I miss the way you
punctuate my sentences
put purpose in my windswept
words
complete me
make sense of my
heaps of jumbled gibberish
you
hold me when Im
running on
when youre
gone Im
stuck split in splices
and tacky fragments

doesn't hurt, not
always. Sometimes
it heals the cracks in your
ribs and eases you gently into sleep
for the first time in weeks.
Truth
is curious and ugly and forever half-hidden,
cowering uncomfortably behind
partial lies, obscured like
the sun rising behind the mountains.
It's seemingly more beautiful
when cloaked,
if only you don't look it in the eye
and let the darkness help to scatter
all its fuchsias and violets across the horizon.

and I don’t know why.
I woke up with pins and
needles, and they’ve been aching since.
I’ve barely walked, at least
not more than normal
but they feel as if they might
crack and bleed.
They hurt more knowing
all the things you had planned for us -
skipping and jumping and dancing
and laughing
and though I’ve cried to them
they just won’t let me go.
All I can do is
apologize to you and your
runner friends
for everything I can’t
bring myself to do.

waiting at the crosswalk
next to a man, but with
an air of being alone.
She stands proudly in her
body, her feet planted
stoically on the sidewalk
her lips are slightly parted
to blow a single silver ringlet
out of her face.
I wish I were her,
for even an instant,
instead of a car passenger
stuck staring out the window
at strangers she's known for
a lifetime.

Everything we once thought unique
settles guilt-riddled into
misshapen paw prints on the dusty
floor.
It shakes with the sound
of the television set,
blowing blithe static,
glowing black and
blooming into the everlasting
forgotten space between hello and good
bye.
It leaves me dehydrated, coughing, spurting
riotous air from the ugly gaps in my
teeth, barely
audible over the roar of nothing. It's goaded
by accidental location permissions, loaded
with deafening illusions of privacy
which hold fast to the hands
of individuality.
They tighten around my neck
and press against my stomach
and demand to be
always remembered, never noticed
like oxygen and
extinction.
So we will do nothing but obey;
rebellion is a luxury we
are too proud to know.

I won’t forget to
mention how I
hate your asymmetrical gait; it
offsets my lucent cynicism
and offers me seasoned lucidity
which I already told you I don’t want.
I’ll continue to make
my disjointed offhanded comments,
thank you,
much to the vexation
of my sharply shrinking social circles.
Advice has always been icing on
cake which I
scrape off with a knife and
use for shape-making on
the edge of my paper plate
as the other party goers
advise me not to play with my food, it’s
childish.
And rude.
And anyways, who doesn’t
like icing?

and I was supine
on the couch, with thoughts
flattening my chest, usurping
oxygen from my open mouth.
I watched a muscle
twitch in my leg,
the image bent through the lens of
an unbroken tear
and wondered if my body
was even my own.
Of all the things I
must accept
that I cannot control,
my body will always
be the most difficult.

red zeroes,
circumscribed about
our sallow
wrists. yellowed
paper, we
circle our
mistakes and
fatal flaws
no erasers.
lemon eyes
pulp and
peel crammed
down our
throats. how
were we
to make
lemonade? four
american dollars
to our
names, it
means everything
it's worth
nothing. crowds
love the
tragic heroes,
but we
suffer our
own stories.

Do you sleep on your back
with your heart to the
sky, and your face to the
sun?
Last night, I wondered
as the moon peeked through my window
and the night awoke,
I wondered with my heart to the
floor, and my
face pressed to the pillow.
When I was a baby,
my mother lied to the doctor:
"Yes, she's sleeping on her back,"
but I would only sleep on my stomach.
Still, I turned out fine,
right?
Sometimes I lay out on my back,
and I can see my heart beating
in my stomach,
through the fabric of my shirt,
but I can't sleep.
Is this what you feel like?
Can you watch your chest rise
and fall?
When you cry,
do your tears make two tracks
from your eyes to your ears?
Maybe you don't sleep on your back at all
maybe you turned out fine,
like me,
sleeping with your heart to the
floor, and your
face pressed to the pillow.
Maybe you don't watch your heart beating,
or your chest rise and fall,
maybe you don't cry —
but I'd like to think you do.

If we could truly feel love
perhaps we would rise with the dawn
like steam over the lake,
evaporating into the soul-shaken skyline.
Our questions would have
not answers, but more questions.
The flames that licked our lips would
fall on flowers and
they'd bloom.
We would plant gardens
sow them with our dreams,
and the seconds that sprouted would stretch
to last lifetimes.
We would see the world
in a drop of rain,
folded over in paradoxes and surreal truths.
If we could feel the vast expanse
of time and space
of pain and regret
and if we could love all the same,
it would not be romantic in the least:
romance is heartbreakingly unequal,
and if we could love,
we would love with billions of fragments of
broken hearts, sewn together,
perfectly imperfect,
spitefully ironic and
irrationally equal.

How does that make me feel?
It's complicated.
or maybe it isn't –
maybe it's outrageously simple,
like the condensation that becomes rain that becomes
a raincloud again:
I am all three and dangerously unaware,
trapped in a comatose fever dream
wishing you would pinch me and
disappear.
If I knew how the game was played,
I'd be so unbearably bored.
I spare myself the tedious details:
whether you're real or not—
whether I could ever wake up—
whether I care enough to try—
ignorance is bliss, honey,
and imagination is only everything they say
reality isn't.
The narration is a little confusing, my editors said,
the perspective is a little jumpy,
my thoughts dissipate before they can be
properly understood.
They can't tell whether the story is supposed to be a
tragedy, or perhaps
dramatic irony,
I don't reply because—
well, I'm unconscious, of course.
And busy—
I've got appointments all day; being ignorant and blissful
is quite involving.