The butcher would be a troll,

but there was no bridge

for the girl to cross

in her white dress

sewn by the seamstress

married to the writer

in the grand, white house

built by the builder

married to the girl

who sleeps with the writer

but never tells her husband

because he'd die of a broken heart

and never build the bridge

that would give the troll a home

or get her and the writer over the river

and into the lovely, black city

where they can be heroine pin cushions

and he can write words

and she can look pretty

and at the end of the day

they can all shoot ****

with the seamstress's son

who has been in the city

for years and years and years

because

*he knew how to swim.

I would love to learn how to waltz before I die
because that will make my dance into the ocean
that much more unbelievable, remarkable, dramatic.

I'll be most endearing as I move against the tide twirling with oxygen
as my beautiful partner; she acts with finesse and is unbending in the moonlight,
predicting my next moves and graces into the ice cold dark of the sea.

The water is soft and encouraging at first, supporting my moves without question.
As it deepens to my legs then chest then chin it fights my gentle rhythms with ferocity
Oxygen keeps dancing on the surface. Why won't she keep dancing with me?

She bids me àdieu rather harshly as my head finally goes under,
and the music blaring from my phonograph on the shore is drowned out.
I hear the rushing of a billion bubbles, yet my open eyes see only black.

What was once a dance is now a march without beat as I continue ahead
the iron shackles I wrapped my legs with seem to be the only glint of light
in the shades of blue that ought to be black that envelope all of my sight.

When the music died my will to ended as well.
I want nothing more than to drink tea on my patio
my record player off the shore and near to me.

I wretch and I turn, my eyes set direct on the surface
where I see the moon filled to brimming with jade milk.
I reach to the greened moon, but never come back up.

My pants tighten as I scrawl across photos of you
alone in the sewing room of my grandmother's house.
Nobody's been pricked here for years, maybe decades.

The stroking of my pen against the paper
sounds rhythmic, a resilient beating and motion
as I delicately carve out ***** verse into the white.

The ink stands black as widows' veils
against the **** colors of your pallid hands
pressed firmly against your etiolated *******.

Your red nails filed into clear, elegant points
act as arrows guiding me to the carmine of your lips
which hang low in a whimpering, begging pout.

My eyes strut southward following the lips' drop
until they arrive to the spread, blossoming like a rose
in the spring, or erupting into the conflagration of July's fireworks.

Photo after photo I stare and write my hedonistic desires
the gravity of which could **** me to the second circle
or rather, I think as I lift my pen, just help me to get off.

Rumble.

The earth loved San Francisco so much

Boom.

That he opened wide and swallowed it whole

Crash.

I'd love to make an earthquake with you

Moan.

In a steady, illiterate static
this room is my study.
And you are my book.

Legs spread 'cross my lap
hands firmly upon my frame.
I lean in to see the words.

Your soft lips graze mine
like branded cattle in a glen.
Wet and cold we sit there.

Then your tongue begins flickering
beguiling like the serpent of Eden.
How could I resist but to bite?

I kiss you sweetly
and you kiss me back.
Minutes pass in the study.

My tongue examines your mouth
like a cartographer mapping a new world.
Each slick and ***** is wholly new to me.

Teeth clink like crystal glasses
during a wedding day toast.
Eyes shut tight make the black of mourning.

The noises dribbling from our mouths sound akin
to a murderer tromping through the forest mud.
Shovel dragging hard. ...Plop...Plop...Plop...

Our hands run over each other's bodies
open-palmed like a child examining the globe.
I want to feel you from pole to pole.

I pull back and run my fingers through your hair.
Your color is rushed with red and you wipe saliva from your lips.
Your smile is without flaws, and you taste like ambrosia.

I love being literate.

They sell bundles of clothesline for $6.99.
That's how sad men play shirts from the tree
we named Alice after the ugly old lady
who waters her flowers in postmortem.

Or more likely denial, as water
and love and care and rich soil
is no way to conduct an autopsy.
She saw green when we saw dead.

Yet day after day we drove past her home,
pink paint peeling. White windows whining
and creaking for salvation from her songs.
Alice loved to sing to the floral corpses.

Alice wore pajamas just in case it was time for sleep.
The others called her hag, hippy, and witch.
The others would yell, but we only watched
from down the street or in the park, we watched.

And listened
to Alice
singing.

We sat on the tree named Alice
which hung bent in defeat, an ugliest sin
smoking spewing like milk from our lips
as we murmured along, mesmerized.

She sang low with her tapered watering can
cradled like an infant in her calloused hands
drowning the shrunken bundles of empty stems
just in case, she hoped, it wasn't time to sleep.

And after Alice played shirts
we heard song no more. Just city din.
The empty dead blew away,
the house bought and painted green.

The owners planted hedges in her flowerbed.

The secret irony,
a grand conceit,
was that to Alice
the hedges were brown
and the tree was evergreen.

It is windy.

"This whole day has been turbulent,"
I think as we make our way down the beach.
It is a day so warm you can feel the heat
burning dumbly off of the sand itself.

And yet the day was cold.

The wind whips my bangs into eyes,
an obvious strike of envy at their brilliant blue
or a strike of malice at my incredulous conceit.
I whine on about my needs, my hopes, myself.

And yet you never seemed cold.

The wind does not whip your marinara hair
rather yet the frame of your face floats, glides,
drifting in the colorless jealousy of the wind.
The tide is rising and we are being cut off.

Urgency, urgency. The wind is jealous.

We walk and talk and sing and hold hands
and all seems well for a few moments.
And in those precious seconds where our worries are lost
the dear ravaged wind dies down, then back, then down again.

Urgency, urgency. The wind is dying.

The summer endured with a kiss:

He was the worst thing that I could have loved.

Bulldog called him the Straightened Arrow,
because *"**** like him get all the ladies"
with his curls that turned like a surfer's dream.
But in order to not be, Arrow had to bend.

Because a bent arrow never flies far.

He would pity me with his hands in mine
late in the nights spent buried in his bed.
We shared our secrets and our stories,
our ******* nightmares and our souls.

Through the sage and past the shack
he took me down the beaten trails
to where he swore no one had been before.
The sun was an actor and the train tunnel's arch our seats.

The play progressed from Act Noon 'til Act 6:00.
We sat on the overlook singeing our lungs,
flicking cigarettes onto the occasional train.
The stench of tar, then a nuisance, is memorial to this day.

And once, on the artificial cliff where no man had been
on a day when the sun, tinged terribly red
by the burning of a forest I would now never know
had played its most powerful sunset,

Arrow kissed me.

His lips
were as soft
as sheer air.

That was the day I learned to hate theatre
and the day I first loved a poison.
He was the only boy who ever kissed me because he liked me,
and not because I like boys and you like boys and we both like boys, too.

Because he didn't.

Throughout the summer I walked with him and his girls through the sage
and past the shack to that vaulting arch hung above the tracks
where I watched him kiss them fast, kiss them sweetly,
I noticed how he never kissed them the way he kissed me.

His lips never looked so soft as they did that evening, and the sun never set so right.

*And the summer went on.

"I expected better from you..."

She has a way of making me feel like a real man,
as she plants her legs across my chest
and whispers into my ear,
her tongue inches from my face
inches from my mouth
feet from where I want her to be.

My eyes close as she drapes her tongue over mine
I feel into her cheek and a nausea rises.
You tasted like coconuts and your hands were rough as sand.
I love the beach.
She tastes like picnic sandwiches and her hands feel like cold rubber.
I love the beach.

And, "If only, if only!" the Red Rover would cry
we played all the day and I had fun with her.
But I could only have fun playing with you.
And how desperately, suddenly ******
the press of my teeth had become
as I realized we are picnicking still.

I let my mind wander.
Kissing is a sport for the focused and lonely.

"...they say you're the best."

The summer began with a cigarette:

She was the hottest dude I had ever seen.

‘Bulldog’ we would call her late in the night
as she danced the northern soul in her Trucker Hat
that fit a little too big, and her boy shirts that wore a little too baggy
to hide the fact that her bra had skipped town.

In an instant she was my best friend
and after a few nights of staying up a little too late
smoking a few too many cigarettes
Bulldog and I had become a little too close.

Near her house was a monolithic parking garage
that we began sneaking out to each and every night.
The orange lights flooded each level,
painting our rescue mission clothes yellow.

“It’s nice,”* I remember thinking,
“Now we never have to buy anything yellow.”
When we got to the top we would peek over the edge
and see who could spit farthest.

Bulldog won.

I’d see who could *** the farthest.

I won.

We would laugh about all the people we loved
and how they’d never love us back.
Then we cried about all the people we loved
because they’d never love us back.

Hours passed, and each night was radically different but always ended the same:

We would sit on the edge of the fifth floor
surveying the city that hated us most
and holding each other's hands because we both wanted to jump,
but neither wanted the other to die.

I loved my Bulldog like I have never loved any man, woman, or person
and like I never will again.

She was my soul mate.

And the summer went on.

I am in cold. I watch that garish ward brimming with false light. Bleached air from his lips touching hers. He hides in her mane, sterile and alone. Why is it so hard, such an insurmountable task for you to see how I lather my face with paint each day just to smile at you?

My face, my heart, my mind not a blank canvas that I hide with these diluted pastels but a deep, rich chorus of colors and oils that were never meant to be hidden. But the ward will never know.

There are thoughts and opinions rolling like a torrent behind this mask I call a face. This world was against me from day one, don’t you dare say I’ve given way to cynicism. Nor optimism, pessimism, or God-forsaken realism. Can't I think the earth is beautiful, God is good, I am right, and people are wrong without someone putting an -ism behind me? Of course not. That's narcissism. Egoism. Egalitarianism.

It is what I unknowingly wrote across my mask. But I never chose to attend this outdated ball, masquerades are cliched. Pure romanticism...surrealism, the kin of commercialism whose visage is a polychromatic wheel of logotypes that you just have to know en masse.

What if I stop believing that compassion Himself can hate me? No, no that's atheism. Agnosticism. And if I'm better than someone because He said so then that is monotheism in all it's delicate flavors.

Can't I breathe alone in a quiet corner? Isolationism. Can't I want to simply be a follower, and think about life, literature, and art? Incomprehensible, that would be totalitarianism, absolutism, authoritarianism. What if I want to give God all the power He gave us, and watch the world change? Fascism. Revolutionism. Extremism, because releasing the wheel is extremism. Existentialism.

And what if I choose to remove the mask, break the levees, release the floodgates,    my thoughts and opinions, never watch my tongue, and speak the world as it is: A capital M-madman's schism of logic and faith. As it has always been, and always will be. I will always be in love with the counterfeit ward. And yes, there's a label for that: Catastrophism.

So I watch Beauty and his Beast touching in fluorescence. Bleached breath, save for the smoke of his lungs in hers. Sterile and alone; I am in cold, and cold hurts me.

So much to do, my mind is buzzing. My fingers are dancing with perverted excitement as my lips form words with more syllables than letters. I feel as though I were a more capable Atlas. May the world rely on me, I shall hold it higher than an aeroplane as it soars through the sky. Our skies.

A testament to the ingenuity of man the turrets, ******* the weak, and credit God; the asexual ****** he is.

This is no song for the hipsters to play as their ringtones as they feel for each other through their LCD screens. They search for other brazen articles of humanity trapped within their social networks, a web of faces, **** smiles, faces and words with us wherever we we go. An inextricable mass that haunts like schizophrenic vocals droning out the real life. But there is no real life. We are all just like Him.

*****. Not natural. Filthy. Unclean.

Today, I grabbed a handful of sand just to see if I could feel it. Ten years ago, I would have felt every grain as it passed through my fingers; crisp, sharp, invigorating. Now, it’s dull. Blunt, rounded, indistinguishable. *****. Not natural. Filthy. Unclean. Nothing for our worshipped deviant to see.

My life is pornographic; an infographic of my exquisite taste in infectious lies, in the slaughter of old days, in the times immemorial. A map of things that don’t relate to me. A chart of things I don’t care about. I have too much to do, so much to write about! To write about...me.

*****. Not natural. Filthy. Unclean.

My mind is buzzing.

Until the next day, when my bones fall sluggish and my mind thinks plainly of its singular desire: Sleep…*****, sleep...filthy, sleep. But I can’t.

So now...I work. I am alive, alive, alive a lively beat of my heart as blood runs like an inmate from the bars of confinement. From my body: a testament to the ingenuity of *******. My body. Where my heart is beaten.

Beat, beat.

Sleep, sleep.

Fly high.

October 12th, 1998: This is not an apology.

♐ ♐ ♐

Most days I feel like I’m underwater. It’s like a dream where I’m never dead, just not living. Because the living cannot feel this dead. I whither away into isolation singing sweet melodies of love and peace and hope and **** and loneliness. Most days I just smile.

I am a fake. I am a liar.

I am an incongruent youth; unable to be constrained by the freedom laces of society. Tie me down and watch me run, trickle, run like an avalanche down the face of conservatism. A cheap hotel ******: musk and sweat and suits and scandals. On-the-course-to AIDS infection loose ends who walks the streets in pristine filth. The incongruent youth, or what we in America call sick **** and shameful liars.

I am confused. Standing here on the edge between glamour and reality I scream into the nothingness, the watery void, a stark reality composed of my dark humor and evanescent solitaire: How can thunder roar so loud? Why am I part of this ambient isolation? How can you do this to me; to us? The beautiful few and we are beautiful, trust me, we are in the clouds searching for each other, beguiling and anonymous as we may be waltzing merrily through nighttime New York parks searching for rarities. For others. For God. And into the emptiness I whisper: Why is this park so big? And the trees so thick?

I am waiting for "someday." But this someday, this could be, this will be, would be, won't be for awhile. And this moment, this here, this now just passed. So let's look ahead and hope it gets better, because our lives are 1942 cattle cars riding away from the nows that just passed. Moments of incongruence on a grand scale. One night stands with our own hands and imaginations. Moments we thought we knew.

I am an inconvenience on the path to wholesale liberties. To children wrapped in barren barcodes that read “no real identity” when the red dash of judgement steamrolls their sides. God forbid the glamour mix with reality. Because when you are a somebody, you can never be a nobody. And nobody wants the incongruent youth to keep thinking. Because to think is to love. And nobody wants us to love.

This is an apology. I am sorry if I’m not what you meant for me to be. Terribly sorry if I love the wrong music or words or styles or *** is all I can think about. Sorry, but I can only love the beautiful few. I can only smile knowing I am a real somebody in all this hate.

Knowing I am a fake. I am a liar.

I am a human being. Hardly. I’m nothing but an incongruent youth.

Set the mood: Can you feel the bitter? Taste it, drink it, **** it, love him. That is life and if these are the best years of it…then I’m not sure we want to see the worst. It’s called an epiphany…a warm rush of ice, slitting my lips. ****** as they are, these lips are open for you. So speak. I am here for your assumptions, so assume. Please, good friend, assume. Right here, write this down:

I need a voice to speak into. Ears to teach me to listen, because either I'm deaf or God's mute. Cause I've spent too many hours branding paper with my pen in these half-hearted prayers they call poems.

I need true empathy, not the GreatValue knockoff from a dimly lit aisle or Made-in-China substitutes worn around my friends' necks. Empathize with our loss. The traditions you and I will never know. The traditions we both know we’re going to miss.

I need a way into your mind, a shortcut through the jokes and labels. Ask your heart to crack its wary shell open just enough for me to slip my secrets inside, cause I know you're just as lonely as I pretend not to be. And I know you have secrets, too. Whispers are like questions begging not to be known, but I'll whisper to you anyways and beg you have the answers.

I need someone to talk to, someone who thinks about the skies at night. Stares off into the nothingness, screams into the emptiness his whispers. Someone who can blink away all the light. I know I am young but I am a witness to the symptoms of true thought. And you? You are infected, as well. You think. You are a liar, like me, and a natural-born beauty, as we all are. I see what this world has to offer today, and it’s you.

So how much time must we take? I think about you thinking about how much world there is. Or how little there is. How little all the people are. How the people look like flowers.

But not us as we sit on the roof of some ****** car. Its walls are ridden with messages from us to God, and he wrote back in dyslexic lettering, “I lvoed yuo all alnog.” I may seem more shallow and less a witness. You may seem like little but a confused sadist, desperate for an experience. But behind your perjury, you are scared.

You need a voice to speak into. To feel your words, molested in the dark. You know more than you say. Speak to me what you speak to your mind. Watch the flowers sway as we sit, immaculate. Slip your secrets inside my heart. Speak to me. Just speak.

I don’t need to love. I need to speak. So whisper #1: Why is the sky so ******* blue?

How do you feel about the word: Insatiable. That is my mind, forever devoid of what I can’t seem to pin. It is dull, throbbing hunger for more-more than a distant attraction claiming to be mine. Picture sent and picture received, but my body receives nothing more-more than desperate experiments. Countless hours of sexing in the darkness of a toxic Hummer. Toxic money burning a hole in my pocket, inches from the burning of his slick on my ****. I hope his *** bleeds.

Let's light another cigarette, and watch the cherry bloom. A single rose, shimmering and flaring like a nuclear waste, and the light is out. So let's smoke some more-more mirrors. I often peer alone through those sheets of glass. “Substance, ketamine, satiate me,” I plead as I see me and I hate men. My faith in God is never mutual. These prayers are useless. His want for me is beyond repulsing. His money is useless. My body is rotten from the mind, out. I am the king of self loathing. I am useless.

Yet I go back for more-more pain. More quarrels. More lies. More-more. He only takes more. And I take him, too. Wait for it...wait for it...wait for him to; Come! O gentle souls. See how my confidence sways in thine wake. You are purity. You’re innocence. You're what I crave. To be free. To be whole. To be done. So do me like the ****** you know I am. I hope mine bleeds, too.

My veins are coursing, pulsing, shattering at the edges with blue. I am blue in both my complexion and my complex feelings and thoughts and pains. My veins are blue, and I am cold. Taste the metallic crush of my slang. It is intolerable, and I must not tolerate. The ripe stench of escape burdens my mind. My mind is escaping. I know there’s more. Toss the rug over the barbed wire and run. Run. **** that ***** and make her beg. Make her plead. Make her run. Sanguine with ketamine. Run, ******, run.

“I think I’m a coffee table,” I whisper as I lock the door. My hands are cold as I slip them into my pants. Tonight, my icy hands are yours and though I am alone beneath my sheet, I can will you to be here. All I need is the slick of my spit and the broken borders of my mind.

Welcome to Gomorrah. A nation built on depravity.

He is The Coffee Table. No need for names or personality. So long as he spreads himself thick on the stained furniture, he is stained furniture. It’s an art, and he takes it with stride. "Take it," the chandelier cries in the most meaningless of tones. Money for *** never did mean love. The camera is watching.

She is The ****. Nobody knows of her children twice never born, nor do they care to listen to her tales of men who swear to love her as they beat her with their fists. But, like the author, she would rather be loved with a brutal, manipulative passion than to not be loved at all. So as long as those legs are spread, and there’s a chandelier between them, she is content with being nothing but a ****.

She is The Victim. Born forthright into this world under the name “John.” How can God forget something as vital as her *******? I understand He makes no mistakes, but He made a mistake. So she stands on the corner waiting for johns. (Ironic.) Raising some money. (For what?) To fix what God ******* up on the first time around.

He is That Little Boy. No longer searching for answers to why his piano teacher gropes as his fingers dance across the keys, and hers across his lips. Confusion and anguish are washed away by a tide of childish reasoning: His father works. His mother drinks. And somebody loves him.

Funny way of showing it. Depraved, really. But this is Gomorrah, a nation built on depravity.

Turns out The Coffee Table is a romantic. Likes to slow dance to nothing, stare at the stars, and cook dinner for you to the tune of Bing Crosby. He’s not a coffee table at all. The **** is a mother. Third time, she carried the baby, lost track of the deadbeat, and found her independence. His abuse was a rhythm she never cared for anyways. As for The Victim? Cost thousands of dollars, ten STDs, and her family but she is a woman. His mistake is fixed. How about That Little Boy? He is now just as much a monster as the woman who taught him to play E flat. Turns out they have a lot in common: At age 38 he likes little boys too.

That is Gomorrah, no that is America: An explosion of pure sexuality displayed for all the world to scrutinize, slander, and wholly enjoy. Pleasure has no morality, so let's watch the show.

I think often. It's a habit I can't seem to break like a gambler with his gambling and a priest with boys' knees or what brands red A's on our chest. I think we're a bit too trusting and I know we're a tad naive. I think it's best we love each other from the safety of three feet. This finite planet and our infinite greed pair up wondrously said the axeman to the tree.

The world that has made us has gone from a fine fitting coat to an ugly old shoe. We say we've outgrown, but what of the sea? Let's poison it. What of the the ice caps? Let 'em melt like a bowl of forgotten ice cream on my coffee table. I have more important things to devour. Gotta run, culture's waiting.

So I follow the rabbit down the hole wait I stop! Curiosity killed the cat I bought with a two dollar bill my grandmother gave me as payment the first time I cleaned that labyrinth of a cellar beneath her house: musty, dark, repressive I thought I was inside of my ten year old self then through the dark I can hear a rustling, "God?" I plead, my hands clutching the windex. No answer, there never is so I head into the shadows when I see the rabbit and this time I bolt for the hole but my head hits a wall. I concluded that life was a cruel joke as cynicism ensued.

I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't dance, couldn't sing because boys like girls, and girls like boys and boys don't cry, but I cry. As does the gambler and the priest and the woman on the horizon. I could have bet it was an angel and the gambler, he did. She steps into the reef and we hear her song and I know that she's me and I'm him and he’s all of us and the reef is that cruel joke I learned in the basement chasing rabbits but it's awful pretty from here is a warning to you when you think God is dead and death is synonymous to halt:

I'll swim inside this reef 'til the day I die. Water slipping through my fists and I'm yelling no I'm whispering no one's got a verb for trying to help. Water's to my neck but I'm not stopping. The coral ends here where I can finally sink sink sink my body in the trenches, spread a dustier me across the oceans, fill Earths' blood, a mass of veins and rocks and steel blemishes with my own maze of veins and thoughts and inauthenticity…


♐ ♐ ♐


Bury me naked cause where they say we're all headed headed it's gonna be hot hot hot like a medics sweat dripping down his nose as he beat beat beats on her chest but she's too big to get through. Too big, too fat Lady Liberty's choking on fries we're the world's laughing stock, the UN's singing jest for me, jest for me, jest at Mother Nature's giving way to political pressure same as Gods giving way to backwater pleasure and curses, a moment of weakness but 14 billion years? He’s old.

It's 2011 and more people hate hate hate from pin ****** in the ocean spewing bile in the deep, now whose fault is that, really? We're all shallow like my lagoon, my tropical retreat where there's no oil. No God. No smiles or tears. Can't sing, can't dance...can only be me. Who's gonna say that they're one in the same? Heaven's not a cloud and Hell's nicer than you think and I do. I think often.

My bed is empty. I count the seconds down until you appear: 1...2...3 times you've asked me to leave you alone. Leave you alone? How can I let you be so cruel, so uncaring, and so completely and totally near to my voice. I can't. It's not who you are in this world-we call reality sets in and I grab my **** as the black of guilt sets in.

Black. Gray. White. What room am I in? There's ten feet of tile by ten feet heaven bound. The claw foot tub grips at the **** stained floor, fighting gravity's nagging whine. It's all too real. All too fictitiously crisp. All too false.

The ivory room slips into the field as the brown drains from the vomitorium. Bathhouses, **** me. Lesioned tricks, **** me. Loneliness, *******-off to Cair Paravel.

I'm an ice cube in an ocean. Don’t drown, don't go, just come.

Rhythm stops and I study the damage. Laying alone on my bed, skin burning with the genocide of my seed spilt for you, I realize you are gone. With the revival of my senses I realize: You are a dream. A fabrication of lust and desire. But this moment, these feelings are ever changing. This moment is real. This time it's you. Tomorrow night: Tommy Anders, Brent Everett, Mr. Corrigan! Pornstars extraordinaire.

That's all I get nowadays.

Do you know who I am? Do you understand why I do what I do and think what I do is exactly what should be done? Do you have even the slightest respect for my decisions? For who I am? Do you know who I am?

That’s alright. Neither do I.

If I have said it once, then I best say it over and over and over again until you start listening: I feel like I'm underwater. I am in deep oceans, not blue or pale waters, but a horrible, dark abyss. I am drowning in a strange love for the spin-offs of truth, dignity, and cultural revolution. Now that is situational comedy.

My world is composed of nothing but reruns. Clips of him drowning on repeat. And when I drown, he drowns too.

I pray to find the sun so that I may trade all that I have for its warmth to melt the ocean into sky, and this glass from my skin. I don’t need to keep my heart shatterproof, I am no porcelain. I am an independent. Fill my flooded lungs with fresh smoke. Make the water go. Make the bad go. Go. Going. Gone. The sun is gone. All that I have is my fragile body, my ***. I am under sexed, overlooked, and infinitely exhausted of these nonsensical rants. If I could sketch a message into the night sky it would plainly read: I feel like I'm underwater.

So here, in these reefs, will I search for my meaning. But I think it’s best we all come to terms with the plain truth: Submergence is submission. And I refuse to submit to your societal pressures. I will decide what is wrong. I will say what is right. If I wish to empty my lungs of this saltwater, find the sun above the surface, and turn off the abhorrent sitcoms I cannot submit. I can only drown.

“Not another one! Look at him, look at him!” she yells.

His veins are coursing, pulsing, shattering at the edges with blue. He is blue in both his complexion and complex feelings and thoughts and pains. His veins are blue, and he is cold. Can you smell his insatiable mind? Taste the metallic crush of his sanguine? “This world is intolerable, and I must not tolerate,” she reads from his tear stained note. The ripe stench of escape burdens our minds as we watch his soulless body hang. My mind is escaping. Toss the rug over the barbed wire and run. Run. Sanguine with ketamine. Run, ******, run.  

Do you know how to drown? That’s alright. Neither do I.

I promised myself. I met you and I did everything I could to bring you down, to break your obvious beliefs in your beauty. I worked and worked to get you to feel like ****, so that I saw you as nothing but a filthy little ****. An average adolescent marring the face of society. I assumed you knew you were flawless. I mean, how could you not? Look at you! Listen to you! Listen to me. I promised myself I would not let this happen.

But it happened. That’s what I keep telling myself: It. Just. Happened to be the right things you said to get me feeling this way. How you asked me simple questions and actually cared about the answer. Cared about me. But I just kept whispering, “He’s nothing, he’s nothing, he’s nothing but the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. Brad, you can not **** this up.”

Yet here I am. Sitting in this archaic basement, listening to your words as they shift my views. Listening to my heart as it beats ever faster. The drugs in my veins urge me, they beg me to pull you in. To show you how much I care for you, how many questions I can ask and actually listen for the answer. Tell me it all. My hands glide behind your head and I lean in. Inches away, you whisper, “I’m in love with her.”

My head shifts to make this almost-kiss an always-hug. Her. The girl that makes you happy. That fair creature with her carcinogenic cheeks and strings of average hair. Her bountiful mind of average thoughts. Her average *******. I can’t be that, not for anyone. Not even for you.

You ask me what to say. How to tell someone you are in love with them. So I speak, your arms wrapped around me in the pale darkness of my eyelids. I tell you everything I have wanted to say. I give my speech that I have prepared in the lonely darkness of my room, or in the nights spent staring at you as you sleep beside me. I tell you I love you.

The saturated lights of reality bleed in as my eyes hesitantly open. “Well spoken, Brad,” you whisper in my ear, right in my ear. Your breath is warm, and I want it. Your pulse is slowed, I have to raise it. Your mind is made, and I can never change it. So I give you an always-hug, and imagine that never-kiss.

“Tell her that,” I say, “And there’s no way in hell she can turn you down.”