Scars are fireworks.
They dance like breaths,
breath, pause, breath, pause.
Breathing is a cry for help.
You brushed my forehead with your fingertips
like wind and smiles and time
and what kisses are supposed to be.
Like time, time, time,
memory typewriters tick and tock.
They sound like footsteps,
like pallbearers and raindrops
and heartbeats and whispers and
time and time and time and time.

Scars are like spiderwebs
and patterns in half-full coffee mugs
and scales that shield, that measure.
and they're like empty stairs
and definitions the textbook wouldn't accept.

Scars are dreams.
A skirt and skin and whatever else that implies.
Scars are consensual, like sugarcoated suicides.
Scars are bodies.
Bend them, break them,
cracked contortionists.
Watch stardust pours from eyes
and arcing, narrow roads.

I shouldn’t be here.
This is a love song, not where I belong.
This is the maker, taker, the gamebreaker.
This is somewhere between violin hands
that weren’t meant to touch.
This is where the eyes will blink.
This is where the blood will rush.
I shouldn’t be here,
where fingernail window stains paint vivid memories,
where the silver broach didn’t intend to fall in love.
This is where the voice rose and fell,
where the dress turned as checkered as a past.
This is where cigarettes go to die,
where tomorrow slept with doomsday.
This is the notebook library, the dream anthology,
the bespectacled spies faster than a gun.
This is the crescendo, the roots,
the bud snipped before its time.
I shouldn’t be here.

Tomorrow is you, you, you day, doomsday, Tuesday, too-soon day,
But for now, we have headlight heartthumps and stars in your eyes.
We have oceans of asphalt where we sail in shopping cart man o’ wars.
We have frizzy hair where moonlight hides and kisses on our magenta lips.
Tomorrow is for you, by you, with a special guest appearance by you.
Teleprompter notebook clutched in non-regional fingers
as your throat flies over the early morning traffic for the eight am report.
Tomorrow is to die for, lie for, try for, because you need it, seed it, want to be it.
We have place, we have lace, fingers traced over the skin between the lines.
Tomorrow is lentil spectacles, vision impaired, nightmares in mirrors that are closer than they appear.
We have scarves, secret sensuality, subconsciousness, sovereign sometimes and their armies of selfish senses.
Tomorrow is springtime revolution, noodle-nooses and ready, aim, fire reanimated dreams.
We have the means, the torn seams along the moments when we know what we want.
We have what seems to be the day, the day, the holiday, the you-day.
Tomorrow is every day.

Electric tension crackles across your lips,
tiny bolts from tiny hurricanes raging around the eyes of your pupils.
We sit where two halls meet,
parallel paths on perpendicular lines,
an x marking, a t crossed, the intersection with
our eyes playing a game of red light, green light.
A smile, possibly imposed,
a gold spot where my finger touched the blush
of rose begs rising on the hills of your cheeks,
your shyness fogging your glasses
and your passion hiding in deeper dimples.
A smile, possibly imposing,
building trenches in your face to match the
sharpness of your chin and contrasting the
charm leaking out of the corners of your mouth like faulty boxes,
packages, boxes and bags tied with ribbon in denial,
the fabric timeless tapestries torn and tied around the tree like tinsel.
You touched my hand,
drawing me back on the sketchbook tiles, shading me in
when my mind wandered off to wonder.
It sounded like the moments between the fingers of
impatience and angry clocks.
Tick tock transgressions make me a momentary monarch of mirth before I
falter and realize that you biting your levi lip
to hold the tide back
means that the hurricane is swelling.
You apologize because of secrets you hold in Roman ruins
and for sweetening the cyanide syllables.
You regret these moments, because unlike promises,
you can’t recant.
You stand and storms pass, stomachs settle and
the last jagged bolt streaks
into oblivion.

Empty eyes
took it in, a sin
when she touched his face.
Smiles aren’t meant to bleed.
But you grinned and
undid carefully wound heartstrings.
Hands break when you hold them too tight.
They asked me to live;
I asked them to look in a different direction,
protection means a tired heart.
Bodies aren’t meant to touch.
They don’t curve to each other.
They bend to death alone.
Break them farther enough over your steel ribcage
and they’ll make stardust pour out of their eyes.
Breathing is a cry for help.
You brushed my forehead with your fingertips
like winds and smiles and moments.

I took the casket by the hand,
whispered to her that everything was going to be alright,
and then poured my heart out to her.
Literally.
The little red pieces get buried tonight.
The viewing's at eight, between final exams.
You can take a piece with you.
Don't tell the funeral director.
He's afraid people will cut themselves with the shards.
But I don't mind.
A few scars do people some good.
Ironic.
I wouldn't have said that if my heart were here.
He always knew what to say.

Oh, what's that?
You want to fix him?
He said in his will
that the idea of repair was stupid.
Funny
that my heart would believe in YOLO.
Oh well.

So, coming to visit soon, old love?
He left you something in his will.

Himself.

Hello, old friend,
whose semi-permanent smile
laces my vision like toxic ranks of pearly whites.

Hello, old friend,
whose sparkling eyes blaze
like the funeral pyre of my pride and prejudice.

Hello, old friend,
whose apparent ineptitude melts like happiness
as your name burns in black on that page.

You signed my yearbook like a death certificate,
wrote an affectionate note in the shape of nothing
worth knowing.
The lines bleed, multiply, crackle and shine
in the dull light of this most tiring expanse of computers.
Their brains function better than mine.

Hello, old friend,
whose pen now swirls across the work you were assigned,
work you pursue less like a lion
and more like a cougar,
if you get my message.
(There’s no taking the jungle out of you, Amazon.)

Hello, old friend.
Keep snapping pictures with your iPhone,
like it’s New Years and you just kissed DiCaprio in Times Square,
wearing a dress with all the greens of envy
splattered across the fabric.

Hello, old friend.
Keep telling me you hate it when I act like this,
when your eyes turn to four points and your skin to letters
from colleges begging like a forgotten lover
for you to take them and make them home.
The home you’re leaving for next month.

Hello, old friend.
Today is now solemn in so many new ways.
You achieved higher than the skyscrapers in the photograph
next to your eight-line submission.

Hello, old friend.
No.
Revision time.
Revision like the backspace key and the scribbled lines
over inadequate things I wrote
to try and climb your Olympian pedestal.

Revision like the eraser on the pen,
revision like the keys thumping as though this machine
had a heart,
as though mine wasn’t broken
because I’m never good enough for anybody.
I write my best poetry when I’m angry.

Ironic that poetry made me angry.
I can taste the paradox spinning like the clock hands
that tick, tick, tick until the day when you sit in a car
on top of a thousand suitcases
and a few well-wishes from your confederates in college.
I can taste it like a toxin.

And now,
now you’re going
and there’s only time to say:
good-bye, old friend.