my loneliness is killing me

i compose poetry to forget i'm alive

a dance of sun waves,
the silver crescent shadows of a fearful moon.

under the open sky,
under the multitude of colors from empty rainbows.

we kissed in secret,
hiding behind the big oak tree.

2 am,
you slept,
knees curled in towards your chest,
a ball,
trying to protect the fragile bones
lying there.

3 am,
you cried,
gripped your pillow tight,
begged for the lost to come back.

4 am,
you showered,
cleaned the sweat from your
achy limbs.

tried to scrub
the sadness from your hair.

5 am,
you made tea,
looked at a picture of them,
and wept.

6 am,
you walked,
flowers in one hand,
a book of poems in the other.

7 am,
you kneeled like a pastor
besides their grave,
prayed for deliverance,
prayed to see their eyes,
just once more.

8 am,
you read to them,
love stories,
you told them about your adventures,
and how you aren't doing so well.

9 am,
you slept with your hands
dug in the dirt,
wishing you could dig them out
and hold them in your arms.

10 am,
you gathered your things,
and walked back alone.

11 am,
you flopped yourself on the bed,
you wished you were dead.

I could touch ground to the idealization that all love is impossible;
not the kindest touch of palms against the breastbone of my soul,
could heal this immaculate desire and terrible crushing feeling
of being alone. Not even the notion of dry lips against even dryer ones could form and mold back together the splintered pulsing place in my brain that still aches for you.

Dying at noon with a boiled shot glass of ***** seemed fitting.

The ever growing heated birth in the sky blinded out the grave-****** silver of clouds. I wanted to reach out my overdosed arms, push that fiery ball of hate and replace it with something much more of grace: The moon, the moon in all her calm and peaceful beauty.

But I was left with the devil, it seemed, the devil and the still fixated image of your smiling face behind my clinched shut eyelids.

I prayed for a redeeming act of elegant forgiveness. If not from you, than at least from the one we both tried so hard not to believe in, the one we so desperately tried to tie a knot around and leave slaved to the broken fence out back.

God: he seemed too barbaric and cruel to even think of, but he still, lie there, in the back of our minds, keeping some part of us both safe and alive and breathing.

The ash of you is kept in a jar that doesn't speak or move or try to resurrect itself back into the loving boy that had once possessed it. And being alone here, trembling numbly back and forth on this creaking rocking chair, almost seemed like a thing of torture. You were uncountable miles away from me and I was sewn in frugally to this wooden piece of rotting slab wishing more than ever I was a ghost.

A ghost that haunted the deserted halls where you might be.

The sky should be bathed in black nothingness, instead, it washes my skin with unholy punches of toasted warmth.

I close my choking, pleading mouth shut and let the warm salt of my body dissolve in hail like figures down my face.

Accepting your loss was more an impossible act than finding out how love, the most ferocious, corrupt perception of life, could still somehow exist, out there, in the world full of tremendous hurting.

love is not lasting.

its body, its shape,
a mere faint breathe among touch-starved bodies;
among crippled souls,
too eager to discover, too eager to disguise.

love is not lasting.

its cozening of faulty hopes,
owns,
it wraps around our hollowing bodies like clay;
captures us, weakens us.


he loves
he loves
he loves

until he lets go.

love is not lasting.

we hold on too long and the wound only gets deeper.

the skyscrapers of oak, swaying,
the soft, peaceful melody of the wind,
branches, extending, wrapping around themselves,
in an act of dance, a twirl around the whirling, impassable sky.

fallen leaves, raining down,
painting the ground an open-flesh red.

the wind chime, the banging pipes,
the unquestionable need to be a part of nature.

the ominous ocean,
the drowning sailboat,
the screaming seabirds.

the nature drags you to where it wants you to go,
the clouds cast a scolding look,

“Listen,”
It hums,
“Listen to me.”

you open your arms,
pressing your fingers tightly together,
bruising each bone there.

you lean back and let the breath of earth,
steal you away.

this is how God discovered bird.

a bone-born body,
stretched thin, wire-taught.

he kisses each speck of red,
***** at every open hole.

a name is never said,
instead each fragile letter is replaced
with

             “sweetheart,
my darling boy;

wake those tired eyes,
i’ve got you now.”


waves of ribs, motionless;
a set of lungs, naked to the touch of breath -
he can’t comprehend
why this trembling body has suddenly stilled.

            “oh, my hummingbird boy,
where has your song gone?

keep those flutter-winged eyes shut,
i’ve got no one.

             not a soul to encase.”

past midnight blue,
an aged light in the sky
guides two bodies to a cradle in the earth,

and only one is set down,
wrapped in the warmth of freshly dug soil.

this was emptiness, the feeling he felt;
the sea above offered no condolences,
only rainfall,


the man with scarlet skin
lays down his body in the mud,
stares at the corpse he made
and prays for the earth to swallow him up.

black,
crested with water
beneath my sinking feet,
the sky is a shaking grey
filled with
fumes
from a saltwater tide;
while the sun lays a hollow,
swollen bleed
above my shut eyes.

i can taste the ocean,
i can hear the rising breaths
before they flow from up her lungs.
and in that moment,
the briefest, most fragile moment,
before her hands touch my skin,
I think i feel your ghost,
creeping up and soaking in.

her body wraps around my toes,
as the silence brings your voice.
harsh, in the wind,
i realize that you aren't gone,
you've embedded your soul into the
crisp blackness of her.
and so I breathe.
I swallow the air.
because no one really dies,
they just find something else to live
through.

i knew what was meant
by the dark the sky held;
how it dozed
in and out of consciousness,
frugal attempts of
harboring continuance.

it spoke a language
only known by itself.
but it heard our breaths,
and ached to understand.

we were dressed
in the copper glow of sunset,
immune to the taste of *****
as it swaddled our throats
with heat,
and our lips,
reeking with scent
from a strangers tongue,
would neglect our eager sentences,
begging to be told.

burdened in the dark,
the sky still felt,
still watched with vacancy,
as the children below
traced and counted its freckles;
and it felt
surely then,
all at once

that it started to rain

i knew what was meant
by the dampness the grass cradled
how it sunk into my skin,
sharp like blades,
frugal attempts of
harboring continuance.

it spoke a language
only known by itself
but it felt our skin,
and ached to understand

Fall bloom, summer falling eld.
The crisp kiss of a pleading farewell.

The first hello of a cantaloupe dream.
Fading leaves; shedding its skin.

The kids in trunks,
hands tied together, a vowed bond to last a lifetime.

Jumping into the forbidden lake;
A hurried plash from wet, parading feet.

Flaxen, cold skin,
A gaze to the wuthering sky’s of storms.

Shy smiles, first kisses.

Fall,
She lives a Dive in our dreams.

they sculptured you,
"a replica of the sun,"
they said.

"the world is dark and brutal,
but she is so brave"

you draw art
and you drink on the days you wish
they never sculpted you in the first place.

you write love stories
and poetry
and you cry sometimes
and you call yourself weak

"nothing more than a failure,
I am just no good"



"she's something unique,
don't you think?"

19 years is too young to feel broken  

"oh how she smiles just like the sun,
and oh how she weeps just as the moon."


but a few years from now
you'll sit yourself outside,
you'll play the soft tunes in your ears
and you'll sing along a little

and you'll realize,
you'll realize

the sun is a courages thing
she hides at night,
but she flaunts herself so bright.

you really are

an exact replica of the sun

where did we go - were we just erased?

from this cage,
where we settled our remains into a mountain we tried to escape out of,

from this garden of panic,
where we planted our hearts into tulips,
where we refused to pluck them, in fear they would sprout into weeds,

from this nest of lust,
where we gathered broken bones instead of leaves,
where we fed the other in hopes to starve ourselves.

from this river of guilt,
and these lips that never spoke,


my shadow creeps towards a sky that’s forgotten how to breathe,
your eyes close, hazing into a soprano moon.

It sings us both to sleep.

it seems as though i am dying right before my very eyes.
This unkempt body doesn’t know when to stop rotting,
and this ungodly frame is no longer gilt in sunlight,
nor gray underneath an empty moon,
it looks like a skeleton,
decayed and laid to rest beneath a hill of grieving people,
lost to the spell i cast from these highways of depleted veins,
from these rivers of tendons that don’t ripple anymore.
I cant breathe anymore,
my body has forgotten the air and how it swims,
because now it is just sinking and sinking and i refuse to open my mouth,
refuse to drown my lungs in fear the water will weigh me down and leave me there,
at the bottom of a forgotten seabed,
just drifting - a floating fragment.
But i suppose i am already gone,
too consumed by nothing more than my guilt of refusing to live.

Love him if you can,
If you are able.

He’s fragile
Too delicate to be held.

Keep him safe if you’re sure you can,
If you're positive.

He’s too timid to fight on his own,
Too weak.

Kiss him if he says you can,
If he kisses you back.

He’ll breathe if you tell him to
He’ll smile if your order,

But he’ll never love you the way you love him.

desolate, raging waves,
breathe in and out,
like a philippic of breaking glass.

fragmented pieces of water,
sharp and hostile; a parallelism of one's own swain.

“I could drown with you,”
I uttered, “I could fade away like these waves soon will.”

you kissed like a starving child,
you kissed like it was your last.

heated bodies,
malnourished, swollen tongues,
begging hands, digging nails.

the performance of hungry ***,
the dance of darkling seas.

evanescent, like the two of us,

we began to understand the fulminate of storms.

there was a moment so fragile
so unentertained
that it was as though I was watching it -
watching you - from outside my body

boise, idaho
a humid apartment building,
november.
you sat there,
molded into the love seat,
eyes ablaze,
face giddy,
a girl cradled in your lap.

and i didn't see you
but i saw so much of you.

the room was screaming
with unfamiliar energy;
with fumes of smoke and apple pie,
as i sat,
pressed against the wall
& my first ever drink
clasped into my sweaty, shaky hand.

I stared for just a minute,
i watched you,
observed you,
as your hand swept
over the crevice of her arm,
your face, eager for warmth in her neck.

you looked like art,
like a structure,
filled with clay,
and sharpened with porcelain
on the edges.

you looked like art,
with golden cheeks,
contrasted against dark, doe-eyes
and i didn't want to stop looking,
i didn't.


july
7 months later
the roar of an engine
rumbles beneath my back.
i'm high,
& im watching the glow and flicker
of descending street lights
and i feel like i'm floating on a euphoric daydream that refuses to end.

that night,
there was a moment so fragile,
so un-entertained
when i looked into your eyes,
staring with secret intimacy,
that i swore i knew you.
not the simple parts of you,
but the important ones.

underneath you.
your body spoke a language into mine,
and we talked with our hands
with our tender gasps,
and constricted moans.
and tentatively,
while the fan rattled
and the bed shifted,
i shut my eyes and smiled.
because i knew that this was a moment,
i'd only get to appreciate
a few times in my life.
& it felt special,
knowing one could be with you.

It started out with gravel and bruising spines,
with my hands wound round your throat and your fingers,
scraping skin from my wrists.
It started out with a dark sun, hiding itself behind the hairs of trees,
unmoving like asleep, or dead.
the streets were empty, and quiet like how I wanted you to be,
but you were screaming and begging for rescue,
and I just wanted to bury your head underwater,
or between my thighs, anchoring you there, immobile.

It was noon but it felt like dusk,
the wind was nothing but a fragile, empty gasp from your lungs,
and the shaking ground enveloping us, was not an earthquake,
nor a crashing plane, just your begging-for-breath, body
and our own fears settling tightly around our clayed bones.
And the wet on my face wasn’t from rain, or hailing skies,
it was from the flood of words you tried to drown me in,
us in.

“I want you to disappear”
you yelled
and I replied,
“I would disappear, as long as I had you, beside me”

It felt like it was snowing but the sun was burning roses into our naked chests,
it felt like winter, maybe because your fingers felt that of a dead man's,
or perhaps it was because we were both slowly fading away under a fiery sky,
thawing out, and then being left to dry.

we had these eyes of ours, woven shut, and these screams we worshiped, webbed into pleading sobs and pitiful amends.
I felt like a sinner, and you felt like a priest, blessing this unholy vessel I remained in.

a bruise was blossoming around your neck, holding on as if my hand was still kept there.
I turned my body into a cave and you turned yourself into it, as though you were a beggar, seeking shelter, seeking warmth, seeking something.

It was dusk, but it felt like we were already dead.

while I slept.

I woke up to a skin-thin sheet of it,
dressed into the window pane,
with
pass-
ion
I’ve never seen from anyone.

i want to forget,
        forget these bruised bones and how they got that way.
i want to forget,
         forget this emaciated body and walk away from it,
I want to forget,
         forget why my twig fingers dug into this dirt, dug into an empty grave,
but it hasn’t rained in six months, it hasn’t rained since you died.

I want to forget,
         but the flowers on my bedside table are not even flowers anymore,
     and the picture of you doesn’t even look like you, and these stupid poems of love and forever only announce themselves later on as *******.
               Because love is not something you gave me, love is something I only offered up to you as a sacrifice of my own existence. Love is all i had to give and you didn't even want it from me.

I want to forget,
          forget about the ****** knuckles, forget about how afterwards
   you would lay me down in a warm bath and wash off the blood and everything else you etched into this already broken skin.
                But it hasn’t snowed since last november, and last november you didn’t even know my name.

On this stiff soil, with the sun cascading itself through fingers of dead trees, i almost think i hear your name, like you’re echoing it off of your sorry tongue, like you want to unbury yourself, like you want to go back to where you didn’t stop for me, where you didn’t tell me your name.

                      I wish the same, i wish the same but all i can bring myself to do is cry over a body that never even deserved crying for.

he leaned over, breath hot against cool skin

and it didn't feel like fire, but it felt like a burn. and i closed my eyes, rapid moving things

nudging for an escape,

and thought i could hear heartbeats flooding my lungs

but from where wept, it sounded like anger.

and from where i heaved, it sounded like ripping flesh, like the slow drag of a zipper and the whip of an unfastening belt.

i could draw out the shape of him

without staring, without studying. he wanted me to remember.

& i remembered

It felt like fire then, and it burned like a flame and i opened my eyes, and kept them steady.

while, the train shook the house.

while these bones were cement things, laid out beside me.

don't cry, don't cry, my, darling, don't cry.

and for the most fragile moment,

swore his hands wound around my flesh, were there to mend me, not break me.

and for the briefest moment, i swore this was more than just

a broken body tapered to the mattress like a stain.

it wasnt raining, but it felt like it.

wait wait

the train is too loud and i feel like im being ****** right underneath

Wait

Like all flesh rubbed raw,

Everything stays a shade of pink

i paint our pasts with the bedroom light turned off,
the flickering ghosts of street lights,
tiptoeing their frail arms into cracked windows,

but we were never built to last,
our ankles were never meant to support us.
only these hands, holding my body underwater,
could truly save the meaning of us.

and at noon, while the ground was still moist,
and the trees were still swaying, i bundled up feathers,
from dead ravens, from dead doves, and tied them to my hairs,
shut my eyes, and let my soul wander,

to where I was a bird, and you were a worm,
where the earth was void of sin,
and nothing else nurtured me more than you.

to the open sky and the now toss of trees,
to a dimple in earth, and my pebbled feet,
to you, drowning in a puddle of last night's storm.

my hair is falling out, and the birds are begging for their feathers back.

my window is latched shut,
the rain continues to drum against it,
you are almost painted, you are almost painted

but i am still a part of the storm, my body lives unfinished.

we could feel the pressure before the
bombs hit,
and the way the sky shifted, a shadow of coal
hurdling its urging body towards an impending color of red;
from not the dim decay of a setting sun
but the weeping of our bodies
in the same moment the buildings would fall.

we could feel the cradle in earth
where we lay embalmed in dissected cement,
in open cracks teeming desperate-child arms.
it was silent, lasting only a moment
before our ears would adjust,
before a wave of awareness hit us,
worse than a bomb, worse than the remains of our homes,
resting against our toes,
because we knew those screams,
we became familiar with them.

and it was dusk, but above it was covered in light,
as our bodies were put to bed,
without our mothers, without our fathers;
but a blanket of ash to cover us,
and we'd choke on the particles
as it swarmed it's nails into our throats,
and we wouldn't breathe - we couldn't even conjure up the thought.

cries in our language were not known beyond these borders
but they were heard between a choir of people,
a bundle of bodies in a father's arms, as he kissed his sons goodbye


min faDlik…

…min faDlik

naked,

underneath snow that falls,

like a dead waltzer,

like you and your shaking self.



naked ,

where snow melts around bones that break,

knees that shake.

and a voice that refuses to speak.



naked,

laid out to rest,

cede to the crackling frost;

frost like a galaxy,

the same galaxy, crafted and stitched into your ice-born skin,

into your glacier eyes.



naked,

starved,

a suicidal dreamer,

trying to touch the stars,

the begging, arctic moon -

trying to touch anything

but her anorexic, marbled form.

how did we fall here,
to this exact place -
this exact idea,
spun into our heads, like yarn,
like your hair, a flapping mess in the wind,
little strands, eager to keep up.

how did this floor beneath our tousled bodies,
keep us together, like it was meant,
like it was supposed to

how did our hearts explode into little sparks
of suns and stars,
and tears?
how did they know to explode
like the ticking of a time bomb?

how did our hearts find love
            i just want to know -

Small enough, curled upon your lap,
I grip your skin, struggle to dig my way inside.

You smell like leather and medicinal gin,
You smell like stale cigarettes and dissipated tears

with you, I feel sea-girt.

You call my name,
like a quissiental redolent of living.

this abuse of desire,
Is something I crave.

***** lived on your tongue,
***** lived in her throat.

there's a hiding girl,
she's crying and she's also bleeding.
you bend down, old levi jeans
suffocating your knees.

"it's alright," you say to her, "I promise."
but you can tell she knows its a lie.

her first time riding a bike,
you push her, let her go.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1 -- blast off.
she falls and scrapes her hands.
she earns a scar on her ankle.

you kiss her,
she turns away.

you shush her in bed,
sooth the crying girl.

"don't tell a single soul"

she tells her 4th grade teacher.

13,
nicotine washed into her hair.
she blows, fogs the window,
draws a face -- its frowning
her hair is the same color as her bleeding wrist.

13,
three people are holding her down.
it takes her back to the
sinking rocks she threw in the river,
the sinking mattress she was pushed into.
the old, sad man.

"sedate her,"
make her disappear.

don't kiss her,
she doesn't want to be kissed.



*****,
beads of sweat.
an axe, a noose, and a pool of water in the tub.

she decides on none,
she goes back to the river to find the rocks.

amidst all blue,
all pure caribbean,
i thought of the ocean and the blooming gray sky

amidst all metallic
all sunflower yellow,
i thought your eyes could never look so alive.

it was 9 at night
in the backseat, full of sweat

and you looked at me like
everything living between us was silence,
not heated breaths or shaking chests
not your hands dug into the caves of my body.

and i closed my eyes not to forget
but to remember
and i leaned up
amidst the color of your lips
and everything felt like red

there's a path of wet kisses

danced up an emaciated spine,

the one that belongs to the skinny

and precious boy,

laid out underneath you.



you know each **** there,

have counted them multiple times.



there's something beautiful, you think,

in the way the bones crafted themselves,



The way they formed and fit;



locked away beneath tight skin.





you wrap a hand around the beak-like neck,

the fragile piece you love,

and when you squeeze,

the boy doesn't reject it.



his pulse is quickening,

trying to break through the skin,

you can feel it reaching for you,

it begs silently.





"Shh,"

you say,

"don't make a noise,"



so the boy closes his throat,

holds back that rebellious tap,tap,tap,

and falls.



hands rest now, unclenched,

and you let go then.



you will him to breathe,

and somehow he knows,

knows what you want like its carved into him.



there's blood on his lips,

blood on his nose,

and tears in the corners of his eyes,

hiding away





you smile because you can't help it.



you love him,

yet you want to **** him.

your svelt form lives in sellers of
shivering bodies and creeping hands,
of a galaxy spun,
from not your ember eyes,
nor your cotton skin,
but the cascade of stars,
embroidered onto your wrinkled face like honor,
or worship or fame.

you just wanted to be loved,
by earth or sea or from abusive winds,
or by my own scared-to-touch fists,
grazing over you as though you were molten lava,
a possessed vessel, kept by the devil.

but lightning only lived in dark skies,
and the sea only roared when it was about to rain,
and the earth only moved around you,
the earth never bothered to hold you,

not like I did.

adderal fantasies
to sober up the
alcohol tragedies

boys puking out their guts
in attempt of healing
all their mistrusts

the black sky hued with vibrant colors
while all the kids in the truck could do was holler

i sat in the grass
watching my friends helplessly harass,
and i felt such shame
because all i wanted to do
was take the blame

the 6th of july,
and my heart was on high.

there’s a boy I love,
the boy doesn’t speak,
the boy is pale, a body full of bones.

his ****, limp
his eyes, weeping
his form, skeletal and twined.

i want to dissolve him into body wash,
clean my body with his.

there’s a boy,
a touch of 25 to his grace.
the boy kisses like he’s carving gold into cement.

he makes art out of willowing branches of thighs,
out of dove-necked wrists,
out of a sloped, vining neck.

there’s a boy,
mute; but as loud as roaring packs of waves.

there’s a boy i love,

even when i swore love was what I was most afraid of.

the evidence of ****** is soaked into your skin.

the red of his blood feels like lava on your dried hands.



sweetheart. pretty boy.

                      why in the world did you have to go?



The revolver has planted its body on the tile,



the same cold tile your own body is sinking into.



i love you,

but it's too much for my own good.



i suppose that's how i ended up on this floor.



his skull is punctured in like a never ending cave,

you want to dig out your eyes so you wouldn't have to see where he had gone.



                  he's too far gone to be found, anyway.



crying doesn't feel like pleading for him to come back,

it feels like pleading to join him.



but the gun is out of bullets.



The gun is out of bullets.

the dining of open flesh,
bares its bitter bourbon taste of silence
into a room masking ****** with romance.

the disguise of trampled hedonistic elegance
from dead mouths, liberates black moons, stolen
from charcoal hairs of blood fed suns.

the devil pleads golden,
rinsing off broken souls,
pushing them to their belonging tides of famished sea.

lathering ashed breast bones prepare starving vessels
into hissing snakes, into a porcelain face.

banking celestial existence weeps into tortured passions,
feasting on self destruction.

a desired blackened grave blooms venom,
knotting its unnoticed self to daring victims,
harvesting a norm of perpetual sin,
dwelling real and unchangeable; like gravity.

the dining of open flesh,
swears its inevitability.

these fingers,
your decayed bones.

these nightmares,
your dying face.

these despaired remembrances of daylight ballads,
your hand, the pen out of ink.

these scars,
these blades,
this ruined flesh.

A promise once made,
to kiss you at midnight,
beneath a solar eclipse.

Instead, I lay here,
gripping your fleshless body,
imagining you are the sky,
The multitude of dancing stars,
the moon stealing the sun
in a heated, begging

act of sworn devotion.

'people come in your life, and people go,'

that phrase is sinful, that phrase is brutal.

if you come across a gentle soul, one that touches your heart,
don't let them
go.

if people move your soul to dance,
keep them there with you.

Maybe the good in your life is meant to come in,
and
stay,

for more than a little while.

I couldn't seem to find where you had gone.

The road narrowed down to a small passageway in the woods,
getting lost in the crowds of trees surrounding it.

I walked until my feet ached,
until the gravel beneath my naked toes cut ****** rock sized openings into my skin.

You were nowhere to be found,
I realized that now,
but I kept walking,
as if each step could somehow guide me to you like a compass,
pulling me in the right direction,
promising an answer.

I wanted to know where they had buried your body,
where your still decaying bones lie a clean mess inside the earth, but I couldn't find it,
I couldn't find where you had gone.

The moon had once before,
promised me a source of light,
but now,
it only provided a terrifying, crowding darkness.
I wanted to lie underneath it,
urging her out of the sky and onto me.
I wanted something heavy to plunge me underground
so I could worm myself to you,
find the body that belonged more to me than it did, you.

I just wanted you back,
and if I couldn't even have that,
than a piece of you to hold onto;
something I could look at to know you were once a living being, once a boy I loved and always will.

I walked back then,
after allowing myself the refusing will to move on.

In the impala, on an abandoned road,
I pulled your cold blanket over my own decaying body,
trying to wrap the ghost of you around me.

Pushing my nose into the wool,
I smelled the last remaining parts of you.

I closed my eyes,
not willing to imagine the small space where you should be,
vacant.

After all,
how were you supposed to wake up there with me,
when I was half gone myself?

the clouds looked like waves,
we lay, accumulated underneath them,
like lost souls, scattered like dust,
like wingless leaves, like our drifting fingers,
tracing stars, writing our names into them.

it wasn’t raining, but it festered on the brink of,
like a lover holding back, like an abuser, keeping his fist clenched shut,
like us, trying not to roll over the other,
trying not to steal each other's innocence.
maybe we just wanted to be corrupt,
maybe we taught sin with these lips we held agape,
trembling over fragile words, trembling over hollow bones,
like these knobby knees, dancing over damp earth,
dancing under a bleeding moon, and these arms we called our feathers,
unfolded into frostbit air, but stitched around mountains of spine.

we’ve forgotten what it means to fall,
because we just creep now, afraid to find the edge,
afraid our bodies will dissolve into the soil,
we once before tried to bury ourselves in,

the clouds swayed, forming around each other to fit,
gripping one another, like our own hands did.
we smiled, bodies sinking into embers.

I prayed we’d find the waves and get lost in them,
you said we already were.

i stopped talking to the stain on the wall when i realized it wasn't you,

just the desire of it to be you.


the house where you were born, is standing up just by the bones of you,
i'm sure.

dad sometimes says your soul is still trapped here,
like it dug a grave and buried itself in the foundation.

i wonder how that can be --
have you wrapped the roots of the maple tree around your middle?

are you holding your breath as if the soil is water;
As if the meaning of you is still refusing to go on because there's a snorkel attached to your mouth?
Because i'm here waiting for you at the maple tree
with the ash you would call snow,

in my arms,

and you're still in some place I haven't found yet.


The stain on the wall doesn't look the same.
The place where you should be feels void,

and outside there's a storm,
it's causing the heads of the flowers you planted to bat against each other.

I wonder if you've possessed one of them,
I wonder if you're trying to **** me so I can possess one too.

I wonder if you're even here,

or if I am even here.

Sam.
Sam.
little brother?

i'm sorry.

The ground beside your grave is cold,
I've dug dirt stained nails into the earth to try and reach you,



but you never reach back.

with a dancing body
she will sway as fragile as skinned trees,
and her feet will drum against the earth, wounding it.
and with the instability of dying daffodils, her arms will harmonize
fingers separating, ribs expanding,
and she will breathe in the sweet fragrance of life,
close her wandering eyes and for a graceful moment,
forget she ever spoke of fear.

we are sentient,
we carve ourselves from gravel,
from volcanic rock and dying evergreen.

we crawl through clouds of dust,
limp on injured feet, tired hands.
we are arbitrary, we evolved to decay.

because we live in graveyards of our own
before,
dead selves.
we bury grief, after every
collapse, every bitter break of these bones.

we keep our skin as treasure.
we dig out our eyes,
to replace them with hands,
as if what we see,
could somehow be grasped,
and what he hold,
could somehow become lost.

cotton,
cotton we wove from webbed skin,
from burnt hair.

veins,
that were never meant to burst,
veins we thread needles through,
as if they were yarn,
as if they were something we could use to stitch ourselves back up again.

The swell of your feverish hands over mine.
Sweat soaking into my skin.
I’m clutching every part of you I can grasp,
Every part of you I can fit into my palm.

We’re sitting beneath the hollow tree,
Beneath the ocean of a sky,
Beneath the screaming black-billed cuckoos.

We don't say a word because we don't need to;
Just silent prayers burned between us,
Scarred into pale, malnourished bones.

I look at you as your sloe-eyed gaze
bores into the mountains of clouds swimming above us.

I want to kiss you,
But all I can do is lay my head on your shoulder,
Wishing I could build a home out of your collarbones.

I don't ever feel safe anymore.

Except when I’m forgetting everything, with you.

At dusk,
I tried to unlearn the way the gold in your skin,
Possessed your face in scintillant rays of spots.

I could count each one if I had the time,
But you’re already turning your spine stuffing back away from me,
And skipping back home

Without the bother or concern to look back.

all noises run dry around me,
I feel nothing,
nothing at all.

And I ache for something,
I ache for some kind of pain to know
this isn't

dissociation of being alive.

But my skin can only stretch so far on these
feeble, starving bones,

and my integrity can only bear so much weight at once,
before it collapses.

Before the only thing that remains of this deathful skeleton,
is a distant memory of lost friction

when I perish,
pray embers of burning fireflies
harvest me into organic soil,
plead for my soul to swim to clouds of wool,
dwell in the sky like dead stars.

when I perish,
hide far from that uncontrollable sickness of despair
that will strive to chase you.
waltz there, on the fragmented earth belonging to me,
waltz as if there's an unheard beat of elegant melodies,
soaring through you.

when I perish,
keep the fear at bay,
and the hope where you can reach it.
For I am not remote,
I am just away,
inhaling royal tides of bloodless seas.

when I perish,
think of me and try to dream.

I learned how to breathe,
cramped naked in a soapy, smog-filled tub.

Innocently laid bare, a human sacrifice to the drowning waters,
I opened my lungs, suicide clinging there like mold.

I forgot how to breathe,
kneeling on open ground, nails dug deep into dirt,

watching your carcass disappear back into earth's womb,
faceless, unaware of where you had left me.

I learned how to breathe,
Wrapped around a picture of you.

****** wrists, an irreparable body,
I reached devil possessed hands to my throat to attempt to find you.

I forgot how to breathe,
When I felt your **** body.

Your skin, heated and smelling of ***,
You kissed me, lingering lips fixated into mine.

I learned how to breathe,
Watching crying street lights fly by me,

A rumbling car, the wind in my hair,

The last, quiet farewell from you.

on carried,
leave-dressed streets,
my burning,
searching hands,
find chorus
through harsh breaths
spoken bleak,
from stale storms.

my feet danced
over gone autumn days,
eyes shut, calm,
to hear fallen leaves play,
but dead now,
are the cold naked trees,
kissed with frost,
draped with icy shimmer.

delightful,
my heart is
to hear song,
that only
winter plays.

spoken against the window pane,

your breath,

like flapping shingles of a roof in agony.



and,

tethered there in your hands,

inorganic flesh,

spews from open fingers -

curdled,

rotten.



you couldn’t look.



you couldn’t look.


this room is a cemetery.

this room holds only the dead.



in a brief moment,

the glass clears, the fog has lifted.



outside, bodies of decomposing trees

string their arms through the hairs of a setting sun,



and he,



he looks up at you with open eyes as the faucet drips,

the pipes creak,



the kettle, softens your futile screams with a thermal hiss.



how unbecoming of this boy,

exposing his insides with a lifeless heart in his chest.