the room is empty
as a smile, walls that stand
blank as eyes waiting for truth
as i fumble for stolen words
and like children they
spill from outstretched palms.
a gift to the gutters,
a gift to the gods
who laugh in my wake,
inviting me to whiten my bones
among them, among their
house of trees and their
all-knowing shadows.

landlocked words that sit
stagnant in my muscles,
whimpering in cold corners
and clamoring at whitewashed windows.
i want them,
not the labor, not the anesthetics,
but the small, pink-lipped
baby of them.

words like garbage, words
like paper Mache, or as
silent as both.
they are maddening, porcelain,
but they are mine to nurture,
mine to cure,
mine to hold.

you are not
really gone. i
say this to myself.
when the lights are
low and the music
is quiet, when the hum
of some distant furnace
is the loudest sound
that i can hear.

i still think of you
from time to
time; testing the wind
with your feet in the sand;
or striking notes like
the death of love
in the purple halo
of twilight on your
front steps.

i still reach for you
from time to time;
but my hands
return to me
empty.

i still miss you
from time to time,
but I cannot secrete
the venom from your
backward glances;
nor could I tell you how
our future shone with golden
strips of sunlight,
a pinpoint of it
dancing in your stratosphere.

so, i’m writing the future
in the corners of my mind
and convincing myself
that nothing is permanent;
and that one day, you
will return to me, with
the sun strapped to your back,
re-gifting that which had been
taken when you left me
smoldering in your wake.

and i’m glad just to be
floating around in your atmosphere,
because the view is so lovely
from here. your face like marble,
carved out by the the wind,
and I dare you to bend
like winter twigs or golden light,
one of those things, you never could hold.

one of those things were never here at all.
nor the curve of the wineglass,
as your fingers twisted through air,
and the pieces scattered like mercury,
gleaming as bright as your teeth;
licking for something more tender,
something more meek.

i steal flashes of light and pin them
to the sun’s greedy eye for you,
like the brink of extinction.
it is more like a rebirth; the trees burning
and heaving their limbs like lungs.
it is a changing of seasons, and
it is all, it is all that I can do.

i linger at portholes shaped like your eyes,
gorged somewhat with nostalgia,
but i can move on through the chemical highs
and the lovely dramatics of reds on a stereo blue.

i can stand on things that are uneven.
oh, see how we’ve grown.

you were so beautiful
that you were ugly,
like mercury, you
ominous shape shifter.
i couldn't pinpoint it.

you told me you loved me
but love was just a fallacy;
a promise that couldn't be kept,
an expectation that couldn't be met.

dead stars and bleeding hearts,
landmines and orchestra song,
sun like knives, and
deafening silence;
all of it had never meant
less to me.

perhaps its only when
you'd rather wake up
with a bullet between your teeth
that you really learn
how to live,

how to love
something with
a pulse.

you came, dragging
cardboard shackles in
your wake and fell upon
my floor like the final
messiah.

surrounded by these walls
that I built for you, and
the props that I live by;
a porcelain cat ticking
time on his paws, and
a blue fish swimming laps,

you fold into origami birds
and exhale debris into
the moonlight, sighing
a breath of defeat.

i cannot decipher it.
i remember how you looked
when you were mine,
how you spoke when you
belonged here.

you are strange to me now.
i cannot pinpoint your
watercolor edges nor iron out the
fissures where your smile hides.

i want to take you in my arms
and place you in my bed.
i want to play chopin from memory
for you and carve figures out of wind,
carry you across the threshold
on gilded fingertips;

but you are no longer
mine to form, and
i do not follow.

i haven't written in months.
i'm terrified of prying out
the demons in my solar plexus
and birthing them into something
as tangible as ink against paper.

the things that i miss, they would
have me shaking in my metaphorical boots.
things like your socks on my floor,
or your words hanging like ornaments
in the sunlight above my bed.

the things that i can never get back,
like lost time and fleeting moments
of untouched beauty;
a look, a crippling smile,
the honesty of it all
could sink ships or worse.

ossifying words into something tangible,
a task fit for earthworms or kings,
leaves me wanting more, or maybe less,
waiting for something bone-deep
and overflowing with light.

someday it will find me.

on a slow night
in march- an
oil slick of a night,
the stars are dying quietly,
and the moon is subtly
watching the show.

there are unloved cats,
that once moved like nylon
and smiled into fireplaces,
crawling the perimeters of my thin
walls, as I sit dead center,
in a room that I cannot
call my own; where
the paint sticks to my
creations
and my words are swallowed
by empty wine bottles
and empty smiles set into
gilded jawbones.

and somewhere, somebody
just dropped dead in their kitchen,
while most people are
sleeping, or
chasing sleep, or
making love to their
plastic wives in a cold bed.
and somewhere, is
nowhere
to me.

i am ******* in air
and hoping for zyklon b,
grasping for keys that once
opened doors, but now,
i cannot cross the threshold,
anyways.
i am tripping over old knives
in the floorboards
and scolding my wide eyes
for their blindness.

i resign myself
to my decisions, because
there is nothing else
nothing else I can do.

i will rise in the morning,
cast aside the sun,
and hope that someday,
sutures will take hold
and i will see the ocean again.

crawling, creeping,
slowly shrinking back
into skin and nails
and bones and hair
and glistening ectoplasm.

backwards thinking because of
infinity eyes and a lovely
spine that was never there
to begin with.
and, I smile,
but its always your
smile

even when I tell myself
that the geraniums
cannot cry forever, or
that the sun can only eat
so many shadows
before it
explodes.

a prelude to insanity;
it slowly eats away at you
from the inside, tearing
down walls and wreaking havoc
on your psyche-

it is all of those daffodils
glaring yellow
unreachable,
and it is the sound of
an empty orchestra
in the middle of June  

it is the worms beneath
your stocking feet
and the sad birds
who haven't suffocated yet,

it is the wind chime
that sings for someone else
or the frequency
that carries the tune.

it is the sun, burning holes
in your clever retinas,
and all of those gracious porticoes
that you will never walk through.

it is the cats retching
in alleyways, and the ******
smiling across poorly lit
rooms, as they forget
to grow old.

it is all of the discarded books
with their broken spines,
it is smudged windows
and Neanderthal kisses.

it is the end of
something that was never
really yours to keep.

it is everything that you
wanted to love,
but couldn't
find the
time.