and we asked you for help
and you laughed at the candor
and we dropped dead like flies.

****** t-shirts falling from
clothing lines as clothing pins
litter the floor of the morgue

and parents pick out caskets
ten sizes too small, for dead
babies and children of the

night, the ones who had been hanging
from street lights and shooting stars,
who asked for help in the form

of loud music, slow dancing,
painting in dark colors, tying
red balloons to doorknobs,

and leaving home without layers.
these children, they’re wearing t-shirts
in late december and you’re

wondering why they’re shivering.
in the mean time, you turn your cheek
and lift the zipper of your fur coats.

My friends all think I'm crazy because I stand in the middle of the street and talk to a God that doesn't exist while high-fiving the windshields of passing school buses. I stopped taking my medication again because guilt taste a lot better than artificial happiness, and I stopped wearing that cross you bought me for my eight birthday because it contradicted the sense of uselessness I received for my twelfth. Life seems a lot less precious when you're talking to your parents in the TV room of a psychiatric unit and look them in the eyes while they tell me not to cry and say that 'pain is only temporary'. All I do is write letters to a man on the moon about the time I realized how hard and easy it is to die. Send me to therapy and make me take pills. I'll smile, but I'll always remember how to tie a noose

S
  o when I die, burry me inside the deepest of graves
  farther than six-feet-under, because if I’m that close
  I won’t behave. I’m too close to him, through the earth
  I feel his sins, and they keep me alive until
T
  omorrow. When the quiet life subsides, there’s no blue
  left in the sky, and the life we thought we lived was just
  a happy little lie. **** affection, I don’t need it, all my
  lies will supercede it, and I don’t need some therapist
O
  ver-analyzing my thoughts, because I’m already dead.
  Love was just a word we made up to feel better about
  the holes in our shoes and the ones in our hearts, and
  maybe I’m not over him, but I’m over the thought of him
R
  eaching out and grabbing my hands, he’s a boy, not
  a man, and he’s too afraid to whisper ‘I love you, too’
  because he’s too busy trying on a new pair of running
  shoes, and I know he won’t ever love me, even though
G
  od and him both tell me to wait and see, and I know he
  won’t stay, even though he swears he’s anchored to me
  and I know when the sun sets, he’ll be nowhere to be found
  just burry me at least seven feet under the ground, ‘cause the
E*
  arth will love me more than him, and the frigid temperatures
  will remind me where I am, and the sun will bleed down promises
  (not so empty this time), and my corpse will be the breeding
ground for new life. I don’t love him, but I’m glad he killed me…

I always wanted to be a flower.
Now I get to be a whole bed of them.

I am not suicidal.
But life has lost all meaning.
While I may not go looking
for Death's hands,
if He found me,
and wrapped his fingers around mine
I think I just might
fall
     in
          love.

I remember the little men
in big boots. The ones who sat
at the edge of roof tops in a city called
Loneliness, and cut their teeth while chewing jagged glass and angry truths.
They parachuted down to earth
and hit their heads on desperation.
Hollowed out hearts with tree trunks
serving as legs, they marched
across the stratosphere until their existences neared zero. Nothing
more to disappearing than popping
some pills, falling asleep, and dreaming
that the whole world had gone mad.
The interesting part is when you wake up
and you can still hear the echo of
unfilled boots.

In the event I drink liquids fit for automobiles and devour
the taught warm light of a match, I hope you know that
I won't say sorry for all the hardships I put you through.

I won't say sorry for the way I stormed through doors
and plowed through hearts. I won't say sorry for the way
I told you yes when I really meant no. I won't say sorry

for the time I cried over spilled milk and shrieked over
stained sheets. I won't say sorry for leaving you without
even so much as a formal goodbye, other than this one

which was scrawled on the back of an unused napkin in
the middle of a crowded Starbucks down in the city, this
being the first time I've been in either place. I won't say

sorry. Not to you, not to anyone. As for now, I bid thee
fairwell, from one poetry lover to another. I won't say sorry.
For I've already managed to blurt it out seven times.

I.
I am confined behind the walls of my very own life.
The echoing of cluttered freight trains and the laughter
of invisible clowns fill what's left of my conscience, and

the voices of old God's and hushed Devil's are my only form
of a lullaby. I'm not crazy, I'm just conscious of the overlooked.

II.
I can feel snakes when there are none. Consider this a sixth sense.
Literature clattered in the back of my throat and the top of my head,
I tried to explain this to my lover, who became increasingly

bothered by the fact that all I knew was Shakespeare, and all I spoke
of was Caesar, and the stars...to which we are underlings.

III.
A threat, they consider me. 'Not to others, but yourself.'
Fools, all of them. I was not granted a gift to have it locked away
and drowned at sea. Listen! Act! Forewarnings are scarce, and if

the Gods and the Devils have chosen me to speak, then I shall speak.
My only question: why didn't they choose someone to listen? To understand?

Please, don’t be shy- join us for the baptism and the requiem of both destruction
and creation. Bring flowers to both their graves; bring flowers to both their births.

Teeth corroded with a lust for madness, you smile, though tears
stream down your *****, thin cheeks. Trees, burdened with ripening
despair surround you, their tenants long gone and their leaves long shed.
All searching for life; all fearing their deaths.

There is an immense amount of beauty in the burning of an old
house, of old pictures and blurred memories. As this occurs, a paradox is formed, from the striking of a match,
to the collapse of a foundation, to the blackened snowfall of ash.
The creation of destruction, the destruction of creation. A flaming catalyst fluttering

downward through the muggy autumn air, a blazing, kamikaze
butterfly plummeting down toward earth. Drop one into a pool of regret,
which, unbeknownst to the world, is flammable. Let it lick and devour its prey;
let it paint the land red. And as you allow flakes of tarnished life to blanket

the ground, and the shoulders of your shirt, the divine intervention that is
creation is underway, and in the midst of destroying, you have created. Space!
What entity is responsible for such indescribable beauty. How wonderful it is
to look out and see nothing, all the while seeing everything. What a magic

it is, to see life growing within that very nothingness.
But, do not fear the fraying of man’s existence. Marvel at your creation.

Liberation of death! Confinement of life!
Insanity can be one sad, beautiful thing.

She told me she loved me, and I knew
this was a lie. But sometimes, in the time
between dusk and dawn, when I'm lonely
and tired of chain smoking by candle light,
I pretend
she was telling the truth. And she's not
going anywhere. She's stuck in the spaces
between worlds and words, lying naked at the ends
of galaxies and sentences. She's whispering words against
the back of my neck, where they remain
tattoo and brisk. More importantly, she's telling me
she loves me. But she isn't real, and moreover,
neither is her love. But still, when I'm lonely
I pretend.

Blood-stained sheets of paper littered the floor, like
the mind of a depressed author. And you picked one up, looked
me in the eyes and said this is a dead man's idea of good-bye,

where you got them, I didn't know, but I listened
to the way your voice softened as you read and sang and
wallowed. I'm sorry it had to come to this you read, I just

don't think I belong here anymore. There's this empty
hole in my chest where I loved you once before. And baby,
don't cry, you did everything you could, but sometimes

everything just isn't enough. You never said who the author was
and I think that meant a lot. I remember the night you serenaded
me with lines from suicide notes, and I remember how it was not until
the end that I realized it had been yours.

These rain drops won't leave me alone. It's not
the clouds that torment me, it's the ******* rain.
The rain drops like to see me miserable, and
the clouds are just their chauffer

I still love the rain, though.
I still love you, though.