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.

You're dangling again, darling;
existentialism isn't your color
flush bright and laugh skywards
finish your homework and fall in love.
You rise with blithe baroquism,
I can see it in the faint
shadows beneath your eyes
as you rush windward into past.

It's alright to love the program, honey,
but if you're over-cautious
you might turn too perfect.
Just don't while I'm alive, please,
for I love the curls in your words
and the feathers in your walk.

Be me when you don't want to,
and be you when you forget what it's like.
Just remember me around the edges,
paint me in the corner below your signature
and remember my kisses goodnight.

Red midnight glares above my head
heating coals in my belly,
pushing tears from the corners of my
eyes.
Education, success, modernity
boil me - I scream to sleep cold.
Just outside the window rests
a faint outline,
the shape of my future.
A train shudders to a tired stop,
miles away
the driver
daydreams of going backwards
or getting off
I dream of today, now yesterday,
as I enter, sleepless, tomorrow: today.

Midday is almost dark; the
ashen sky holds its breath
rain buzzes between cloud and sun
leaves drift, blurred,
in slow frames through molasses space
to kiss the sidewalk with
thundering authority.
Between the daisies, lightning sprouts and splits,
spitting stripped splinters into heaven
then pausing, fingers frozen, posed –
a portrait of aloof elegance.
Midday is blinding, deafening,
nature's cinematic masterpiece:
terrifying, thrilling, and everything but numbing.

The elixir of life
is the stuff of self:
we are spit and ocean
minuscule, innumerable, pellucid
drops dangling dangerously
from windowpane and eyelash
anticipating the inevitable;
the fall
dying to dry
when the sun shines scarlet.
We are nothing more than products of the sky
earthbound, plummeting, wishing
we were suspended in the clouds
gathered just beneath heaven,
hoping to float higher than destiny
someday.

She does not shout, she’s
the color of mirror
and the shape of song.
She whispers that she loves
herself; she’s clarity
in the absence of reason,
perched on the apex of pain.
She hurts like my stomach on
my birthday,
glaring red beneath my sleepless
eyelids. She was
firstborn from darkness and sprawls
fleshly into light.
Hers is a compass with a
hidden true north,
a tapestry woven of
all love and evil.
She’s poster tack stuck to the wall,
in little shapes like a near-cloudless day.
She is all we can pretend to know,
the only thing we create and
never fully understand.

If you drank burgundy we’d get along better
I think;
I’d like the way it would
stain your white collar
and laugh when you couldn’t get it out.
It would sit angry against your neck and
stare at me, and
I would smile because I'd
know how it feels.
You’d think it was you who
had painted me happy, so you’d
forget it was there and I’d
know how it feels.
I would take a napkin
and wipe the crimson tracks from the
corners of your mouth,
just so I could have some
burgundy of my own.
It would sit folded
neatly in my lap and
long for your spotted collar and
I’d almost cry because I
know how it feels.
It’s too bad, really,
you and your glass of clear.
No stains and no taste
and no idea how I feel.