some things go without being said
and some things leave in the same manner . . .  
the door is still opened
i kicked it off of its hinges
what’s the point of having a door
if you keep it closed all the time
right . . ?
and what’s the point of having kevlar
if you’re too lazy to attach the straps
right . . ?
i have more attachment issues than hair on my head
because life has always left me cliffhanging off the ends of ellipses' . . .
i can’t be around people for extended periods
probably because they breath too much
and i would much rather be alone underwater
or at least deep enough to where light becomes afraid of dark
even though light never gave him a chance . . .

I slap wax on a hand that’s had its share of crinkles and callouses
as I look in the mirror to mold myself into something out of a GQ:
Man of the Year magazine. I look at my watch and its 8:42. I look
back to the mirror and see something that is not the caliber of a
man but more of a frightened boy buckling at the knees and
shaking at the wrists. The walls behind me start to liquefy and
soon dissolve while the florescent bathroom lights flicker in and
out of existence. I rub my eyes as I manage to hear knocking at
the door over the boombox playing on my dresser drawer. But I
can’t seem to move away from this boy I see right in front of me,
a boy who’s never done anything like this before.


I turn my head to look over and it’s her. Her name is Brittney and
she is the first and only love of my life, though she may not know
it yet. The rainbow colored lights are flashing in her direction to
the sound of the booming bass. I take a look down at my sprinkler
head hand. It has begun to melt into hers, molding ten fingers into
one fiery fist protesting against all the cold voices that tell me, "I
can’t do this." It is a time of swing sets and swing dancing while
long before empty bottles and bar romancing.


She say’s, “It’s getting pretty hot in here” and I say “A wise person
once told me to ‘take off all your clothes’ when that happens”. She
smiles at me and I look away because I’m scared she’s going to look
directly in my soul and figure me all out like, “Where was the fun
in that?” My window of opportunity only opens when something
else reaches in and grabs her attention by the hair. Only then can I
be the mortal to ever look into the face of a goddess whose head is
just preoccupied. The Dj masterfully is mixing music from a bland
radio driven generation to create the perfect stage for an offbeat New
York teenager who is slowly finding out that he has just as much
rhythm as he has shame.


I get a call on my cricket phone from a best friend who couldn’t
make it that night, as if to say he was telling me to grow wings of
my own. I reject the call needless to say and catch that it’s 8:42 and
in that moment I hear someone say, “Baby you’re all that I want.”
I look to Brittney and say, “I don’t know how to slow dance.” She
pulls me to the floor and fastens my hands to her hips as we start to
glide gently from side to side and I hear that same voice resonating,
“I’m finding it hard to believe, we’re in heaven”.


Born as a natural leader though grew up as a follower, I begin to
dig up my roots so we can float to a place where no other human
can find us. A step to left and then to the right as I carry her head
over my shoulder with clouds tickling our toes with every step of the
way. Prickling chills from being up so high make their way
kneading down my spine. A white light flickers behind her head and
I seriously ask myself, “Could I be dead?” Naked bodies chest to
chest and cheek to cheek as two flames becoming one with
heartbeats in sync; a heart that has never beaten the same because
this song never truly ended.


That night marked the largest recorded meteor to ever impact the
world since the extinction of the dinosaurs. I burrowed this lady
closely in newfound wings as we fell from clouds beyond the
atmosphere smashing us back into dancing shoes, rattling the
footing of our tomorrows today and shaking the foundation of
where we now stand. The walls behind her begin to liquefy and
soon dissolve. I look to the only window in this building and catch
a reflection of myself in it, though I do not find the same boy I
once saw before. I see a man with purpose, a man without fear; I
see a man who would take on the world if the challenge arose,
and a man who had finally earned the right to say, “I’m free.” I
leave her hips to rub my eyes in clarity and as my pupils begin to
focus I make out florescent lights that keep flickering in and out
of what appears to be my bathroom mirror. I hear knocking on
my door faintly over the boombox playing on my dresser drawer
while I look down at my watch to see that it is 8:42. I take one last
look in the mirror and I remind myself that there truly is no better
time than now.

It feels the days have been weeks, the weeks have been months, and the months have been years since we last met. And though we have left each other, the river of love flowing through my veins have never stopped running for you. I remember times when the sun rose to wake me it was you the first thing that caught my gaze as the hunter for his doe at the first of fall. The times when you were the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes to the melody of moon; I could not dream without you there. The times I would stroke your smooth curves and praise the One who created the beauty that is yours and yours alone. The times your scent made my pores throb and eyes wide, a scent we shared whenever you let me have you, a scent I longed when you were gone from me. The times my lips would touch you and tongue would taste you casting me without breath in throat and sweet air in lungs to the instance of choking; ironic as the world surrounding us the drowning while we the afloat. With you before me the world as we knew it vanished I could not begin to tell what century I was from. There is no need for time with love as eternal as this.

And yet I wait,

Wait for the day I will have you back in my presence, back in my hands, back to my lips, uplifting the very existence of my being. The day when I once again will be able to reach, reach far into the depths of my pocket and summoning the $4.31 it take to see you once more. . . my ever sweet breakfast burrito.

More often than is naught I carry the face of the villain.
Snared in this prison waiting for my turn to burn while
your fate is not so different from mine. My clocks still
yield some ticks and tocks yet before I go there stands a
few things you need to know:

They told me that your love was fatal, though failed to
hear the laughter of irony from behind their heads. They
cried tales that you were toxic and I could not save my
lips from curling. They said that your presence in mine
would design the suffering for those around. I was told
that you would leave me up in smoke as if God still
plays with dice. Your middling cigarette spends just the
beginning of their lives packing yet I waged it my
whole life just to spend its remnants with you. Addictive
by nature so let me take my pick of a million other lips
to secure truth that it is you I am addicted to.

I want you to simmer my skin when the world is cold,
I want to cast you brighter than a hundred suns hold,
I want to steal breath from your chest and place it in mine,
I want to make your heart stop like an eight-sided sign,
I want you to move my pistons and ignite my core,
I want you to saturate me as I lay on your shore,
I want to find what it is to go out with a bang,
I want to be that picture that fits in no frame.

I want to get you out of my head but you are
my song on repeat,
my hole that’s too deep,
my nights with no sleep,
my words when I speak.

Yet alas I hail from a pack known as Montague while
you bear the brand of Capulet. They will never render
us free in this life so when my time finally comes to a
burning halt, and my life flashes before my eyes, just
know that you will be the only thing I see in the next.

I left a trail of breadcrumbs for your lips to find
but they were hungry for something I couldn’t create.
I was hiding in a place that wasn’t hard to find
and I just,
I just wanted someone to take the bait.
But when the time came that you caught me there wasn’t champagne, there wasn't bouquets- no.
I looked behind to tag you back but you were already ten steps in the other way.
And to me this was play
but to you it was probably just a game.
We were a picture that couldn’t fit into any frame
or a fire that couldn’t be contained, it was all the same.
Just like the very place you called pleasure became the same room I called pain.

I spent my entire life chasing shooting stars
thinking that I could make all my wishes come true,
stopping my feet here and there just to then try and
catch my breath.
I was always chasing but never very good at pacing.
I got battles with my mind erasing while my heart keeps retracing
and in that time
on the assembly line
they smacked me with a sticker that said, “Replacing”.

You see I was born with fingers that were small and stubby,
stretching out trying to grab the answers I would always come up short on.
My heart’s been known to skip beats but sometimes as it skips,
it gets caught on something and trips
head over heals down a black hole that swallows then spits
me into another time and place where you are stripped;
from sight misplace, but I still chase
because no one ever taught me how to land in space.

And if you took my legs I would crawl through wet concrete,
and if you took my arms I would roll to a mountain peak,
and if my body is taken this heart would still beat
because when you left that home
you forgot to turn off the radio
so all of our songs still play on repeat,
you can hear them through the walls and down my streets
where everyone else still hears it too
but I,
I was the idiot for giving my only set of keys to you.

I’ve spent my entire life trying to close gaps
that I probably had no business closing in the first place.
But even if I’m not the one who wins the race,
or finds the foot this glass slipper longs to embrace,
or catches a shooting star flying in cold space
I know that being here is better than being there,
that living today is better than dying tomorrow,
and even if,
even if these tiny talking hands never get a reply
that it sure beat the hell out of never giving it a try.

The moment when you couldn’t wake up in the mornings.
The moment your hands stayed cold when I bound them in mine.
The moment you made dates with the TV screen.
The moment you forgot to call and all the countless times you had no service.
The moment you became too busy and every single time you made me wait.
The moment you needed a cigarette every 10 minutes.
The moment your lips forgot how to dance with mine.
The moment your shoulder couldn’t bear the weight of my arm around it.
The moment your eyes got narrower and your brows stiffened.
The moment your hugs cut me too much slack.
The moment you stopped getting the chills.
The moment your heavy cheeks couldn’t budge a smile.
The moment your heart stopped skipping beats.
The moment you froze when I told you that I loved you.
The moment fear became your vice.
The moment you hid behind closed doors.
The moment I had more in common with strangers.
The moment I became embarrassing to be around.
The moment when you needed drugs for a good time
The moment you fought me just to feel something.
The moment I was just like my father and the moment you cursed my mother.
The moment you slammed the door in my face and the moment  ‘I’m sorry’ left your vocabulary.
The moment the bruises healed.
The moment the word ‘give’ was spelled t- a- k- e.
The moment your dreams were only visible in sleep.
The moment I realized that you weren’t worth another moment of my time.

                                                               ­                   .   .   .

I gave you everything and you came out with nothing, which now is the very thing you are to me.

forever; anti-never
and I sever hearts that measure
not so clever, my hands tether
butterfly flutter, changing weather
birds of feather, my endeavor
open kevlar when I met her
cupid's quiver, better get her
stupid picture, wet in gutter
letter lover, better ever
let her, love her, now or never
red her lips, that make me stutter
yet her kisses, soft as butter
hands together, soul that suffers
empty vessel, no more clutter
enter bodies into blender
piece by pieces all dismembered
open heart you let her render
cut her heart, and made her tremble
nothing left, feeling better
nothing left, I can't remember
dreader, just another pleasure
deader, just like sunken treasure.

The place you stand in casts a loathsome light from behind you as you gaze to the Mirror. A salted tear is shed followed by many down into the loch you have locked yourself into; drowning. What has the Mirror said to you today? I wish I could understand it.

The Mirror has rendered your wings useless, crippling you with a deadly snare it has embedded in your mind. A snare you could free yourself from with tools you’ve always possessed but never knowing how to use.

I reach inward to pull my heart out and smash the Mirror once and for all. The shards cut deep but nowhere near as cavernous as the cuts your razor edged tears have when they used to fall from you’re calloused eyes down into my chest.

The Mirror, now in a thousand pieces, must be screaming in your ears as you try desperately to put it back together. An act that is meek for you from the life you’ve lived befriending such a foe disguised as your comrade.  

It’s a wonder how one tries to fix the broken long before they realize that they themselves are the broken. The fragmented mirror cannot speak the same again to you but only display you it’s rightful self, showing you the truth.  

The truth that we’re all fragmented; no one was created to a perfect perfection but rather perfection due to an all-pervading and ever powerful imperfection.  One last tear is glazed down onto your lips. The sweetest taste you have ever savored.

My dear, sometimes you must shut out all other light in order to discover the Light that sets you free from the prisons you once existed in. Walk with me now into the darkness until we find ourselves in the ever awaiting Light of freedom.

You're like a book I never want to put down,
where every page I turn pulls me deep into a place
where I realize that turning back for air
would be an impossible journey to make.
So I've accepted this as my fate.
There is no plan B, in fact there isn't even a plan A.
I've exhausted all those options.
I'm to the point where the only letter
I care about making plans for is U.
If you took just a glace at my latest chapter,
you'd see every letter, word, and sentence is this.
People are getting tired of hearing it but
I am far from tired of letting people know that
I am done with dreaming only in my sleep.
I must become the dream
where you draw the inspiration from
that keeps your quill in motion.
I want to live in your story
like every day was never-ending.
Just please don't ask me to be your knight in shining armor
because I don't care how shiny it is,
I'm never going to wear it when I have you in my arms.
And I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't completely scared of that idea,
but a long time ago I made a vow to scare myself at least once day.
And I'm not saying that you're simply just a means to an end,
I'm trying to say that you are the end and
I feel bad for whatever means to get in my way to reaching you.
Scared? You bet your *** I am.
But I think that's just the universe's way of breathing life back into me.
So let me fall deeper into your pages
till I am left without any air in my lungs
and I begin to see stars,
because your universe now
is the only place I care to draw breath from.

It had been scorching from a time I can’t seem to recall anymore and lately your words had been ice cold but instead of saving us you held your breath and jumped off this burning ship into waters I refused to swim in. Inevitability is talk of the future but no one can see past the choices they don’t understand so I’ve been standing under a gray sky instead trying to cheer the clouds up with echoes off a sweet tongue that fall on absent company. The sky may be out of reach so instead I’ll reach for the stars in hopes that I touch a cloud on the way who may join tears with mine as we douse your lingering flames. What will be left of this broken ship worries me not for I know it will still move. Where it drifts I cannot say, but I understand now that perhaps sailing to nowhere may just be the perfect place to find myself.

I don’t remember ever seeing so much rain in California.
The great city of Los Angeles translates to the city of angels.
You can count the number of rainy days a year on two hands so
when I see so much water cut through the clouds
I can’t help but feel the tears of angels falling on my skin.


Recently my brain has been spinning in circles.
A needle scratching the surface to the melody of someone else’s face.
A phonograph that hasn’t turned on since the hopeless drunken nights
of butterflies trying to flutter through waterfalls.


Since then my heart has been handy
with the backs of a No. 2 pencils. Erasing the memory
of where this player’s off switch went.
I’m left with a familiar loop that feels like fine fleece cue tips
warming the inside of my ears,
wiping the very dust off my soul.


I'm taking the wheel of a mind and driving my madness to rainclouds.
Raindrops of today
filling the warm puddles of nostalgia for me to splash in once again.  
So don’t ask me how old I am today
since my stomach is tied in boy scouts knots
as I think of the cocoa-colored eyes of my boy scout’s crush.


Dancing under the tears of angels with butterflies dancing back.
Being smart is a skill I’m good at,
but being foolish is a faculty I’ve mastered.
So I dance one step forward and two step back, laughing
while slipping off the nostalgia.
Falling down on butterflies that have grown strong enough to pick me back up.


You can call me crazy,
but the rainclouds above me never seem to last.

Have you ever said "Hi" to the sunset
and have him say "Hi" back?
As to unpack his rays,  
he decides to stay with you
and glaze his hues
across fluffy warms clouds
and a sky once blue.
Like he's happy to see you too.
And to send a message to the moon
to "Stop running away!
'Cause no matter where you go
in this Milky Way,  
I will always melt your gloom.
You know I'm not very good with goodbyes,
so let's just say I'll see you soon."

Honestly I’m too caught up in you to even function sometimes.
People ask me if I’m okay because I have tunnel vision confined
To a place where I never look back and never resign.
But I can barely make out their words
When your song keeps singing in my head,
And stringing the thread of your heart to mine.
As it pulls without tearing enough to flatline,
While taking you in
To a “Once upon a time” world beneath my skin.
Where the sun kisses you every chance you look away,
And the moon cradles you as if someday you’ll never get older.
Because with you, time never wants to move but carry
Your everlasting stokes of color made from sweet berries.
On a canvas that’s trying really hard to sit still when you’re fatal lips ****
Whatever seems to be holding me down.
A piece that compounds beauty on top of brilliance.
Discovering yourself and the meaning of existence.
Like two flames holding hands, never to strand
From the light, they expand to burn down the doors
That others have shut with all their might.
Chasing the tails of fairies to horizonless twilight.
Searching for no end but the means of foresight undressed
When looking ahead I see wings spread from behind your chest
And pull me pressed to the taste of heaven
When I'm close enough touch your breath.
So don’t stop breathing and never stop believing in our laughter
Because every breath we ever share becomes happily ever after.

I lost myself once upon a time
in a place that was only whispered to me in dreams.
Where the fog is thick and threads through the seams
of street lights and street cars with *** fights and brillo bars.  
I tell you I lost myself on the tongue of insanity
who swallowed my soul to feed its humanity.
I lost myself
in a city that found me;

San Francisco, 2013

Let me extend two points like two bridges
that begin in separate places but lead to the same thing.
I’m talking the people in both hands with countless art in between.

The people, the people, the people.
What can’t be said about the near million faces
sleeping on warm pillows or cold stones,
wearing top hats or traffic cones
because not every night are people thriving.
But they’re still surviving, getting busy living or getting busy dying.
In their eyes are stories being told
once you wipe those windows into their souls, deep.
You see it all,
Just like every star in the fall when the sun goes to sleep.
I gave a homeless man a dollar who gave it to another homeless man who then gave it back to me
Like we were passing a love note that said, “You need this more than me.”
So which of us was the one without the home?

Home I soon found in the art of every step taken,
one foot in front of the next.
I can’t walk through that city discounting the side effects.
I was drunk,
but not from bottles or cans
I was drunk from the hands
that told tales with graffiti art to camera pans.
and countless other melodies
massaging bricks into the landmarks that spanned.
Culture sprinkling up and down the hills and between the cracks
Painting colors in the sky as the rainbows stacked,
Finding pots of gold by merely lifting my eye lids back.

There is so much to say about this city in the bay,
that is held in place by the people of race
and the vessels of art that encompass in its space
like stories and attitude,
survival and gratitude,
muse and expression
in delight or depression.

I tell you I lost myself in that city.
But I know now that being lost is sometimes the only way to be truly found.

Of all the things I could imagine
I could never conjure up
Something as breath taking as yourself
With eyes wide shut I see many shades of you
But confined I am
To only the colors of the rainbow on my palette
I have not your heavenly hues nor the steady hand
To even begin to trace your masterpiece
Free hand with shackled mind
To the prison of mere imagination
Your face is the key to my cell
Your hands the key to my heart
And your soul bears the key to a life of never-ending color
A life I've spent my entire existence searching for
And I could be completely wrong about this
In fact I always have been in my history
But I'm done being the historian
Whos eyes are always shut to the future
While stuck to the past
It is time to blow dust from the pages of present
And hold your hands while writing in colors not of this world
To create a life with you that is equal in nature
So you mustn't ask me to rely on imagination
In creating your duplication because in every case
Your truth will always be boundlessly
More beautiful than fiction
And I shall never limit myself
To the colors of this world
When you created from the heavens that lie above it

I will not slam my gavel on the splinters buried in the back of your mind that drive you insane. Let me pluck them instead only to fill their empty graves with seeds that will grow their own food for thought. Let us spit our souls on our palms and be unafraid to shake hands. I want to become sick with your expansive mind so I may develop immunity to the wretched virus of the narrow majority.

And when you can’t handle any more shut doors locking in your face, grab onto the rope I drop by your side and I will pull you to a new hallway of opportunities. When your back is up against the wall, I’ll remind you to close your eyes and breath because the next time they open the wall will have sunk into the shadow that you yourself have laid on the ground.  

I can’t stand knowing. I have to walk it and exercise it, much like a muscle breaking its former self down only to rebuild itself stronger, and keep it moving because the place where my awareness lands will be the cage where it sleeps. So lend me some of your mental crack and lets find our own over this great wall of the unknown and see if we can’t break down the impossible together.

It’s been said that infatuation makes for a fast spiral down to
sightlessness.  But do you say the blind cannot see? I bear no
mind to mere optics for I need not the sense to possess the
sight. I have your radiance with me, branded to the backs of my
lids for I cannot help but have you always until the next time
I look upon you. With a clutch of my hand you have me at
your will. You present this present with your presence and I
shall honor this with my eyes, never to shield whilst I have
you before me. Consumed I become as you lay me down
beneath the leaves. Take all you will from me for I shall
remain exposed to your desires.

My gaze wandered up and found the leaves on fire. There
was no smoke; there was no fear for we had been the fire
all along. The flames of yours and mine together had
consumed the air of our yesterdays, leaving nothing to look
back on and ceasing the urge to look forward; we were here,
existent, ready to ignite once more. This surge required
naught save for the breaths of yours and mine to chance;
your breath compelling this sealed backdraft longing for
indulgence, growing wild with every touch, every scent,
every taste of your delicate tongue as it wrapped in mine.
The embers knew nothing of destruction but rather renewal
of that which I had longed for.

I once believed it foolish to feel the same with another
synchronously. A belief I now find fault in for just as the
two flames who dance incoherently; once they touch they
become unified in their brilliant engagement, creating a
distinct cohesion that most will undoubtedly remain unaware
to. It is that moment, that paradise we search for. A sensation
that last a moment but for those without sight, a single
moment becomes the ultimate reality of eternity; a single slice
in our whole of existence which we stay hungry for. So look
no further for I am close at hand. We have already set this
world ablaze and altered the realm of our tomorrows. It is now,
in this very moment where we shall get a taste of eternity and
there will never be anyone more adequate to share this paradise
with other than that who makes me sightless.

Her eyes
Her eyes 
Oh those eyes...
They create something of a solar eclipse
A celestial rarity you may only look upon
When the universe permits
Rare and yet I’ve been told not to stare directly
Into the seductive light
Which makes it all the more tempting to take a peek
And become hypnotized
Once I look away from them
They become burned
Burned into my mind
So even with eyes shut I can’t help but feel her
Much like the moon dreams of her long lost lover
She catches briefly only at dusk and dawn
Living from the shadows
Of the very thing that makes her shine
To me this is not mere coincidence
And like the Fates I do not play with dice
When a jigsaw is tossed in the air
And all of its pieces land into their rightful place
I do not see chance
I see providence

                           I see the impossible

                                                     ­       I see . . . you, staring back into me

You set the bait and I never let go,
I never wanted so.
A fish out of water;
I’m suffocating in the same room you breath calmly in.

Moving hopelessly alone on reflex
I’m going mad in this state but lie still
every time you touch me.

Your knife digs deep
though like pain is something I have become accustomed to.
Cutting away at the surface,
then to the core,
digging deeper and deeper where I really feel you.

Before you’ve truly experienced me
you coax and cover me with flavors of your own,
as if I’m like the rest of them,
as if I won’t taste different on your tongue.

Burning from the inside out as you cook me to your liking,
I can take the heat
so long as I know I will melt inside you.

But
when you gutted me you forgot about my heart,
maybe because it was too hard to find,
maybe I was saving my best for last, or  
maybe I hid it because I knew you didn’t know how to handle it yet.

It’s all I have,
it’s all I’ve ever had
and I gladly would rest it upon your lips even but for a moment
and when that single moment finally arrived,

you spat me to the floor,
swallowed what remained
just to **** me out the next day.  

I don’t know why I thought this would have a different ending.