ancient and withering. Youngest of them all, older than the rest. I am the moment between waves, when the water flees the shore and the sand and shells believe they are dry and safe, but I know, I know, the wave is coming, much stronger, but no one believes me because I am too young to know, too young to have seen the previous waves. And yet I know. Because I am eternal. Midnight passed for me; It’s 12:01 and the stars are still shining and I’m waiting for dawn, even when no one else believes in dawn anymore.

There is a body beyond the door next to me. He listens at the door, he peers from the dark, and he watches and he learns. He is the buyer considering. I am the expired ******* that has no brethren to follow, yet will never mold. I am always viable, a cockroach among mammals. I am different. This does not make me valuable. This makes me dangerous, this makes me another rat in the race, because the paw prints next to me also belong to a different rat, but he is not dangerous. I am dangerous. I am eternity in a cell, screaming with insanity because I know, I know, there is a melody floating in space without any time and I hear beating, beating, beating all around even after the clock has stopped and it’s 12:01 and midnight was supposed to be the end but I found the back cover of the book and kept walking.

Your heart is a clock. Mine is a time bomb.

It’s breaking and it’s lifting
But **** the alcohol helps
When the cold taps your shoulders
And clutches more than yourself
I could stand in darkness for these next few days
But the fear of trying
Oh, it’s gone and passed away.
I know the end, know the struggle
I’ve cried many a night
But the dreams that still wake me
I’ll be **** sure the win this knight is mine.

And I stretch and I breathe and how the mistakes help
With the twisting and turning beyond the letters
Into the soul.
Into the soul I delve.

Let it be dramatic, you’ve thrown bigger things away
In the rotten garbage I thought I’d remain
But I rose to the light, rose to Heaven above
Not because I’m some silver winged dove but because

Because, because, oh friend, I don’t remember where I belong
In the nights with the cold tapping and the street clapping
Oh, I know this worn song.

It used to press me from bitten skin
And torn flesh
And forgotten blood,
…my God, what did I give?

I gave everything I had and still he took more
From the liquid release I REMEMBER.
I KNOW.
I SEE.
I FEEL, my Lord, I feel what’s been stolen

And in the brisk night
Between the twilight
With the wind aloud
Slapping streets proud
I have been wasted
My soul, been tasted.

But tonight I belong to myself and no more
With the sunlight scratching deeply
In a drunken, morning chore.

The light that seeps, sunlight is absent
How this soul glitters in the blurry wasted seconds
And I know, I know, that some poor soul will hear my cry
Instead of pity I’ll find the dreams of another kind
Together we’ll rise in the frosted air of light

As I sing drunken lullabies so sweetly in the rhythmic night.

How pretty the skin on the worthless *******
With hair that caged the essence of strawberries
What a soul that burns electric in the common neon night!
But all he can see are her legs.

I guess those are good too.

Sleep, little girl, where the nerve endings died,
And pain no longer finds you.
In the sun’s thoughtless light your heels are too high
With your chest falling away from your body.
It’s on the edge between dreams and waking
The shore of feeling and thought
That those gentle storms kick and shake you.
Don’t you see it? Sitting wide
A hole with a mouth to swallow you.
It’s the place where the glass kept cutting and cutting,
Where fires burned and the salt ocean burned worse.
Memories forgot about it and they’ll forget you too,
In the place where all nerve endings died,
Where the little girl forgot she cried
And drowned without pain to alarm her.

And what’s the story you want to hear?
Been a long time since you’ve captured blank pages.
Sit close darling, I’ll whisper in your ear
The sad sung spins of repressed, burnt-out ages.
I found the Mocking Man,
Though his charms are better kept in their cages
They’ve all run wild against the master plan
And left you to your worthless weeping.
Sprites will trickle back over the paths they ran
Simply crawl into the memories you’ve forgotten without seeing
So don’t ask me heedless questions yet,
Your memoirs of blood will be written amidst your screaming.
Take the blank, take the bet,
I’ll be surprised if you survive without him, Dear.
It seems your heart is dancing forever in his well-spun net.
Don’t cry to me when you realize he’s all you’ll ever fear.