Stripped of her vices so she was left with only fingernails
to scratch at peachy skin.
Shards of crimson coated glass
felt foreign in my possession.
Nights got hazy and lines blurred
when her cheek had to be smacked free
from historic nightmares of older boys
and tainted orange juice.

We existed in shades of sallowly lingering gray,
between soft coos and forked tongues.

Straight jackets cannot clamp wild hearts.
Pulse points are really hidden under our ribs.
How could my arms be enough when the world has never been?
The caged bird beats its wings into a frenzy.

Vultures are monogamous.
Cragged necks looped,
it takes them years to forget.
Wing and wing in a nest of rot,
together they pick at sinew.

Fierce devotion in a hollow church
and no organs remained.

She will consume her dead lover,
spanned on an opalescent log;
regurgitate his remains into a baby’s mouth.

Born into the leftovers,
we become remains.

It’s graceless
the way I’m always shifting.

I stole a teacher’s book of poetry once,
pages dog-eared and marked up,
I thought it’d help me understand.
I haven’t touched it since that June.

One perfect summer--
I spent the first two weeks of it back in the halls of a convent.
I know my Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s,
nothing else. What is hubris?
2 years doesn’t get you far in any doctrine
unless you’re desperate.

You were the first and last perfect anything,
since lost in nebulous transitions.

“Why are people in the subway always in such a hurry?”
Said a girl who left her purse open in a crowd once.

Always trying to putty in voids,
selfish fingers sewing up breaks,
pulling out stitches before they’re healed;
Wanting to feel that scar later—hear the click between ligaments.
I can pop my jaw. It might fall out some day.
Juggle pride with martyrdom carefully.

This is the first honest poem I’ve ever written.
It's hard to know what to say,
when busy gracelessly somersaulting through stretches of time.

Don’t let me disappear.

I'm talking to pine trees
teetering on a brush fire--
they do not speak English,
needle whispers are of a foreign tongue.
Feet varnished by sap
clodden with traces and feel no pain,
You will not forget.
(It only rubs off with extra-****** olive oil,
a pumice stone,
boiling water;
I had none.)
Later
toes slick and raw,
hands fleshy red in heat,
the ungraspable fresh veneer.

I let my fingernails grow out.

The forest burnt down in my eyes.

I am split-minded
With quivering doubts,
Because that Other one
Slipped in through the back door--
Didn’t even knock,
Whisked me away to a cocktail party
Where everyone was murmuring about her last aberrations;
I knew it would be better to stay home.

I don’t hear voices—no,
We all sound the same.
She just hates to be bored,
Doesn’t follow direction well.
She likes to smudge all my
Self-proclaimed happy-truths
With bloodshot graffiti ink--

I never was a very good artist.

Always too clumsy-handed to
Make anything beautiful,
Or to clean up my own messes.
You are both delicate and
Extremely cruel,
And I am far too human
To be anything but weak.

In July
right after her name stopped showing up on your phone,
we climbed a mountain.
It was one of the hottest days that summer, and I think
we both thought it was a test.
Too much weight teetering on whether we could make it
to a plateau on that cragged mountainhill
and then retrace our steps on a weary car ride home
without airvent fans on full blast,
sending shivers down our spines to fill the silence.

Boots that didn’t quite fit, a cramp in my abdomen stopping me halfway for a moment,
we smelled like stale bugspray.
And I still felt the ***** of a mosquito pierce the forgotten spot
on the back of my neck.
Flushed from the waist up,
sweat pooling on the cleft of my lip,
a damp heart-shape on the small of my back;
your hand pressed a small pressure against the dip.

Never ones to let our successes cheer quietly,
we spread ourselves bare on a flattish rock.
Pretending to be naïve still, we soothed sweat-salted wounds with kisses,
while creating new ones until our kneesbackselbows wore matching rock-burn.
Something in the pinky-warm of my face made you love me again that day.
I know you never stopped,
but I also know you forgot what my laugh sounded like.

Summer 2013, we made the most of our rickety hearts.

It's not our faults we were happy
Maniacally, brilliantly happy,
Midnights in hot water and cold air, breathing into eachother's necks,
"But what will happen when summer ends?"
We scrabbled at each passing moment with stubby fingernails
Teary eyes on champagne nights
We always knew we were no more than fleeting chaos,
Beautiful ******* chaos,
We may have fit together in all the wrong ways but we were such a pretty sight.
I could not crack open your weary mind,
I could not crawl inside with a wrench and Phillips screwdriver and right all the wrongs,
But I could whip your brain cells into a frenzy.
I was everything that you did not need,
But we were everything that we wanted to be.
We tumbled our way down the domino track to the very last peice,
And when our inevitable tragedy came like a cyclone, we threw up our hands in surrender on the last loop of that rollercoaster.
And love has many meanings,
So don't doubt that I meant what I said, love.

“Just don’t leave marks,” we said,
Profiles illuminated by the hazy Manhattan skyline.
Wine trickled down our sides
As I learned I’m just a number in your phone
So maybe I’m just someone for you to ****
But *******, does it feel thick and rooted.
I’ll press your words back onto your skin
So you’ll know I’m not just a myth,
I’ve been here all along in the echo of everything you do.
I filtered life through a colander
And you’re all that was left.
I’m open and star-shaped for you.
If you’ll hold my hand in a diner,
Will you hold it in central park?
Let our lips realign,
Let me wrap you up again
Let me fold into you like origami spoons.

We nestle into chaos like an old friend’s embrace,
Spitting fire-encrusted words sharp as the smack of my palm on freckled skin,
Under skyline bespeckled night like ebony, hearts like stone,
We became a self-consuming ever-implosive volcano.
***** slithered through our veins igniting synapses into eruption,
Your fingernails dug into my palm, your name hoarse on my throat,
We crave these embittered words, these scorched nights.
Mad as hatters, we beat on, drunkenly gulping down saltwater tears.
In the morning I’ll kiss your temple, love.
We forget our sins.

Bile in my throat
at the thought of you with another set of hands,
another pair of lips,
Deserved acid rising.
Face like tar baby, maybelline smeared
a black film to each eye.

Scald my case of a body with shower spray,
I remember when your torso pressed against mine
as water spilled down our misshapen noses.
I forget what your lower lip feels like
to be pressed between mine.
Forget what sound stumbled out when teeth left marks
when crescent moons kissed your clavicle
and freckles became a map of my sky.

We never kissed behind any vending machines,
but every moment felt preciously stolen nonetheless.
Too perfect to be ours for long,
we desperately traded in bits of our adolescent hearts
in the lottery of fools.
Doled out vulnerability
in the hopes that
maybe the happiness
would stay
just
a bit
longer.

I listen to synthetic music now
because my heart’s a little less raw,
a little more metallic,
and Conor Oberst cannot
coax open pandora’s box.
Because your ****** eyes
are no longer my 10:30
goodbye.

When the clench of your hands was the only thing that grounded me,
The veins of your palms were my rivers.
Your breaths traveled down my spine,
And every tremor was an earthquake.

Shrouded by rain in a little car,
You were so huge
And I was infinitesimal
In your all encompassing everything, everything.
And all I could inhale was your stardust.

You sit daintily on her lap
And everything’s a frenzy
Not a sunset fiesta
But an angry cataclysm of molecules
Ricocheting into hysterical radioactivity
And I sit quietly
Warily
I watch mine become hers
During brief moments
Of searing mania and the pit
Of my core is unraveling
And my heart is two patters too quick
In the most sedated of ways
On days when the wrinkles of your hands
Match another’s
And when you are no longer my own.

A piece of my heart will always be locked away in your chest cavity
I started using words like chest cavity when I met you
Because you taught me how to face reality head-on with all it’s porousy entropic beauty
But now I’ll speak in metaphors because the truth hurts too much when it’s unveiled

I tumbled into you tripping over my own feet and my own past and scrabbling at your amorphous grip until you became my solid paperweight
My edges held carefully into place with leaden stability
And we reached such great heights together, skipping two steps ahead of everyone else
We whispered forevers under shadows of lashes and I still believe in the power of a first true love

I want to dig under my skin and scrape out the indifference and pour salt into the raw, deeply-seated pain
I built you and held your heart and our souls intertwined
I began to unwind
I frayed because I am no saint
And I ****** with a heart that I cherished
And **** me.

I’ll leave an empty page at the end of our final chapter
--the one I never thought I’d reach.

Maybe in time we’ll scrawl in an epilogue
Between honey sweet days on a tapestry in Saratoga
Woven like loops of a three ring notebook
A convoluted beginning met a harsh end.

We swam into the deep end
Sputtering and gasping for oxygen
Our lungs ¾ full and drunkenly heaving
To the beat of spoken word and Astronautalis.
I spanned my globe with you, measuring pieces of my soul like sugar cubes
In careful bits, we rationed out our hearts
Bartering for love through semisweet jaded eyes.

Your head in my lap on a Central Park afternoon
Your words imprinted on my neck, wrists, back, *******
Our fingerprints sealed together
I’ve never been more naïve.
So glad I didn’t die before I met you.

she says she likes to be alone
until she’s seated at a marble counter,
pitting open a grapefruit and
smiling fondly at its pinky-orange nectar,
refrigerator hum echoing
in the dimly empty house,
she welcomes the acidic trickle
seeping into her day-old papercuts,
her slurps rudely remind her that she is human
and cannot become unhinged
because bones are nothing
if not persistent

Hunched spines slouched with an air of indifference against backs of rigid chairs
Anxious toes tapping on linoleum floors
A generation of Attention-Deficit-addled youth, subdued with medication because they think our eyes dart too quickly
Minds fluttering more rapid-fire than individual thought can account for
             What is “unique” when everything stems from mimicry?
We think ourselves philosophers (only because we’re naïve enough to make assumptions like that)
All that our naked minds can bear is a sliver of the reality we suffocate in
We reject conformity by conforming
We discard typecast by creating stereotypes
We critique and self-doubt and are relentless in our own auto-denigration
Yet still, we see ourselves as infinitely superior
              Because we’re the sum of earth’s 3 billion year journey
              We’re the product of every galaxy and star-birth
              We’re a shred of every molecule of humanity
              We’re the chosen ones, we’re evolution.
We’re ragged, fraying edges
The living definition of a walking contradiction; hypocrisy in motion
Our pens are still doodling in the margins of our notebooks
We march to a syncopated beat with heads held high but eyes cast low as we count our steps and avoid stepping on cracks
Our heels drag with the showmanship of nonchalance but the eagerness in our fingertips betrays us
We’re all just kids caught in the purgatorial limbo of high school
We’re all just trying to pretend that we’re more than we are
We’re mostly hoping that someday we’ll prove our parents right

Rules disintegrate between midnight and when dusk hits horizon

Ask someone, anyone, to run away with you. I dare you. See if they’ll say no
Shrouded with the gentle miasma of sleep just out of reach, a half-step towards the unknown doesn’t seem so risky
Only when the sky is swathed in dull orange does logic start to kick in, 70 miles from home with nothing but a broken compass and a fond companion

Spit bitter regrets at a nameless former lover
The one who scoured every inch of your body and eagerly delved in every crevice of your fragile heart before you even knew the true definition of naiveté
Naiveté: (noun) the scared, nostalgic hands that innocently cling to a forgotten yesterday while prodding us towards the blind plunge of tomorrow

Declare love to that unrequited forbidden fruit
Sleepy vulnerability cracks away at the protective walls we build
Besides, what could the ramifications possibly be when come morning, faintness of memory won’t be able to distinguish fantasy from reality?
So seize the opportunity; be horribly candid and nakedly honest
Feel the transience of the night and relish the fleeting moments that rest between your fingertips.

You came like wildfire
Indistinguishably incendiary
Struck my butane skin
With phosphorus fingertips

Clouded myopic eyes
Saw the ashes to ashes
Flushed lackluster lips
Whispered dust to dust

What you left me with:
A collection of burnt bridges
A drawer of regrets
A heart of hieroglyphics

We are all reverberating shrapnel of an explosive kaleidoscope of organized chaos
We’re scurrying ants piggybacking bread crumbs that press too-heavily on our abdomens
We’d scratch our way up to the constellations on the ceiling if we could just be weightless; if we could just find the right handgrips and footholds
But shoelaces get tangled, palms get sweaty, knuckles get scratched, bodies get heavy
So instead we settle for ducking into tunnels, seeking out the empty train-cars and avoiding eye contact with strangers
Seated alone in tattered pleather seats, we wish we could dissolve the stained grimy window-glass that stands between us and everything that could matter
We’ll force smile-lines into our cheeks when we reach our destinations while quietly scrabbling at the semiprecious dream of a place that we can’t articulate: the unattainable, inexplicable else else elsewhere