Asked to be safe, to be calm,
with the suction-pores of each palm.
Lips in twist with skin so sour,
drawing blood to drown a flower.
Pulling back, to study faces,
shaking out of sure embraces,
her heels kicked out
and her face soon followed,
and what she left,
I chewed and swallowed.

She kisses the boys and girls
that pay the most attention.
The boys play with vapor
and her girls play with tension.
I wish I was the only one
that she will decide to touch
but I am who I am
and, in a way, that is too much.

Sawblade-sunflower petals
wrap around an earthy cushion,
and the humidity hangs in the air
as her beige body is crumpled
and I feel too sober, pushing.

Baby yellow falls apart,
in her hair the flower starts
to trickle onto sheet and pillow,
decorating the absences
that define how hollow
she and I have felt before --
******* like an endangered species
on the killing floor, I whisper once,
I whisper sweet, "Don't you wish
that we didn't meet?"

She kisses the boys and girls
that give the most attention.
I played with vapor
and she played with tension.

The ***** ate into rocky soil,
pushing through clots of dirt.
It reminded me of
the girl I love
from two-thousand fifteen
and how she
struggled to be clean,
because of a needle eating skin
burrowing towards vein,
against what was within.

My fingers pushed on it's ribcage
-- I never found out it's *** --
only forcing brief breathes
and gasps flowing from
my grasp, knowing that
I can't save her and that
I can't save him.

Patches of white were
framed around squid-ink clash;
fleas fleeing from
an ever-slow dying of heat,
hopping onto me,
a host with a heartbeat.

She never had a name
and all I can call him is 'it'.
It's paws fluttered like
a desperation dash across
the invisible wall of life,
a borderline between
eternal logos and
dimming pathos.

Whiskers brushed against the
plastic, grocery store bag,
destined for celery,
destined for dead cat.

And as the shovel
drank the soil,
And as the bag fell
into nothing --
Heaven or Hell --
I feel so tainted
for a life so fleeting,
for a love so wasted,
for everything leaving.

For everyone leaving.

He protects his phone
but not his ***.
Sitting on a cherry
withered-wood,
it's good to remember
that in December,
he waited for this
tired world, to pass
him by, for his mother
to 'please come home.'

Casper, undercut with curls on top,
plays a greyed banjo while wearing
the green-chestnut flannel his dad
wore before he disappeared into
vermilion sky, only remembered
with lullabies from a hopeful mom
that smelled like Pall-Malls and
factory-soaked-heartbreak.

White, chiseled with skeleton intention,
he sips from within himself,
hoping to harness new direction.

kinda messed up
kinda like
all the other ones
but you know
in it's own way
supposedly the worst way
but that could be
simple hyperbole.