Your father’s belt hugs tightly to your arm. You twirl the syringe between your fingers, a little container with a world inside. You take a deep breath, and ****** the needle into the blossoming  purple flower on your arm. You wince at the pain, but the ***** feels like a kiss. Your finger slips the plunger into the syringe, and you feel the cool liquid glide into your bloodstream. With the syringe still in your grasp, the pillows catch you in their embrace as your body crashes in a heap. Weakness floods your body; washing into your legs, hips, torso, arms, and finally your hands, as your fingers unfold from around the syringe. It rolls off your hand and onto the ground. You do not hear a clatter. Limply, you throw yourself onto your back and stare at the white ceiling; it shifts as your eyes lose focus. Silence consumes your ears. A smile slides onto your face; your problems melt away. The bed disappears from under you. You’re floating; you’re flying; you’re invincible. You laugh. You laugh until tears run down your face. Your crazed barks echo in your small room. Untouchable freedom projects from every pore. Nothing matters right now, except this euphoria running through your veins. You’re flying head first through space; speeding past cartoon planets. Good god, you’re flying, you’re flying. You’re dying. You’re flying
The room starts to flood back into focus. You desperately claw at your freedom as it slips away from you. You try to dispel the oncoming reality, but it’s inevitable. Reality punches you in the jaw. Your head screams with static and your arm aches. Worries creep back into the crevices of your mind: parents, school, friends, grades, college. It overwhelms you; panic fills your bloodstream. Your spine arches sharply as you scream from the pit of your stomach. This is real. This is real. You are no longer flying, or in paradise, or happy. You curl up in a ball and begin to cry.  You are nothing more than a lost child, alone and scared

the onus of breathing
the duty of eating
tasks of a desk job
the burden called living

humans clicking their tongues
and making mouth sounds
speaking rhythms and tunes
that mean nothing to me

I bury my eyes,
swallow my voice
just stop existing
"be a good boy"

let me fall asleep
wake up 6 feet underground
i'll be smiling
with no feet above me

Commit arson on your lungs
with some stolen cigarettes
destroy the last good thing
your parents ever gave you

Time is truly an illusion.
these minute, these hours
don’t actually matter
if we choose to ignore them.

When you first kissed me
time didn’t stop
it just swirled and twisted
morning went back to sleep
the Earth’s rotation faltered
and the glass face of a pocket watch
shattered

we laughed at the world
and their silly clocks
we screamed we are tenseless
from the all the mountain tops we climbed
as we burned every last american spirit
and listened to the absence of time
I whispered
Baby we are the now and the now is what all we need
we didn't care about our future or our past
they were occurring all at the same time
we lived in the waist of an hourglass

when we laid in bed
I forgot that time ever moved linearly.
I forgot that outside of our little world,
clocks were ticking,
days were passing,
and snow was melting.
we were encased in a moment
we lived in every lapse of time.
where clock hands stay fast to their post



I didn’t expect things to last forever
because forever is a unit of time
but i've seen the sun set and rise 62 times
since i saw you
      with your watch wound
and ready to go forward