My legs swinging at the counter
your soul sizzling in the skillet
my cheek pressed to cold granite –
is time running still?
Funny how the night turns
my palms to melted wax
they're stuck on your skin; I
dissolve.
We drift intertwined,
smoke into the detector
and
I'm sinking through the floor,
if you care.
If you don't
I'm gone,
and I was never here,
I never shuddered from your warmth
or cried into your pillow.
You could look for me but you
don't, do you?
You sit redly in the cold,
waiting for Love to love you.
I would be remiss if not to inform you
she is not I
we are not even acquaintances,
her heart and mine.
I am where you aren't searching
she is seated next to you,
waiting for you to give her
what you never gave me.

languidly glows in your cheeks,
just north of
the lip you split trying
to tell me you loved me without
saying you loved me.
Saturday morning
breaks burgundy behind
your head, silhouetting
every piece of heathered forgiveness
we earned without merit.
It rises and splatters
in my chest like laughter and it
shines from your eyes to
the edge of your jaw.
Saturday morning
solidifies sunrise in memory,
with its hallowed rays streaming
haloed from your long lashes. It’s
interlaced with the scent
of you,
suddenly flooding my shuddering lungs.
Saturday morning
swirls early in whispers like dew
steaming
toward balmy April ether.
It supersedes time as it
unwinds the hands on the clock,
flexing post-Friday and
stretching pre-Sunday.
Saturday morning is everything
delicate and divine
that is ever-coursing from
my soul to yours:
I love each Saturday morning
because I first loved you.

Of course I cry into the hollow
space between my stomach and happy
there is little else I can do.
Don't pretend to understand how it aches when I breathe
you, who have trained your tongue to do
what it should
do not let it curse the smoke stuck to mine; I
know the contempt in your eyes better than I
know my own reflection.

There's an inch between
sunrise and sunset:
the sky's walls flatten
me, stretching my skin thin,
taffy turning interminably
over the earth.
Another inch between
this bated breath and the next
almost enough space for
a claustrophobic prayer -  
my occluded wheezing
heralds the marriage of
laughter and sobs.
When my cheeks wetten, I
watch them wrinkle
as the years drip down my chin
one inch lingers between
my face and the foggy mirror,
as I contemplate giving
an inch of love to the girl staring back.

Autumn is an expired favorite
of the sad lovers, sitting apart
with forearms stuck between
forehead and tabletop.
Tired souls shake off old skin
with the shifting of the seasons
and some call it a fresh start, but
it only ever feels like wasting away.
The desperate optimists grasp for beauty in
changing colors, but every leaf falls with a tear,
each
a dreary reminder
of all the once-lovely emblems
that decorated the golden days.
"Once upon a time" no longer evokes
the sweet nostalgia of fairy tales,
but carries the melancholy weight of
better days fading from
memory to myth.

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

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.

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?

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.