So you **** me
It is off, the sun,
Since you are gone
I try not to think about you
But everything talks to me about you
Vorrei stringerti forte
This night, the city seems very beautiful to me

who knows if you are sleeping


So you **** me
The moon has begun a new cycle
Since I have left
I cannot help but think of you
As everything here cries out for your touch
Non avrei lasciato*
This night, it seems so very cold to me

how could I possibly be sleeping

My words jump ship
A careless mutiny
Do they not realize their weight?
My words fly, from lips to sky
Little birds of stone
They gather in the depths of
The ocean
Brought to shore by a jealous storm
Years later
You forget, I am a fickle girl
Flush with promises to stay
But
My words are not walls
Instead they are the smoke
Veiling my escape

baby, little boy
with bones of steel and ice
hate coiled in your stomach
like
barbed wire
i see you so clearly, on the edge
of that rooftop in Spain  
wind pushing your hair back,
arms spread, unafraid
The descent-
how beautiful you are, falling
i wish i could have been by your side
and held your hand
as we dove into the concrete
like
angels in reverse

That day, I remember the sun
And dancing shadows beneath
The blue water in which we swam.
But tonight, there is none.
I do not bother with a light
As I fill the bath in darkness,
Knowing that it withholds your reflection.
I submerge,
Hoping to feel you in the ripples of the water,
Hoping to fall into your warmth,
Hoping to enter the world we constructed;
The one where a sated moon hung
Over that bridge, like an unrequited lover
from a tree.
It was there that I crammed each lung
With every passing second,
In order to prevent our last.
I am still holding my breath -
Though my chest cries out in pain
As time gnaws at each rib, starving
For ruin.

The sea—
a place where turquoise silk can cut like a thousand daggers,
where souls are lost and subconscious is sought,
where granite is broken and dissolved,
where one gazes into the Nietzsche’s abyss,
where the dawn spills and day
sinks.


Bodies are kissed by foam and lifted by the wave’s crescendo,
caresses from an emerald lover, salty
diamonds reflect light off of lashes,
eyes like lighthouses spanning across the cerulean plain of forever, searching,  
Searching
for deliverance,
for solutions,
for forgiveness,
for escape,
for what is lost,
for something, anything, to find.  

The long interstice between solidity.  
A beautiful monster, a terrible magnificence, a mercurial cure.  
A paradox of temperamental consistency

—the sea.

Before,
Chaos reigned each day
The ground quaked with the weight
Of every fresh pursuit
Such debt I've yet to pay
For years of inane deeds
I explored man to excess
Until all thought turned towards lust
An insatiable beast that feeds
Upon its eager flesh
I craved things evil and benign
(For both I wished to feel)
Though now they are malignancies,
That no human eye could find
But just as storms will peak
And give way to idle skies
My story is now a fragment
- nothing more to seek
Though plateaus are pleasing
To walk upon at times
Extended paths exhaust the mind
Just as anything unceasing

Find me in the piazza where Neptune's confined
As night makes phantoms of us two entwined
Hold me tightly, with all your power
When we come across that evil tower
Where the feet of men once danced upon air
Please - do not let us not linger there
Instead, take me to the statues ball
Where shadows waltz across the wall
We'll join them in this moonlit masque
And spin until dawn begins her task
As darkness burns in morning's fire
Take my hand so we may retire
I'll place my head upon your naked chest
And savor the silence in which we're blessed
But most of all, do not let me leave
For home is not a place to grieve
Keep me here, until our hearts cease to endeavor
In our final moment, we will live forever.

"That seems so very far away," you said.
And it is; we have both time and distance pushing us apart.
But they say that time is a river,
and all rivers must find a larger body of water to pour into,
like an ocean,
the one that stands between us, the stagnant blood
inside our bodies.
You said you will hibernate until I wake you, or even better,
until I lie next to you and your eyes open to the rise and fall of my chest.

Let us sleep away these long months,
let us close ourselves to autumn, so it will seem as though we had been together
the whole time, and are finding one another in those foggy morning hazes,
while the rain falls softly against the glass of your windows,
and the house is silent with the sleep of others.

We will pull on our wool sweaters and scarves and
walk along the river, hand in hand, laughing
at the pain we create when we are apart.

Close your eyes to the flames of days past-
those trips to the great mountain,
the first time you shot a gun,
that evening drive home from the sea, tired and salty and content, made so many times it became one
Let your heart jump only for a few bars when
you hear music that is now a memory
Or when you are handed beer that tastes of a warm afternoon spent fishing-
Close your eyes for a moment only,
lest you be consumed by the flames you feed.

Sometimes, it seems like
You are my only companion
Feeding my hungry ears
you need me
Until I find solace in an empty stomach
and alone
Will count each bone
one-two-three-four-five
Searching the 200 and sixth
Because there is no one else
To share
Our midnight prayer.

But you also make me hate
The laughing face of an empty plate
and the stares of strangers
What do they see?
Surely not what I do
What do they know? Of desperation
and loathing
To preach to me the danger
Of smoking
(7 calories wasted)
nothing you hiss
So I make home
In oversized clothes
Room enough for you
and I
To co-exist

I have had many highs
And fooled around with lows
Felt nicotine’s sweet sigh
After mans savage blows
Caffeine runs my morning
And sedatives my night
But you came without warning
Of side effects to fight
Addiction is my sin
Though lately I've been true
Yet every single bone within
Is still a slave to you

Torn from the wallet of the eye- a tear
Shunned for coming as it come
The cathartic shame of soulful slum
A derelict ship of the fleet of composure
A captive buys casket, but what of enclosure?

We fall to the silence of fear
Pile it high and bury it low
Yet still these mice of woes do flow
Over marble pages of black and white
Confirming the captain slipped away in the night

We lived in an abattoir
On the edge of our abandoned world
Come darkness we would draw
Into cages made of pearl

We swam in blood of beasts
And of each other we ate
Each night, a divine feast
Your heart upon my plate

Though we lived in death
Our appetite would claw
For the other's fervid breath
Within the abattoir

my palm tree heart holds your initials
and i sway, sway to your calls
an outsider's aperçu is such a pretty lie
behind the rosy haze of waterfalls

I hear they hoard Picasso’s like diamonds.

Excess is common—
escargot at a diner, Parisian no more,
cheapened slime beneath
industrial grade lighting.

Women
drawn and quartered, all cut up,
chaos-con-cube

hung from the wall of some
split-level apartment
where I hear a man
hanged himself
(and his children might, too*)

Their bitterness
licks at the paint
in ordinary strokes
driving down the value of,
what once was,
a masterpiece.

the only thing that kept us together was rock n roll
but lou reed died today
and now we are that much more alone

I carry you like a badge of dishonor.
You rest on the left side of my chest, fastened to my skin, causing me to bleed. My scarlet letter of wrong. I am avoided by the parenthetical deeds of day. I am oppressed by the dense solitude of night. A crowd is nothing more than an overgrown forest. Silence. There is only silence. Once there was laughter and arms and warmth to call home, though now I cannot keep my eyes high enough to search for a wandering smile. I grew a new pair of bones in your absence. They are brittle. They need to strengthen. They keep breaking. I tried hope to calcify them, I tried love to mend them, I tried tears to set them. 
I am still crippled. 
Each time I stand, trembling, the sky shakes and the earth moves and I fall, again and again and again until I am looking up from the mud in the ground. I cannot open my mouth to question or cry out. I endure. I lie until I am entwined with the path itself, until feet cannot distinguish between dirt and flesh. I watch you fly. I try to accept the ache of emptiness. 
I cannot.

It’s all a mess
This face these hands this bed
Without rest
You me her him
Running circles in my head

Even long after we ended
Love is natural for me to give
But to take it back untended
Is like dying just to live

I cannot hold you a place
In this heart any more
There is no delight in waste
Or the mistakes I try for

Still

I’ll tear my house apart in search
And try clawing at concrete
But I will never find a meaning
Underneath such beautiful deceit

I miss you
Like the secrets I whispered deeply
Into my pillowcase
Just before the house caught fire
Those evening tales, lost
With the photographs hidden beneath a loose floorboard
Paper and ink curling into nothing
But lightly falling ash
Kissing me softly as I watch from the street
Until the embers cease to glow
And morning light reveals me
-A silent statue of grey

it's blue, now* someone murmured
our hands woven carelessly together
as light slipped through the blinds
was it your hand?
I am unsure
the window is framed by fire-
fire, so true and pure
just like us
a pile of bodies clutching at one another
the pleasures of skin against skin
a touch is a touch
and *** does not matter, not when
lips are so painfully soft
this union
not working towards darkness, instead,
digging in our heels against dawn
we held off the best we could
*it's blue, now

Today is the anniversary of nothing
The birthday of almost
And could-have been
On this fence post,
Balloon heads hang in shame
Their white faces
Grimly fixed upon the ground

Full of wasted breath

O nightshade! My enemy!
Tempted by chronic ennui
The day's control has dissipated
And the slender body created
Comes in waves of illusion

A cavity of emptiness bites
The mind lies and fights
Diagnosed, and very often
Do not let the form soften
The rules of hunger

They said this year, Saturn
will leave my house
In retrograde
Trailing jade silk amongst
the black trees
But still, it snows
and still, I ride
On this ghost train
to the coldest hell
Couldn’t you have left a star
to gaze upon?
While my lips drip ice
and my eyes stay
open
To see the mess you
made
For me to clean in
darkness

hung over
hung up
hanging on
left                          

                                    hanging

done and undone by
loving to hate to love
i can't do this
anymore
i am too weak to carry us

my greatest hope
is that, in time,
I will be able to look
Within
for resolution
instead of finding
the tired echo of

                          I do not know

but when
or if
this day will come

                         I do not know
                         I do not know

those **** eyes
those **** lips
cry black lies
slash like whips

whiskey and a cigarette
that's how i forget

those **** eyes
those **** lips
your sweet sighs
and fingertips

How I wish that my eyes shone
Like a garden of delight
Free of time I've spent alone
And every stagnant night

There are times when I am she
Though such perfection tends to fade
Know that I cannot always be
This woman I have made

Know your bones

What they crave
 and ache for

What they will not break for

Know your bones

They are your home

Wherever you find yourself

Know your bones

Not the shell of another’s

Even if it seems a relief

You are then a thief

Who forgot your bones

While they still were your own.

I have reached the point where
the imprint of my body stains the couch
Refrigerator and shower find common ground
in their abandon
The last time I opened my door was
three days ago, maybe four
Dust swims in one shaft of light
That ******* crack that sneaks
through every shaded window
I would ask for help
but the only person that could
won't

I am autumn, some days winter

Never am I summer.

I am cashmere against pale throats

The deep grey of the pacific.

I am the dusty rose of dawn

The bitter wind of day

The sweet silence of night; yet most

I am the eerie moments between dark and light.

Some days I wish to be the warmth of august

Instead of diamond rays of ice.

But what beauty is in glowing suns

Compared to velvet vespers.

Predictable, like an afternoon breeze
Gently touching the hazy sky
This heaviness in my heart grows
I need more, some insatiable thirst
For a drink not yet known
No matter the happiness I have
Nor the possessions I hold
I am not satisfied, and I know
Deep down in my broken soul
That I will die without tasting
Serenity

In this house
Where the walls exhale softly
And the bed does my sleeping
Like the door does my leaving
Where the rain is my beating heart
And the roof does my weeping
I am little more than a fixture-
Collecting dust, a glass figurine
In this house

bruises come with ease
when you find yourself pressed between
four walls
and concrete falls
over time, in little pieces unseen
despite your pleas
to bring them down
to keep them up
do you think
you are prepared to tread in open sea
with her winter bite
or will you sink
content, at last, to simply be
out of sight

We adulterate ourselves; this era together.
Purposefully, we work
to blur the edges of night-
memories already fragmented.
Perhaps it will cost less if we are
cautiously destructive,
perhaps the tangle of empty sheets
will be less likely to drown us if
we begin to forget before

the end.

The words try to jump from my lips
I grit my teeth, bite the soft inside of my mouth
and whisper into my drink
I’ll be ****** if I say it first
You looked at me and said
that shouldn’t have happened to you
I know I know I know
I have exhausted all thought on the matter
The past won’t come knocking, as long as you are here
All I want to do is wrap myself in your prison arms
and forget
I’ll be ****** if I say it first
So I sing it when you’re gone
In the echoes of my house the neighbors hear
Those stupid ******* words

Another cigarette in bed,
another sleepless night.
The cats have prowled,
the mice are dead,
and still I dread the light.

When dark arrives, tears follow
Heaving sobs to a baby’s sigh
It comes so suddenly—
An iron punch to the gut
Until I am doubled over, writhing
And when it finally passes
Delirium ensues
And every object surrounding
Turns a violent violet
So I curl into a ball and shake
Begging for morning
To keep me from mourning
The little girl that wasn’t

No breeze stirs
so the heat endures
in this town
where loneliness found
a home in me

What I know
is not so
in this town
where love has bound
me to be

It was raining and it was morning.
They sat in the car underneath a tree, upon a hill, overlooking the vast cemetery below.  Clichès still have the potential to be beautiful, they know. Intellectual awareness allows for understood symbolism, the death of that which dies at a cemetery, the emotional downpour demarcated by rain, the interstitial distance of looking forward and down.
Silence and language working symbiotically as a stratagem to both hide and reveal vulnerability.  The clichè of their location works with the conversation.
He is sad. She knows.
She knows the emotional location he lives within, she purposefully disregarded his eyes, those eyes that have always stared at her from the mirror, her eyes. The eyes of those with hollow love for themselves. The selfishness of selflessness, the facticity of unfortunate neurological tendencies, the self-imposed limitations.
They speak. He speaks.
She hears him speak, she who is devoid of empathy, she reaches empathy through his words, she hears the thesis of her own thoughts, she cries. She cries because he narrates her perception of herself, through narrating his perception of himself, and she knows the meaning of it.
He cries because it is his.
He looks away.
He says I don't want you to know the things about me. The things that are disgusting.
She loves those things. It's not enough. She knows.
She talks to herself, she talks to him.
She takes his hand, they cling to the ephemeral union.
It stops raining.
They walk into the chapel, the ashes of those who lived resting upon glass bookshelves, behind glass cases. They sit upon a couch in silence. They collapse, against each other.
Two women observe the marble of the mausoleum.
They arise. The women are startled. The women didn't see them sitting; they were three feet away.
He takes her home. They fade into wordlessness during the drive. They look at each other with desperation at a stop sign.
She says goodbye. She walks away.
They walk away.

The owner bites the dog, I bit myself
I think
I ate my leash
My psychological hand pulls the chain
from my stomach, leading me into the kitchen where
You are making coffee

I wake up in the morning
and curse you
that bed, that old vessel of human broth
I make it
Repackaged, like new,
let’s consume from within –
Crisis averted

Last night I dreamt of islands
chasing me
And I was afraid
because I had deserted them

You
Pour me a cup of coffee
I accept
offering you a smile, but
no gratitude, or hope
While my mind gnaws
at the memory
of love.

There are no breaks
From my mistakes
So I seek to canonize
Every well-spun lie
Like children they are to me
Lovely things that wish to flee
The tunnel of my mouth

Ex nihilo: you, refusing to apologize
I wonder
if the world that your eyes violate and consume
withers
painted in the colorless color that comes
from mixing all colors
your color.

I have painted my room with you and now
it is nothing, no
nothing at all

I yawn and I tremble

Consequentially; therefore; thus; and so;
- as a result
the cracked walls speak of (but do not explain)
Sundays
thorned, tragic, unyielding;
sighs of futility writ large

You, on a Sunday
painting the world
in your color

And I felt the universe explode behind my eyes.
                     The language and thoughts
                                     and sensations that accompany such—
                                                 This sea foam fever, this glassy-eyed sickness;
                            what a beautiful horror!  I shiver.
                                                      Thi­s and that.  The shadow of an afternoon.
                                                      ­ A Thursday.
Perhaps it was imagined (that time has passed, that it happened at all)
      But when I wake up in the morning,
                    Emptied of the ticking tocking melancholic howl,
                                   I know why this is so—
                                   I believe I know why this is so—

Of course, to say it aloud would be suicide, and the lovers of the love of the fear prefer purgatory, and of course we do what we can to do what we do to maintain, obtain, sustain.  I aim—
Yes, I aim!—but not in a fulfilled sense:  esse est percipi—to be is to be perceived—a foreign and welcome sensation.  But put those hands away, put that look away, before I forget my—
Before it is lost.  
Lost...? Yes, lost.  
My name, I believe in my name.  Perhaps.  To crawl to crawl to crawl inside of this warm nothingness that tastes like gold soft sweet afternoons, like
driving
along
the
coast
at
dawn
like stopping at the gas station before the forest like the blueness between 5 and 6 pm.  A truly really very steep sort of warmth.  

Temporal fears are so beautifully placed.

Saturdays, when I take the train home
through the hazing misting grayness
I am happy

the window of your house
is like a television screen
for those nighttime walkers
they gather around
faces pressed against the glass
trying to catch the scent
of us
when our show ends
i will be like them
so hungry for you

As you twirl me around
I lose all direction
Abandoned drinks melt
Into lights, into faces
All there is—sound
And a guiding hand
Wrapped around my waist
No measurable space
Between us
Of nights like these I know little
And dancing, even less
Yet the divine song of doing wrong
Is one I never grow tired of

I do not count sheep
So little I care for sleep, instead—
Two windows of red
Pressed against glass
As those white cars pass, strange
The limit of domain and range
Die in my mind
But what of the mice,
When the cat plays nice? No bite
To provoke the nightly fight
Against my dreams
Though when I try to wake
For appearances sake, I think
Of what is brave and real, but
I do not wish to feel
Such things