Here is your brain,
Here is your brain on drugs.
Here is your brain on a bad day,
on a bad year.
Where is it after a couple?

Here is a handshake,
a desk for you to sit in.
Here is taking orders absentmindedly,
Here is silence.

Here is the rain,
pounding agasint the sidewalk like your heartbeat,
Here are the pockets of your coat,
weighted down with water.
Here is depression.

Here is lust,
Here is an attraction to your irises,
the tips of your fingers,
the backs of your knees.
Here is a sidewalk to scrape them on and to
leave part of yourself behind.

Here are your thoughts on sadness,
Here are your eyes welling up with
intangible amounts of wasted ideas.
Here are your eyes welling up,
blue, and holding on to my hands.
Here are your eyes

on closing.

Contemplating,
Though I won’t say what because the
Term has become taboo-
One of those words that the second it is said,
Faces have already begun to fall.

To some,
It is romantic.
I can see the appeal.
I can see how tragedy is beautiful-
A sun setting over a grey ocean,
Raindrops heavily hitting pavement;
And really,
What is more beautiful than sadness?

It is a heavy term to use,
A weighty thought to even
Think of thinking of-
I know this.
But somewhere,
There is someone standing in the rain,
Perhaps waiting for a train or a bus
To ride for another hour or two,
Only to end up somewhere else she
Doesn’t really want to be.
And somewhere else,
There is a person with tired eyes,
Dragging behind him a large bag full of trinkets
He doesn’t need,
But he keeps them safe as though they are
His lifeline.

The thought consumes me, and it is
Morbid,
And it is probably
Unholy,
But it is terrifyingly beautiful,
That by tomorrow,
These people will never see what they saw again,
But neither will anyone else,
Crying on a Sunday,
Over coffee and the
Morning paper.

We thought of ourselves as sensitive –
So intuitive to the sounds of
Other people’s sadness that we
Felt it as our own;
Like we were testing to see how much
Sadness one body could hold.

We called ourselves writers –
The kind who wrote poetry about love and
Hopelessness while sitting in
The front row of history class;
Secretly hauling around notebooks and pens,
As we dragged our flimsy lives behind us.

We diagnosed others’ depression –
While remaining purposefully blind to
Our own trains of thought;
Which coincidentally always
Seemed to be moving along without
Any tracks.

We categorized everything with
Adjectives in our heads, and
Black ink on paper, but it never
Seemed to be enough –
There was always, always
Something else.

Today,
We wander back and forth from
Who we were, to
Who we are, to
Who we will be,
And most of the time,
We can’t tell the difference.
We are still writers,
And we never stop thinking of love.

There is always, always
Something else.

Sometimes,
I am afraid there are so many
People In this world,
So many crowds to
Walk through,
That eventually I might never
Recover the body (and mind) that are
My own.

Some days,
Even when I am alone in the
Pale light of my very own
Thoughts,
I seem to lose myself in the
Vastness –
I seem to lose myself in the
Narrowness.

Do you ever wonder if it is
Possible that a person could get
So lost inside their own self that
No matter how hard the trying
Hands grasp through the
Darkness of the soul,
It could never truly be found again?

It’s funny –
The places a person will discover himself,
Not in the back of the mind,
Usually,
But in the back of the hand,
In the back of the throat, ending
At the tongue and the
Slightly-open lips.

Occasionally,
I climb up an ancient wooden staircase that
Ascends into an attic,
And I gather the thoughts and pieces of
Myself I have hidden there.

And, just for a challenge,
I try and assemble the pieces together,
Like a necklace-
The kind of necklace that looks
Interesting enough,
maybe even beautiful,
but is never quite wearable.

It was when poetry first
walked itself through my ears,
that I knew something had
changed

It was not as drastic as
"The grass seemed much greener"
But you notice something
Smiles, maybe -
faces look different.

Poetry, it walked through my ears,
passed my brain,
and slid itself through the tunnels
of my body,
leaving its mark on each individual
*****:
a stain of something different.

I felt poetry move through my being like a
hissing snake,
flicking its pink tongue at the ends of
my limbs,

And then finally,
poetry made its way into the center,
and instead of hissing,
it whispered,
and my whole body answered.

Poetry walked itself through my ears,
and poetry,
it landed in my heart.

The sounds of passion,
and the beating of our hearts

Echo.

It is moments like these that
Step into our memories,
And never leave

It is strange when your body feels
As though it is an extension of
Another’s

And suddenly,
The air becomes stiff

My heart is so afraid with love.

Dry throats become dryer,
And you tell me it is okay
And I believe you
But your skin tells me otherwise

I remember in your car
When you told me the sound that
Airplanes make is
Lonely-
I knew there was poetry
In you.

These months,
They’ve felt like years.
And these days,
Well, I wish they wouldn’t
Go by so fast.

Some people,
They train their hearts to
Love one another.

Us,
We only train our
Hearts to love harder,
And to not break each time
We say goodbye.

Some people,
They talk about love like
It is all romance,
It is all sympathy and roses.

But us, we don’t talk
About love,
Because we know we have it.

And you tell me beautiful things like
The mountains are jealous of me.
The night sky is jealous of me,
But Love,
I’ll bet you
The universe, in its beautiful and ugly
Entirety
Is jealous of us,
Because between each smile,
We hold more than the universe could
Ever hope to hold in its
Gigantic,
Outstretched arms.

With you,
I never need to think about the things I have
Lost
Because in front of me is the everything I have
Found.