You live only in memories
for me, memories
and ashes on the floorboards.
It's strange to think
that you're out there
living and breathing
and moving about
in a world that I'm not
a part of.

I think of songs that we sang
bruises we made
broken guitar strings
ragged throats
disembodied words
wasted glances
and it all just sits there
misty and faint
in little corners of my mind
and I don't miss you at all.

the human condition
is rarely terminal.

I linger at skin that clings
and hollow bones
that catch in the moonlight,
pausing at mirrors
that look more like
still-life paintings-
an empty gold vase
over here where my heart
used to reside,
a fresh green sprig
where there were once arms.

There is a sickness
sleeping in my hypothalamus,
heaving with every breath,
every step, every heartbeat.
I try to look at it
and it slips like sand
through my closed mind.

I smile, and it's not
my smile anymore.

Silver tides roil and spill
across wayward toes
and crossed fingers,
haphazard eyes
moonlighting as mirrors
flicker and stick
and there might be something here
that I can touch
that won't turn to stone.

I navigate through
cnidarian carcasses
and splinters of shattered sunlight
to find your fingertips-
an X where reason meets delirium,
and I trace the passage
of cerulean veins
that never lie.

It seems that time is circular here
and all of your questions,
rhetorical.

What the **** is love,
anyways?

unseen melodies buzz like cicadas
borne out into the velvet night,
filling up my ears and eyes
with beautiful blind fervor
until you bury me
and the honeysuckle sings,

denying everything I thought
resembled truth.

I have had bits of my heart taken,
pinched tight between greedy fingers
and shining white incisors
just to be squandered between cold sheets
and walls without windows.

I have given small pieces of myself
in a subtle show of willing naïveté
only to watch them wilt and die
without patient hands to tend to them.

I have lost so many essential parts
that there's not much left to give-
everything is mathematical
and there is no pain in letting go.
I am an expert in the field of
cool, calculated detachment.

But then there was you.
you came padding in softly,
asking for nothing,
taking nothing.
I gave you only
what I had the strength to,
and for the first time,
I could see the pieces
blooming and thriving
as they crawled over the trellises
of your wandering heart.

The empty spaces fill
with shadows of your voice
and a glimmer of your eyes
when you're smiling

and for the first time,
I am whole.

I hide in plain sight,
giving small pieces
of these patchwork thoughts
crawling in cold circles
inside of this silent skull.

I only allow myself
the safe, silent pieces-
the ones that won't offend
or be misunderstood.
and all of those
lecherous little things,
those things that might
make them think too much
or feel too much,
gather and swell within
my eyes
my ears
my mouth

until my entire atmosphere
is clouded with these things
reverberating quietly
in the spaces between my tongue
and my teeth,
moving with molecular force
until they become too heavy
to carry around,

until they start to die,
calmly resigning themselves
to an unfulfilled purpose.

I skirt the edges of humanity,
a lone wolf, incalculable
in silent black dresses that flutter
and colossal ideas that squirm,
yearning to see themselves
reflected back in the moonlight.

You shift on my horizons,
a quiet place amidst the swell
of violent noise and clenched teeth,
and something in you keeps
drawing me back- a magnetism.
I walk amongst your leaves,
feel your scattered light,
and it is calm. It is home.

You see me, not the smiling
daguerreotype that I paste up,
but deeper- inky black and serpentine,
with feelings that swell
and burst like balloons.

We tread lightly over the bones
of things we've left unsaid,
our eyes reflecting mirror images
of words that swim and satiate
this primal thirst, a spark
of unconventional
connectivity.