replacing white lines with gray ash and sleeping in beds for sleeping in bathrooms and you wonder if you had any self respect in the first place because this afternoon you tried to think of your happiest memories in the past year and it wasn't when you were in someone's arms or thinking of your successes in the mirror while you flexed your kickass young *** it was when you were smoking bummed menthols and your friend commandeered a miniature tractor in the tenderloin and conducted two drug deals in less than 30 minutes and you watched her disdainfully with her girlfriend and wondered where on ******* earth you could get a three dollar old fashioned and let a forty year old flirt with you for coke and you wouldn't even have to do anything for it wouldn't life be nice like that

do you become a bad person when you start snuffing out half a pack of cigarettes in your daily six pack of beer

While dragging a green lighter through a damp parks,
I've learned an empty beer can is universal and a cigarette is the shortest measure of time for a conversation.

You get lost on trains that you pay too much for,
you feel cramped on planes you pay too little for,
and burnt barley smell like cat food.

Bridges in the rain
are more beautiful than the destination you're on them for.

You can spend years, tears, and fights in unmatched white sheets of your dreams. Or rattle in an train to Istanbul, under their arm.

His curls smell like sweat and he tastes like sweet, touched with hair and a scruff of a beard. He mingles Arabic, English, and French and you feel obsolete.

But do not fall in love with a boy from Lebanon
because sooner or later he will me gone.

I dreamt, curled in the thick cut lines of "The Starry Night"
and I forgot what an old city feels like when I look out at the streetlights with neon flickering glasses

I forgot how to feel somewhere in September;
my lips pressed on a boy's from the Ivory Coast.

Face blistering on the Champs-Élysées, thinking of nostalgic songs I should be too young to feel

-

I remember how it feels to rub my hands into redwood bark
and how I wished for something real.

I don't love you
or you
or you
or you
or you
or you
or you
or them
or them  or them  or them  or them  or them  or them  or them  or them  or      them  or them  or them  or them



where's the intimacy gone when I **** nowadays?

cat-eye flick
and that tongue's quick

but not as quick as
the quick death that comes

from burning at both ends (ha)

I lie awake on two trazodones, a cup of neighborly sugar, and NyQuil,
remembering moaning your name with my fingers in your sweaty curls

and how I am only allowed a single Vonnegut novel on my birthday
and how I can't ever see your furrowed brow without consequence.

I wonder if you have realized
it's close to a year since I've knelt down for you

and that I am nothing you'd admire now.