It's all winter legs here,
curled in scarfs of red,
boot lace tied tight to seal in the warmth.
Walls of emptiness flutter skirts, graze ankles,
solid nothing like a stronger glass.
Her tilted head, his own inclined to trace the
dust on her boots.
A glimpse of a face poking between brown-sweater shoulders,
soldiers of some greater empire in floral uniform,
legs crossed loosely,
patrols of them crossing in twos and threes
past the archway of the gym's one-toothed mouth.
They had no solidarity of soldiers,
nor the strength.
Instead, like silly schoolgirls,
they stumbled over straps of bags
and stretched their syllables into the
first notes of laughter,
their voices as sensual as an air raid alarm.
They stepped sure-footedly,
every pace a vow of forwardness,
a marching corps ever onward,
the banners of their hair catching
unanticipated breezes that
misguided the heartless counterfire of rival divisions
even as their rifle lunch bags crackled in their white fists.
They swung long jackets around their forms,
the bones protesting, pushing against the cloth like
trapped men flanked by greater loves.

One paused to ask his name.

We nibbled on paradoxes.
Like houses of cards and romances
following three a.m. phone calls
from the bar or the mistress,
they crumbled in our mouths.
Tasted divine, heavenly.
We waited for tomorrow
to pass us in the next lane,
but he was texting Wednesday
and caused a pileup.
But time doesn't stop for anybody.
I've had loads of tomorrows, anyways.
I've got one in a few hours.

Those paradoxes
didn't settle in my stomach.
They didn't make homesteads.
They made nuclear power plants
and then blew them up.
Paradoxes are a lot like humans.
Cause heartburn, destroy things.

I'm going to go lay down.
My stomach is gurgling,
as though to say
that the paradoxes are
in disagreement with it.
They doubled back on themselves,
says my gut
before it implodes
and covers my conscience in gore.
Lovely.

Call me a sandwich.
I'm full of jelly.
Or am I like a Hot Pocket?
New flavor, new filling.

Those paradoxes
once said
that love is like a Hot Pocket.
Great advertising,
terrible product.
Premium cuts of meat my @#$.

I'm rambling.
Sorry if my bleeding innards
and paradoxical statements
fail to amuse your standards.
I think
I need a drink.

There's another paradox in the box if you want it.

Oh, you've heard her all the times before,
the seashore girl, the midnight star,
paler only than the white knight
striding from the peanut gallery,
cell phone sword in hand.
You've heard of the
smiling, charming,
built for beauty,
the trusting,
hopeful
girl
who
does not
exist because I
love the concept of
being someone's hero
too much to slay the dragon.
I slay paperbacks and TV binges
and essays and occasionally, when the sky
feels like being blue, I'll write a love poem about
the girl who does not exist.

They say the night is black,
a shadow cloaking the beast that
makes horizons bleed at dusk and
flees her wrath at dawn.
But the night is grey,
life is grey,
a transitory shade,
silver lusterless, passionless like
gleaming blades too long concealed.
Inflections chart themselves across bed sheets,
worksheets, warning labels,
charm their way past sunlight and into
matrimony with patriarchal corners,
vestiges of dark upon dark.
Grey is beautiful.
Sad symphonies tender their resignations,
masterpieces monochromes occupying the dome
of the sky, storm cloud devout
leaving their stations.

Don't let me be
acquaintance ancestry.
Celestial bodies deny me peace,
hidden behind moonlight white sheets and
skyscraper evidence markers.
But I, advice malnourished, recede
among the intangible tangents
of lesser-used thoughts.
I let the shadows take me because
maybe they should have a long time ago
and I was too scared to let them out of my veins,
let the crack from my neck
leak the demons and my trust.
Don't let me be
predisposed possibility,
never so whole as seraphs and satanists,
guided by singularity.
My lives were revolutions,
made up of weaker constitutions
encapsulated, a prescription purpose
that guides me past milligram monument men
braver than I was, but already marble ghosts.
Let me be the helpful dream,
the stitcher of seams;
it seems the tie is torn too much,
the threads thrown astray like things lost in space,
too tangled to discern the strongest way to
reinforce the conclusion of my weakness.
Let me be the used-to-be,
the once-was boy who could never see.
Blindness is a condition I accept willingly,
and deafness with it, and warmth's retreat.
Let me be cold, forgotten gold
buried beneath a tombstone treasure map.
Let me go.

I don’t like love, but I know Time reads Life magazine
and the heart is the advice columnist with love as its photographer.
I want to feel the days away, make them say the things
the world thinks, the words the night writes in black ink on headlines,
Mind the things big and little, look left and right when you cross the line.
People need light to help them, stretch their faces long in shadow.

I found you in
peeling silk shadows
and socially unacceptable acronyms.

I met you
and you remade me
in the image of self-realized dreams.
Frayed heartstrings
blossom
from used ***** dealerships.
Spinal cord columns, rib rotunda,
cranium cabaret and Lazarus lungs.
We hugged on collarbones and
loved in dimples.

We ran.
We ran along shores we never knew,
skirted expectations like cliff-side raceways.
Somewhere
along a three way road of cobblestone delusions,
at an intersection of gas stations
advertising ninety-nine cent perfection,
we misread the legend
and the map lied anyways.
There are no u-turns in relationships.

You made me dependent upon
perfectly posed pixels and
lacing my fingers with the air.
Half of lace is empty space.