Silence twists around my throat,
serpentine in the inky light,
as the paint sticks
and dries beneath my fingernails.

Ideas claw at my solar plexus
threatening sycophancy
treason and madness
in a world of stale passion
and stuttering ignorance.

They wake up and shower,
****, shave, apply the mask
with painstaking detail.
They die before they reach thirty
and go on walking about
as if they know the secret
to eternal bliss-
it's possible that they do,
after all.

I mean, consider the alternative-
an artist haunted by the colors
that live in a winter sunrise,
a nomad reaching for no one
as he chases the sun
across mercurial landscapes,
a writer living through ink
because there's no other way
to quell the storms,
a human shedding expectations
for beautiful things
that will always be broken.

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.