my body is a trash can
a dumping ground for mistakes
every day is a morning after
every day breeds saccharine aches

bruised lips and handlebar hips
a naked exposé of wrong
from tarpit lungs, through purple teeth
eerie hisses of my afflicted song

the poison flower blossoms only once
infernal fragrance of forgive-me-nots
no tide rinses the sins of night
at 1400 weeks this vessel rots

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

A burglar would be kinder
They would take what they wanted
And run
Instead of leaving you with half-broken
Reminders
Of what you believe
Is still there
A burglar would not hesitate
Nor would they trace the outline of your face
With rough thumbs
Thinking that if they wait
Maybe,
Maybe,
Something better will come along

I watched what you did to me
In the hotel’s bathroom mirror
I didn’t want to run even though
I had nowhere left to go
As you delivered a fist
my naked stomach received your fist
I was trapped between the sink
And your hands
one two   three      four              five
Like the amount of rings you wore
I dropped, my face found the counter's edge
On the way down
Your grip found my neck
I couldn't make a sound
White turned grey turned black
The hotel floor was so cold
I woke up
To gift shop flowers.

On the ride home
I placed each over a bruise

Crawling on all fours, traffic drags its bleeding body forward.  
Men with collars of lipstick tap tap tap their fingers against steering wheels.  
Time slows, cars inch, passing hands find cigarettes, cigarettes find fire.  
Tap ash tap finds tap pavement.  
This is the unobserved hiatus of daily routines, the dreaded stretch of heaven that separates from and to.  
During such moments of inertia
thoughts drift through open windows
forming a cloud for bargains, regrets, wishes, doubts, prayers, and curses to perform cotillion upon.  
Faster, faster, so quickly now, oh, change partners, switch lanes, spin, oh baby spin, fasterfasterfaster, until differentiation is impossible, until drivers become one with this steel river, until minds make their essential switch that makes home a bearable punishment.  

Someone has broken down.  
Do Not Stop.
They are shunned from the sweeping mob of machinery.  Necks swivel in uniform towards this abomination, how dare they, how DARE they outshine our misery.  Perspiration works its way down backs and pools into leather cracks.  

Will it ever end?
Do we want it to?  

Finally,
regrettably,
the final exit, the last few feet of purgatory.  
We descend into the next inferno where we leap through fiery hoops of interrogation—
yes no it was fine yes okay.  
We are exhausted.  
If only we would have stopped.  
If only we would have hit the brakes and remained in our haven of anxiety and lust and confusion and endless searching.  
Our love affair with traffic can only last so long.
    So we make solemn promises to ourselves to appreciate tomorrow’s,
    to run our fingers along the satin thighs of the freeway,
    to plant a rubber kiss upon the ground.  

How tap long tap until tap five?

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

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

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

A barbaric thing, winter’s price
The crude symphony of blood and ice
Through cataract windshields
Behold barren fields
In the grip of evening’s womb
Listen for the hangman’s loom
Forever weaving, weaving
But do not speak of leaving
Towards a melancholy freedom
Liberty to and liberty from
Run towards the sea,
Away from land’s fee—
And know that winter follows
Felt deep in the hollows
Of lung and bone
And in the silent moan
Between each leafless tree
Only winter alone is free

There's a blood moon in those eyes
by your heart shaped tattoo
and if an eclipse was for wishing,
I think I'd wish for you
I'll walk through your desert
to your river of sorrow
fill my cup with your tears
and drink through tomorrow
No stranger to poison,
no stranger to sin
I'll let you get up
and fall down again
Just please know, my darling,
those thoughts are untrue
this may be your darkness
but I'll walk next to you

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

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.

It's all very arbitrary
Desiring what doesn't reciprocate
Trying to hold diamond smoke
Even though fate
Shook her ruthless head
Chasing madly after a mirage
The only oasis thirsted for
An ambrosial image
That leaves us wanting more
                                                  more
                                                          more

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

To you, I owe each sleepless night

Which I pay by every turn and toss

Until morning drags her violet light

To collect my dues, each hour’s loss

This is not something that I resent

I have found delirium to be a pleasure

As the only things dreams can present

Are fleeting moments, a frantic measure

I know we spent at least three days

As slaves to desire, instead of rest

With crimson eyes, a rosy craze

And even passion had confessed-

That she grew exhausted, and so she left

Yet still our bodies found each other

Knowing her absence was no theft

For the true criminal was another

A crueler kind-his name is Time

And it seemed as though a second spent

Brought upon the cathedral’s chime

If only to remind us of our rent

Late again, and again it’s due

But he had taken our every cent

I will never regret giving me for you

For sleepless nights is all it meant

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

She turns her head from it;
I turn my back to it;
It faces them in their deflection, they who are ruled by planetary alignment, they who spill rogue waves from calm mouths, just as the lace crashes and pools around bare legs and lips -
Any enigma free from transcription lies within the chasm, who sleeps buried deeply between two bodies, too deeply, it has been said, though perhaps for the best, as the truths who precede intent rest there as well.
We, the sea, urge in ad hominem, convinced of indelibility, consistent in breakage and dispersment of that which is built from and upon determined chaos.
Her, I, the sea.
Our madness.
I turn towards it; she turns to face it;
The sea has drawn it's long breath
We reach for the exhale with open palms, never closed, for the retreat is inevitable.

I washed your sheets on Mondays, a private liturgy
Their veracious nature spoke; my eyes sought not to see
I scrubbed those stains with child's hands
Until linen stripped and fell to strands
Those twisted ropes that once bound us
Turned silent traitors, servants of  lust
Denial is my cross to bear
And of the irony, I am aware
Yet do not dismiss my right to ache
My faith in you is your mistake
But know when thread unwinds to bone
You will lie prisoner on those sheets
Alone

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 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.

Eliminating madness
Would be to lose my essence
A barbed wire snake sitting pretty
In my belly, his presence
Is what puts that shine in my bright
wet eyes, the look that makes you
want to run and stay and fight
It is the molten gold you feel
In the hollows of my hips, or
Why I go weeks without a meal
and sleep four nights out of seven
Madness-the tinge of darkness
Within the heart of heaven

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.

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

Your fingers formed the words I sought,
Yet it seemed as though the tongue forgot
A coward's shield, of silver and glass
Protecting long after battle's pass
How may glory relinquish pain-
If victory's honor should wax and wane?

Like winter's sun, your affection is fleeting
And stretched by time, hearts slow their beating
This tale told - more often by some
The ones who call for love to come,
But just as threshold meets its cross
Their cries fall silent, for feared loss

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.

Here I stand again in this broken town
Where my face turns up and I turn down
Here in the streets of home I'm bound
Tracing our names carved into the ground
You I see under each streetlamp's fire
You I made a crown from copper wire
Each gust of air whispers into my ear
Your name; I write it with every tear
I wanted to be your strength, your queen
Yet for all those mistakes I made unseen
You paid in full, though I tried to give
Myself for you-my life so you would live
I wanted to remove your pain and sorrow
For I felt it too, and it stripped each tomorrow
Of the hope felt in our endless coast
Where once life was what we made most
Little I cherish what has happened to me
I've endured such you should never see
It matters not, and naught that I care
Except for making these days you bear
Less difficult, and much I will find
To do for you, to make clocks unwind
I will spin you those lost ribbons of gold
The little worlds that went untold
I know them all, my memory's treasure
Though my sadness comes from pleasure
I will always remember what was true
All our moments and our failures, too
And the night when my lips faded to blue
I realized, there was no me before you.

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.

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

In the honeyed season we cry for the missed lips,
Those slow strolls along the coast of nostalgic seas.
For the ones taken and for the ones lost
Those who vanished through doors without keys.

In the hopes of what we will find in the morning
We are dismayed opening our eyes to grey.
The months gained and the days lost;
We our dreams of sunlight fade away.

In the hearts of the victim and hunter
Both bury pain and anger beneath sorrow.
Though one is running and one is chasing
Both hunger for the honeyed lips of tomorrow.

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.

I was never the bad one.  Not until now.  Yet here I am with ice coated fire in my eyes, the gaze that I have seen so many times in the men who have hurt me, a monster of their creation.  It feels like the good in me has receded into the castle I was forced to build around my heart and is starving out the battalions of intent.  I need to cleanse myself of this abomination, a mental labyrinth meant to keep myself from success, my own worse enemy - me.  

There was a girl I liked once, when she was living in Italy.  Her hair was white-gold in the sun and her blue-yellow eyes were always open, though often exhaustion fought to close them.  Even when she cried she was beautiful, because she did not hide her sadness, or her anger, and the blue and yellow became cerulean pools to swim in. Her happiness made strangers smile, she stood upright despite her height of 5"11, and she woke up every morning with the knowledge that everything was exactly how it was supposed to be.  This girl, this donna, had that chemical spark in her stare, fed by the history of several centuries, and always, always, her intentions were true.  She spoke to strangers, slaughtering their language but they did not mind because she was trying, forever trying to bring joy into her heart.  That kind of determination becomes a cloak of silver lace that brings others closer to you, all seeking the refuge of contentment, until everyone is wearing the same spider web of felicè and little iridescent strings form a community of pulsing satisfaction.

I wish I was still her, and sometimes I am, but mostly I believe she is waiting on the rosy marble steps of the duomo while I battle my invisible monsters.  I do not think I will see her I again until I knock down that castle, surrendering my slender body and my past and those tremors in the night.  I hope she is still there, her cheeks matching the cathedral's glow underneath the pink clouds of dawn, to embrace me when I fall to my knees, begging her to share the cloak we wove together.

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

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

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

I once met a captain, three yards from the sea
In a tavern where only true sailors should be
This captain questioned if I was a We
"No," I replied, "I am both lonely and free."
He, too, could relate to a life in this way
His comfort came from the boat's gentle sway
And time held nothing but day after day
Yet my smile, he said, kept his ship at bay.
The captain, filled with both warmth and fear
Watched our faces in the tavern's mirror
Sadly, and tenderly, he declared it was clear
I was the shipwreck into which he would steer.

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.

Tonight, I am afraid.
I am afraid because I had a piece of toast 13 hours ago, and there's nothing left in the fridge except some horrible strawberry liqueur, which I am drinking despite the fact that it feels like acid in my empty stomach. Me, I'm 5 feet 11 inches, 112 pounds, blue-eyed with longish blonde hair. I'm hungry, but it appears that New York doesn't feed outsiders. So I'm listening to Leonard Cohen on Leonard Street because that's the only thing I can think of that makes sense right now. Smoking in bed, my small luxury. I had a neighbor who leaves me toast and coffee in the morning, except I haven't seen him in a while and I'm too proud to knock on the door and ask for food. It's strange, leaving a perfectly ordinary life for this desperation, this skinny **** that I thought was important but now just makes it hard to climb the stairs. I'll make it, though, right? It's almost September and that's when I'm supposed to make money. Money. I just wanted to go to Italy again, feel the life I should never have left again. So okay I’ll be their clothes hanger, their one-man show, walk a pretty walk for them, and then go somewhere else. Except right now I'm considering the hospital, that sweet IV that will keep me nourished. I can't afford a taxi though, and I don't know what is I’d tell them- “Hi I'm 20 years old, broke, starving, alone, and afraid to sleep because I don't know if I'll see another day”- I think they would send me to the psych ward instead. I don't know, I am supposed to be a hybrid of girlish innocence and feminine mystique, but all I really want is someone to put me to bed and watch me sleep so I know I'll be safe.   It's 3:26 am. I have no one to call. It's just Leonard Cohen and I on Leonard Street, singing through dry lips and fading into the white of the sheets. If I called for help, I doubt they'd find me in the bed. I'm here, though, I'm here.

"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.

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

“Was it the backless back of a black dress that did it?”

                                          They’ll ask, loudly
                                          even though the wolves that roam these streets
                                          are merely feigning sleep
                                          and are starving

“Yes!”

                                          They will agree
                                          as drool slips from the hinge of a wolfish grin
                                          from the forked tongue
                                          of an angel

“What else could she expect?”

                                         Of course
                                         they must abide by the code of the pack(of course)
                                         which is of course
                                         the root of disrespect

“How obscene! How uncouth!”

                                         (how to measure human flesh)
                                         as if they could  hold up her “no(s)” to his “yes”
                                         which is bigger and louder
                                         and stronger

“Yes! … Yes! … Yes!”

                                         As if to them
                                         to the wolves, to the men, to the uncondemned
                                         what happened, really
                                         was for the best.

I left with very little, expecting a week or perhaps two in the city, quick cash and then home to the sand of my beaches and the touch of my bed. It has been exactly two weeks and I am starting to say that I live here. There's an exhilaration attached to the detachment of a one-way ticket, I am a thousand people a day while being none, I can walk away from conversations without feeling guilty, there is not one person who cares enough about me to bother with my affairs-it is absolute freedom. Yet there is a loneliness that hangs on the hinge of liberation...a traveler has the world in their heart.  We cannot stop ourselves from stuffing our experiences inside, gluttons of the road with the horizon in our eyes. Sometimes, though, we lose sight of what we wanted all along and then begin to search for what we desire, which becomes blurred and tangled by time zones and climates and languages...our stomachs are always empty and our chests are always aching for the unknown.  It can break a person. I was on the bus back from East Hampton when an older man asked me why I was crying:
"I don't know",  I said, "I suppose I just realized that this city takes everything from you, and you must prove yourself to earn it back".
He told me what they all do:if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere
I turned back towards the window before asking, "when you came here, did you have nothing, too?"
The man nodded and smiled. Maybe he was lying, but he gave me 50 dollars and paid my cab fare. I hugged him goodbye and he wished me luck. I don't know how he knew I was completely broke with no way to get back to my apartment, but I cannot imagine the forty-block walk with three bags. There is a kindness in a fellow traveler, one more seasoned than we are, who will always understand what it is to be poor and hungry and tired. But we chose this life, I chose this life, when I stepped on the plane with no way back. I realized this as I was locked atop a rooftop in SoHo, watching the pink and blue of sunrise with champagne on my lips. It is okay to admit your inadequacies, to ask for help, as long as you appreciate the sheer genius of the universe. That, after all, is why this life calls to us.

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

The blood in your throat
Milk for the moribund
You choke on need's euphemism
                  want
Because that is all you have left inside
Solipsism's slave,
Getting down to get up to get down

My beloved,
        The night is orange with the oppression of city against cloud.  I sit outside, staring blankly at the exposed brick of another building as mosquitos prey upon my distraction.  My heart cries out for you as I do - we ache together in the solitude of our nights.  I do not know of the future, for all I feel is the cold knife of your absence.  All I own is hope, hope in the anguish I hold, the longing that serves as proof of the intensity of our love.  Though I know we will be together soon, I hold our nightly funeral, guarding our ashes and awaiting our ressurection.  This death that is worse than death consumes me, yet day forces my face to change into one of complicity.  If those who surround me could only feel how much I yearn for you, they would leave me silently by our tomb. However, I stand alone, a woman with her eyes upon the horizon, searching always for her sailor.  I touch the Atlantic with the knowledge that it is the only obstacle that stands between us, and embrace it as a friend rather than a rival to be conquered.  Soon, this sea will deliver me into your arms, and soon I will no longer serve as sentinel to our funeral pyre.  Your hand will touch my shoulder, awakening me from this reverie, a long-forgotten dream of the past.

Bound in chains by cyclic affairs
Patterns of the past - my chrysalis
Has ceased, complete paralysis
From language's malicious pair-
      what if?
The edge of a cliff,
Or solidly on land
I'm unable to distinguish on which I stand
One step will disclose all
*But what if I fall?

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

I’ve overslept
I’ve smoked too much
My house is unkept
And my body's wrecked
My heart's a mess
And my head is worse
The doctor said
I over think
So I sought a cure
In the form of drink
That didn’t help, so
I turned to men
They let me down
All of them
My daily pills
For various ills
Don’t work so well
I’m starting to believe
That life is hell

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

Imagine loving a sober alcoholic Gemini biker with a chipped tooth.


After you are together for eight months, let that sober alcoholic Gemini biker with a chipped tooth take you out in to the ocean, when the waves are cresting at six feet and you are terrified.  You almost drowned when you were a child.  He tells you to come out further.  Turns his back on the wave, just like your father said never to do. He looks you in the eye and says I will never let anything happen to you, I am not him, you can trust me, I will not hurt you.  
So you dive under the wave and he has you in his arms and the sun is expanding through the water droplets on your eyelashes.  It’s cold but not too cold and it feels clean.  You believe him, and believe that nothing is truer than this moment right now with the salt drying our lips and tangling our hair, nothing is braver than trusting someone despite the past.  This is one of the greatest days of your life and you never want to leave the coast or his tattooed heart because this is what is real.  

Imagine that you two part several weeks later.
Imagine that he begs for forgiveness.
Imagine that you go back.

Because you remember the beach and that day.  And every day in its consistency when you are together, and how your anxiety subsides, just for a little while.  Things do change, for a week, maybe, but then the past arrives reading The Book of Power and she is hungry.  Wrapped up in memories, she plants a green kiss on his cheek and he leaves you in the water to drown.  You are treading water trying to seem like you are swimming but you are failing, failing miserably, and when he finally drags you to shore he doesn’t pump your lungs with oxygen, he watches you choke as everything comes up.  He tells you that he loves the past and he is waiting for her to come home and always has been.  
So now, you do not even have the past.  He took it from you and everything you thought was real.  You cannot tell the difference now and ask and ask Could he have loved the present, just for a small while? Does he look at your chair in his house with his dog and think of her? When he looks at the ocean, does he taste you?
You are the past, too, just not the right one.  

Imagine this but do not live it.

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