A pair of phantoms hands
clasped and held to center
Symmetrical as Hell.
They pull apart and in their wake drift embers sparks and calcite.
Colors where these hands just were make-out and roll around; they leave their imprints and their stains when they are done.
Out of the unwashed we arrived
A symptom of passionate cries.
None comes from creation besides the thing that we made, just pray that it is ugly in all the right places—we pray, but not I, me, I make eyes at the mirror and punish myself until Hell's tides become shallow ends against mine—then frivolous, yank myself from sinking lifeboat to cloud-nine,
Let helping hand erase my demons, baby, I must be omniscient because I just personally faced damnation and swift rapture all within one bathroom trip.        
I am my own savior
You are the deity I suffer for.
For whom I could create under conditions of such self destruction and from you only disassurances to fuel my flame; watch it ignite
then go out,
Me in a panic,
Rolling newspaper together, heaving in the embers—making winds to toss that heat around, frantic cause I feel the maelstrom tossing inside me and it is quiet, nervous, commonly occurring. You can avoid all of that if you just GO.
No destruction required.
No promises of plans gone unmet if you never promised.
I only exist if you see me
Now shut your eyes: this is the remedy for lame creations.
I will still see you, Deity
You will still make fun of me if I am visible; I will sell fragments of my truth to the same machine that I loathe, and it will churn that truth to muck, my spirit to a discard pile, while my heart and the entirety of my body will belong to you.
Watch dust gather on my lashes as my eyes wait for a clever opening.
Aren't my thoughts eerily possessive?
I think I want to be one of your things so I can watch all of your successes from the shelf, and cover my eyes when you have visitors
Pretend I am a man to you
Not just something that your curiosity alone birthed. What is this blind responsibility I throw at you?
Myself I do not fully recognize, but I won't censor what seems logical to me, though visibly unhealthy.
I'm just trying to explain because avoiding didn't work: you are all that I think about. So much for NEW, maybe improved is still within me.

Ok.
I'm sorry for all of that. Believe it or not I have been trying to be less dramatic lately. Honestly it has been a very long time since feeling comfortable in here. You raided my thoughts long before I ever considered finishing the ******* thought
And then you left, so everything I ever/never said (or read or showed or wrote) to you was wrong and I had to change myself accordingly.
According to every flaw that I could find in myself. Income trouble.
Kids my age aren't supposed to go inward, they are programmed to ****, **** up, and forget. Success is just around the corner!
Don't worry, I'll go back to poetry format soon because this reality **** as it turns out is pretty depressing.
I think we need the
many moany broodings of a teenager who is white and straight—can't even write straight with this inky, ****** pen. That joke works better if you can physically see my notebook and the smudgy black Hell that it embodies. Seriously, it looks like some grabby octopus with parkinson's and seasonal mood swings tried to write the word "parkinsons" in here and then spent four to five hours sobbing about their meaningless existence and self-harming—just deep enough to make the ink drip out and fall into a pattern, maybe good enough to read aloud in public spaces which I would consider an honor in and of its
wobble and of the nerves that fire in like some unsteady chorus.
Still not good enough to sell. So bruised, so heady, Please Howard almighty I am ready
To be shot down in wave after wave of this stupidity. Oh how embarrassing it would be to face a firing squad if she could see; how could I ever imitate your immortality or even just your shine...
Here! More Pretty Words!
Pressure builds and compresses the body performs more or less—a little shaky.
The DANGER is in the mind right next to the safety.
Beneath the skull there is a small office-room plastered with disheveled documents, maybe important, the ones that I hired to clean up in there are actually four well fed cats, using the pages for their waste and spending their days pledging to untangle an endless, brain-sized ball of thread but—you know. at some point.
Right?
Like once they figure out that their cheap new carpeting is getting redder and redder the more that they tug on it. And—also they need to learn the color RED right after we have a professional explain to them what colors are.
Oh! Also. That they are ******* CATS!
Wait—don't leave. Please don't leave!
Wait.
I'll be relatable.                     Wait.
I will only say handsome things.        Wait.
I'll pretend that I am not thinking about you even when your breath is pumping somewhere within the same enclosed facility as mine is.        Wait—
I will shorten my sentences significantly.
You won't even know it's me
Or that my lips could be so sure of anything
While my tongue so eager to betray.

I'm throwing tantrums at the page I know that now.
I just want to see if they will stick
& what they will finally say
once I complete.
How many things can one word say
How many words can one page hold
How many girls can I **** in a lifetime
some or many
None.
Any.
Slip into my cinderblocks—pretty
New style,
smack Breaks tile,
Wait for the fuckboys to finish fillin up the fish tank, I'm at the bottom
feelin petty,
Suckin blue,
Countin out the seconds till I'm trapped beneath this filthy pool.
Thrash tantrum,
Flash forward,
Zoom zoom
I look up and wonder will the elephants come save me, but there's not one in the room,
nobody watchin
Im a goner,
and I've been one
ever since I started kicking in the water.

The skyline is a range of mountains that surround us on all sides they reach about the same height all the way across and resemble a wall.
I am at the bottom of a fish bowl.
Just above that dark structure the sky is a hazy green which transitions into hazy blue as it ascends vertically. Overcrowding the first two layers: long and lazy clouds, they turn from black to grey, to purple then to a bright salmon orange as your eyes follow them sideways— closer to the sun. Above that the sky is blue, lighter, still all clean and unbreathed. Above that pink clouds, stretch their limbs like sleepy housecats, fur splashed purple like bruises and wine stains. The neon mass conceals the rest of the sky until the blue steadies-out, turning nighttime, resting like the ocean from afar.
The moon is a curved grin on the bottom, a perfect crooked smirk from my position here above the murky pool, resting on the fake rock mass— Orange like expired oxygen.
Inside the house Jim tells Wendy to clean the pool. The Cheshire Cat is laughing at me as I look up.
There is one star directly above the moon, their distance apart from each other is the precise length of my forefinger if I hold it up to my eye and close the other. I don't know if it's the North Star, but it's so far the only one bright enough to shine-out through this thick veil of SOCAL fumes and advertisements.
By the time I finish writing this the clouds have turned a sickly brown, then all a smoky grey. The skyline still shines; greener more toxic and honest, like the body of water below me.
The colors all die down, one shade at a time.
Like whoever is editing this picture simply dragged a decisive finger on the brightness setting backward to reveal the darkness. The curtain is now lowered not raised: the contrast cranked to full. Full-dressed I light a cigarette and step off. The water takes me in with open arms and wet kisses.

When you think of me
if you think of me,
imagine who I am when no one is here. Because usually no one is here.
Imagine me smoking alone,
and hating every bone—and looking around myself.
Imagine me bathing, and In the mirror checking out, and being happy finally with what is there.
It's all I have: the fleshy bits.
Wonder about the way I wonder, and
feel one way about it. Or another.
Think about me running,
think about me crying,
I am all alone in this.