your name is
forbidden in
my mouth
or in my heart
because when
i think about
you;

i'll cry a little more,
hurt a little stronger
love a little softer
because you no longer
make me feel sober

i'm drunk on the
memory of you

i sit amongst the wreckage and her sisters
destruction watches as i run my fingers
along an old scar, opening a fresh wound

i ***** every finger on every edge i can find,
trying to find some semblance, some feeling
of what used to be

the dust only reminds me of
how long its been, yet no dust
has settled yet on my
mind

within my fingers, i clutch
a fragment, glossy and new,
another one of the hundreds
i've created, one that i am
finally bound to love

right?

i feel drunk
when reading about drunks
looped
no bracement
i look up from the book
it's 6:45 a.m.
i'm in the hospital cafeteria
nearly time for work

in a stranger
     i clock a face
                     struggling to become a face
publicly
            she breakfasts
bent under a hood of hair
(she's not sure what expression
                     to let be witnessed )
i dodge her glance

overloom
the windows
make a massive jet mirror
          reaching the full ballroom height
a shield onto hard darkness
   protected from a primal cavity
the patrons are shied in its casting
a smudging forms at its base
   the horizon beeking
   an easing hint of winters sun

the glow is wanted
          but it brings nothing new to its display
still a hibernal wash
i don't hum with these morning frequencies
they can be beautiful
but i pitch sickly
and i suspect
the stranger girl is also no dawn spark either

a little raw beautiful you are the way.


                                            and ,ti evol I


the mouth that soft(that cruel) of teeth
and lips
is like it. thorn'd

and prim and

ringed in pinkness
of petals parting

on a pistil between.


such smoothness that rushes,
such skinness that prickles exactly
at the right arch
of its rising hips.

to meet with the riding
heartness of my surging taste:

blood and just
that tiny tang
of left behind from.




                                               (can i begin?)'(




and to fold you;
into my hands–as fists–
that unfold–inside you.

spent years wandering halls
cutting the "i" from my sentences
forming words from vowels
and emotions from consonants
hard and solid, but nothing
without that internal structure

guess that describes me pretty well
all consonants, harsh "t" and definite "d"
and the ever-slippery "y", like me
never making up its mind

felt like a half-learned language
still do, really
like someone forgot to learn the proper nouns
forgot to turn the sentence around
grab the sound and speak it

there's an accent colouring my life
awkward and stuttering, unsure
and never fluent enough
to step in time with the music
for long enough to make it matter

words from vowels
and emotions from consonants
hard and solid, but nothing
without that internal structure

pushing for love is scary. people like to say that it's worth it. but love is a bitter boomerang; you push too hard and it comes back swinging, comes back pushing you, comes back beating you to the ground until you can't breathe. true love leaves you gasping for air, but not in the poetic sense. love leaves you tied to the bottom of the ocean with rocks in your pockets. trapped in a plane with your head out the window. inside of a plastic bag. love is suffocation. pushing for suffocation is scary.

"it's been almost a year,"
that's what they always say
as an effort to help me forget about you.

but it's been almost a year,
and i think i'm missing you again
and i know i swore to myself
that i'd stop writing about you,
but not enough shreds and scribbles
can erase the fact that to this day
you're still my muse,
you're still the only reason i have
to keep writing,
to this day, you're still here.

maybe you're drowning
in the ink of all my pens,
maybe you're engraved
on the pages of every piece of paper
that i write on,
or maybe your face just naturally resembles
all the clouds i look at,
maybe i've just been hoping that
you're looking up at the same sky as i am,
but i know that your skies
are thousands of miles away from mine,
and no matter what i do,
the sunshine there
just won't replace the rain here.

see, they keep telling me,
"it doesn't have to be this hard,"
"it doesn't have to be him"
but thing is, even during those times
when i didn't want it to be,
still, it's always been you.

and i know that
if it had been anyone else,
i wouldn't lose hours of sleep again
i wouldn't have to worry about
time differences either
i wouldn't have to wait for calls
that are way long overdue
and i certainly won't have any problems
missing you;
but i guess i've always been
attracted to complications.

but it's so late
and my thoughts are in disarray
and since i can't be there
to say these things to you
i ended up writing them down
like how i usually do.

soon, we'll be walking under
the same old skies again;
i guess asking you to be patient
would just be selfish,
you probably just stopped waiting.
or maybe you never even have.

*-djs

I’ve felt happiness sink
In this tremor flesh
Sometimes I don’t think it’ll ever rise back up again

Pale figures stretch
Themselves apart at the wrist
Living transient
Beautiful deaths

I know the shift and the slide of my aches
More intimately than love
Or lust

I think when lovers collide
Bloom, then die
They depart redefined

do you remember when we use to play the nights away and find comfort in each others arms—now it's just a cold and desolate day with the sun set in my eyes and rays in my blood stream; and when i'm alone, i can still feel your eyes set on destruction as they stare me down into a little war path of lusted rage. it was you that held me when sweat matted my skin in drops of rain, when blood coated my lips in passionate ***; it was you that varnished my skin into the glass tiles when i rocked back and forth in the middle of my bath tub waiting for the ground to descend into nothingness.

and now it's you, that disbands my brain like an array of dying stars in the sky we once painted together with our trembling hands and bloodshot eyes. and now, it's me; it's me that stands in the middle of the street with blurry cars running by like angry lions in heat, fighting for the heat of the moment because they're too ******* stupid to eat their way through the decayed animals that are too far gone into the wilderness of disaster—and with their bones like melted clay in their stomachs, i stand in the middle of a highway with my hands thrown aside like a cape of darkness.

was it that your were too tired of spending contagious sad nights with me that you had to pack your stuff in a tiny suitcase that could barely fit the words I’m sorry into the brackets of their shoulders. maybe it was the way i scratched your back during steamy tales in between the sheets that scared away the words i love you from your mouth—or the way i had to pick up the pieces of the faulty mirror for you to even utter my name from your rocky eyes. i think it was the stitches in my marred bones that threw you off guard; they were too weak to carry your ego on felted silks because while you thought art was an object of disguise. i thought it was an object demanding to be felt through brittle streaks of dull colors.

it was when you shouted at my writings for feeling too much when i whispered that my words were messages in disguise because our feelings were too much to handle—and that’s when you broke the handle to the cracked, wooden door that held more blood than the inside of our hollow scar tissue. it was then when i realized that—

my fingers hurt from unbuttoning your skin, unzipping your veins into two split pieces of heated metal that slice my wrists open with uncertainty. it was the lines that the scars created that dismembered my wrists from my hands and clawed the nails off with broken bites of disintegrated love into my knuckles—when the cemented wall hit my fist with action-packed wrath of fervent wisps of outpoured whiskey into your mouth, into my breath, into your eyes, and into my clenching veins is when i knew the nights we spent were only tales of childish foreplay—heavy innuendos of vapid, misused paint on cracked paintbrushes and oil-based pens.

i’m tired too. i’m tired of my bleeding fingers used to scatter your drops of paint onto the pallet of my skin while i had to sew the seams of my veins into a cross so maybe I could find a way to God while my God was too busy fondling the idea of pain into my eyes. i’m tired of my oil-based pen handling my hand with sacred demons barking at the nails stuck in my brain while my brain fights for some sort of unasked forgiveness that i didn’t know i needed.

it was then that i realized that the milky ways in your troubled soul carried out the stars in my name—that’s what sold me the first night we met—only, i wish we hadn’t met.