days like this, gray sky
over coastal grandeur,
I sit and look out across
the rubble of a city,
the rubble of our souls;
what a ******* mess
we have made.

the gulls loop and dive,
screaming, into the
winter lake, and all
the classical music
in the world couldn't compare
to the dull sorrow
of this moment;
such a beautiful contrast
of trash and gold.

we are all, every one,
searching for something
beautiful, something
to hold that won't turn
to stone.

I was going to write you something
that embodied our love, some
infinitesimal prose about
your name click-clacking off of
my tongue or your eyes
when you're smiling.

I was going to answer all of
the questions that are silently ticking
inside your mind and scrawl
perfect prepositions across the page
so that your hands might
falter as they traced the corners.

I wanted to tell you about
the tug of your presence or
the way that your fingerprints
feel against mine,

but I'm writing this instead,
listing off the beauty that I feel
seeping into my skin and
it doesn't really make sense
but that's just the way it falls
onto the paper, bit by bit.
sad things, serenade me.

I'm only romanticizing
the madness of it all.
I never asked to be
a ******* poet.

The urge to create, to write
to paint to compose
is only a disillusioned
form of madness.

But great art can come
of madness, and
sorrow can birth
extraordinary genius,
so embrace your
defects and fault lines,
for normality
is a fate
worse than death.

how strange; you leave me
hanging on to your words
like parachutes, a smile
dancing across my gratuitous
face; appalachian eyes
the color of melancholy
and mouth of a sailor.

you said, I never thought
that I would miss you
quite this much.
...and my very heart
swooned at the idea of
you, so very far away,
so close to me.

come home to me,
darling, I want to tell you
how much I've missed you.

wake up, the sun is cold
amongst the din of mourning doves
and impossible airwaves.

breathe, are you ready for
the apocalypse of silent words?
stuttering silver mercury
and glimmering plasma
tracing paths in your brain,
and the sun is cold,
so cold, and the coffee is black

and, my lover doesn't even know
who I am anymore.

Ophelia, Ophelia,
voracious daydreamer,
how dare you
upset this delicate orbit.
your hands were the kiln
for my sloppy and misshapen mind,
but that was nothing,
relatively, compared to the way
your eyes reflected lost souls.
my dear, it's a catastrophe.

now when the moon chides me,
and the stars reek of your smile,
I run my hands across
the fronts of empty dresses
that you wore years ago.
Ophelia, Ophelia,
I recall the way your eyes shone
like the peak of madness
and how your shoulder blades
touched in a subtly avian manner.

how simple are the remnants
of your existence, of your melancholia,
I cling to them like a ***** to touch-
and I know they will bring you no closer.
stale shadows haunt my lingering eyes;
where you should be standing
I see only lost time.

Ophelia, Ophelia,
smoldering star in my hindsight,
stone in my chest-
I'm sad to see you go.

I wish that I
could fall in love
with a female,
for she would make
a far better muse than
the gruff sailors and musicians
and drunks and men
in general that I am
inclined to crave.

to write about
a painted pout or
skin that brushes against
your own like nylon,
sunlight shining through
the window onto a Cupid's bow
and dancing down to
a delicate clavicle, or
black eyelashes that bat
and blink remorse
into your cavernous heart,
to muse over such aesthetic
delights, would be
ecstasy for my poetess heart.

I linger, staring, at beautiful
women, androgynous women,
delicate, feline women,
stringing words
together in my head
over long legs and
hair that flutters like silk,
and they think I'm crazy
or in love with them.
well, maybe I am crazy,
but I crawl into bed each night
with my snarling, gleaming,
mahogany gentleman,
and I love him madly,
my rugged muse.

it's too late to fret
about decisions made
and ties cut, past tense.
it's hard to see it
without the glaring minutiae
of my demise.
I'm scanning the walls
for a change of subject-
Polaroids and butterfly carcasses,
city skyline sketches
and old cigarette advertisements
in gilt gold frames;
satisfy yourself.

my mind is saturated
with degenerate cogitation-
a stew of pantheons
and painstaking nihilism.
my bones are brittle
and begging to break
and my eyes are growing heavy,
with the weight of it all.

six deadbolts
and a loaded gun
tucked beneath your
pillow, what are you
waiting for love?
is it the rapists or
the sociopaths or
the criminally insane
come to shatter your
suburban dream?

they may come for you,
or maybe you are
one of them.

it doesn't really matter
anyways, you'll still
rise when you rise,
laugh when you can
and never, ever cry-
that would make you
human. you'll still
be seeking answers
if you're lucky and
pretending to know
what love is
in a dark, dark place.

everything will go to ****
on its own. be wary
not of the sociopaths
but the preachers
of god, of love, of war,

be wary of
your own mind.

bugs and little blue stars
crawl from my eye sockets-
they hiss and pop in the light
and burn my transparent flesh.

glow like phosphorous.
grow like weeds.
bend like my spine.

you are not
permanent.
you will float off
on shiny orbs of soulless
plastic. helium smile,
chrysanthemum hands.

i've been building sentences
for you, because there are
too many words to keep them
stagnant and docile.

oh, words on melancholy smiles,
chipped porcelain and
sunlight dappled through your hair
like the sun herself had
kissed the crown of your head.

i've been writing you letters
inside of my head. little golden
pinpricks of love
seeping through my cells
because my body cannot hold
the very idea of loving you.

in those moments, i am liminal,
held tight by the arch of your spine,
the pads of your fingers,
the way that you held my name
in your mouth before
it rolled off of your tongue and
the smell of your skin
in a dark room, with only
the moon watching us
woefully, sweetly.

words like saccharine and
your name, slow like honey,
taste sweet enough
to make me cry.

i've been stuck on the idea
of loving you, loving me
and wringing my hands
over bad luck, mon petite chou.

and still, you close your eyes,
clasp your hands over your ears
and brush off my words like
dust or snowflakes or
unrequited love.

lonely lonely,
you leave me so,
inside out watching
the stars burn out
in an emptying
of cosmic sorrow..

and tomorrow I know
the sun will smile at me
your kisses will taste
like honey and
the birds will romance me
with slaughtered butterflies
and sweet lamentation.

But today,
I've been tuning radio static
to white noise and
flashes of Chopin,
trying to recreate a feeling
from shadows and memory.

don't leave me lonely,
dear, make love to
me in the hypnagogic
stare of the rising sun.
play me soft as buttercups
and foxgloves;
piannissimo,
gentle as death's
watchful eye.

**** poor, dying for a dream,
or a drink, one more cigarette,
the landlord comes around, asking for rent
and the money is gone, it was never there,
so you smile and bat your eyes,
one more week, I promise

soon he'll be at your throat
with eviction notices that scream
louder than stereotypes of poverty
louder than your baby's growling stomach
louder than all of your meticulous schemes.
are you uncomfortable yet?
I've barely scratched the surface.

the stereotype that you fell into
doesn't suit you, single mother
wiping off tables and smiling your hardest
to make tips, bend a little further,
hike up your skirt, show some leg
some ***, let them see your ****,
generous patrons love that ****.

you go home and scream into empty spaces
and curl into cold corners thinking of
Bukowski in cockroach rooms
eating candy bars to survive
and dream of an end to a means.
you play some Tchaikovsky
and hold your own flesh and blood
close enough that they can't leave you,
drink White Russians until your hands melt
and write **** that nobody wants to read
about your struggles, knowing that
you will be gifted with rejection letters
and apologies.

**** poor, it is a way to live
but if you prefer sanity, not one
that I would suggest.
it will devour you
destroy you, upend your hopes
and shatter your dreams.
god will not help you,
nor the state or the politicians,
but if you make it out alive
you could be stronger than
diamonds, harder even than
your own resolve.

Bone-white moon.
Lacrimosa caught
in the mechanisms.
Can you see me?

Of course not.
I blend in
with the sawgrass
and the catacombs.
With beach glass
and stones the color
of rust. I am a

microcosm.
Can you hear me?
My tragedy is in
the way I keep quiet.
Silence like ashes.
I am ethereal now.

This is my requiem.
Send my regards
to Mykonos.
Burn the screaming harp.
I am subterranean now.
Someday it will all turn
to gold.

but I've an inclination towards
laurels and violet,
celandine and foxglove;

the wildflowers you plucked
in the sunlight of our summers.

some days I can wake up
and understand why the world
does what it does.

today, the sun strikes chords
on my naked spine
and I roll over, retreat
beneath blankets and sheets.

I falter at the thought of
senseless murders
land mines and apartheid
babies starving
and mothers dying
in an epidemic of ungodly
proportions.

what's the use, anyways?
nobody's winning if
we're all losing.

that fizzy chemical
feeling
wraps itself around
my veins.
again. again.

not again.

i am full of blue smoke
and voracious wind voices.
i am full of melancholy
and still-born
dreams.

i miss you,
there, in the mirror.
you shine like
forgotten sun,
laugh like
terrific miniature
gods.

i am acetylene now.
i am neither human
nor beast. i return
to the ashes and ether
from whence I came.

i don’t belong here,
living as a fox among
the pheasants.

there is a girl made of stardust
and ocean salt, breathing static
into the night sky.
her love, if tended to
with patient hands, would
grow like wild roses across
the trellises of your heart.

she is not born of men;
but a child of luna,
sweet mother.
she is a breeze in July
softly rustling your hair
and the plague of
heatstroke and withered
tongues that swiftly follows.
her touch lingers into
the winter solstice.

she is the wave of sorrow
sweeping over your bones
and the light in your eyes
shining with leftover love;
a shadow dressed in white,
a consummation of grief.

she is a wallflower, a habitual
offender to the gods.
she will nurture you like an infant
and then leave you on your knees,
gasping for redemption.

I lied when I told you
that I was okay, that
colors were still colors
and that my thoughts
were still pure.

you should've known better,
dear, that I am the dirtiest
form of clean, gritty smile
and the inescapable nature
of a poet.

don't look so surprised
at the words that bounce
off the roof of my mouth.
I know you shudder at
my carelessness, at my
inclination to destruction,
but don't look at me that way,
darling.

don't come around,
if you can't thrive on decay.
don't think twice about leaving,
I never promised you a martyr.

Color me in.
I lie naked and
wrapped in white linen-
A corpse.
If only my mind could
lie still as my body.

Let them carry me
to the incinerator.
But the pallbearers
have heard my death rattle,
they've found me out.

But I am an island now.
It is quiet here, only
remnants of Chopin

and little gold rings,
ashes,
a story in Braille,
what else have you got?

I'm so tired of being
the Phoenix in this tale.

Another night spent
between walls
that ooze sympathetic smiles;
drinking homemade wine
and raising my crystal glass
in a toast to my homeland-

Congratulations.
You've all gone
to waste.

Blue wind encapsulates
in the midst of this ephemeral
autumn madness,
and my hands shake
as I try to forget.

I am just a human,
small and faulted,
trying like hell to squelch
the siren songs
of these maniac thoughts
buzzing like bees
through the empty spaces
within my skull.

I am just a silent body
and grey matter processing
words and colors
that feel truer
than any cheap emotions.

Cold light illuminates
and sparks nostalgia
and I am just
two eyes
retreating
into the mist.

in a city that breeds hooligans
ingrates and indecencies,
where the architecture of a lost era
crumbles into brothels and madhouses,
where shootings peak
with the heat of summer,
where new windows are boarded up daily
and we chop down trees like fanatics,
in the city I call home,
in the city I love,
destroyed by its ignorance,
I am condemned to silent pleas
and empty stares.

you played me like a mandolin,
striking notes like broken glass
in the space between your wayward sheets.
your hands were my compass,
your eyes the Adriatic Sea-
and I plunged into the depths
like an albatross,
fawning over wide open spaces
and beautiful colors.

yes, you played me like a symphony,
my body ebbing and flowing
in ghastly syncopation.
notes like honeysuckle and lilac
coursing through my bloodstream-
capillaries to venules to veins to the vena cava
and straight on into my heart.

and you'd be ecstatic to know
that I haven't heard such a haunting refrain
since you went away.

he told me,
you are the strangest creature
that I have ever laid eyes on.
and what could I say?

I am a curator of slick thoughts,
cigarette thin and clinging
like mad to my small sense of resolve.
a stranger in a house of ghosts,
writing phantom epitaphs and
combing through scientific journal articles.

I am no mystic, but a logical anomaly.

stranger things have happened.

there are these things like summertime
sadness and frosty windows,
moth wings and the cosmos
and goose flesh and miniature houses
with miniature chairs and

hourglasses and sun-soaked
sheets in the morning and your lips
against mine, hollow bones
and thin blue veins and the
delicacy of synapses and nerves,
reoccurring thoughts and images;
my intimacy with them is
alarmingly sensual;
like the honeysuckle curve
of a bare shoulder,

shadows of hands on walls
and the nectar of your kiss.
things that haunt me and
dance before me,
the epitome
of grace.

Gentle plutonium flows through
a cloud soaked sky.
The next breath is
somewhere
in the air all around me.
I cannot catch it
I inhale the scent of a city
to exhale the circular lengths
of lost civilizations held together
by faceless, mindless tycoons
and machine-gun fire.

Like the phosphorous spark
of distant fireflies,
words stirring like chemicals
to flash in unison.
So what is this now?
A cerulean tempo limited alone
by the accidental pausing
of an instant?
Stutter of the clock.
or these hidden iron
beats hammering rhythms
into my soiled heart.
Touch of an infinity
blood flow
with a pinch of glassy
thoughts that dwell on stilts over
a sea of miniature gods and
hourglasses and TV sets and
suicide beds.

Streetlights in the
windows talk
but do not offer a final
answer.

time is an hourglass
glued to the table,
and the world outside
has gone quite mad,
my dear.

rats in the gutters
and a soundtrack of
nine millimeters
resounding through
the air; and didn't i tell you
life was beautiful?

the shooting stars now,
they look a lot like bombs
as they make their way
to the shrieking silence
of dry land.

the golden babies laugh
their golden laugh
as a million more are lost
or left for dead in the
alleys of my mind
and didn't I tell you
this would all be so very
lovely?

don't fret now, baby,
the skies will soon catch fire
and the madhouse
will bloom
and thrive.

Skies like sheets of shale
floated above our pretty heads,
shedding fat drops of rain
upon an unseasonably warm
December day in Michigan.

I broke free from your grip
beneath our shared plastic umbrella,
ran into the yard
and spun around six times,
arms outstretched like an albatross,
face upturned to the miles and miles
of unbroken grey clouds.

I stopped and called to you,
fly with me.
as my palms turned up
and reached for you, involuntarily.

You laughed, staccato,
and your ambiguous smile
was nothing more than
an ugly daguerreotype
set before a landscape
of compassionate trees.

I'd rather not get wet,
you said

and I think
I've always resented you
for that.

Borne into a frenzy
of sleepless black nights
that coil and surround me,
where chimeras and serpents
glide like paint,
in the sea that separates
the mind and the horizon.

I flail and sputter,
treading naught
but black water.
Just leave me here for awhile.

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.

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.

black morning- the birds fall apart
beyond the curtain, forgetting their lines,
and the regret hangs around my neck
like a talisman.

the knives are sound asleep in their
wooden block and, alas,
the gas still warms the house.
yes, this is clarity pressing her fingers
to my temples and lifting the fever
of earthworms and giants.

your face still haunts me
but only in the dark womb of sleep,
that cruel temptress.
you come like a shadow and
I am dressed in black, patiently
waiting to consume you.

clarity comes upon awakening,
when I discover how easily the dirt
and grit of your smile
washes away.

c'est la vie,
I can stand on solid ground.

you sound like broken glass
and your hands..
your hands,
are otherworldly creatures
roving over my flesh
like so much unclaimed land.

I smile, I hate you.
punched out cigarettes
lie smoldering in the ashtray
and I thought I could hear
the point of impact
in your hurried sentences.

I'm not worth the trouble,
I never wanted this anyways.
I just wanted to stand
at the edge of where the sea
meets the land and
taste the air in May.

I just wanted to know
what it
*felt like.

stuffing stolen oxygen
into my secondhand bag,
and smiling up at the
butter sun;
the ancient groundskeeper says,
earth mama, you should be
doing pirouettes
in Santa Ana, stumbling
barefoot bright sidewalks
in Albuquerque.

I nod and get in my car
feel my soul twitch
and I am astounded that
the trees haven't
found me out
yet, that the lilies
haven't strangled me
in my sleep
yet.

maybe I’ve been here
too long too long
maybe I need to go
where the sun is
relentless..

1500 miles to Albuquerque

When the fog dissipates
and the city skyline
winks into your clever retinas,
will you be satisfied
with what you see?

When those things you had forgotten
are worming their way back
into your bones and blood vessels,
will you still glance at the intractable sun,
awestruck and catatonic,
like a moth to the moon?
Will you still find beauty in
sidewalk weeds and broken glass?

When the fog dissipates,
and humanity presents itself,
brazen and unabashed,
in a flurry of chaos and stale dreams,
will you still fall into the mass
of faces and hands and ******* and eyes?

Or will you falter at the glaring sight
of a society that's run amuck?

alone, there are worse things,
like being an artist
trapped between microcosms,
unable to make eye contact,
or wasting away in suburbia,
stuck on photographs
of Venus and Cetacea,
or reading Bukowski to
a room full of preachers and
PTA goddesses,
or mourning the specimens
spread and pinned to a board.

yes, there are worse things
than alone; did I mention
slithering black nights
and the touch of bare skin
when you've forgotten
how to love?

it's too late to realize
such small truths,
we simply adjust.

I do not fit
between straight lines
and words that twinge
metallic and cold
as they strike notes
upon my open mind
and upturned palms.

I do not fit between
cities that shriek,
burning inexplicably
and wide open spaces
that stretch repetitively
on past your periphery.

I do not fit between
envelope folds
and crisp little notes,
crying at all the indecisiveness
of my worn edges.

I do not fit between
blue skies that mean nothing,
and a white hot sun
burning holes in it,
overexposing this bleached
and silent landscape.

I do not fit between
tightly packed cubicles
and hungry eyes.

My body moves about
with marionette precision
as the mind screams
with contempt
cool and sharp as glass,
white hot and fleeting,
lustfully arcing
into a shadow of identity.

I am still learning
how to be gentle and kind
in a world that is not mine,
where the flowers sway
in fields of golden solemnity
and the trees shake like a word
that wants to be said.

I am still learning
how to live in a place
where knowledge is but
a means to an end;
a point on the map
to be forgotten once you've
crossed into the blissful ignorance
of suburban accomplishment.

I am still learning
how to look at a sunrise
and feel more than this
transient melancholy
at a beauty that is held alone.
The thoughts that bloom
in exultance just to be borne
lie waiting, ripe with discontent
at the threshold of a room
where no one speaks the language.

every word that comes tumbling out
of your superfluous lips
is loaded with wholesome irreverence,
weighing leaded and cruel upon my heart
by the pale recycled light of the moon.

déjà vu lingers before my bleary eyes
again,
as crumbs of flightlessness
slip through my fingers, again.
and I can see you unfolding us,
dissecting us, laying out all of the pieces
in a heart-wrenching vivisection.

and I know you can't really **** something
that's been near death for years,
but when do you give up
on resuscitation?

you glide across the floors
of my imagination with the
gait of a silverfish and
a name just as deceptive.

and i sweep you beneath
the rug or erase you
with a stamping of gilded feet
or bury you beneath heaps
of discarded memories
until your features fade
and you are nothing more
than a lost relic,

a watercolor portrait
too beautiful to keep.

and suddenly it was as though
all of those fleeting moments
that I had been grasping for,
all of those feelings
slipping through my periphery,
all of those things
that I could never quite
taste-
they came rushing into me.

And suddenly, I understood
what it was that was escaping me.
I knew exactly what it felt like
to see my heart beating
in someone else's body;
I heard my thoughts
spilling across your lovely lips
and saw my spark
reflected in your eyes,
speaking languages
that I wanted to learn.

I spilled forth all of the rusted,
mildewed things that were hiding
in the recesses of my memories,
and I held them up to the light
and let you touch them,
turn them over and hold them.

And that old feeling
in the helplessness of
my naked soul
was replaced with
a lucid sense of weightlessness.

I found you, and I thought
that you might be able
to know me,
to really know me,
without turning away.

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.

Slip down into the
temporal lobe of my
aching brain,
crescendo of *******
organic effects.

I draw the shades and
hold my head in pale winter hands,
allowing oceans of cerulean sorrow
to fill my lungs,
and you say what you will,
and you say that you're right,
and I fold
beneath the weight of
your shadow.

i know your demons,
and I kiss them on their pale and
broken foreheads to appease you.
i know the map of your skin,
of your bones, like white gold.

my hands are shaking
as the stars collide and
the dust of them lingers in
your eyelashes; and
i should detest you
by now, but you have
this way of consuming me
with the shadows in your
irises, but i

exhale- a breath like the
million before you came,
a plume of smoke,
radio static.

smoldering desire lights
upon my tongue and
infiltrates my thoughts.

and it is overwhelming,
everything at once;
our love may be a chronic
illness, but
the delirium is
hauntingly
beautiful.

has spring arrived
already?
i brace myself
and wait-
boughs bent  and
naked.

but, there are no
fluttering cherry blossoms
here, nor golden
nightingales.

i brace myself against
promises of gods
and false prophets
shivering in the wind.

cede fortunae,
they say to me.

i was destined
for this.

Organic electronic sounds
reverberate throughout
this closed up room,
and I am swathed
in crisp white sheets
and indigo delirium.

The sun slips in and out
between the leaves
holding their breath
outside my window,
and I inhale
air that is heavy
with lost words
and melancholia.

The walls are grey here
and they call for sleep
and great cerulean silences,
things that might heal.
But old lovers keep on
sending messages
like Morse code
and new lovers
cut their teeth on
my collarbones,
smiling at the novelty
of a pretty face and
a sick mind.

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.

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?