The sort of home you want to be in,
When all you can focus on are the buttons of his suit,
Tightly woven into the fabric, brand new

Is not the same house you were in when he was alive

Its 3 AM staring at the floor, begging for the sleep to take you,
Anywhere
Even nightmares are better than this, nothing.

The solemn stares churn my stomach,
Somersaults with acid, my body lurches
Doubling over in the pain that is grief.

When the eyes in a room all fixate on you,
It's difficult to hide in a box inside your own head,
Because they tear the walls from your fragile shelter,

And their rain is a burning flame,
You are the match that refuses to be put out,
But wants desperately to feel nothing.

The sort of home I want to be in is
Roses, the thorns cut clean from the stem,
Green tea, just the right temperature
And an old console with his favorite game loaded up

But that house is abandoned,
Left like last week's sawdust,
Swept under the rug in a pile of books,
And i am the can of kerosene in the corner of the room,

Waiting to be used in the most vile of ways.

I am an unlit candle in the midst of a hurricane,
The shadow of the night sky blotted out by the moon
I am the fading smile of remorse,
The pang of guilt,
The sorrow of loss

I am the broken inside of you,
The one that eats away at you until the shell is broken apart
And you are all that's left
In the dictionary, i look up sad and expect a picture of me,
Depressed is myself in my room, alone
Suicidal is the knife i once picked up,

Daring to question if my own beating heart was worth the blood

My House is boarded windows and jail cells,
The crawlspace of cobwebs and creaking stairs,
The leaky roof and patchy ceilings

I am all but a finished mess,
And my foundation is cracked and split.

There is always vacancy,
Because who wants to stay in a house like that?

I’d rent out the rooms, but i'm paying for their rent
if they choose to live inside these decrepit walls

I only wish someone would see the shambles
As a start, and not the leftover parts from a failure,

If these 4 walls housed opportunity,
Instead of destruction.

My house, is a home that i long since enjoyed.

I think in fragments.

Half-sentences, rushed together.
Incomplete.
Human.

You think in beautiful rhymes and phrases.
Sewn together with careless precision.
Perfect, godlike.

How could I have ever hoped for us to last?

My jealousy is not a thing of beauty.
I don't wear my envy
daintily on my sleeves,
I scribble it on my hands and face with a
cheap green crayon.

Looking at you feels like my heart
is microwaving aluminum foil on high.
Not because I'm jealous of what you have but because
I'm jealous of what we could've been together,
had circumstances been different.
If one day you had sat here
instead of there and maybe we would've been friends and
what if
     what if
          what if—

I'm jealous because apparently
there are people in the world who don't spend every minute
overthinking
who don't feel the need to
analyze every little detail and wouldn't it be nice to breathe,
to breathe and not
     think.

I believe in myths.

Every naturel blonde was first someone else.  By that I mean, she was known as Norma Jean, maybe Katy, in high school (see reincarnation below).

My teenage glory days, when I was the king of cool,
will revisit when I am 75 years old, the man-in-demand (wink), wearing his lucky wide cord corduroys and letting my man-bun,
all the way down, at the prom in the senior citizen home, getting lucky, say once a month...

God, yup, after all, he/she cometh to me regular-like,
when he needs a poet~father to take his confession,
and pays me most excellently for refusing him forgiveness,
with the most excellent poem suggestions or lesser valuable things.

Love at first sight, of course, happens to me all the time,
twenty, thirty times when I am walking home.  I tell ya, it's exhausting, the stress of living in the big city

Not only will I win the lottery someday,
will take down both,  Powerball and MegaMillions,
in the very same week the odds for which
there ain't enough zeroes in HP's servers. (See God, above).

Reincarnation. One time they Hale(d) and then hanged me (my "namesake") and I said: " I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country."  Well, the selfies all show oh-boy-o-boy, was I ever grinning and winking.

Only boys are bullies, girls get off easy, by getting called
just mean.

One day my city's teams will win the World Series, the Stanley Cup, the NBA Finals and the Superbowl all in the same year but only after I die and me, well, only after they will have buried me in Wyoming or France, just for spite, and nobody will hear me screaming.

My children will speak fondly of me even after they find out I died broke, well maybe not fondly, but they will most definitely call out my name, regularly.

After my demise, all the typoes in my poems will magically disappear.

All these good things will come to fruition, because I am a believer, and walked the humble path. The autopsy will also show that my tongue was permanently stuck to my cheek.

I think too much.

Maybe that's the wrong way of putting it.
I don't think—thoughts ravage me.
They assault me with battering rams
in daylight, and at night they slip into my mind
As spiders, spinning webs through my consciousness
Weaving me awake.

They follow me like ghosts
Whispering in my ears, demanding an audience.
I hold my breath as I walk through hallways,
Afraid of breathing in thoughts I cannot contain.

I attempt to capture my thoughts,
to hold them in a poetic prison.
Pen to paper
and all my insecurities and doubts come rushing out
Like drowning in reverse.

I can breathe.

When I was young, I would steal the old cassette tapes my parents never listened to and record messages for the stars. At night, I would sneak into the yard and play the recording back, hoping someone was up there, listening. It was a silly thing, really, wishing the stars a good night as though they could hear.

After you died I thought that maybe the messages had been for you all along. It takes years, after all, for things to travel between earth and the heavens. Perhaps I was getting a headstart on missing you.

Now, I know the truth. That I was a kid with nowhere to turn to. That space is a soundless vacuum. That you are gone, reachable only in the moments I press rewind.