I sidewalk-chalked the Devil incarnate
while my childhood innocence slept soundly.

It was at midnight
underneath the sterile galaxies and omnipresent suns,
behind the home of our opalescent father,
who only existed in just the right light,
just the right situation.

As I drew faster, my tears froze, fell,
and encased my sinful artwork in ripple lined glass,
a window into a lifetime skinned clean of happiness.

We are a subway.
We ride encroaching on our own spaces.
We bundle and fold each other
into outer significant dimensions.
Our arms harden to tree trunks
while our blood begs to flow freely under the elevated pressure,
grounding our Earthly existence.
This track beats on without destination,
regardless of bumps and bulges in the pathways,
our starting point forgotten light years before.

We try sharpening the images melting under this velocity,
and our eyes flicker back and forth attempting to follow these quickening pictures.
But we ride on,
crushed by the pressures of the Earth,
decaying the love we housed in storage,
now rationed up our stabilizing arms,
holding us averagely comfortable in this close proximity.

I never liked it when you called me Honey.
It dropped each letter and froze my throat shut.
It shallowed my breathing,
cut off my fluttering circulation,
swelled my eyes closed.
It propelled my heartbeat,
calloused my skin,
inverted my fingernails.
My vision bled,
you laughed at this,
and through my head rang your shrill cackles
as giant gongs infesting all sound.
You thought it was silly,
my transformation,
my drunken anger,
when you flashed your canines at me,
you Monster.
Only the most wicked can kindle their hatred into someone else.
Only the most cancerous find humor in other's tears.

Time is relative.
It can yell. It can scream.
But it can't run backwards.*

It takes 8 minutes for the light from the sun to reach the earth,
And hundreds of thousands of this exact timeframe
for the sun's inexistent sound to permeate in permanence.
A solar explosion would annihilate the human force.
Everything we know would sublimate into a vacuumed space.
All knowledge of everything,
Vanished in a fiery apocalypse.
Death would arrive before it even happens.
So what is the purpose of life if death could already be here,
Eight minutes from this moment?
The time it takes to boil noodles,
Take a shower,
Eat a bowl of cereal,
Could be the last spoken,
Thought,
Performed part of everything.

How should I believe time is real,
Death is cheated,
God is listening,
When this minute could be my eighth?

I swing my chainless pocket watch and count each of my five hundred seconds.
And wonder if it would be simpler to exist where time doesn't.
But each child climbs higher on the playground's jungle gym,
Reaching for doctorates and dissertations,
Their watches not as precisely examined as my own.
No worry of things that are all too possible
In just a matter of time-
School shootings,
Asteroid strikes,
Uncontrollable plagues-
While my watch counts nanoseconds as it falls onto Earth's surface,
Their watches spin rampantly,
Drilling into their sandboxes.
I see this,
The same age I was years before,
And these children melt into wheel chairs and death beds alike,
Their children mourning their passing,
While their children's children,
Crippled with tears,
Hold the hands of their parents in desperation
for an agony so ripping.
And all the while I see the sun exhale its time.
The trees ignite,
the sidewalks smelt with the burning grass and buildings.
And just as I peer into the beyond,
My rusting pocket watch clinks with the sanded surface of this childhood play box.

I love ignorance
almost as much as I love that distant smell of rancid toenails,
but not as much as I love the sound of crying, ill-changed babies,
nails on a freshly cleaned chalkboard,
a violent and exhausting ***** two stalls down,
or the jaw-work of someone gorging on a steak,
swallowed down by their tonsil constricted esophagus.

I'm okay with receiving a D on a test.
An F would never make me want to convulgely cry or scream
WHY?! WHY?! WHY?!
over
and over
and over again.

Perfection is the last thing on my mind.
I never feel the need to sketch a circle,
I just half-assedly drip it into the paper
until it portrays and eighty year old man's forehead.

I swear I haven't slept with a stuffed animal since the fifth grade,
because I always had the company of ten to twenty friends
at any given time.
I never felt pressured to look good,
wear makeup,
straighten my hair,
and do the skinny jean thing
even though they look like crap on my engorging thighs,
because everyone loved me as is.

I was never picked on,
I never had to try to make new friends,
but most of all,
I was perfect.