new summer, spoken then lived.
new letter, spelled in crayola crème.

you were the love of
my life.
plucked my heart like
squishy fruit.

we once turned the night
into paintings and poems,
particulates of
a golden time gone by.

i am early onset gum disease,
mouthfuls of pink spit lining the ceramic sink.
i am enough to warrant concern but not enough
to change.

i am skin stretched tight as a drum
with a living thing trapped inside,
stretching scars into its elastic prison.

i am ***** evaporating on suburban pavement
and the halo of litter around a garbage bin.

i am the stickiness of salt water drying on skin,
dribbling down and down and down.

i am the sensation of growing too old too quickly, of a rip in the seam of a shirt you once loved, loved, loved.

i am a nobody that is everybody.
i am so crushingly common and so
******* singular and i am the terror you feel
when you think of this.

i am lowercase i and capital I and grammar tables and the volumes of modernist poetry.

i am the twinge you feel when they speak his name
and hers and the ones who are just faces living in the corners of your mind.

i am touched and taken and drowning in liquids turned amber and sweet. i am gluttony and those six other sins which have never seemed so deadly.

i am speaking for myself, and i wonder if others speak for me.

i am nurture given living form. a product, a creature, a many-limbed thing.

i am all repulsion and vile intrigue. i am the
hall of mirrors and body cut in two. i am gemini sighs and red skin flaking free.

i am a half of a whole of a half that is
tired of completion and its worship.

i am a pilot, a lookout on the highest point. i am cracked lenses and falsely tripped alarms. i am the things that frighten then grow dim.

i am twenty and i am nowhere. and i am a living time capsule of things not worth remembering.

i am smoking a lucky strike clamped with old tweezers.
i am sitting on the back porch of my friends house
he is asleep. it is 2 pm. i am alone with the rooms of accumulated years.
i feel like an intruder. or maybe a burgler.

there are children next door screaming as i tap out the lucky strike into a dish full of his siblings.
i wonder if he knew them. there were 20 packed in tight.

i am wondering why i instantly personified a cigarette as male. i am worried for the implications of this.

i am hungry and still somewhat thirsty. the cigarette is drying my mouth even more but i don't have the will to rise.

a lawnmower has started up two backyards away.
i am worried for my strange superiority complex regarding suburban life.
i wonder if i am better than the mundane despite this observation.

my friends dad put his arm around me and patted me on the back. it is the most physical contact I've had with a male figure in about a year.
i hope he didn't see the discomfort.

i am writing a poem in this style because the matter of fact is all that comes to me. i am realizing i will probably never write anything worthwhile and spend my young years in the halls of retail: customer service. fast food. i will not travel the world. i will not take Polaroids of incredible things. i will only have my body to sell and the tasks that it can perform. my mind will be placed elsewhere for safekeeping. i am writing a poem in this style because i do not need to write something good. i am not a young genius. i am not a prodigy. i am smoking a lucky strike with tweezers, if that gives you any idea. i just want to write. i don't need to be beautiful. i can be an important ugly, a clunky tongued verse. a bad poem. this does not ruin me. this releases me.

I like to think I've seen,
my fair share of life.
A city man,
sculpted of concrete and steel.
My years on this earth may be yet,
short.
That life however,
opened my eyes to much.
I know about the lows of man,
about how far some of us will stoop.
About what it means to survive.
But,
You dragged me,
drunk and complaining,
out into the hills.
You sat me in the back of your truck,
and you showed me the stars.
I don't know if it was the urban lighting,
that burns eternally,
or just that I'd never looked.
But you showed me the stars that night,
in all their luminescent glory.
I will never forget that.

What is a name but a mask of an
      empty mind, for bodies are just callous
shapes of the odd DNA
      handed to us from destroyed
generations. It would be nice if I
      could look you straight in the eye and speak
with incomparable
      honesty, but I'm reminded of the blinding glare
illuminating like blue lightning behind my eyes
      of past bridges burned down with that tactic.

Listening to staggering silence
      prompts me to unravel the one pinnacle
thread to my existence. I'll tell you my weakest
      point before you even get the darts
out. Indecision is my only theme,
      and you found it out. You found
it out. I'm grinding my bones with an iron pestle,
      and sifting through the dust as a last resort that
there really isn't anything more
      to my meager existence. I don't want anyone to know
that I'm nothing more than my empty words,
      but every time I part my stale lips,
the truth comes out and I'm busted.

Brick barely coated in chipping white paint
Across from a theater with red crushed velvet seats
Green backyards & girls gripping beers
A beamed basement, home of the mountain boy
Not far from the teepee
Brown wood as dark as his ***
Ashy black woods where you gave me your sweatshirt
And my blue hair turned gold
Pale sun in bottles on his back porch
In the orange glow of early summer
Red blood drunkenly thrown away from a broken heart
And the saddest color I've ever seen
The color of something that could never be
The color of you and me

let's get drunk and tell eachother everything we're afraid to say sober. and by that I mean you sit and listen to everything I'm angry about. if your voice mail was set up it would probably be full of venom. id like to repeat to you every lie you ever told me over and over again until you're sobbing. remember when you told me I was the last girl for you? that's my favourite. sometimes I read the letter you sent to me and I can't help but laugh. thanks for proving "just because they said I love you first doesn't mean they'll love you last" is true. what's it like realizing you let the best thing that ever happen to you go? I hope you're happy settling for second best. remember that time you chose drugs over me? I can't keep count. I'd like to pretend that you really care how I'm doing but I get the feeling we both know it's not true. remember that time I told you to run if you were going to leave because it was now or never? you told me the same thing; your now must have been more extended than mine. sometimes it comforts me to know we live under the same sky, then I think about the time you told me you would box the sky up for me if you could. how does it feel to know I can't see a sunset without cringing?

it was in the hours
between evening and
the fading warmth
of late afternoon
she could feel the changes
of the season
in the way the rain
fell in short,
whispered breaths
against her window

there are no hands
to hold
the creeping silence
the yellow light
of the lamp
nodding an apology
into the strands
of her hair

when did it change-
the twisting
hurry of the snow?
water is pooling
in the grass and
on the dimpled
sidewalk
bleeding light
like an open sore