In my years,
I have noticed,
writing about the birds and the trees
comes with great ease,
but an ordinary day with pale grey skies,
and flat stale air
is a subject as to which not many care.
A day when birds are too bored to fly;
people drearily roam outside.
When there are too many clouds for the sun to shine.
On such days, us wallflowers seem to thrive.

Tonight I feel like a thunderstorm

Been wrestling with my sheets.
I can't sleep.

The words you said are booming through my head

I am losing
my Mind.

It's about **** time,

you hear what I've been screaming for so long.

My brain is flooding with the words to this song that makes my body feel electric and my heart feels like it belongs,

Somewhere else.

A place I've never been but I can taste it like the liquor on my tongue. It's not just in my dreams, you see, I'll get there.

Not today though, because it's raining...and I'm blissfully drunk.

It is
a single blood-red rose,
Lounging in a field
of Sunday morning daisies.

It is
a venerable novel,
ripe with life and adventure.
Love splattered across the pages.
The binding,
begging and writhing to free the secrets
coddled between the lines.

It is
how your mother takes her coffee.
A little cream,
no sugar,
and the promise of
9 AM jitters.

It is
Expecting a hurricane,
only, having to recover
from a day in the sunlight.
  
It is
a tiny footprint in the sand,
a greasy fingerprint on a doorknob,
the intricacies of a fragile snowflake.

But above all,

It is
You.

"The problem with love these days is that society has taught the human to stare at people with their eyes rather than their souls."
                       -Christopher Poindexter*

See, that's where you are wrong.
I dove right into
that pacific of a soul and knew it had to be.
He let me sail on the deepest, darkest
seas of his mind, as I to him.
I love him, I always will,
but as time moves forward water goes still.

You could put a bullet through my brain, and I'd still miss you in hell.

I want to tell you everything,
but lately I haven't been able to find the right words.
Upside-down vowels adhere to fractured consonants;
mismatched words snap into twisted phrases and unkind sentences.  
Hesitation has been holding my wrists and drowning me
in rivers of regret and  loneliness.
Waves of sorrow crippling my psyche with every drip
of the faucet.
What once was a controlled trickle
Is now a raging flood.
Oxygen isn't common
In the box labeled reality.
"Take a hatchet to the walls,
and step into the sunlight!"
Curious knights ride upon steeds of
broken glass and rose petals,
with hopes to sew heartache back onto her
tattered sleeve,
all of whom are poisoned by greed and
red-hot lust.
They don't know about the bridges
that've been incinerated inside her soul.
We all need that person who will kiss our scars,
and read us seasick fairy tales of love and triumph.
When we find this victor of such an immortal task
We'll dive into the ocean of eternity,
and hope for the best.

Let me tell you about the sun and the moon.
He falls everyday to see her rise,
And craves the sight of her sparkling eyes.
She prays for him to pass by soon
They share a love the stars despise.

Her shimmering glow,
And his glorious heat.
Never has been found a love as sweet.
With each gentle kiss their feelings will grow.
Within the darkness they arrange to meet.

He’ll see her face with each coming night.
Behind her smile is a glint of charm;
Under his protection she’ll endure no harm.
He is the source of her undying light.
Awaiting the day they’ll be arm in arm.

You're a
confident
hard working
minimalist,
while I'm a glorified
mason jar filled with
butterflies and Jack Daniels.
I want nothing short of
the entire universe
written on the back
of a crumpled up receipt,
and nothing more
than your hand
half-way down my back.
With that in mind,
I is a lonely and fragile vowel,
but U is probably the
strongest most immaculate
one of the five (sometimes six).
Our hands are meant for holding,
never hitting,
and our bones, molded from
stardust, not concrete,
but our tongues are as sharp
as dull razors.
Always, always, always
be cognizant of your
surroundings
because what once was
so beautiful
will eventually slip out
from under your eyelids,
without so much as a kiss
goodbye.

I'm on the brink of 2 a.m.

It's a sticky-sweet July night,
and even though you're not here
I'm surrounded by you.

I had this dream we got lost in an arcade,
and decided to never leave.

I don't know what love is,
but I do know that your clothes
fit me better than my own.

I want to write about you...
but it's hard to fit the entire universe in a poem.

I can try,
we can try.

I live my life
in black and white
because simplicity
tastes so much sweeter
than the poison
on your lips.

(2 PM)

I've been insatiably numb for a while.
it's hard to admit that,
being this codependent
is like being on trial.

Vulnerability is not my forte
and breaking your heart wasn't
the Right way
to tell you,

(2 AM)

that I've been listening to your voicemails
from when we were Seventeen
with nothing but Dreams.
now all we have is a few
Conversations that never happened.

'I miss you'
I miss you more

'I love you'
I always will

If you feel broken, imagine pouring the poison.

We move to the rhythm of the city
Beating to the waves of adrenaline, never pity.

I need to hold you close, this affliction is impossible to diagnose.

Trying to comprehend and begging Gods and Monsters that tonight will never end.

Our Sonic Youth cannot be contained,
Electronic and unashamed.

With brains that bleed idiosyncratically and make magic with words or a pen,

Hands that turn a gin and tonic into something drastically more chronic.

The solution to the problem is that the cause is quite solemn.

Leave everything behind for a new place;  taste your favorite stranger's face.

Let them know that their perfume can light up a whole room.

We're searching for the people we've been our whole lives, in structures we do not recognize.

Know that most women that dream only survive on nicotine,

Slow Dancing in the Dark just to feel Nevermore than a spark.

This is how it feels to be unreal, when your entire body becomes brittle steel.

Don't let the season tantalize your demons.

If you can feel your own unapologetic heart, realize that this is just the start.

And when you're tired of leaving, run.

Stop breaking other’s hearts.

One day, there won’t be any left to break
but your own.

I'd like to think I'm an artist

Working at a pace far too glacial to be in the race.

Trying to write this poem is like painting a portrait with handcuffs on;

The architect’s human condition

Calculation, infatuation, manipulation,
a Little Miss Communicating.

Words are incapable of recreating

The way your face illuminated the solitary silence of my darkroom.

A winter solstice in full bloom.

This inversion in theory isn't negative, yet I don't feel satisfaction when my bones start to shutter.

The subject of my matter does not matter.

It's how I paint the portrait.

I’m constantly developing the negatives  
that I hear in my head.

Curiosity created the cat, and slowly, she grew wings.

A hall of fame rage angel.

Rendering the artist

Insatiable.

I can never find the right words
when wanting to write about you.

My thoughts become your cluttered desk.
My mind, searches,
but cannot find its way over your
plastic paper protectors.
Because you insisted that everything more fragile than skin deserves
a little extra attention.

When wanting to write about you,
my brain becomes dog-eared.

By every play, every novel, and every anthology still on your shelf.
Waiting for your hungry eyes
to return to the adventure.
You have yet to turn the page.

Shakespeare couldn't've prepared anyone
for the hurricane hearts you left behind.

There is no monologue
that can fill a pair of lungs with air,
no poem that can breath for the breathless.

I am a natural disaster trying to write
about the sun.

My head is trying to put words
to the fire you left behind.

I know now,
that California's forests are
nothing compared to an empty stage.
Your flames branded
everything you touched
With the sound of your smile...

For a while,
I wanted nothing more
than to look into your oceanic eyes
one last time.

Then I remembered, that I do,
everyday.

When I walk through that door at 7 a.m.
groaning.
coffee in hand,
ideas for poems in my head.

You are not a sonnet, or a clear sky.
You are not a tomb.

You are
the cow as white as milk,
the cape as red as blood,
the hair as yellow as corn,
and the slipper as pure as gold.

Most importantly,
you are a classroom full of wide-eyed children.
Ready for their lesson in advanced theatre.
Well, not ready, but we'll get there,
with speed and purpose.

You taught me how to fear my own darkness.

So leave the light on before you go.

This house is cold.
The wooden floors have lost
the patter of tiny feet flopping
against them at seven in the morning.
For those feet have grown old,
and moved on.

This house is broken.
The fireplace coughs up dusty
memories of chilly nights,
and holidays passed.
Something once so inviting
has lost it's tender charm.

This house is alone.
The walls whisper
sweet nothings into the air.  
Only to be carried away
by the echoes of the wind
throughout the uninhabited hallways.

This house is a canvas.
A chance to start fresh.
A second chance.
A new beginning.
A work in progress.

This house will become our home.

Forgive,
forget,
heartbreak's only antidote.
Unto chains of despair  
I became one
with solid ground.
Only to realize,
if the world was an oyster
than I must be a pearl.

Liberation struck me like a train,
abrupt, showing no mercy,
leaving the tracks a little messy.

Indulging someone else is going to feel
like conducting
after a life altering derailment.
Uncomfortable,
unsafe.

Nevertheless,
I'll bottle up my remedy,
with the intention of your freedom,
but with the hope
that you'll always remember
your Annabelle Lee.

Words are not always compiled into heart stopping love letters.

Memories do not always spur intoxicating nostalgia.

The sky is not always that awe inspiring shade of baby blue perfection.

Crayons are not always yellow.

Sometimes, they are black.

Sometimes, darkness is the ideal absence of color needed to complete the masterpiece.

I wrote you a poem,
But I dropped it amongst the stars.
It wound up on the ceiling
While we were chasing cars.

I wrote you a poem,
But it dissolved into the ocean.
A fisherman caught it
While his net was in motion.

I wrote you a poem,
But it's on the other side of the world,
In another man's hands,
His fingers distorted and curled.

I wrote you a poem,
But you haven't read it yet.
Someday you will,
For now it hides in your silhouette.

A hopeless romantic:
what I used to be.
Dreams consisted of warm blankets
and long walks by the sea.

Childish whims of
beautiful song and prose,
awaiting for the one
to spare me a rose.

With time and patience,
I waited, and waited,
only to find a four letter word  
irrationally overrated.

Today, I'm still waiting,
though not as determined.
For I have learned,
four letters should not be burdened.

Build monuments for her.
High and prime,
with lustrous gold trimmings
and intricate pearl accents.
Surrounded by clouds of lavender,
like tufts of perfection
whispering into a beautiful stranger's ears,
gentle drops of sound.
Strong pillars protecting
a most-prized acquisition.
Love,
cementing every brick,
bridging every gap.
Tides of satin caress the nearby shoreline
in an infinite melody.
Crescendoing all prayers of light
and a mother's kind brow.
Diminuendoing unanswered
sighs of temptation.
Dawn kisses wide arcs,
turning immortal sadness into
her favorite raging affliction,
Home.

I feel like a ripple in the harbor.
Throwing myself against
the Hull of your chest.
A place I used to call home.

Not far from Beason
liquid green
caresses silt that has
always pumped life
into this broken city.
A city where sirens and
church bells sound the same
if you just listen
to the hum of floating taxis
circulating you straight to
the heart of a
civilization learning to collect illumination.

I drag my feet along E. Pratt
listening to the whispers of our past,
a quiet riot in the distance.

Somewhere in this city
a woman is taking her son's hand
for the last time
a brother is tanking
his last free throw
somewhere
a daughter scribbles
her name in side walk chalk
one
final
time.

These children were the
city's flesh and blood.
Fells point in their bones;
a piece of Pigtown in every cell.

We've learned from
our mistakes that
burning down convenience stores
doesn't make life more convenient,
but owning a gun does.
What is the cost of protection
when you're not the one paying the price?

I hope that one day
we will build upon the ashes
and Light Street will burn bright again.

Now, I have experienced several
types of love in my youth. Fiery, quiet,
and the kind that's mixed with a dose of
vermouth.

Though, I have grown tired
of ideas of settling down.
I fear to live a life
uninspired.

This kind of love, unexciting.
I prefer a poison,
some would say, is more
inviting.

A kind of love that tastes like fire,
where living our dreams
is most definitely
required.

I feel as though it is time to try
a new sensation.
This is unfortunately not a drunken
revelation.

Though I leave one pint behind,
be it trivial to most,
I believe I have found the right
Kind.

My nightmares?
They aren't just nightmares.
They're more like...
night apocalypses.
Why?
My entire world
shakes hands with death
in every single
twilight terror...


You.

Life that once so desperately
clung to your lips,
has bestowed it's final kiss.  
Golden flesh is now fresh powdered mountains.
Emerald and fiery yellow hues have
departed the only eyes
I will ever drown in.

Please wake up.

Do you still think about me
when your car hums
past the baseball field
and beats toward the twilight?

Can you hear my smile
when the sun is melting into your favorite
flavor of summertime sorbet?

-

I remember when
we used to summit the dugout
and watch the sky slow dance,

we held hands like our fingers
were sewn together,

and kissed in celebration
like we had reached
the peak of the world.

You taught me how to
write poems about love,
and my open chest cavity.

Since you left, I’ve been writing
about everything all at once.

About how the smoothness of your skin
brushes me awake in a bed in which I am alone,
how love tastes like jazz music
and fireball whiskey,
and about how pain leaves you gasping for air and
draws canyons under your eyes.

-

I don’t know how to forget
the palms of your hands
in my mom’s basement at 2 a.m.
or the sound of my heart as
I hung up the phone.

I don’t know how to forget
everything all at once.

Your smile is like the sunrise.
Gradually, you light up the world;
the luminescence is taken away
all the same.
Even when you're not bright as day,
your spellbinding light shines through.
An infinate glow radiates around you.

I wonder what it feels like to be the earth under a stroke of lightning.

A close range bullet wound from the love of your life?

Green crust curls around the energy like my hairy goosebumps around your fingers.

Earth and sky clinging so heavily to one another.

To be ripped apart, neither would survive.

Essential primary chaos.  

Pain so devastating is only natural.

Love so tender never felt more excruciating.

Is it symbiosis if only one party can be completely destroyed by the other?

Her eyes open and wreak havoc on my delicate armor of vegetation.

She feeds me all the same.

I carry both of these truths responsibly, a concealed weapon.

Emotion coursing through my veins, a final meal of electricity.

I absorb the impact into my fleshy carbon layers.

Waiting for the day she can soak up the same.

It's 1:45 am

I am listening to the ocean inside your chest.

Your shoreline fills my ears with white noise and reminds me I'm not alone inisde the sleeplessness of my bedroom walls.

I've never heard lungs fill so effortlessly with waves of wet Georgia air.

Every exhale is an excited sigh. An introvert, greeting a common acquaintance.

Sometimes, you swim against the current, end up drowning in the abundance of oxygen, and the rip tides role in.

I stopped playing lifeguard
because your inhaler is always close by.

You don't read my poetry, but in my poetry you do.

My heart is a sinking ship.

It is taking painfully too long for the ocean to swallow.

The moment their lips met
he recoiled promptly.
For he knew that every action has
an equal or lesser reaction,
and he did not want to be pursued.
Not even by Aphrodite herself.
The girl with bones chiseled from ivory.
The girl with skin smoother than silk.
The girl that kisses the boys and makes them die.

We are not children,
Yet we're still not fully grown.
****, how our finger tips can wonder.
They've traced freckles
we never knew existed–
explored galaxies within
the palms of our hands.
I understand,
that sometimes you won't;
I'm still making
mistakes of my own.
I've learned there is no I in Team,
but there  is a U in Us.
I don't want to be a part of an Us
without you.
The adventure we
accept as love is infinite,
much like the universe.

I listen to the rain,
how it falls steadily, surely.
Precipitation has a single purpose.
Not to be danced under,
not to be kissed under,
nor to be sung under.
Rain falls solely because
no one is there to catch it.
Everything is impressionable,
hearts especially.
Don't let the rain mold you
down to earth with it's
incurable loneliness.
Look up into the
teary vastness,
hold your arms out wide,
and let go.

There are so many reasons to leave.

Tar sits on my lungs like a winter coat.

Philadelphia is colder than your shoulders.

You tell me to stop smoking.

I’d run out naked in a snowstorm just to feel your goosebumps against mine.

I don’t know how to tell you

I'm looking for a reason to stay.

She’s a wonder of the world, and you treat her like she’s a house on fire.

She’s tired of burning for you.

Rome wasn't built in a day,

comparatively to the age of earth,
a single day is just a trillionth of a grain of sand.

Making me about 0.00000007435 grains of sand in the hourglass.

I am not your Athena and my studio apartment is not the Parthenon.

I consider myself a Modernist, modular.
No columns, pillars, domes, ornaments.

Just fire and cheap nicotine.

My bones and flesh will never be immaculate, my body is concrete and corrugated steel.

Based on classical mathematics I will never be perfect, yet I am still a perfectionist.

That is the infinite burden I bare.

Unlike most people,
I sort of enjoy going to the dentist.

Poking and prodding in my mouth,
“What college did you attend?”
“How often do you floss?”

These are life’s eternal questions.
What scars did you create?
The first or last thing to rot is your teeth, no? Your choice.

If the woman didn’t have her fingers in my mouth I would tell her about your 22-year-old baby tooth.

How it caught every crumb and how we planned to pull it out with a doorknob.

And how I fell in love with your chrome colored bedroom, dripping with chains, like the braces etched into your knee.

And how the whites of your eyes get pearly in the sun, milky baby teeth.

I’ll stop drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes if it means we never decay.

Just promise to brush and floss and keep me safe, and maybe, I’ll stay.

I doused myself in gasoline as you lit your cigarette.

From my ashes will grow, a city of Weeping Willows.

She asked me to write her a happy poem.

Me, a natural disaster trying to write about the sun?

Yes, I found her, Liv.

The one who’s orange brilliance pushes through even my most treacherous storms.

Exhausted and still burning. The one who loves me with purpose.

Her shards of lustrous flame carve across my palo santo sky like red tattoo ink dancing on murky water.

She taught me that cats and rabbits can learn to fall in love if you let them.

The food chain is a human construct, love isn’t.

I want to become a red sunset reflecting over the lake too.

Eventually my clouds disperse like fireworks.

Engulfing the sky together against a moon made of chrome.

I’ve never written one before, and now I never need to.

She is my Happy Poem.

I’m sorry

The person you’re a trying to reach is unavailable if you’d like to make a call please try again...

I’m sorry

she’s passed out drunk
on the roof of a building
in a part of her mind you’ve never been to.

I’m sorry

That she discussed the nature of pleasure when smoke was slithering from her mouth.

I’m sorry

She made late night calls taste like
sweet and salty carcinogens.

I’m sorry

To be a bother, but can she get her bike lock back. Your keys never fit right anyway.

I’m sorry

She made you feel anything other than anxiety
for a moment.

I’m sorry

“Do you know what you want?”

Yes, listen,

I want to hear glowing creamy light kiss my houseplants in the morning.

I want to feel the weight of my gravity against that ****** diner booth at 3am.

I want to dance until I can’t breathe between the upturned corners of my crooked and cracked teeth.

I want to hold every single cell in my body and watch them trickle through my fingers like sand.

I want to stand barefoot in the snow and watch it melt into an ocean, then a desert, then to dust. I am dust. We all are.

I want to see how small I am under city lights and smoke and breathe it all in.

Don’t forget to breathe out.

I want to drive until there is absolutely nothing left in my mirrors.

I want love to boil inside of me so I can help feed another starving heart.

I want the same internal convection in return.

I want nothing more than every square kilometer of the moon.  

I wanted you.

You were the chocolate sprinkles on my soft serve.

Burrowing into my chest like a sandcrab melting through saltwater and ocean city sand.

Fading into my body, until we became one gooey sticky sweet mess.

Such a beautiful summertime massacre.

I prefer the mountains in June. A cool evergreen breeze sighing through my buzzcut season.

This is what true royalty feels like, to sleep forever under the pines. A place we wanted to grow.

I shaved my head because I’m not yours anymore. Or theirs. I belong to my own shallow grave. So please, do not call me princess.

Disney did not forget to write my story, he was too busy creating women no one would ever receive.

My life has never gone according to plan, stopped praying before bed for my fairytale to fruition.

I created myself. A handsome hairless heroine. The tallest trunk at the peak.

Only faith I have left is in my own photosynthetic cells.

Feeling still a lingering winter. SPF cannot protect me from my own emotions.

I don’t need it to anymore.

Looking down at you from miles away like that man from lilo and stitch.

Sunburnt and confused.

Black sprinkles and ants slow dance on the concrete in my giant sugary shadow.

I wonder do the ***** still bury their troubles? I haven’t been to the beach in years.

You haven’t considered these sappy limbs a place to call home since then.

I always have and I always will.

Doctor, please! I have come down with a terrible case,
a disease so rare you may have never seen.

She grabbed my heart and gave it a long squeeze,
I'm having a bit of trouble getting back on my feet.

I'd do anything for her so she lives her life with ease.
Sing to her, cook for her, and dowse my body in gasoline.

Hopefully, soon again I am groovin' to the beat.
I just love her so much I've forgotten how to breathe.

As she lights the match, I will not scream
because her darkness is something I'll never let myself see.

I don’t even see.
They’re just words on a screen.
She wrote them, no seatbelt fastened.

Gray eyes and all
I love myself,
and my dark passenger.

She’s starting to
arrive at that destination
We never planned a trip for.  

I hope she’s not waiting at the gate.
The way I waited for you,
as you waited for me in that very room.

The words glaring and I see your face.
Touching you touching her touching me touching her.

If I met her mother would she
fatten me up respectfully? Leave it open for spring to come home?

How do I explain
the way you shut my closet door?
The one I was born and raised behind.

I being the poet,
You being the poem.
Amor Fatí, forever and ever, Amen.

Will she drown in
an ocean she wears to class everyday?
Will she still come over for dinner?

Maybe I stay silent.
“She’s not here and that’s okay.”
They’re right.

If you never ask you never know.
They never know unless you speak.
It’s just fire in an uncorked bottle.

Without jet fuel, I burn out eventually.
Don’t lift a finger,
I’ll let my body embrace the atmosphere.

Free falling.
Crash landing.
Into no one’s arms but my own.

Sounds of a shower ringing against your back like skylights.

I whisper to myself in the silence, a long cotton smile and a breath.

Pillows wreaking of evergreen tides and the taste of your tongue.

Mancala eyes rolling, reminiscing the best parts of my childhood.

Curls caressing me like question marks. I want nothing more than this.

Happiness is holding a hand that never has been held before.

Neon light peaking behind my eyelids, strange faces flashing in the night.

Handed me a triple shot of gasoline in a room full of mirrors.

Homemade pasta and a heaping side of unnecessary apologies.

Stay a little longer. Let’s wake up next to the clouds on my carpet.

Taking care of myself and I’d let you take the wheel without a license.

Ask me if I’m okay again. Go wash your hands again.

Tomorrow is never a promise. Hopefully this lasts past Saturday night.

Cut into my bones and you’ll
find fragments of your irises.

Dark flakes of earthy perfection,
cowering behind rigid pores and dense structure.

Parts of me that used to be gelatin in your arms.

I hear sirens in the distance. I see the hallows of your cheeks doused in blue.

The most beautiful face I have ever seen.
Nothing but a ghost coursing through my veins.

I don’t want to give back these fibrous gifts you left behind. I want to piece them back together, until I’ve rebuilt you wholly.

Standing together in the blue light under a night sky as thick as oil. One last time.