I fell in love with God when I was five. I knew who He was before this, but until the day I fell in love He was just a friend my mom told me about, like Santa, or Peter Pan. I fell in love with God at the age of five, when my brother tried to commit suicide at the age of nine by playing tug-a-war between a jumprope and his neck. Thankfully God stepped in through my mom and I can safely say that I love my brother to this day. Even though he doesn’t believe in God anymore.
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I have loved God through every moment of the day, even when I thought God hated me for being a ***, or I guess a half-***. A *** in some way. The way that I thought I was gay but I couldn’t forget that gays were bad and that I still knew that someday I just might fall in love with the girl sitting in my English class, or the girl I went on three dates with and each time I saw her I realized I was smiling even before she reached the door. I still loved God even though people told me that a *** could never go to heaven, but I wanted heaven. It wasn’t until I prayed and prayed for months, and weeks, and days for God to take the bit of gay I had away that I realized I loved God and He loved me anyways. I don’t pray for my fagness anymore, even though I hear people say ****** and I hear the devil whispering my name and all I can say is “God, let me remember my true name which is love and love and love and love”.
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I’ve always loved God, but I’ve been ignoring His calls lately. He speaks to me late at night when I’m in bed alone with just me, my sadness, and thoughts that are very ungodly, and I hear Him whispering lullabies to me. There are many times when I tell Him to skip this song. My friends tell me God isn’t real, my brother says God isn’t real, the boys I kissed, and the girls I kissed say God isn’t real and I don’t know how to tell them otherwise. I don’t know how to tell them that God is right there and here and in my heart and theirs and that He loves and loves and loves and loves and loves.
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But then I finish writing up a letter I save for the times I whisper to myself that I want to meet God, even though God says His home isn’t ready for me yet, and I say “God, don’t worry I don’t mind the mess”. But He tells me it’s not the mess that He’s not ready for and I say God show me love and love and love and love and love.
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I shred the letter before I love and love and love and love myself to death.
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For God so loved the world and He loves me and I love Him and that’s love and love and love and love and love.

your eyes seem to carry volumes.
deep set inside your sockets, flecked
with fire-light shadows and deep red ocre.

some would see this and think of romance.
your breath traveling against my chin and warming my jawline with humidity. a moaning similar
to the shriek of jungle birds and hoots of primates.

they would see your hand grabbing at my side, and see morning glory vines. your fingertips flashing bright orange similar to honeysuckle.
do you think they see the bruises?

I wonder just how often you weave your love poems into your teeth
when you bite into me.
when you take my flesh into yourself and devour my peace
like a cut from sweet, fruity flesh.
does my submission satisfy you?

or do you have these wild nights with the others?
do you go
out on streets and flash your smile?
do you let your fingers drip down sweet flesh laced with salt and lime juice?
do they open up to you more
willingly?
or do you take their silence as
invitation as well?

from the first moment your
geode lips scrape against my body,
until I am filled with a satisfaction
all your own.
I count three-hundred-and-thirty
seconds.
and during that time the cosmos breath,

and the stars continue to whisper
“goodnight”.

The smell of bleach is overwhelming,
but my mother always liked the smell.
She would mix bleach with a splash of lemon and the smell of sickly citrus would
drift through the house.
She would spend hours on the floor, scrubbing
each baseboard and kitchen tile.
Each swish of the mop would bring my mother
closer to God.
But for me, the fumes seemed to shake my mind and cause each ridge in my brain
to sweat.
My head succumbing to the pressure of finding my home
sterilized,
like some hospital.

Bleach burns. Once I let my hand slip into that lemon-scented pail,
feeling the itch rise up my wrist.
It felt similar to the Holy Spirit rising through my
chest during each Sunday service.
An antiseptic,
a decontaminate, something that desensitized and purified.
So, I began to rub my hands, with a spiritual fever,
letting my skin flake from each coat of
lemon-scented cleanliness.
But somehow, I never felt clean enough.

I never felt sanctified.

I like to think that I’m dangerous. That I’m powerful enough to be feared - that my kindness is a gift for others - that if I chose, I could bury those around me in rubble.

But oftentimes, I feel like I’m more of a danger to myself than others. My thoughts being hiccups of interrupting fear. Each thought surfacing from some malicious screen-writer - is it my own voice or a more malignant author that has become an unearthly tenant. A priestly follower with intimate knowledge of my doubts. I suppose this could be some kind of a final confession.

I imagined fireflies swaying through my stomach the first time we met. These little living lights tumbling through my organs and illuminating my bones. The idea that I had this glowing light inside made me feel much calmer.

That was the first time. The night seemed perfect enough yet drawn out on a track that I had no control over. But for some reason I enjoyed it. Letting little fireflies take the lead instead of whatever things run inside my head. The perfection was comfortable but didn't leave me holding my breath.

When I tell secrets I feel sick. Nauseous and full of air that seems to tickle my spine and inflate my mind. I begin worrying about serious, unrealistic things.

The second time we met, I imagined my arms covered by spider webs. Thin candy floss of silk threads, attached far away to the horizon. I made sure to stay subdued, because I knew without these strings I would run to you and stay. I knew I would touch, and grab, and rub, and shake. I knew I would find myself entangled in much more complicated things then a spider's webs.

I feel pathetic wondering what to text. I feel homely wanting to see you, to let my fingers trail through your hair and feel you tense (I know how much you hate people touching your hair, but you still let me) and then relax like a cog on a gear dying down. I feel worried knowing just where you would place your hand on my chest and just how your fingers would wander.

I imagine myself covered in insects and creepy crawling things because such creatures don't seem like lovers of romance. I try to pretend that neither are we.

Although it seems to sting.

Sometimes it makes me want to choke. When I see girls in yellow sweaters and boys with aviator glasses feeling love under a fluorescent gas station light. When I see hangnails on holding hands, and when I see chipped-tooth smiles. It makes me wonder if I’ll ever feel something for anyone around me. I feel a connection with all these people who float around, yet I can never get attached. I can never make myself feel anything more than mediocre delight in knowing a person.

I see these couples who are revolving around one another like the cosmos and I am left buzzing around their romance like gnats around a bug-zapper. All I hear are electric vibrations that get louder the closer I get, and I wonder how far I can go without killing myself.

I find myself wishing for your lips touched with the scent of honey and anise - flavored with sweet citrus and worn laugh-lines. There are times when I feel snow settle across my cheeks that I remember how it felt when I gripped your thigh and let each finger slide and tumble across your skin. It seemed tender and soft, but never in my life have I felt so desperate. Your lips gliding down my neck, following my arteries that seemed to wrap and wind like the smoky smell of cinnamon. Eyes closed, but all seeing, even without sight we found our way along one another's topography. Your wrist ice and cool slate. Your back red and weeping, bruised red and purple like stone-fruit. I still find myself brushing off the trails left by your quivering fingertips as they slid down my sides, your chin resting across my shoulder and your leg intertwined with mine. Sheets scattered and spread like drops splattered by rain-boots in fresh puddles. Heart beating like the flutter of an eyelash being blown by a finger-tip wish. Blood pumping like shady sunlight scraping across a tiled back porch, snapping against arched feet hoping to reach cool, summer grass - freshly cut.

I find myself wishing for these moments, yet the call of phones ringing and the gargle of co-workers commenting on the boringly interesting, coupled by coffee breaks and water-cooler talk. It brings me back to where I am now. Post-it notes and paperclip reality.

For a while, all there was, was excitement. A trembling in my body and bones, an increase in my blood. Serotonin flooding each neuron and making me feel satisfied with all life had to offer for a moment.

But excitement is a petty lover. She gets bored quickly and tends to seek for more troubling things. First alcohol and then more powerful beings. She pops pills and drinks spirits, trying to seancé the happiness that has left her dry and dead. I suppose I'm always left as the channel.

It's perplexing. For a time, each second last minutes or days; and all I feel is a type of passion while stuck in a haze. But happiness doesn't belong here. This is not where she's known. Yet, excitement still plays, lounging on a pill-bottle thrown and plays these moments for days at a time (or maybe it's only seconds, one could never tell).

It becomes catching. Soon my body forgets how happiness feels but it is intimate with passion. It knows how strong the desire for things truly are. When you see the thing you love, serotonin begins rushing through your blood. But vices never seem to love me as much as I love them. For I consume them. Taking each morsel inside me because if it's left in the hollow of my chest, perhaps it will stay.

But excitement (or is it passion?) is always fleeting.

The cold seems to creep in. It gathers at the folds of fall and sends crisp crackles down splintered spines. Things gain a sense of urgency, the wind whips with more ferocity and graves are left to lay away as they decompose like the bodies held inside, where spooky stories tend to thrive and people wonder. They wonder just when the world began to change. Just when shots began firing in cluttered squares, where man decided that the decision of life was their's, to gather in. Just when did man decide that the grave was home to his fellow mankind. The earth rests in commotion, in question, in fear it hides.

But the world knows. The earth can feel chaos in it's bones and breaths in peace real deep. It sets it's children out on quivering feet and whispers: "find freedom and peace to be what is meant to be." So the world walks. The wind howls and leaves fall softly to the wilting ground as nature crawls and yawns and bows to seek....rest. The streams and rivers flow deep and cool, they set a path for wounds to heal, oceans deep and mountain glen - reminding the sky to set peace down upon this wilted ground, again.

So thunder strikes and fire crashes, a tapestry of sunset skies. Man once again feels life behind his closing eyes, and winks. Winks and sees fresh covered ground, a white silk blanket set upon earthen crowns. Crows hollowed caw is set in rest and heralds in peace that is blessed.

The world sinks deeply into sleep, lullabying softly "be at peace, be at peace," and so the earth rests in hibernatious slumber, and boys become men and begin to wonder what is left for them in a world that has already been discovered.

"Peace, find peace," is all that is muttered. So they keep wondering.

I tend to lay everyday against the yellowed, tile floor looking up at the textured ceiling that wraps around wood beams. The ceiling looking cracked and fractured like a child's bone laying in a florescent cast. I lay there seeing faces against the platform above like angels looking through a fogged, glass ceiling. Gazing down into a fishbowl called reality. I wonder if they ever question what really happens down here. What really tends to grow.

A cool rag placed against a heated forehead, wondering if heaven exists - how long we are left to sleep. Someday we'll know.

Someday we'll know,

Not much happens anymore, ever since you left because you thought death was a better companion then me. I always wondered who it was you were sending notes to. There was never a return address.

It's much quieter now. I'm left alone in this now bigger home. The click and tick of the clock is the only sound that can overcome the silence that lays against the floor, making the air seem concrete so you feel all you can do is creep around this house.

They wanted to take your pictures down from the wall. The ones that took you hours to create. The ones that you spent hours drifting from shop to shop in order to find the perfect frame to frame perfection. I guess photos were one thing that you always had in control. I couldn't let them take them now.

In the silence, it's harder to sleep. It's harder to soak up the darkness that tickles my feet, because even though you no longer steal the blankets my feet are still never covered. I guess we keep some old habits, even when the old friends move on.

My mother is worried for me. She says I spend too much time in this grieving house. She says I need to stop addressing letters that will go unanswered, she doesn't know that I send these words to you. I open the letters and face each paper towards mirrors wondering if you will see them there. I'm told I stay there for hours, but it never seems that long.

Why did you never talk to me?

When one sees death and pulls back the rot, we call this reunion. When the nights are longer, when the moon continues to shine even at noonday and the world wonders just how long it takes for a man to forget his given name, and remember what he really is.

When mushrooms grow out of panicked fingertips and cleave to the sky above while being buried, we call it desperation. When the boy remembers just how deep the earth really goes, and begins to forget that a man needs to breathe.

When flowers bloom right beside graves and flies become the most recent pollinators, we call it coincidence. When a family scatters into every direction of wind and whim, and starts to forget that the earth was where it all began.

That's how it goes and goes. That's why the world is left spinning like a record stuck on a tired lullaby song. We still haven't realized, nor do we care to remember the fact that we have not been here all that long.

the most peaceable places end up under willows, shrouded with angelonia clusters against lilac streams. framed by a clover carpet, granite stones sprinkled across flowered ground. there is little history here, bones buried in grass tiled earth.

terra-cotta ground keep treasured secrets. no one hears any stories the earth could whisper into rose-colored ears. melted, molten, muddied metacarpals, sternums, ribs, and tibias moored against dirtied pits covered over to become unknown graves.

it seems the most peaceful here.

I would not say I love you. Those words always seem to catch halfway up my throat the way seaweed wraps around the pillars of a dock. Those three words are fleeting and have always seemed to fly with ocean drawn winds, traveling far out into sea - leaving a poor little me to wonder just how far those little words can travel before I can convince myself that they never existed.

I never meant to fall in love with you. I never meant to have feelings for a boy, or to smile at the thought of your bashful lips flirting with the idea of a quick-wit comment or rather a flickering flame. I never meant to see a boy in the mirror and wonder what it would be like to wake up every morning and seeing another boy standing just behind me in a bathrobe smiling. The smell of coffee grinds and burnt toast make me think of sunday mornings, wondering just how I fell in love with you.

I say love is accidental but it's no wonder it seems to happen so regularly like hurricanes during monsoon seasons or southern migrations of geese on september wings. I keep telling myself that it all started with the little things. It seems less frightening that way. It seems less intimidating that way, in the same fashion that seeing pictures of Everest make climbing the Himilayas seem achievable for a person like me, someone so uncertain.

I would say I love you, but you would know I'm lying. I might see you in the mirror every morning, but I see a astronomically stable star woman in my dreams. My body and mind may say it's meant for you now, but this love was never meant to stay, it is being drawn to someone else in longingly slow and soft lake-laughing waves.

If you close your eyes tight enough, little, big words, like 'love' become a little easier to say.

It's never easy to talk about depression. For some reason people worry that saying it's name will make it spiral down on top of you, and so they lay any mention of chronic sadness to rest. Letting it fester.

When people ask about depression they expect simple synonyms like: sadness, tired, unmotivated, weak, faking, unreal, imaginary; for example. They expect quick metaphors of sinking beneath deep waves, and weights being placed on thin chests. But it's sometimes hard to believe the truth of it all.

Because truth is, depression is not like anything you would expect. It's like having the winter Alaskan sun set in between your rib cage, like having melting ice floes sliding between your teeth, it's like having cosmos placed within your head and you begin to wonder where people really go once they are dead. It's seeing caskets instead of fingers, grave markers in place of toes, with sun-dried heat melting your heels till they look like cracked crayons on an elementary school table.

For six months each day felt like six drawn out years of playing an apocalypse, of wondering if it's really worth it to bend your knees and get out of bed. For six months I plastered the greatest **** smile for each day, so that it was me, not a star in the sky that heated the Sahara, only to come home to avalanche covered snow banks that quickly settled to become my home.

The issue with feeling sad for days, or weeks, or months, or years; is that no one understands till they understand it for themselves and even then; there seems to be little they can do to help.

The truth is, I don't know what day my body began feeling inner peace again. I don't know what time my bones seemed to slip back into each cradled socket. But I got there. You'll get there too.

quiet. still and silent, a little taste of mystery to hold us over in panic. let the fear drip from the walls as they close in, bandages adhering to our cracked and breaking lips. a silent screaming sigh, that plays out the cords of misery's disappointment in discovering that speechlessness has found us first.

a cold touch down our spine like the drip of winter water from a decade old rain pipe, set on a roof of rusted, warped tin. a scrape of nails down iris purple shoulders pushed deep into the skin, but we are told to stay quiet about the truthfulness of things.

but little consequence, and little fear. for much longer we won't be left down here, though we might miss the quiet. voices travel better through cement and rebar walls. little whistles of laughter and slight mania, but left alone who wouldn't find comfort in the crazy.

for we have lost the longing for fear. it seemed to disappear after spending a few years resting here.

it was surprising the first night I saw you right before me. skin imprinted with the pattern of lace, the light scattering in a cacophony of projections against your porcelain skin. lightning marks against your throat and thunder rumbling in your eyes. it was unexpected.

in no way were you tame. fragile, perhaps. superficial, undoubtedly. beautiful, certainly. but never tame. never would your wrist be bound. the sharpness in your teeth and flick of your flesh would never allow anything so shallow as domesticity.

you were raised out of the authentic. molded from clay, the word "impossible" placed under your tongue and mouth closed shut. a shattered childhood born from an indian-summer sun frosted by wildflower springs.

so here I stood, gazing up at ceramic wonder. earthen-ware and glazed glass. a sculpture of femininity by all aspects, by all respects. left to become memorialized in a wilderness, little time noticed.

sputtering and submerged. choking on baptism water, salvation salting my throat. a coliseum of lapis and jade, shadows solidly shifting while swimming, brushing, and lifting against folding flesh.

it's sudden, letting the world sink above you. letting graves enclose you, letting rose vines entomb you. a quarry, a chisel, a graveyard - they all shallow out the earth, ethereal in nature and uncomfortable to the nurtured. necessary.

I am uncomfortable. It feels like the very bones in my body are revolting themselves. My stomach is tied in knots, my head is pounding and my heart feels so heavy that it seems to be collapsing my chest. Oh, what a horrific war it is when your instincts battle your beliefs and you are forced to be the battleground.

I feel a warm, rotting coldness in my gut. It feels like a corpse in a coffin. I feel like a funeral, a morgue, a tragedy.

The problem is, I don’t seem to feel anything. Not anymore. My emotions are numb, like they have been submerged into an ice bath and have not yet been lifted out. I want to feel sad, I want to feel depressed and get over it; but I feel nothing.

I feel nothing. Just this corpse in my chest and this pounding elation in my head and this urge to feel but not feeling.

It has been five years.
It has been five years.
Half a decade. Five out of seventeen years of my life, this addiction has been a part of me.

Because for as long as I have had this addiction I have been haunted by the event, the moment I went from innocence to lust and I regret it.

My body now hungers for something I do not want. I am saying no to myself and myself isn’t listening, my hunger is molesting me.

This is what it does. It excites you, makes you want it before you understand what it is, and then when you do it has cornered you. It has played its game and you are now its pawn and you cannot escape. It twists you around like a puppet on strings, twirling you across its stage and making you intimate with every niche of its addiction. And then the sadness comes. It comes in waves and washes the strings out and for a time you are safe. You are allowed to drown yourself, to float through an abyss that expects nothing of you. But then the tide turns and it retreats again and the addiction makes sure to chomp down any ground its lost, and gains more. You return to your strings and continue to dance in a jiggling dangling fashion and it continues.

Finally, you cut the stings, shorten them a bit and it loses a bit of its grip but overall it just holds you closer to itself with the shorter strings and you are left with a numbness similar to when you are held too tight. Too tight.

That is addiction, you become entangled in a thing that you don’t want. An urge that attaches itself to you like a spider web and softly encroaches on yourself. Makes its way into your hearth and home and shuts out the fire. Smothers it, till the room grows cold and there is nothing left. No heat, no flame, no spark, nothing. Just ash and ash and ash and memories because that is all ash is, memories. The leftovers of the flame, the leftovers of the life you had before it all turned gray and oh what a horrible bitter thing it is. It is forced to be consumed down your throat and coats and coats with its gray coat and you become a gray thing, an ashy flake.

That is all I feel right now.
That is all I am, for a time.
I do not feel anything else.
It’s true that from dust man rose and to dust man returns.
I just never thought I would return to my origins like this.

I use to worry, sitting at home lying on the couch wondering just how long I could go before drifting off into some psychedelic slumber. Wondering how long it would take for you to find your way home from a bed two towns away. I use to think of all the ways I could maybe, for a while, get you to stay. That I could try and make you remember the cold January nights when sleet covered Philadelphia's streets and icicles hung from windows, yet we stayed outside, because for the oddest of reasons we were happy out there.

I use to stay up late, sitting on the kitchen floor against the fridge, staring up at the yellow fluorescent light above the sink watching fruit flies dance to some unknown rhythm. Shoulders drooping, arms laid haphazardly at my side like fresh snow shoveled from a driveway. I guess I found some comfort gathering from the tired warmth that blew from the fridge vent, some stale form of heat, that if I closed my eyes and dreamed seemed almost like passion. Almost like acceptance, almost peace, almost satisfaction, almost like you weren't gone.

I use to be so cautious. Cover my shoulders, keep to yourself, don't let them stare as you cross the street. Just come home, just come home where you belong, you were there. At least you use to be. Then sometime under the dehydrated September sky I settled at the front step. I let myself stay free for a few more moments, and it grew. Everyday I would stay outside the front door a little longer - as I began to not flinch at every creak coming down the street because I knew it couldn't have been you. You were in some other city, down on some other street, in another house, with some other fool that let you be their everything.

The simplest things are the first to change.

You eased out of my life like the slack of a power line, coasting away a little every day till I could only see you as a horizon, and then beyond. No sooner had every piece of you eased out of my house, life drifted back in. I sat on that couch and little by little every day, yellow dripped from the ceiling. The smell of lilac flowering from the walls, and for the first time in a while, an empty apartment felt filled. Occupied. Present.