we used to sit at your kitchen table,
with spices and leaves swimming in our mugs,
and talk about politics, the higher powers, and
disastrous events we spoon fed to our souls
so we could relate somehow.

(but those were silly conversations, just to get to the point.)

i  brushed the old leather straps of the
beaten ******* you found on your
thrift shop adventure and i could see
you had no sense of direction from there
on out.

i should have left then.

I began collaborating with the old western ghost towns,
constructing the basics to whip my luck back into shape.
Yet, I hoped to find guts and glory from
the time chasing stories played out on the big screens.
I wanted to talk to God from the pavement, so
I let my knees kiss the asphalt with the idea
He'd give me some sort of incentive to leave this
small hellhole called home.

I welded my toes deep into the road
maybe to come across some kind of faith.
I let my fists get a contact high with the rocks
gathered in piles on each side of me.

I made love to the ground, hoping it'd
love me back,
but then I focused on my ears and I couldn't
hear the hallelujahs anymore.

I felt the heavy air collide with my collarbone,
reaching and sorting each nerve and tying them together
with
your character; eloquent, mysterious even.

the fingertips roam and graze my skin with such ease,
flowing and fluttering like your tongue against my lips.

I have never felt so dangerous, touching the surface of something so raw,
and fearless,
and alive.

I could feel you wandering over the blades that meet my back,
giving me the chance to pull away, to preserve simplicity.

but I didn't.

the television blares with what you could have been,
soft and delicate or rough and bare.
i couldn't tell if you longed to have those features
swell with fierce magnitudes.

i turned to you, gave you some kind of initiation,
to graze the surface of what this was and what could have been.

whether it held proof or pure fabrications,
i swallowed the facts and liquid courage to
stumble out onto your doorstep.

I emptied my thoughts as you held my hair back,
but it didn't provide much of a conversation.

as i felt the words claw up my throat,
i took another sip on the way back to your room
to let my dignity build back up again.

She couldn’t bring herself to believe that you held your ground for her,
those nights you crossed the highways
and stoplights to reach her doorstep
only to tell her why you can’t use those dusty lungs,
filled with rust and waste, crushing the air you breathe in.

She didn’t have much to say.

You didn’t have much to offer,
just a lot of heart and a little dash of bitter biting your tongue with the ideas that your father put in your head,
the ones that tell you that you can’t feel the beat of your own heart
or taste the saltwater crashing down on your own weathered hands.

No, you gotta be a man.

She listened to your words and chewed on it for a while,
and gathered all her strength to pour the mason jar of alcohol you stashed in her cupboards for last two years down the sink,
as you yelled up to whoever might be listening,

“I never knew it’d go this far, I never thought I’d be this way.”

So she turned on the lights,
made your bed and you laid down to another restless night,
following and circling the cycle you have fallen for over

And over

And over again.

And we were stuck.

This year, so skinny and diluted,
I'm surprised we made it this far,
with the acidic aftertaste and misuse of
love
and
devotion
of time.

But rather than tiptoeing quietly into this,
I'll pour another shot of burning
hope
or
something similar.

Tomorrow is just another sunrise,
(if you could call it that in Northwestern Pennsylvania)
that I will see once again
some other day,
some other year.