I always feel like I’m running.
Not running away, there’s no such thing.
Just running forward towards something.

Something.

There’s no such place.

With how long I've been running
surely I'd have found it by now.

I've though of what it must look like.

Something could be a field
buried in a brilliant, sunlit cloud of alfalfa.

It could be a tundra,
frozen and without borders.

A rainforest,
vivid with life, green and flourishing.

A mountain, lurching
over a city,
and in the city there would be nothing but good men.

No liars, nor cheats.

Just good men and good women,
good drink and bad bars,
blocks and city blocks of motels
riddled, reeking with  the smoke of cigarettes
smoked sometime post-***.

And in the city there would be nothing but goodmen
railing
good men
raving and ranting, chanting for more
railing.

These stairs sure are steep,
I best not fall.

Something could be a desert.
The dunes would stretch, immaculate, across my vision.
The horizon would be sun, sand, and sun again.

Is the sky still blue in a desert?
Is desert wind built of language and faith, or just oxygen heated to boiling?
Is the night full of hushed whispered deviance?
Is the night bent over the day's sofa?
Is he waiting for sunrise?

Rise, sun, rise,
what are you waiting for?

Do it.

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.

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.

Stars a'spanglin' across them blue-dye skies,
them mid-night-summer-night none too bright
starred out janglin'– O' them blitzin' skies.

"Hey. Would ya look in that westward?
That western, he's too bored to breathe."

Fire's a'preyin' here nightly. Owl feathers and the soot.
I call crab-apples applied science. Red shone blue by the water.
I'm sayin' don't tread lightly when there's snow underfoot.

"You gotta breathe it if you ain't playin'.
Gotta be sure, be assuring you're right."

Feelin' some skin by the waterside! Them ditches all dug so deep–
Gonna feel it out, all clamorin' with a'drummin' hearts by the ditch.
Majesty, majesty, majesty. Aubergine, neigh. O' Sanguine, you keep.

"I'll mark you.
You mark me."

What a deed by the ditch– skin!
Yea to that red, hot and lit and all a'dangerin'.
O' burning, blood beating–
Embers a'glowin' now. Tobacco's back to bein' lit.
Skin singes and I'll scab up.
I cross'd them arms by that ditch. Waters be dark.
All them remedies be done.

"That one looks like a dragon,"

you said, extending your arm to the night sky.

Sure enough,
against the aubergine purple,
there is a head
and a tail and a tongue
and a tiny lick of flame.

The wheat feels frigid
when compared to the heat of your waist.

I pull you in closer
terrified that the immensity of this field
will swallow us.

That we would sink down its esophagus,
away from the sky.

The stars are out now.
And I imagine being
swallowed.
Of falling up into the universe.
A celestial dive.

I lick my lips and whisper to you and the stars and even the wheat,

"This night will haunt me forever."

"I've missed you so much,"
I prepare as I walk through the door.

The rich scent of sweet cream
waffle cones and
brownie chunks
float in the air as thick as
smoke
in a happy car.

Her eyes are small and poignant,
tiny apostrophes,
commas beneath her blonde curls.

I stand by the door as she helps a customer.
I've missed her so much.

She glances up and her
perpetual glare fades.
The commas light up,
brilliant,
and the sentence is completed
by the curl of her lips.

I love that smile.
"I've missed you so much."

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.

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.

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.

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.

You said you hated me.

We could have been the most beautiful pair in the whole town.
You could have had the moon.

Just be cautious: porcelain shatters with ease.

And when you were happy you would be very happy.
I would wrangle in each and every thing that you desired.

Every thing is not every one.

And when you were sad I would press your eyes into my shirt.
Please stain my sleeves with your tears, warm my arm with your sobbing.

I think your tears are painfully beautiful.

And when you were angry, I would never leave.
I would listen, empathize, and always care. But never leave.

Unless you asked me to.

And when you were sick I would mend you to health.
I would travel to the ends of the globe to find a cure.

To keep you alive.

And when you were tired I could carry you.
It would be an honest trip from the sofa to the bedroom.

I'd lift you like air, so you would never wake up.

And when you were high I would never let you come down
until every thought had been traced ten times.

Every inch had been touched twice.

And when you were drunk I would hold your hair
as you empty into the porcelain.

I would marvel at how the moon was not marred.

And when you said you hated me
I would leave to make you happy.

I left to make you happy.

And if you died,
I'd die too.

And that's all I have to say about that.

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.

Marcy Shultz was a typist.
She typed and typed the day through
but never wrote a single thing.

Each morning she would drink her coffee
with a sunken ring at the base of the mug.

It was her good luck charm,
an assurance that at one point in one moment
someone had truly, honestly cared.

At noon she would salsa with the air,
knowing **** well that she would later devour it.

But the air knew nothing,
Thought nothing, just stood there.
Air is naïve, and she was alone.

At night she would shower with the blinds open
figuring if someone looked, someone cared.

But nobody ever looked, and Marcy never blushed.
She'd type little tales on her little laptop.
Typed little stories of little couples

walking dogs
kissing in park benches
laughing at rude jokes
eating tiramisu in little cafés
weaving stories of passers-by
carving initials in wood
waking up in the dead of night
to hear the rhythm of the other's breathing
before
holding each other's hands
and whispering softly in the light of the full moon
flooding in like spilt milk from the cracked window
saying,
"We are together now
and if a moment like this is happening,
then a moment apart is only imaginary."
Then,
always,
always,
always,

The little couples would make love.
Their moans bled through the window
like timeless cries over the milky moon.

The cats in the alley would circle about the songs
echoing loud from the little couple's little love.

Then always, always, always with frustration
Marcy Schultz would toss the tales and go to bed
and the couples would live on in crumpled paper.

Hey, remember when we went to Vegas?
You were the only friend I had.

Remember when we went to Vegas?
I couldn't have done it without you.

Remember when we went to Vegas?
All be a'droppin' at the bridge.

Remember when we went to Vegas?
Inane insanities in the sands.

Remember when we went to Vegas?
I'd bet all my chips on you.

Remember when we went to Vegas?
O' desert night, bring me home.

Remember when we went to Vegas?
Hey, you were the only friend I had.

That was a long night in Vegas:
Take me through the desert again.

I'm telling you, there's something about a dune that's bigger than the both of us.
This tablecloth is singed with the cinders of cigarettes.
Them lights gotta be yellows, just see–

Looks like some yellows to me.
Looks like some skulls stuck up in the stucco.
Looks like a nice trip to me.
Looks like in Vegas I found myself and yourself, likewise, found me.
Looks like the best hours I've ever spent were spent sitting on the roadside
aside the road that sits beneath every star
waiting  for     the      cars        to         pass.

Remember when we went to Vegas?
*You are the best friend I have.

I've heard that wakefulness is life.

That hearin' and seein'
and feelin' a'tastin' and touchin'
are living all the same.

I've heard that to bear one's heart is above all deeds.

He said,
"The world's built for cynics, don't say such things. I'd spit on an ant just to sit and watch it drown before I'd share a picnic crumb with an ant who can't swim."

I'm not a heavy sleeper,
I don't spend much time shot puttin' a'careenin'
through nighttime and midday naps.

I think it's hard to bear one's heart.

I hope that someday my son has a branch outside his window.
And that at night it will whip o' wind
and scratch a'scrapin' at his window
and his call will bring me in to bear my heart.

And that the person I first love will walk out the door,
intent to leave me forever, just so I can run after them.
In a sprint to hailing cab to feet on airport linoleum I won't dare say,

"Come back."

No, I'll be a'whisperin' sayin',

"I don't care where that plane's going as long as I'm going there with you."

In the terminal I'll run in to bear my heart.
I guess at the bottom of it all I just want to bear my heart.

I've heard that wakefulness is life
and that the sleeping are not living.

Nor a'dying buyin' time in nonexistent shot putt courts
where they aim for dreams within their dream.
The sleeping are surely always dreaming. But wakefulness is life.

There are some nights when I lay awake,

staring at the darkness of my room,
so dark that my eyes cannot adjust
and it is as black as the base of a stone labyrinth.

When I lay awake and pray and dream and hope
that there will be days in our future that we spend together.

Days when it is just you and me.
When we run barefoot in the sands of some faraway beach,
farenoughaway that all of our problems will be in the past.

In the distant memories of the mountains.

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?