You don't know weird until

You're brushing your teeth in a Starbucks bathroom
And using the sink
To wash yourself
At 9 in the morning, you don't

Know pain until your space has been shattered,
You don't

Know isolation until those who have needed you
Abandon you when
Their help can't be lost, you

Don't know critical condition
Until you've suffered all the wounds you can take

You don't know rejection
Until your spirit bleeds out
And you live from a bag

So you're high
In the Simmons bathroom and
Taking a shower
By yourself

And you're just getting over
The scent of rejection
But her phenomenal venom
Leaves a stench in your mouth

She's asking how she can help

And her passion to make a small difference

Both floods me with warmth and leaves me to suffer

What do I do with the nudes on my phone

Now that I view them, nostalgic,

Alone?

Sitting on the couch with a beer,

Thinking about how much worse
My life would be if I
Had Chlamydia.

Bug bites.
Goose bumps.

"I'm totally down to chill if you are"

If you separate
                                  yourself


From


            yourself,

You become an anomaly.

This body has been cultivated
For centuries,
Sculpted
With strength in mind.

Watch it all tremble
And melt in your arms
As you cradle me
And tell me lies

I'm reducing myself
And others around me
To physical commodities

No face is like yours,
None familiar
Or warm

Bedsheets. A distant memory that is all but forgotten-  fading flesh and neurons straining to recapture the scent of a long-ignited, distant flame...

It's interesting to read your older poems because
You see the shifts in voice and tone and think,

*I was in this pain before,
perhaps worse,
and I survived

Today you are going to pick up your only winter jacket from Hers. On the train you are shaking. You pick up a large bottle of Zinfandel at the liquor store down her street and spend $10 that you don’t really have. You walk up to her street. Four boys and an older woman (mother, landlord?) crowd a portion of the sidewalk. You brush past on the gravel, almost slipping. A form that strongly resembles hers is in the driveway; your heart threatens to leave your chest. This walk is eerily familiar to you. Music is crowding your thoughts and you slip out of your headphones, unsteadily approaching the porch. You sit. She is moving her car so her roommate can go out. You don’t know what to do.

She says “what’s up” like you’ve seen her do to people she doesn’t know very well but wants to flirt with and her eyes betray no warm recognition like they used to. She asks if you should come in?  

I just picked up liquor, I can share it with you if you want to have a drink, you say. There’s no way that your nerves are going to steady themselves on their own.

I don’t know, we’ll see. Cross the threshold. Door closes behind you. You are trapped now. You knew this would happen. You want to go upstairs, up to her room, climb the familiar steps and strip naked, settle in your niche in the bed like you’ve always done...

Bookcase isn’t where it used to be. Curtains are different, or new. Couch is ratty as ever. You remember the nights you used to spend making food in her kitchen, nursing her stomachaches on the couch watching ****** TV and laughing in each other’s eyes during the commercials. Breaking each other’s molds and melting away from the rest of the world.

Did she fix the window from where that guy tried to break in last semester?
No. The curtains are just new.
Oh, nice.
Drink?
Definitely.

You’re handed a pumpkin-flavored hard cider and this relaxes you a little, because you’ve always felt cooler than you actually are when you’ve got a bottle to gesticulate with while you’re talking to someone. It’s really just a mask for social anxiety, a cute 8oz bottle of conversation lubricant. Apply as needed. Consult a doctor for intense pain lasting more than four hours.

You two try and talk. She asks why. You can’t speak. After a few minutes of holding up, you fold, crumple.

Hoarse, tense. Your throat is burning and she isn’t doing anything as your knuckles around your knees wrench up your jeans and turn white telling her about how Heather died and how Chickee is in the hospital and just had a seizure from the meds they were using to keep her from dying of pneumonia and now she’s lost whatever precious vestiges of memory were left and remembers nothing at all and you’ve been fighting daily to keep your mind from running away from you, doing this all on top of work and courses is stringing you out so thin can’t she see that you just wanted you to have time to take care of yourself holy **** -

I know you hate me now I know and I’m never going to escape the hurt I caused you because it feels to you that I just left but I didn’t ever want to leave it just had to happen

We see relationships from two different vantage points
((Did she **** her neighbor))
Why are you on a dating site

It’s a tool you’re using to force yourself back into social interactions but it's also a necessary evil. There aren’t too many queer women to find anywhere but the internet anyway, they’re all in hiding during the day in a batcave or something -

Why did you leave me
You never thought it’d get like this
Coward

Leaving after you tell her to ******* because she asks you to, walking out with my things onto the porch and a cigarette in your mouth desperate to inhale something that’s toxic as if the carcinogens will take effect right there and you’ll drop dead of all kinds of diseases in the middle of her walkway

She comes outside with letter keep this read it you’re not going to like it but it’s all I’ve got for you and it’s what I’ve wanted to say
You don’t want it, you say, you don’t need this cancer sitting on your desk and silently invading your life
******* take it
You stand in the street reading the letter and it’s all about how she thinks you’re some heinous ******* who just left her and took the easy way out when things got difficult.

Maybe you did, you’re a nihilist, you don’t think there’s a point to anything and you do like things when they’re easy for you, it hurts less that way- but doesn’t everybody?

People who say they’re saints are lying to themselves.

Some sort of god is making itself visible to you tonight. You’re freezing and everything in life is shaping up to be a perfectly engineered mess and yet you’re happier than you’ve ever been. It’s so thrilling to be happy alone- sober and control of your body, answering to no one.

You could get addicted to this. You’re making art that means something; listening to rock music and climbing through fountains, burying your face in the dewy grass of the park and thinking of no one else. This phenomenon can hardly be put into words but it is sure worth a try, my ******* god. You were so happy earlier that you wrapped your palms around a small decorative evergreen tree outside an office building and hugged it, breathing in its wintry scent and not giving a **** who was watching or thinking.

****!! A profane word is no less profane than the atrocity of allowing the true profanities of society and the psyche to go unaddressed. You stand inside this concrete empire, watching the world revolve.

"The day I directed
That play in Spanish,
My stomach began to tighten."

Today I came

And did not scream your name

Nor give it the breath of whispers

We're crammed on a couch and we're spinning

I tell you, you kiss like a poet

Don't you dare blame any of this
On my star sign,
Or yours,
You are just as culpable

For breaking,
Tormenting
And leaving

I have to learn to **** myself
Without imagining your hands,
Your palms,
Gliding through my body.

I have to learn how to ******
Without gasping your name,
Gripping your hair.

I have to learn to remember
That your fingertips
Are not the only ones
To ever plunge inside me,

And to remember
That your absence should not be missed.

You said you wanted me
To soften, to not let

The fires I have walked through char my heels

And yet
When I did lose my shell in front of you

you caught flame instead
And asked I be removed

I read other people's love poems
And find glimpses of you in their words

But my breath comes easier now,
And so does sleep

And I will not be deterred
From who I wish to become.

My love was in my words for you,

Why

Did you let them burn?

How I wish that I was small like you, that
my chest had less room
to expand when broken

and my mind less chatter
for me to pay heed to

"You know,"
he says
as he fiddles with his Joy Division shirt,

"The human race
has escaped the food chain
and that is why
we are ruining the earth"

You kept asking me
about my memoir, as if
you'd be there
to see it's completion.

Now,
you will fill its pages
if only in vague form,
for months to come.

You, the observer
have become the subject
of this torment.

Hello,

Lately my poetry has been shifting and taking new shapes. Instead of my typical, drawn-out style of editing and composing, I'm now limiting myself to the following rules:

1. Only write when you need to, and write as soon as you need to
2. Edit minimally - only three revisions per poem
3. Feel a lot.

Additionally, I've embarked on a journey to cope with loss, writing a total of 157 love poems (or rather, emotionally charged poems). The goal is that the final poem's completion will also bring the advent of my catharsis.

It's my hope that these vignettes will provide you an authentic and rough window into my own urban and dazzlingly hellish experiences.

All the best,
Sam

Waking up and remembering
That your life is not sleep,
And your dreams
Are in fact reality -

                       [Things are this bad,
                        You are not better]

These thoughts are the sharpest,
Barely worth living for

I will write a sonnet
For every lover
Who has entered

                        (Or thought to enter)

My womb

And I will clad them
In the scent of destiny
As I forge their names immortal
Upon the sand.

Wow.

I have found out
That someone brutalized you
And as much as it pains
And confuses me to say -

That terrifies me.

Every time
I feel my veins begin to rush
And the slow throb of pain begin to pulse

            I will stop,
           And I will stay the flow

Until I have means
To channel it
Through paper and ink.

These days,

Everyone I talk to
Is a Sagittarius
And I am terrified

Of each of them

Today I have

Cried until my tears blistered,
Watched my heart sink into the dust

There will be a digital trace

Of this in the morning,
And I will know
That I was alive

And there you are,
Electricity running through your veins,
Determined

To make it right

And you find yourself
In the throes of madness

Surrounded by warm, warm bodies

Yet still
Entirely alone.

So,
My shirts are ragged and I
Drink too much on many occasions and I
Often reek of cigarettes and untold lies and I
Can't seem to keep myself steady for more than a minute but
I

Can write a love poem that'll make you go to pieces
And I
Will calculate the distance to the stars and find out how to launch you there
And I
Won't rest until I see it completed.

Sure, I
Can't control a sentence for more than a few words and I
Barely know my thoughts and I
Am a rambling, insecure mess and I
Don't know where I came from, but
I

Can help you find a home here amongst the shadows,
And bellow out your name so it infinitely echoes

You know this is all yours,
I mean,
Who else
Could it possibly be for?

Your breath
On my neck as
You surprise and embrace me.

Your hair, parting itself from your scalp
And leaving traces of you
In my bed.

Your eyes
Fixed on mine as you tell me of something
You've grown to admire.

Your hands
Clasping mine as we wander and explore
Through the seasons.

Your body
As it gyrates to the rhythm of your turntable
As we're dancing.

Your words
as they have fallen from your pen onto
Your notebook's pages.

Your smile
Hydrating me from across a table
As we sip coffee and talk art.

The smoke
As it slips from your cigarette
And you tell me of days gone by.

Some knowledge
That these could be things
You wish to acquire with me.

I didn't need
A soundtrack to my melancholy,

I tell the teen

Slamming a solo
On his keyboard in the subway

What love has died inside you,
Shriveled at the thought of me?

What silence do you send me
In lieu of compromise?

She is always looking behind her
To see what she's dropped
Out of fear,

I do the same
Out of curiosity.

We've smashed against one another,
Desperate to connect but unaware
There was a simpler answer
To our misconceptions

On the day you left me
The wine hit my chest
As soon as I woke.

The skies opened up and wept

How fitting

Well,

I'm a bastion of something, to someone, I guess,
I just can't understand it.

I explain things all the time
To people with half-minded hearts and half-hearted minds,
Who might mean well but are conditioned
To think of nothing but themselves.

And yet I see myself in other people?

I'm a mercenary for a god I'm just inventing
And nobody will follow me, not yet
Because they're waiting out the seasons.

I'm a different person in a different body at the beginning of each new day,
I can't repeat myself.

I say nothing to my reflection as I morph,
Consistency wasn't a gift handed to me
(Much less, taught).

I'm a caricature of someone,
But yet, I don't know who.

So but what gender are you?

I don't know, the answers to that question hide behind a door that's closed and I can't seem to get it un-stuck.

So please,
Do not come up to me on the street and ask me if I give a ****, because I don't

My soul cannot be owned or bought
And in order to understand me, you need to forget all the binary lessons you've been taught.

So, but what gender are you?
Why don't you come up here and define me? Please, take a shot

Put this nervous, wandering soul back where it belongs - in a box

You know what it's like to sleep beside me
And wake up to my morning breath, you know
What it's like to sink yourself into my depths,
Together
You and I know everything.

A woman once told me
I was an open book with tattered pages and
I do not think I can agree with this, but
Whatever kind of book I am, you
Have taken the time to learn me
And sift through every page
Marking and highlighting
Your favorite passages
With your clay-stained, summer hands.

You have seen the rivers of light run through my eyes
And you know that I grew up without a family, live without a home, and
While you understand these things you also know
That they are not why my love for you
Is so strong, and I cannot thank you enough
For knowing that.

When your hands meet my flesh, they are not surprised that it is startled by itself
And take the time to soothe
The fearful currents running through it
Back to sleep.

When your eyes meet mine, I'm reminded that
I have never felt so familiar
In another person's gaze.

You ground me, rescue me from chaos on occasion by reminding me
That it is never too late to be new-

And I ought to slow down my hurtling mind
More often than I do
To tell you this,
And write to thank you.

This OCD means
I scrape at my scalp with this dusty razor
until only raw skin is left.

This depression means
I call on my mother
to re-open old wounds
and spill blood for me.

This anxiety means
I read her old love poems,
scared of whomever received them.

This dysphoria means
I have frequent nightmares
and wake up clutching my head,
making sure
that my hair is still short

and I dream, sometimes
of using a saw
to hack off my *******-

This dopamine means
I feel all of you
and see all of me
like nobody else.

When you touch me
sometimes time stands still
and sometimes it rushes.

I often can't tell
which is which.

You're either electrifying me
or cooling me down,
or both (?)

Flip my switches,
peel back my hardened layers
to see how the pistons
move inside me

the impetuous blood
streaming through my veins

See, taste, take all you want
from my slim pickings,
unraveled from crowds before you,

but still, they're there.

And though I don't have much to offer,
I'd love to offer it to you.

Mozart,
deaf,
died, eventually.

Picasso, pervert, died; Whitney, Winehouse, drugs, dead; Elvis, Methamphetamine, died

(on the toilet).

Van Gogh,
missing an earlobe,
died.

Plath,
head in an oven,
in front of her kids,
Woolf
Patron saint of insanity, I guess
waded into a river and-

River. River Phoenix. Drugs.

Natalie Merchant wrote that song about him in 1995.

Flash forward.
Me, twenty-one, drunk.
Proprietor of a collection of lackluster poems.
Sold their small, nonbinary soul to the Devil
in exchange for a fortune,
gone.