We sat in deck chairs, our feet entrenched in the sand,
as the water crept up the shore
and splashed gently on our toy sailboats.
The fire pit roared and rose with flames
under the moonlight. Our friendship was anchored
in the beach for years, since second grade.
I kept watch on your sailboat,
knowing it would soon cast out into the sea of adulthood.
We spent hours talking about our dreams,
as though the sandman truly existed
apart from
our imagination.

Remember when we dropped our textbooks in the trash compactor?
Because we believed in the Lost Generation and The Beats, and not some phonies from academia.  
We even sprinted away from the security guards after we used our slingshots and shot rocks at the The Verizon Center's Marquee.

Smoke and drink.
Smoke and drink.
Smoke and drink.

We lounged in the dugout while the sky poured buckets of rain on the baseball diamond, as our lighters ran out of fluid.

*

By accident, you shot me in the mouth with an air-soft gun. The beady plastic pellet zinged through the air, and sawed off half of my front tooth. Frantically, you sprinted inside and came back out with a glass of whole milk. You snagged the chipped up tooth from the lush lawn, and dropped it into glass. The tooth got swallowed up by the milk, leaving a trace of ripples.

But you had pure intentions, only lukewarm aim. On a porch chair, I sat bent over with my upper lip bundled with wet paper towels. There was no blood, no flesh wound; just a clean shot. I dabbed my tender gum gently with the damp towel.

You walked up to me and slapped me on the back. I shook my head, rolled the towel into a paper *** and chucked it at your nose.

You caught the projectile in mid-air and threw the afternoon’s remnants over the pointy picket fence. You turned around and saw my back, as I walked on the neighborhood sidewalk away from your house.

Ten years later, in the summer of 2007, we stretched out our limbs on Rehoboth beach and smoked headies out of a papier-mâché-looking piece; we called her Old Glory. As we toked and held in the gray coughs, we took in the view. Small waves barreled over and flattened out onto the fine sand shore. Our toes were tangled in the snare of the ivy green seaweed.

We didn’t want to let go of this.

This picture frame memory, the wooden frame lacquered with fresh pine comb.

A peace pipe shared between each other to rekindle their friendship. I stared at the bright fire of the lighter, watching as red sparks turn into violent black. Light gray debris collected on my swim trunks. We both looked up at the starless sky, as if we were searching for twilight. The moon glow shrunk the longer an eyeball looks, you said.

I nodded, got up, and walked right into a tall wave. I took the full force of the water, standing my ground with a bird’s nest chest. You laughed and lolled your head back off; you were exhausted.
I walked back up the hilly shore, and treaded my finger along the ridges of my ceramic tooth. A replica embedded in my mouth. I felt the jagged edges, the flaws, and grinned a little.

Just enough, to feel like I was on the verge of epiphany, on the beginning of seeking out the correct approach of life.

We hit the piece again. And the sun began to rise.
Our eyes closed, breaths quiet, and our memories entwined
for days to come.

Restless in bed, the stir of warmth blossoming in his heart,
the girl he loved has gone,
drifted from his house to the field of vacant stares.
Rainstorms brew in his mind, shifting from one end to the other,
the current forming into a large sheet of distance damp with disconnection.
He thinks of fire. As he rolls out of bed.
Grabbing a cigarette from his ashtray,
he lights up. Old habits stay kept in the roof of his mouth. Fresh air
permeates through his nostrils as he steps out onto the front porch.
He props his elbows on the balustrade,
brushes against the grainy wood
tarnished from the skywater.
The sun droops below the gray cluster of clouds
hanging over a horizon colored with blues, reds, and yellows.
While he smokes on his cigarette he remembers the girl. Her name is a
wrinkled photograph stored in a dusty shoe box.
She has green eyes and curly red hair.
Her body is shaped in an hourglass figure.
She's tall and gaunt, but her
legs are toned from running several miles on her treadmill
each morning before the dark slips away into the fog of light.
He grounds the cigarette out on the porch. He steps onto the driveway. There's a red
Honda CRV parked across from the two-car garage.
He hops in. The key turns.
Booming engine roars out loud.
The wheels churn backwards. He pulls out of the
cul-de-sac. And he drives, drives,
until he can remember the road map, the one
that she stole from him to follow her dreams, and hopes, the aspirations that he had
once shared with her. A thin, white film of mist
belays across the windshield.
And for a short second he wishes that he were dead.
Dead so that he could have the
perspective of an omniscient narrator to oversee everything, and everyone.
But where is his girl? She's not the one who got away,
she's the one who abandoned him, the
night after he ate the sweet nectar,
the fruit, little drops of dew splashing onto the back of his tongue.
The red Honda CR-V careens down the interstate, windows down, subwoofers pumping
with something similar to apprehension,
tense with overwrought poems.
The substance lacking from trying too hard,
for something that wants nothing to do with him.

When we broke up with each other,
the light in your eyes vanished forever in that moment.
Traces of brightness flickered on the ground,
like pieces of ash.

I lifted up my foot and smothered the traces of light,
as you pulled open your voice from your mouth
and screamed for dear life.
You stabbed my chest with a sword made out of insults.

The blood spilling out of the wound,
stained my white polo shirt
that was supposed to be my bulletproof vest,
the blood piercing the fabric like hollow shells on fire.

I wanted to take every thought from your mind
and collect them in my hands,
crushing them into a pulp. I forgot about the good times,
as if they were our cars in a crowded parking lot.

You said you loved me, but I was born deaf,
so all I heard was you hate me. Layers of cobwebs
laid buried in my ears and your words
were ear-plugs.

After we broke up, I drowned myself
in a bathtub of regret and exhaustion.
I took a bottle of gin, poured it out,
and replaced it with dreams of a hopeful future, then had a sip.

Caring is a treacherous thing;
Everytime i do, i hurt even more.

Though still i keep on caring for you;
It's leaving my heart all broken and sore.

Am i really such a fool?
i keep making these same mistakes.

Untill she leaves this foolish me;
And my heart once again breaks.

How can i fix what we had,
Make up for the mistakes i made.

Because after all i still care for you,
And that's just the thing i hate...

You wanted to leave
My heart started yearning
But I could not stop
This bridge of ours from burning
Now I can hear our song play
In reverse
To the slow destruction
Of my universe

once upon a time, you were every story in my head. you were fantasies woven during day and prose written at 3AM. i saw so much poetry in you, in everything you did. that was a sure sign that i felt something for you, that my love ran deeper than plain infatuation and crushing.

i wrote about how your smile could light up the darkest of days; my sunshine, my flashlight. i wrote about how beautiful i thought the callouses on your hands were, i wrote about how your flaws were never imperfections to me. i wrote about the lyrics you remind me of. i wrote your name in cursive on the back of my hand along with words of promise and endearment. i scribbled you through the margins of my notebook with poetry and song.

but oh, it wasn’t all just fairy dust and wanderlust.

my pen bled ugly words, rage and heartbreak and jealousy. prose after prose of how you’d leave me in the rain, how you always made me feel like i was either too much or not enough. they were angry taps to the keyboard. pens tearing in to paper. the horrors of them made e.e cummings turn in his grave, the curses of young love would have made shakespeare proud.

you knew about that. you knew about how i meticulously wove words together for you, words that would have made other people fall in love. and not once did you appreciate them; you threw aside my gifts of poetry and prose like they weren’t about you. like they didn’t mean a thing.

if you read them, you would’ve seen how much i adored you. if you read them, you would’ve recognized a love so unprecedented, unrivaled, untouchable. but you didn’t. you never got past the first stanza, the first paragraph, the first three words before giving me a half-hearted thanks and changing the topic.

and so i started to write about you less. my words began to lose it’s substance, my phrases got shorter, my metaphors making less sense. and you didn’t notice. you never noticed how you slowly faded from the thing the one thing that mattered more to me than anything in the whole world.

you faded, then you were gone completely.

i no longer write about you. wait, no, that’s a lie: i no longer want to write about you. i hope this is the last time i do, the last set of words i’d dare to pull together for you. you don’t deserve to know how i feel about you, you don’t deserve my poems or my words anymore. god knows my words are all i have, and i can’t love you if you don’t learn to love them. i’m sorry; call it selfish, or unfair. but these words, these words, my words. how can i write about you if you don’t– if you never– valued the best gift i had to offer?

you’re now just some left-over papers that i keep under my bed, one day to open and read with tinges of nostalgia, but never to re-write again.

Once there was a story

About a man who has no glory

His eyes can't even see the sun

Supposed to knows not the meaning of fun



But he never buried hate into his heart

Instead, he seeded love from the start

Gentle Prayers though darkness invades a sunny sky

Knowing the sun will show, when life says goodbye



His story was written in a very

Inspiring golden book

Only perceptible to those

Whose heart knows... how to truly look...




8:11 PM

April 25, 2016

Mysterious_aries

I wish I was sober.
I'm stumbling,
Falling,breaking
and my path
has been one of
crooked winding roads.
I wish I was sober,
and not a man
who is drunk
by the search
of love.
Hoping that love
can ease my pain
heal my wounds
erase my flaws
embrace my strengths
and fix my broken bits.