When we met inside a Dunkin Donuts on the corner of two busy streets, I ordered a small coffee. I said I had a lot to get done tonight, so I can't be out too long. If you knew how well I can lie, you wouldn't recognize me on a crowded street. I always ordered a medium before, because it took longer to cool, so we spent more time taking cautious sips through the small opening of a plastic lid protecting a styrofoam cup. But I dreaded seeing you again, because it'd be so long since I remembered the angles of your face, and the deep darkness of your swirling brown eyes, and the straight sharpness of your thick locks of black hair. Because when I'm not lying, I can say I don't miss you anymore. A busy street full of strangers is plenty company for me, and I don't mind my right hand catching a cold November breeze, instead of warming up inside your left. You said you're doing better, that the emptiness of your studio apartment isn't as lonely as it used to be. You said sleeping on your full-sized bed was okay now, that only one side warmed by a breathing body wasn't sad anymore. But you still missed me, my scruffy, uneven beard, the boots I look my best in and your head on my chest. We walked outside so you could smoke a cigarette, and I left quickly. I lied and said we should see each other again. But I hoped you'd lose sight of me on that busy street, becoming ambiguously shaped inside a scrambling river of cold winter bodies, all with cold hands clenched or covered in gloves, not holding any others.

In winter, sound travels faster. It cuts through the December air like an airplane through a morning cloud. But inside it's still the same: A restaurant of clattering silverware clanking against emptying plates of an overpriced breakfast and dialogues blending together like the roar of industrial dishwashers. I wonder how many conversations it takes to fill an otherwise empty room with white noise. Sometimes a spoiled child will punch through the murmuring with a wild, untamed hiss, or a clash of plates, glasses and silverware stacked like a wavering Jenga tower will crank necks and turn shoulders. And yet, in my booth for two, half filled -- as my coffee is -- there is silence more terrifying than a raging hurricane. As the waiter fills my coffee with a consolation sigh, I sit quietly thumbing through old contacts in a phone built for someone far more important than me. I see no names that should fill the empty seat, and wish so badly to add a new one.

We made plans to spend the night together a week after I kissed you the hundredth time. I lean back in a rigid blue desk chair and count perforations in aging foam ceiling tiles and dead tubes inside industrial fluorescent lights. My stomach twists and turns like thick, black death of a tornado tearing through a Midwestern town. I scroll through your last texts, how listless they felt. I read "Goodnight" from days ago, with nothing alive filling a light blue bubble. I wonder if you'll love me enough until the weekend, when I take the final exit off a three-hour highway and course through city blocks like blood in woven arteries to find you. When we tiptoe into your quiet bedroom, I pray you'll feel concussing tremors in your heart, spraying blood like scalding orange lava through your veins, with every word I confess on the ashen wooden floor.

Remember chocolate
when it's just out of reach
when it's stained into your warm fingertips
and clinging to your palette

Remember chocolate
when you give it to your firstborn
One morsel swooped over itself like a shoelace,
melting in their hands,
smeared across their lips

Remember the crumbling,
sweet velvet on your tongue,
the air through your nose,
and my hand in your hand

Remember the moment
has already passed,
as all good things before
So remember chocolate
when you go to the grocery store

We stared at the ground
because we knew we said too much.
You lit a cigarette
taking drags and burning your lungs.
You said you have to leave.
You had some things to figure out.
"We'd never last the year,
we'd burn ourselves to the ground."

We floated on the raft
wading tides colored dark and blue.
Shipwrecks passed us by
slowly sinking out of view.
We couldn't find a break
in salty horizons all around.
So we kept our lips sewn shut.
If we spoke, we'd surely drown.

You said my face felt
like sandpaper, as you kissed
me with your hand sliding
from my ear down to my neck.

I told you I shaved
my scruffy beard a day before
because you deserved
to see me looking my best.

But even my best wasn't enough
for you to stay in Illinois.
You decided a year ago
to run away to Colorado,
and I would be an anchor
weighing you, dragging
you into a darkened ocean.

My head is a car wreck:
oil and gasoline spilling out
like bloodied bodies
between shattered windows
and jammed in steel doors.

A pile of iron bars slips
and shoots out a spark to ***** liquid
crawling slowly toward a curbside drain,
and I’m on fire.

The words I worry you'll say,
will char my bones to powdered black.
I see us sitting on your bedroom floor
facing each other, while you calculate
whether loving me like you did
on your front porch is a liability.

I’ll admit to the risk
and show you the scars
like tattered ribbons across my chest.
Yours are like Christmas,
all wrapped up in bow.
I've never seen a wound
decorated so beautifully.

I’m the son of a storm and a burning parade
Saw the carnival lights going up in a blaze

This is the first time
I’ve noticed the gray of the stone
And the mountain above it.

This is first time,
Holding up this burden,
I’ve felt eternity.

I’ve watched the same cuts
And gashes from jagged edges
Tear themselves into my hands.

I’ve felt the same blood
And sweat on my skin
Trickle down my arms to the ground.

This is the first time
I’ve let my neck hang below
My weary shoulders.

And for the first time
I’ve truly abandoned hope,
I’ve finally felt defeat.

With nothing left to give
And nowhere else to go
I’m closing my eyes.

I know what this means
And what will become of me
For giving up this life.
But I am tired
Of trying to conquer eternity
And the weight of the stone.

Foolish, wandering eyes
Stupid, twisting tongue
Yearning a cutting scent

What a fool I am
To reach for your heart
Knowing plain, true
My arms are far too small

Raging, winds and thunder
Broken, voices and windows
Seeking an excuse to flee

What a fool I am
To allow you to go
I knew all along
I am far too small

I walked along the quiet streets we knew
from years ago when we were just sixteen.
We lost so much of what we had, between
the nights we shared when I was holding you
to aging slow and cold and dead and blue.
And I became a ghost inside routine;
now I'm an apparition barely seen.
And like a dream I prayed it wasn't true.

You said that you were sorry at the bar
because I built you up inside my head,
and you became an idol in my mind.
In twenty years (or more), when I live far
away from you, with words still left unsaid,
I'll love you still, with all we've left behind.

At night I tear myself to pieces
wondering which organs are failing,
or how many bones are breaking.

I feel for awkward lumps or other signs
of lesions, tumors and rampant disease
that may someday infest my body,
or have already started to **** me.

All the white coats scare me sometimes;
with red test tubes, proof of the life inside me.
But all I see is dark blue and tiny bubbles
watching a little of the life float above me

You laid on the right side of the bed
toward the wall, tightly tucked between
scuffed paint and my bony shoulders.

You drove from St. Louis, a full eight hours
to spend a cheap night's sleep next to me
(if  you can even call that sleeping).

We got drunk and peeled off every stitch
of clothing we were wearing.
It was probably our worst idea so far.

I didn't sleep a minute
in this crowded twin sized bed,
made for a single body.

You woke up and kissed me –
my neck, my shoulder, my chest
from the inside of the bed where
maybe you felt safe
between a scuffed wall
and a sharp shoulder bone.

Now I look to the inside, toward the wall,
scuffs like scars, the wear and tear,
and remember the indent your body made:

fetal – curled and slightly sinking, wrapped
in a rumpled, thick flannel blanket
I had kicked my way out of hours before.

But it's all over now. You left
weeks ago with no plans to return.
I knew that, and it's my fault
for looking so defeated now,
a single indent in this twin sized bed.

In March of 2005, Dad packed his things
and left the house that he raised me in.
I didn’t notice anything missing, except for
a black and white photo album off the mantle
and the lounge chair he slept on for two years.

His new home, a renovated split-level,
was empty like an abandoned barn:
beautiful in its own tragic way, with
barely enough strength to keep it from
toppling over into a pile of rotted wood.

It was vacant, despite all the possessions
and bodies that lay lifeless inside the walls.

Years of silent dinners amplified by echoes
of awkward tiptoeing and closing doors
to hide the things nobody knew how to say.

I opened up a Men's Health
as awkwardly as I was sitting
in that cold, dry room
filled with cheap leather chairs.

"7 Steps to Being Confident,"
Only seven, he says.
The first read, "Love Yourself."
Not a moment, I whispered Nope,
frightened by my instinct.

I'd like to see you try
I threatened, tossed back
into a memory of a failing roof.

Divorce is a landmine
that twists and tears off your leg.
You'll stand after a year,
but you'll never walk again.

It’s an endless photo album
that you can't keep closed up,
locked away in a dusty attic.

All my wars raged in a single year.
One-legged and trying to run away,
I couldn't dare love someone like that.

I'm trying the best I can
To let go of the things I'm not
and put down the stone
But the tumor swells at night
I try to drown it with poison
Watch me catch fire

I don't want to eat myself alive
Tear at the flesh, red stains on my shirt
I'm trying to hold my guts together
Without spilling them on the floor
Pull back the skin and see what's chewing them up

This is ******* the pain
Put down the needle and the spoon
Tell the mirror it's time to stop
Tearing apart all night will **** you
I can bleed out the sickness
Dry it on a towel
And set it on fire
Burn away all the doubts

I can bleed out the sickness
I can set fire to the poison

The air in this room is heavier at night,
it inflates my lungs like water balloons.

I think about what loneliness is,
learning that I'm the only breathing body here.
A twin sized bed is plenty of room for me;
I can't sleep in a crowded blanket
pushing two sets of shoulders together,
like a suitcase slipping overstuffed clothes
through gaping zipper teeth.

I only have one chair in here,
barley enough comfort for one.
But this room needs another life,
two more lungs to share the air.

There won't be enough seating,
or a place for your clothes.
But I won't mind stretching this blanket
to cover four shoulders.

We built cathedrals on street corners
under heavy orange lights
cascading down our faces.

I loved your imperfections:
a narrow, twisted spine,
a long, indented nose
and a shrill voice slicing through
the midnight summer wind.

I'd love you forever
in the sagging bench
on your thin front porch,
where I'd spend eternity
tracing outlines of silhouetted trees
covering soft, flaring streetlights.

We burned through hours
recounting the wounds from our past.
Every kiss was a lightning bolt,
and cracked like raging thunder.
We felt a violent forgiveness
exploding like stars in the pits of our chest.

My house was built in 1926
It was plastered with white stucco
framed within a blue trim, once green
which still shows through chips of paint
flaking off like a scab
from a curious child's playground wounds

This house fended off storms and fires
for nearly one hundred years
and stood tall and strong even when
my family fell to pieces

Dad should have left a long time ago
No one could sleep with him around
as he snored through our tragedy:
A mother and a father who hated
each other, both too stubborn to leave

I had dreams at 4AM, when I could sleep,
of the house collapsing, and these walls caving in
burying us alive in dusty white gravel

Mom wanted to be free like she was
when she would smoke cigarettes in her 20's
with young men lucky enough to have her

Dad didn't want the world to see us destroyed
So he stayed inside our little white tudor
tearing down the walls as we all fell apart
and were buried beneath the wreckage
that tore us all to pieces

In 1558 Pieter Brueghel painted
Icarus falling to the blue and green water
in a darkened corner, out of sight

He crashed close to shore
between a fisherman busy reviewing his catch
and a great ship with its sails being pulled
farther and farther into the sea

He sank and drowned quietly
while the whole world carried on
unbothered by death and tragedy
tending to their plows and herds

They’ll come back tomorrow
to plow their fields and steer their herds
with the same thoughts, an endless loop
even when a boy falls from the sky

And like my house falling to pieces
of white rubble and shattered glass
The screams are kept between the walls,
but the windows are paintings
of young boys falling to the floor
silently, unnoticed by the world

You'll find sparrows, my mother said
Not in the thick,
nor the deep dark
canopies of the woods

You will find them, in droves,
at the ends of tree lines,
busy, busy—always busy
whether in song or with a twig

You will find them in coves
perched upon the green vines,
busy, busy—always busy
calling out upon a sprig

They are small when alone
like me,
in the long, silent hours of my nights
But in the morning they are a chorus
reminding you of all the work yet begun

So, go, find yourself a tree
You'll find sparrows when you're done

I wondered for the first time today
about the man that will capture your heart,
like I never could.

You'll meet him at some Friday night party
in a dim living room among wafts of pale gray smoke
and stale vapors from a shared hookah.

Some morning later, when lights stab your eyes,
and every sound tosses your stomach, you'll scramble
for scattered clothes, twisted and turned,
inside-out: your heart, confused and excited.

You'll say it was all unexpected, unplanned—a flight unmanned.
I'll hug you like a friend, and I'll mean it when I say
something vague about being happy for you.

At some white-clothed table, sheltered away
from twisting hips and unkempt ties,
I'll slide my fingers down condensation
of an abandoned, unfinished drink.
I'll look at you, and we'll recount the nights,
circa summer 2008, on my bedroom floor
and hanging from monkey bars,
dreaming of cool ocean nights and Hollywood lights.
And I'll pray he will love you like that.