I'm not trending.
Have I lost my touch?
Has the flock departed my
exodus for greener pastures
or mountain testaments?
Do the rhymes not carry
the meaning like they used to,
like sailing ships in the steel ages?
I let the winds take me anyways,
take my life and scatter
syllable seedlings across the sites
of battles just old enough where
the ghosts are getting tired.
Maybe I need a touch of comedy?
A critique would be appreciated,
dear reader.
By the way, we made some mistakes
in the last issue you had with us.
On page seven, we established the fact
that I was confident. This was
proven false with a report card report
mailed to us by the fine folks in blue at the
Teacher's Union.
On page nineteen, there was a photo
made of words that sounded like
love song lyrics.
That romance is currently defunct and we
apologize to any soldiers and shippers who
attempted to invade that lost region
on the life map.
Page twenty-three had a mistake,
the byline citing a girl who died
inside.
Our apologies for installing her name on
the neon sign and reminding you all
of the casualties of existing in the first place.
Finally, there was an absence of malice
in the letter from the editor on the back cover,
his eulogizing of his overdosed career
hardly harsh enough a reprimand for
someone who will never listen.
Thank you for your understanding of
this, even if the rest is a mess.

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.

Volatile Voltaire
once said something I believed,
but I've forgotten what it used to be.
Some candide (candied?) little thing,
sweet and soft spoken, recited it to me
like a national anthem without the music
I wasn't up to facing, anyways.
An influx of responses filled the dashboard
of my fighter phone as I wove among
dogfights, catfights over who's in the right
and who he was in that first that night.
He just stands like a complacent general
off to one side, directing troops of decision.
He didn't want a D-Day.
There's so much more to life than
brass ranking you earn by not taking a brass bullet.
Let your best friend do that.
He had no aspirations.
(Cleopatra had aspirations.)

You're a beautiful mystery clad in gorgeous enigma.
You're poetry that looks good in a skirt.

There's an orchestra on your tongue, playing the sound of your voice like a melody I can't forget,
matching the tempo of the drums in my heart
and the broken strings of my violin compliments.

You are a notebook, a yearbook, a sketchbook, a burn book,
every facet of you written in swirling cursive,
rhymes and famous signatures snaking between cinnamon hair and cleverness.

You are a pen running out of ink,
bleeding dry in Barnes and  Noble Moleskin journals,
but that's okay because I have more ink,
and you can borrow whatever you want from me--
store it in the heart you stole if you're bored enough to hunt my words for the pieces.
You have the key already.

You're the first dream of the boy too scared of nightmares to sleep again.

You are the taste of honey and cigarettes on the lips of the first girl that boy ever kissed,
because she was a rebel and he needed a hero
who wore boots instead of Mary-Janes
and band t-shirts instead of blouses.

You are the rose he drew when he was bored,
an outline with potential,
mysterious, entrancing, incomplete,
not yet ablaze with the red of desire
because he was never good at finishing things.
You are a dictionary. Your picture isn't just under "beautiful."
It's under "dangerous" and "witty" and "myth"
because Medusa bowed at your feet next to James Bond and Edgar Allan Poe,
and you're too good to be true anyways.

You are a poem, a telltale heart beating inside a lesson in vengeance,
temporary only because nothing gold can stay.
You've walked past where the sidewalk ends (certainly the road less traveled by)
and come back far more darling than any buds of May.

(You are the paperback novel he read under the covers,
the flashlight only bright enough to show paragraphs,
and every new page unique in shape and form
while the text remains the same.

You are the raw words read aloud by the daring poet,
standing beneath midnight moon,
the power of the throne,
the breath of a whispered promise falling upon the ear,
the warmth of kisses on the cheek,
the passion of all hope there ever was in trust and truth.

You are the fire in lightning,
the sparkle in the snow and the glitter in the rain,
the fierceness of the wind and the gentle, soothing peace,
the blazing chill of winter and the roar of summer's heat.)

But you're still a mystery.
A beautiful,
beautiful
mystery.

Maybe it was fate in the threads of that
skirt as short as temper and temperance
that ended the ellipsis breathing.
A dancer needs an answer
on life enhancers, dear romancer.
Your smile was more than good enough.
I drank of it, the cup of Christ that turned
my blood into whining moments of
insecurity.
Call security, you say, making the call on
what I am because I am transparent,
transdimensional, traversing the bridge
of your nose with my high-risk eyes.
You say that I am, and they cry.
As your hands ticked at your clock-click keyboard,
I waited, passed the time wondering the
difference between naive and navel.
Harm came like rain in winter, the words
of Zephyrus slipping from between those
amber lips, lithe on naked fingertips.
You take the names of gods in vain,
into your veins, let them convert only
the white blood cells. You'd crucify
me for vanity.
You accuse the recluse of abuse,
and it suits you, tailored because
hatred sized you up the moment you met.
The orchestra disbanded, the buds of May
have yet to burst, yet to blossom like you
say you always will,
but the spring in your step when
you walk away from the last word
tells me more than the chirping birds
nesting in your hair.
You remind me of Paris
on the walls of Troy,
thief of hearts and fool indeed.
Bringer of fire, brander of hell,
but only because you were already the
Tartarus Employee of the Month and
enjoying Elysium.
This is the
beautiful mystery
undone as her clothes and
naked as the day Rosemary Matron gave her
to the world.
This is the beautiful mystery
returned to voids as tangled as her hair,
the nonspace between the curls hiding
secrets and conviction.
This is the beautiful mystery
concluded, all the movements of
her symphonic body no longer to allure.
This is the beautiful mystery
answered, the riddle of the Sphinx
leaping from the pillar, a killer
not quite so strong as her eyes.
This is the beautiful mystery
laid to rest, buried alive in a life discarded.
This is good-bye.

It hurts to touch betrayal,
to know how cold she appears
to eyes too lonely even to see.
It burns to hold her, embrace her,
to smell the naked emptiness on her skin.

Can you ever understand
the raging, nameless abomination
that fills the bones upon betrayal,
rides the flipping of the heart
and the slow melting of the soul
like a carnival ride so perverse?

She is omnipotent in the mind,
holding thoughts as a python does its food.
She slips her invisible fingers over arms,
makes them tingle with the empty sensations.
I despise her, constant companion
to the lonely man
that I must always be.

If we were books,
I'd be spineless
and you would be a paperback
with a hardcover head.
Page turner pretense turns to
kisses and fifty shades of
sequels.
My life is an open book.
You read?

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.

Don't let me be
acquaintance ancestry.
Celestial bodies deny me peace,
your sensitivities shielded by a moonlight sheet,
picketed by skyscraper evidence markers.
They died from lust for light, broken trust and fright.
I'm looking for the inevitable morgue.
I, malnourished of day,
recede among the intangible tangents
of lesser-used thoughts.
I let the shadows take me because...
they should have a long time ago
and I was too scared to let them out of my veins,
let the abstract crack on my neck
leak demons and my trust.
Don't let me be
predetermined possibility,
never so whole as seraphs and satanists,
guided by singularity.
My lives were revolutions,
guided by weaker constitutions
encapsulating a prescription purpose
that tours me past milligram monument men,
marble ghosts braver than I am.
Let me be the helpful dream,
the stitcher of seams;
it seems the tie is torn too much,
the threads too thrown astray,
too tangled to discern the strongest chain,
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 old warmth's retreat.
Let me be cold, forgotten gold,
less a frozen dawn than a synapse half-way gone
buried down beneath a tombstone treasure map
with an epitaph two decades long and footnote dates.
I never liked dates, smoke breaks, moments that
persist longer than they should,
like I have.

Pity poison, pity party,
pity is pretty *******
at your Pompadour proposition,
your parcel proposal!
O, a cardboard box,
the symbol of the distance crossed
and darker shadows to bright love lost.
What a world of merriment their melody foretells
as you shake them like little silver bells.
Go to hell.
Car chase scenes excite you; sit tight, you,
as your flight from fight reunites you with
the boy who never knew
what you are.
You are jelly in a jam, so your ham-****** attitude
leads the lamb of love to slaughter;
the s leads laughter on, standing for *** (check male or female),
stimulation, stimulant, squabble, ****, ****, sext--
a wrecked relationship sinking, sinking,
and being nearer, my ******* God, to thee
makes me sick between my bones
but the iceberg of your persistence has to melt,
even with a bit of red paint.
Your dainty hopes that you could go
two for two with hearts and minds
not only disgust, but your lust broke my trust
and I must, must, must ring the bells.
Class dismissed. I hope you've learned.

Pity party, pity poison,
pity is pretty *******
at your Pompadour proposition, your Pompeii proposal.
The judge and jury blame  your execution;
you thought the tri in matrimony meant three
in love when it really meant that you're the third wheel.
You hoped I'd kiss and tell in your world of wedding bells.
Go to hell.
You smiled as you beguiled with false feminine wiles the
boy of miles and miles away, hoping that he might stay
with you instead of her.
Well, this is his answer, and, dear failed romancer,
you won't get that last dance.
Her love was pretense in past tense,
events not recorded in your history book hips.
Ah, a novel idea: you, John Green with envy,
tried to bend me to your whim.
Tried, but your pride died when I sighed
and said that I loved her, so you booked it
from the floor and seemed gone forevermore,
a footnote in the lore until you...turned into a *****,
came to me and said that you loved me more.
That is wrong.
Strike the gong.
This is a correction.
Your insurrection of our connection turned
affection into an infection,
and don't interrupt with your **** interjection--
were you expecting an *******?
Because you're getting a rejection,
so keep your confection objection to yourself.
You hoped to trace my face, take first place or third base,
leave no space for even lace, and half of lace is empty space.
I should have brought mace.
You are jelly in a jam, so your ham-****** attitude
led the lamb of love to slaughter;
the s leads laughter on, standing for ***
(check male or female),
stimulation, squabble, ****, ****, sext--
a wrecked relationship sinking, sinking,
and being nearer, my ******* God, to thee
makes me sick between my bulkhead bones.
The iceberg of your persistence
puts up its last resistance,
but it melts, melts, melts, in water hot as hell.
Is it not plain as you the pain you put me through?
You, with two left feet, hope I'll cheat the day we meet
on the girl who was your friend, and you've done this
once before.
Your dainty hopes that you could go two for two
with hearts and minds disgusts, and your lust broke my trust,
and I must, must, must ring the bells.
Class dismissed. I hope you've learned.

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.

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.

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.

How temporary be the hours,
our residue of memories left to wither.
Her empty whispers, his empty promises,
Misses and Mister This and That, dear lovers,
Earthly things all the same—shadows.
Owed debt, be it green sheets or gold bars,
bars us from seeing beyond skirts and ties,
ties us to all these things we hold.
Hold me close, memories of forgotten time,
timeless thoughts that barely cross mind’s plains.
Plain to see here—a painful wound we ignore.
Nor shall we admit it, for it bares the scars within.
In our ignorance of purpose, I ask now—
Now that you see, ask yourself, “How?”

I believe
there are three ways
to win the public heart.
Blind the public eye with
shards of their broken chest.
Steal it from them
and refuse to give it back.
Or tell them Satan says
thank you
as they watch it stop beating.

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.

When the pills stopped working,
she wondered if it was because she couldn't taste them
or because she'd run out
of the house with her heart on fire
and nobody had seen the flames.
Her manuscript men marched above her mantle in little inky rows
like birthday candles, like promises from childhood made in redwood shadows and crimson-weeping cuts touched like jumper cables.
There was heat, there was warmth
and it was ugly, ever changing
like opinions and faces and the way it felt
to be touched.

Maybe five is what I deserve,
a lucky seven two beats away.
Is it not justice for the strong to
deny the weak their day in court?
This is our tribunal, tribulation,
the trial of the sensory sort,
the sensitive sort, some mixed
feelings not yet sorted.
And only five jurors showed.

Crack the veil of tired souls
cloaked in lonely sorrows,
broken by faithless wanderings,
and feel the strings course through your veins,
the horns echo your heart.
Hold music close in mind and heart;
it makes hearing more bliss than sense,
makes truth as gorgeous as fiction
and fuel for love and dance.
Grip the hands of the etheral,
hold immortality close,
keep it all within and simply
close your eyes and listen.
Everything in song takes a life of its own,
be it lyrics or the simple voice
untested by use, yet strong.
Choirs echo through the heavens,
forcing clouds to yield,
yet holding them in wavering winds
that carry lovely song.

Crack the veil of tired souls
cloaked in lonely sorrows,
broken by faithless wanderings,
and feel the strings course through your veins,
the horns echo your heart.
Hold music close in mind and heart;
it makes hearing more bliss than sense,
makes truth as gorgeous as fiction
and fuel for love and dance.
Grip the hands of the etheral,
hold immortality close,
keep it all within and simply
close your eyes and listen.
Everything in song takes a life of its own,
be it lyrics or the simple voice
untested by use, yet strong.
Choirs echo through the heavens,
forcing clouds to yield,
yet holding them in wavering winds
that carry lovely song.

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.

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.

The questions are
optional and the
whip cream bra is
delicious.
I dare you to
tell the truth about
seven minutes in Heaven,
the greatest restaurant ever
to steal a bathroom in for
*******'s sake.
This game, man,
and you'll prove you're a man
by dropping your pants and pride,
because you picked dare
not twenty questions.

Snuggled in your corner,
New York, New York, an echo to an echo.
Boulevard cleavage flanked by
lamp-post pigtails,
headlight eyes and
warning sign lips.
Your skin is cream and
your personality is sugar,
but you're hesitant for a
second round of hot coffee.

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.

Were you always a killer,
commendable, expendable
secret agent girl?
Were you always a dancer, entrancer,
Irene Adler, romancer,
secret agent girl?
Were you smart or kind of heart,
lover of art, playing your part.
secret agent girl?
Were you feared or revered,
a pioneer of weird,
secret agent girl?
Were you a dream, beauty supreme,
eyes all agleam, more than you seemed,
secret agent girl?
Who lost you, tossed you
and at what cost due,
secret agent girl?

When did they rob you of your glory,
rewrite author, title, story,
secret agent girl?
Where did they take you, break you,
make you into something new,
secret agent girl?
Are you Cold War fossil lost in time,
too young to be old, past no prime,
secret agent girl?
Beneath the earth, above the sky,
not allowed to cry, to die, are you,
secret agent girl?
Who were you before your halo cracked,
before the fact, your devil's pact,
secret agent girl?
I'll kiss you, miss you,
this bliss is amiss,
secret agent girl.
It's time to go, leave me alone,
you broken hero,
secret agent girl.

Take every one you find,
you data mine from minds
excised, exercised, exorcised
from details emphasized
and breathed here between
pretentious pixels and
the utter necessity to
write the worthwhile,
transcribe tomorrows into thoughts
louder than action.
Sentence sentences that lied on the stand,
judgmental Judas crucified on land
and two by his side in the sea.
Read the series bible, the rough sketches
of predetermined lives written in fibers
thatched into cardboard,
folded into boxes, stored and shipped
into some great beyond
(Maybe the back of it is nicer).

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.

The King
breathed dust
and returned to it,
folding in upon himself
like a child's love note passed
between curious hands.
His fingers drew contrails across the sky
and cuts across a face.
Ambiguity is his medium,
but heavy is the guilt upon
the little corporal's corporeal shoulders.
He blames hubris.

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.

You are not a narrative,
not prepared, not braced
save for your teeth.
Your eyes, surrounded by
shields of glass have their
quotas of emigrate emotion
to fill like morning mugs,
so they're seldom gone
from their post upon the
crossing bridge of your nose.
Your eyes, with their Chernobyl centers,
like candied apples with caramel lace,
blanketed with coldness and a
cunning vision glaring from the pupil
with a sparkle smirk.
Your cheeks are, like you, high and haughty,
bones pressing against the cream of your face
like a lover needing release from these
non-consensual bonds.

You seem to have a thing for blondes
and non-committed things: shrugs and loves.
Your podium skirt, your pedestal boots
do little to solidify. You are sly liquid
slipping between mental cracks
and broken minds like Eden's serpent infestation.
You're the breaker of greater paradises.
You revise the despised accent to suit
you like a tailor, a censor, black bars
going lengthwise across your chest
when you wear that dress
and vertically in your future.
Get used to grey.

You're a marker, standing tall like a tombstone,
dates written in sharpie, a conviction epitaph
from your days of being corrected
by greater minds you accept like false diplomas.
A crimson bracelet once twinkled
around your wrist, or so you say
with your eyes. You think you've died
before, once more to live.
Maybe once you were someone worth a ****,
before you turned into prom incarnations.
You seem to think that, like the wine
your daddy bought you, you have a kick,
and even though you're all leg, your
thighs were never good enough for you
and maybe you show them off too much.

Like a hotel, you try to accommodate
other souls within you, a biome,
but there's only vacancy inside your heart
and that's the pool with the broken filter.
Your sign mouth, neon lips all aglow
promote you and your greater
philosophical concepts written
from eight thirty to eleven
on notebook pages and margins.

Veins of azure snake between the clouds,
flesh of sky laid bare, her breath hushed breeze.
As the shaking hands of lovers tremble,
from her depths doth truest passion seethe.
Across her lithe form do worlds travel,
shadows weaving across her chest.
Beneath, seas of matching hues doth rage.
Thundering waves scarce leave time for rest.
Perhaps, in doubt, I am truly certain
of the love that fuels mine soul.
It is that which never dies—
a newborn story of old.

In ancient anarchy yet untold,
treasures reek of jewels and gold.
They set men ablaze with greed—
living nightmares from Hades freed.
And yet hope laces poisoned world,
doves among flags of war unfurled.
Hands clasped above the shadow’s hold,
voices speaking words too bold.
It is this that grips you, makes you host—
And never ends, but remains a ghost.

If it works, it twerks,
the mirth of birthing
a dance to entrance
men of poor taste
whose race to the finish line
between her barely-there thighs
has two gold medals--
stamped on a certificate.
Pick a name, take a number.

Boys.
Boys.
Boys will be boys.
Boys will be done on her,
for she is heavenly, and
Heaven forbid he reaps the
one who sews and
supposedly
makes sandwiches.
Sometimes you have to stand back
to appreciate a work of art, but they
skip class and
have no class.
There is no art; only **** lips and
suddenly thrashing limbs.
This is wrong, says the dust speck
clinging to his soul.
You crave her, says the evil louder, go, go, go!
Boys, boys, all the noise with their toys
and every point raised is wrong
and mothers are ashamed.
The game of life was not meant to be played
with broken pieces, let alone broken rules.

Your legs are long as moments
spent in your company.
Your hair is longer than promises
I made to you in the
dead of night that I
would not be dead at night.
You are a painting
looking into a mirror
and failing to appreciate the work of art
as a reflection.
You complain that your
lips are warm and your hands are cold
but I tell you that time heals
all transgressions.
There's a dreamer in your ear and a
lover in your eye and a writer in your heart and a speaker in your neck and a leader in your heart and a Good Samaritan in your gut and a winner in your legs and a teddy bear in your hand.
Conversations with you are the scenic route.
Kindness from you is a gift
for the present and a memory
for the future you try to ensure.
I owe you.

In this land, in this world,
In this time, in this place
Behind these glasses
Beyond these fingers
Lurks forever now
The subconscious beast.
In this fortress, in this tent,
In this steel scaler of skies
There is no safety.
There is only sadness and
Sadism and ***.
In this realm, in this womb,
there is only death,
But no so strong a brew
As in that old place of blue.
There is plenty of time to
Linger between the notes
And the ceiling tiles
Where they store bodies.
In this book, in this song,
choral choirs sing past pages
and pages of long legs and
headline barcodes and
hairline calendars.
There is no peace here,
No last dedication to mark
The passing of Father Time
or Mother Season.
There is no monument to
White and black;
All sins are marked in
Black and blue,
Like Earth, the brighter side
of a black eye or a
Black hole.
In this landscape, in this plays cape
There is no escape.

Reach beyond
the beyond.
Pluck the heart strings
of violets and violence,
pull back the bowstring,
launch Eros' error arrow
into weaker men than I.
Watch them become
what they swear against,
rail against like trains
slipping from their
on track lives.
They crumple like
failed poems in my hands.
But as Pompeii proved,
you don't have to fall to die.
You only have to breathe.

There are worlds we haven't crossed
and things we haven't lost.
There are dreams we've never shared
and hopes we've never dared.
There are hours yet to come
until our time is done.
Don't leave just yet
before the getting
is good.

My cellophane soul
music akin to jazz-
ercise revises your
body until all that's left
is cliched telephone
lines drawn beneath your eyes.

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.

Some poems
just bend their ends
and pose a question
that has no answer,
save for hearts clicked
and minds dragged.

Spare change to alter
a tiny density.
Densely packed clothes
folded in upon themselves
like possessed spines,
toothbrush thistles spread about
like a lover's hairs on my sweater.
Only visible upon scrutiny.
Why me, denying my responsibility?
Could I blame gravity
for spilling myself on the floor
of peace?
Falling to pieces,
falling, cascading, rain-dropping
like tears,
tearing open new arguments,
weary, older things clung to
by skin and dust retreating to
recessive elements.

You make an offer
I have to refuse.
But you don't understand the
reasoning.
I seem irrational, irritable.
The inn isn't expensive,
it's just the transit, you say
as you could the zeroes
forming chains and infinity loops
across your bank statement
behind their little corporal one.
You forget that green isn't
just money,
it's envy and emeralds
and I'd buy one but I'm too filled
with the other,
so you call me a diamond in the rough.
Do you understand
the pauses between pulses,
the reason I pay for promises?
I protect myself from myself
but pride cried and I could die if I
accept what you're trying to give.

Tomorrow is the quarter's end,
flipped to tails to decide who gets
the last piece of the pie.
But math never was our forte.
We can only count the days until
we meet again, singles made
into a two dollar bill.
The clock ticks like
loose change trembling in my pockets.
The seconds waste away.

Why are you so
posed in repose,
your toes curled
into baby fists?
You've made your lists,
hissed at boys who
endured the fallout
of your failure
to say hello.
You kissed the girls instead.
And I don't blame you,
nor will I shame you,
tame you, but I will shout
your name at oblivion,
hoping it will recant you.

If you don't mind,
brunette in row nine
and two quarters,
could you please stop asking why I'm sitting in?
Your eyes have explored me,
hands twisting into chemical equations
and inky nail polish. Ursula.
You're a chartist, a mapmaker, a
heartbreaker of weaker things than
girls and boys and dogs.
Your loafers dance across the
ugly golden tiles like impatient clock hands.
Your bare arms move to the drumbeat of your note taking,
your seduction salvation-- your eyes-- looking at me from prison window glasses and wondering why I'm so
free as to slide onto a back lab table
and silently, scientifically
observe a play playing out
in which you are merely an extra
and this class
is a sentencing hearing.

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.

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.