The best places are hidden
like stones in central park
secret roof top not
accessible except
for the morning staff
overnight, the sheer weight
of moonlight
paralleling through a Brooklyn
window pours on
to a frozen floor of
patterned tiles
where touches are like
turning on a lamp
dimly at first. Flickers
a bit then
bright as Chicago (1871)

I want to wake up
With a voice on my back
That traces all the bruises
And the scars
That I’ve had from
Turning away
From things and people
Because I was too afraid

I want to wake up with a forest
In front of me
And the knowing
That I’m not yet done
Exploring
I’ll walk to the end of the evergreens
Feel the fall on my bones
And eventually
Find the courage
To turn around

Fireworks are a lot like promises
But I like the ones during New Years
Rather than the fourth
They have more meaning
Like:
Bang! : I promise to treat my parents better
Bang! : I promise to spend more time with the kids
Bang! : I promise to cherish her more often
Bang! : I promise to never look back

And then there are fireworks that
Can be heard more than once
The ones that shatter the sky and
Echo throughout the whole neighborhood
The ones that are lit to make a statement
Like:
I wish you were here right now.

I left it back in high school
on the bench near the gate
behind it were some red flowers
and I always thought they were nice
standing out from the green
surrounding them
I left it back in the library
Near the encyclopedia labeled
Firsts , I was on my way to you
when I dropped it
Back in middle school
on the 5th field during P.E.
he was beating me senseless
when it came off
I was bleeding everywhere
he told me to pick it up
that day I decided to walk home

There is a train filled with the thoughts of kissing the sea
It doesn’t stop at a station but at the toe of a boot
It shrieks its wheels to a halt near the cliffs of the Mediterranean
It gazes upon a violent shore
The waves pillage the roman sands
The flame descends
And with a whistle it collapses on the tracks
Healing its rust
Tasting the zephyrs with its skin
Yearning for the ocean
And then
With a thunder-
It rips its metal against the earth.
Coaling onward in a furnace

Never to leave these tracks
Never to kiss the sea

I’ve been squeezing moose all over my body in an attempt
To give it more volume
Which is to say I was trying to give my life more depth

When you’re finished reading astronomy you’ll end up
Throwing oranges at pedestrians because **** it, Earth is
Meaningless and everyone needs to cheer up

**** it because being content is the hardest
Thing you can possibly do
Which is to say throwing oranges at people is the hardest
Thing to do without getting your *** kicked

**** it because when an orange concentrates hard enough it becomes juice
And if I concentrate hard enough I **** myself
Which is to say I need to have a seat and calm down—
Enjoy this cigarette while it lasts

I am no longer able to print Handle-With-Care labeling
And tape it to my body like someone who actually believes that works
While the sun laughs and harasses me with oranges all day
**** it, there’s too much moose and I’m wearing a white shirt.

I going to run my lips
through you like acid rain
Every drop of me
is going to leave a mark

We talked about it once
Near the window
With the broken frame
Underneath a night
Covered in cotton

We talked about it until
We couldn't talk anymore
Until we ran out of adjectives
To describe it and verbs to unleash it
Until our tongues were dry
From the saltwater pouring out from
Ourselves

We talked about the fire
You wish you could have
Been anywhere else in the world
But even then, you felt like
It would have followed you

So we kept talking about it
About the people without skin
And the people with too much
About how easy it was for you
To do it
That much iron in your hands
“I had to do it” You said

I wanted you to stop talking then
I stared at where your legs should be
Now stumps like deforestation
You knew too well what that meant
With your shattering eyes

You kept talking in your wheelchair
Hands brutal like mountains
Kept talking about that girl
And how easy it was for you
How you did it with only a couple
Of matches
And a gallon of gasoline

I want you to scar my back
leave wounds deeper than
the ones they gave me back
In high school
Bite me in places where
she could only kiss me
because she couldn’t
handle what was underneath
I want to feel the crushing
weight of you pressuring my skin
to touch my bones
every place where you and I meet
There’s a moon begging the sun
For a solar eclipse

Some people are raised
From a very young age
to believe that they’re
special and one of a kind.
And as they grow, they’re
Devastated to find out that
We’re all the same
They buy a home
They have a few kids
They conform to
The sociable
And they’re happy
Then there’s the people who
From the beginning of their lives
Are told that they’re worthless
And they succumb to the
Pressure of those crushing
Adjectives and they wither
And fall
Into drugs or crime or civil
disobedience to everything

We are made to believe that
The norm is to settle.
Is to capitulate to the standards
Of everyone around us.
Yes we’re all the same
But what makes us different isn’t
Our appearance or our race or gender
Or our personal style.
What makes us, Us.
Is our capacity to hope.
To dream.
To cherish.
To love.
To grasp something so tightly
to your chest that your body
has no choice but to make it
its own
Those exact things also makes us
The same  
We are all artists in the grand
Scheme of things
In our own universes, In front of us
Stands the canvas of decisions
Make sure you create something
Worth the trouble

So much information
So many stories
why one extinguisher?

Afterwards we were glazed
With them
Shot down like arrows
From an Indian mountain
The roof tops did not budge
Nor did the sides of walls
They came again
A hail of themselves-
Everywhere
We walked on
The collective of them
The ones that refuse
to be arrows
But lakes instead

Leave it by the gate
Behind the red flowers;
And In the library
Near the encyclopedias labeled,
Firsts
Leave it on your way to her
Leave it on the 5th field during gym
When they’re beating you senseless
And you have no choice
Leave it near the white ivory doors of
his offices
Leave it near the sun
Have it bake in the light
Grind its face in the asphalt
Have it taste your two thousand tons
of spit as you speak
Let them know—

Throw it at the lake let it dance off into the distance
Let it spin itself to pieces
Leave it in the creases of her lips
her Fingertips—
Chinatown misfits
Graffiti your name on every single  
Williamsburg, post no bill, post no hate
Post some self esteem
Let them know who you are
Have them find you in the fine print
Whispering sweet hymns in her ear
Have them chase you down the icy slopes
Towards the crashing coast
Leave it with them
Let it wash away in the swirling vortex
Of her, dancing till the sun sleeps,
Have it lie in the wake of your dust
Let it fall
and fall
and fall—
Let it tremble off in your voice
Watch it snow away with every move
Leave it in the pages
Close it in your book,
Let your tongue crash
Inside the hall of your mouth—
Let them know.

She’s a desert and
you’re just another drop
of water for her to
soak up
you’ll feel fury and pain
a Hiroshima heartbeat
decimating the skyline
she carved on your back
you won’t feel anything
but he empty touch of
an ice cube
her fingertips criss-cross
your torso like a kite
Stamps her lips on
yours and sends you
Away; express mail
no return address
In to the palm of her
hand

Everyone wants something worth fighting for.
Something to wake up to
Something to justify all the pain
To make sense of why we keep doing the things we do
And you can tell me all you want about love
About the craters he leaves in your teeth from kissing
And the amount of flowers she plants in the places
Where you thought only cigarettes belonged
It’s beautiful to think that we live for that kind of stuff
The stuff that makes us wish days were longer
Breaths were shorter
And nights were infinite

In the forest near the
river, along the sides
of the bushes
towards the vastness
of nothing,
we walked on a
trail that marched
deep in to the tall grass
our feet were sore and
colored with earth mud
there was a wave of salt.
The ocean was nearby
we ran the rest of
the way
the tall grass split open
and in front of us was
a crippled house we could
hear it,  standing
on the hilltop
just before the crescent shore

It’s morning

The light hurts your eyes:

Yesterday is hurting you: You were moving in.

This is how they welcome you to the neighborhood,

The toothpaste is making everything bitter—

he’s dreaming of rivers

you’re awake staring at the ceiling

at clumps of runaway white paint—

on a pillow that smells like your sister

At the beach

The sand is bleeding—

the water rinses away the stains,

You’re making circles out of sugar

She’s laying on her stomach—

The sun pouring maraschino cherries on back

She was dancing absurdly on a bread-shaped roof top
She checked the direction of the wind with her dress
She took photographs with her thumb and index
You could find her planner on her palms:
Do laundry, Write Essay
She made February 31st a thing because
It was unfair for people to be forgotten
She would say her eyes were falafel brown
When everyone would describe them as muddy
She said once, the ability to see is the ability to catch the sun

He would run to his house, emergency or not
And they would go to Lake Erie to bathe in April,
They would watch the seasons go by in the water,
hijack golf carts from the course nearby
And cruise around the neighborhoods
Millennium falconing it through suburban
Michigan, dubbing it The Night We Took Down
The Empire
And eventually they would tucker out and
Afternoon on the asphalt, cul-de-sac, kissing
Waiting for the Detroit to catch up to the sun
They dreamed of places to go
And he would often say Where?
And his response would often be
Anywhere;

I thought you bought me for a sandwich or something
I thought I was going to become butter toast to you—
Now you’re pouring paint into my ears while I sleep?
Stop,
the dreams are nice but I always wake up with a headache
And what are these you tuck inside my dough,
Indigo? Great—

You go to the coast and have the ocean tempt you with freedom
While painting me black from the inside out—
Good job, You’ve managed to convince everyone I’m a rock
I give up
Pour all the colors you can inside me, I suppose
Paint me scarlet red,
stick a few pieces of fresh green grass on top
And Start telling your friends I’m a tomato
Then feed me to seagulls when you’re done,
they’ll **** me out somewhere over Nantucket
And some tourist there with an obnoxiously large camera will shout out
Wow!, what a colorful lighthouse!

My grandpa who eats steamed sweet potatoes on foothills textured in green rice patties
dreamt up a tall brick house with a black iron gate
barbwires sprung around the tips of the entrance to keep out thieves
right now he wonders how long he can keep fibbing to my mother—
their rotten hut at the end of the massive foothill, not fleeting
monsoons come early, swells the ground till it gave
a landslide takes four people and a child

that day, red stars hung above Tiananmen square gates
grounded bones came in sacks, white cement hauled by green skin trucks

My grandpa who loves sweet potatoes constructs an ivory wall.

after the revolution, the sun peeks out in montages
peering through the smoke
gunpowder stuck to the tank tire roads
black heads roll off yellow tar dirt into a pit
My grandpa gives his best friend one thousand yuan—
visas for my mother and grandma,
His best friend disappears,

writes my grandpa
an apology and, leaves him a large white sack of uncooked sweet potatoes

light tan, severs in half and plops down on the lumpy cutting board,
dusty orange inners, grandpa tosses them in the boiling water
and later, while gnawing down,
he pretends they are oranges for once

Grandpa, who’s kneeling on our dried front yard with a worn out copper pail
waters the salty earth slowly until it sprouts sugar canes
chops one down, breaks it in half, the sun beats
peering through palm leaves
a viridescent river of silk and pale honey
my small three year arms grab a hand full
sliced by grandpa into pieces neatly placed
in a blue flowered ceramic bowl
years later, I chop a stalk down and chew until
English becomes a second language again
and in my twenties, I grab a hand full
sliced my mom into pieces, places them in a weaved basket
made of reinforced bamboo
I put it in front of my grandpa’s grave
in Fujian on the foggy mountainside of a small retirement town.
The edge of the South China coast covered in a thick plastic smog,
I sit on a stone eating sweet cold potatoes with my grandpa facing outland,
a red kneeing sun, barely visible past the trees

I have known you
Sitting beautifully
With your legs crossed
Beside the shelves
Reading Catcher
Your hair bright as the book cover

I have known you
Stepping out in day light
With blackness
The white flowers in the air
Fail to resist your skirt

I have known you
Before standing shirtless
In my door way
Whispering drugs when we sleep

I have known you
Far away in the distance
Hair fading orange explosion
Catches me
I surrender like a moth

I have known you
Past the bus stops
And greyhounds
Driving in your Sedan
Singing December

I have known you
Skin as white and bright
As thunder clouds
Pink, as I press my fingers
Against your stomach

I have known you
Swimming in the nighttime
Walking on boats
Heading for the coast
With a hand full of smooth pebbles

I have known you
Deep by the riverside
Painstakingly trying
To drown your fourteen

I have known you
Naked in the night
Laying on the floor
Beside the shelves
Waiting for a fix

I have known you
Seen you catch rainfall
With your tongue
You are use
To tasting tears

I have known you
Running across
The dim valley
Eyes towards the cactus
Toes in the soil
Feeling California  

I have known you
Caught you staring
At the foreboding sunrise
Wishing for it to slow down

I have known you
The color of scarlet
Apples in the summer
Fresh blood of war
On your hair
That fire grows
With each breeze

I have known you
Beneath the avalanches
Near Everest
Above the clouds
Near the Eiffel

I have known you
But I cannot find you

You texted me this morning
When the trees were being assaulted by gales
And the coffee in my *** had been sitting there
For weeks now collecting poison.

It had been a month
And I too, had collected poison
In the form of underage drinking
Tiny piercing viruses, bottle after bottle
In attempted to eradicate brain cells that held a picture of you
On their nucleus.
It didn’t work.

So I tried inhaling glass in to my lungs
Tried passing out so I could land in a coma
But I missed two feet to much to the right
And landed on my frontal lobe
Where you proceeded to dissect me with your tongue.
So when you texted me this morning

Memories came like cancer



I remembered that car dealership
Where you bought the 1960 sky blue Volkswagen bug
With rust on the side,
I remember driving to North Carolina with you
On a Monday morning.
Blistering cold at twilight
And all we did was whisper and hum
To each other
As we drove on empty interstate highways

You taught me how to cross state lines
And eat food so volatile that radioactivity
Spewed from my taste buds,
Down my throat
And in to my rigid spine
Where it shivered like arthritis.

My body isn’t hollow; it’s just frozen
Because tiny tundras fill the fissures in my rotting skin
My bones are brittle ice cubes bulging out from underneath the surface

And if people were snow, I would be a particle on a flake
And you would be Antarctica: vast, mysterious, uncharted, vicious, brutal, untamed,
And you would have had frozen me in to an arctic sculpture
To be hung over your brick stone fireplace
As you stood there watching me melt
With your blue corpse eyes.


It’s 8:34 now,
I’ve stood here for thirty minutes remembering what you once were
A continental mystery on my western cerebral hemisphere.
There was America,
Specifically Georgia
But you spoke Alaskan.
Talked about going there like 18 year olds talked about Europe

Everyone wants an adventure
But all you wanted was to know how it felt like
To have mountains under your palms
And snow peaks over your head.
They called it climbing.
I called it searching.
But those who climb would inevitably know how to fly

If they knew how to let go

So let go darling.
Stop calling me in December to tell me all the great things we did back in August.
If I’d had written down our phones calls
It would be enough to fill a notebook full of parentheses
Because all we did was whisper and say things we didn’t mean.  

So don’t come back and try to freeze me again.
I won’t melt this time, I’ll disintegrate.
I’ll fuse with my fissures
Become tundra and dissolve in to the soil


Where your body is, buried
Beneath layers of cement,
Dirt
And ash.
I place flowers on your head stone every week
But you still keep texting me and texting me
Telling me how great our trip was to North Carolina
And how we can do it all over it again

The whispering, the humming, the parentheses

All I had to do was drink the coffee

I remember how amazing it was to get high with you that night
in her car, everyone looked alike back then Black leggings with tight Black shirts
Black hair and Black shoes
everyone wanted to be mysterious and wanted by the sun
I wanted you furiously but I was running out of time
running out of excuses to give myself
tired of running in general
so I stood still while I sat in her car next to you
back in the passenger seat
nervous as a stone on the edge of everything
all I could think about was how many kisses
would it take to fill up the space where our
lips touch like two galaxies
your hair a magnificent avalanche of night
my eyes digging through the whispers tattooed
on your hair strands dyed in yellow shading me
from your eyes
I sat there
and imagined an infinite number of scenarios
where we ended up having ***;
passing out and waking up the next
morning decorated in tiny red bruises
but no
you were something I felt for a moment
high sitting in the back seat of her car
while you debated about Lana Del Rey

Tell me about the dream;
where you found yourself surrounded in a sandy vacancy
and the sweat on your face glistened like wishes in a American fountain;
Tell me about the dream;
Where you saw the remains of the house your mother grew up in
And how you were amazed by the black shade that skeletons could take;
Tell me about the dream;
Not the dream you had when you slept all night wanting to go back
inside to your mother’s womb; the dream about the inconsistency of light in your apartment;
Tell me about the dream;
When you were five in Philadelphia, it was snowing like bed sheets like falling stars like—
I can’t remember; is it amnesia— no I just can’t remember;
Tell me about the dream;
Where rain kamikazes across your windows; shattering themselves into millions,  for the sun to take back
Tell me about the dream;
*The inconsistencies of light; how a bulb dying is similar to us; the way
Its flashes in front of itself just before it goes dark;

When I was eleven I came home
with a piece of paper
back then I knew
how much those five letters  
would determine how much
you were worth
and as a kid, I felt pretty
worthless
there was a time I remember
before the paper
where all I would do
was draw

Mountains fascinated me
and that’s what I drew
all the time, mountains
I drew them with snow caps-
Without snow caps
I drew trees at the foot of them
Plaster a setting sun in the distance
Made them look like teeth
And a road came from them
Leading nowhere but to you

I was eleven
When I tasted the value
Of myself
Slapped across my cheek
Like a tattoo
And the first word
To be printed on me
For everyone to see;
Failure

And they all knew that
Was true
I could never turn my mountains
Into Everests
My trees into the Amazon Basin
Or my lakes into the Atlantic
And I ran through the world;
A blank piece of paper,
All of a sudden everybody had
A reason to use a sharpie

I’ll never be able
To make my mountains
Into Himalayas

And I can never stop them from
Using their Sharpies,
After a while your skin color
Doesn’t matter anymore
What they see on you is a story
And they can tell me what they think
But they’ve never seen my back
The things that I’ve carved on to the
surface of my spine
She feels them sometimes when we
have ***
trying to figure out where the period
ends.

I wish I
Knew how to
Build relationships out
Of construction paper
Instead of Styrofoam
Cups, something that
I could tape
Together when it’s
Ripped, something I
Could un-wrinkle when
It’s crumpled up
But Instead I
Have These Styrofoam
Cups they seem
Strong and sturdy
I don’t mean to
But when I
Step on them
They snap and
Break, their White
Beads come off
Flake by Flake
They are so
Easily blown Away
By breaths How
Do I Tape
Those flakes back
Together when I
Can’t even manage
To get all
The pieces

I want a love so furious
that I wake up to her
kissing the wounds she
gave me last night
I want to be decorated
with hickeys
tattooed with bite marks
I want to feel what actual
love feels like.
I want to wake up to the sun rising
outlining her body, highlighting her cheeks
smiling.
I want to wake up with post traumatic stress disorder
from the night before
and the aftertaste of her still
lingering in my mouth

Will you stop pouring paint into my ears while I’m asleep
The dreams are nice but I have to address the pigeons
perched on the window in the morning
what are these you tuck inside ice cream sandwiches
They taste like Indio during spring
Let’s go to the coast and have the ocean temp us with freedom
Like it used to
Remind me of the clouds, untouchable to everyone except fireworks
And the children who light them, even if it’s only for a second
I suppose I can’t stop you from painting inside me
Just be careful of the water lilies you left
Pour all the colors inside me, I supposes
Feed me to seagulls, they’ll **** me out somewhere over Nantucket
And some tourist will say
*wow!, that lighthouse is so colorful

And then I noticed that all I wanted to do
Was decorate your skin with my lips
while you rambled on about Baroque Art
I came here to focus
To collect all the piece of myself that scattered around
the world
from the time I had the biggest piece of me yet
to be yanked out
I didn’t want this
I forced myself to not want it
But that became impossible when I found so many
Pieces of myself inside you
It was like sailing all the oceans with only
The stars as navigation
It wasn’t hard but rather tricky to understand
Understand all your layers of black
And intricately woven sweaters
I imagined you plastering yourself
On the floor of your one room apartment
While the moonlight poured on your skin
And I could see every speck and pore
And everything would be so defined
You’re not a mystery but instead a character
That carried the plot of a beautiful story on your lips
While mine had nothing to do with the after thoughts
Of *** or kissing or walks along a dramatic skyline
But a poem about how much I want your story to
Mix with my
This is it

Someone had painted the trails with blotches of shadows
And the evergreens went into hiding within them
Crippled leafs descend and ascend beautifully, reinforced by gust  

Elsewhere, in the Gulf of Mexico, the sun had been drowned
By the approaching night
And the sea waves flirt with the crescent shore

Here, the trail traces the forest vertebrae
Its coarse finger tips rips through maple tendons
And fossil stone cartilage
It cries and endures

It bleeds as we carve whispers in to its bark
Things that we are too afraid to say

Elsewhere, at the summit of Kilimanjaro,
Dawn swallows the foreboding night
And a young sun crawls out from underneath the white cap
The savanna shifts its eyelids open
And with a fray the old titans emerge

The tent stood under a basking tree
A young man lays inside quivering
From too many exposed bones
The flies rally and take turns exploring
His skin rots invisibly
And the stomach bugles from the weight of starvation
He would have swallowed the world if he could

But here, we trace the shadows of these trails
And carve our whispers in to dying woods
A sun is drowned every day.
And these crippled leafs shatter.

There is no Kilimanjaro here.
No Gulf small enough to save the sun

There would be Garage rock playing in the back ground—
Yeah, that would be her theme song
And the smell of Brooklyn would follow her
That one time; or first time
When I walked along the Brooklyn Bridge Park
And there was fog; that time
She was standing underneath dim lights with a strange
San Francisco flavor
Tossing notes in to a notebook and tossing that into her music
And tossing that towards everyone else
On her back she had a tattoo: If lost, please return to;
Which I guess was her way of losing that smell;

I feel like trash being ready
to be picked by whoever has
the worst taste
finding out later
that they only needed the bag.
emptying my contents on to the grass
half broken and dismembered
pieces of glass left behind from the time
I broke my mirror
unfinished 40 ounces from winter break.
the first time I ever got drunk and threw up.
It felt good.
Half a dozen 8ths
I smoked for a whole month
after she left me and my parents
kept lecturing me about
how much I ****** at
being alive

That exact moment, right before it
You can hear cereal being eaten slowly
And the bones of thin skinned people
Rubbing against each other squeaking
You hear keys crunching into a new house
And you’ll realize the secret happiness of
The other side of the pillow
The secret happiness of kissing in movie theaters
Or the secret sadness of crying when no one’s around
That exact moment, right before it.
Before you throw the ashes into the river
Stuttering like the words before the last words
Trying to make sense the gibberish before the first words
The caterpillars before the love

My eyes are heavy
from to many nights
thinking about an
hour glass.
the ticking sound
coming from a Disney clock
I threw away when I was 11
If I knew back then how being
an adult would break
everything in your body
I would have stayed after school
a little bit longer and probably
should have kissed her while
I had the chance.

we both admit to still having our pictures on our phones
the one where you shredded yourself into pieces,
and tossed them into the air,
telling me to catch you
but I lay on the ground--
waiting for you to reach me

There’s dullest in the walls
plastered with dried saliva
From the girl who ******
You, and him and her
The night before
The floor smells like ****
Because last night you
divulge to me your love for
the guy across the hall, Jamie
Your love for his ego and his
eccentric manner of being a
******* ****** bag
Aren’t you tired of roof tops
The crossed off words in your
mouth?
aren't you tired of putting things
Inside you that don’t matter?
I left my cigarette burning
Inside your stomach and Jamie over here
Left two more
Don’t be surprised if it gets that big
After 4 months
I’m glad the cancer isn't mine

you have amnesia
except the painful parts
where I’m a house hiding dynamite
you don’t want me to open up
that,
not an elevator or staircase, your mother’s hands,
your father lies—
I won’t let you down

“the hardest thing is to come back—” he says

no,
the hardest thing is to stay.

I miss your breath after
a few shots
breathing on my neck
Corroding my skin
Leaving wounds the shape
of your mouth
the size of continents
seeping down
in to my bones
like radiation ,
rusting them
grinding my knee caps
my elbows
shifting the tides of
my blood
your fingers sail down
my spine turbulently
I could feel arthritis
On your lips
Taste myself on
Your tongue
and feel the collision
of a car crash being
pressed against me
everywhere

We shouted the things we wanted
The most on unguarded roof tops
Thought up things like new colors
New feelings
we lived like messy hand writing
like abstractions
our souls mosaic
we took things that electrified
our senses
we felt love more intensely
felt it like a ******
felt it like a magnificent burden
it wasn’t a lump in our throats
but a swollen yearning for the truth
like an inflamed tonsil
a piece of someone on our tongue
left from a kiss that we can’t seem to
spit out
a vibration in our teeth
telling us that this
this here is what it felt
to hold fire in your hand
and not regret it
never regret it
we burned with this for days
stayed up all night
drank coffee by the galleons
punched ourselves numb
coated our skins in alcohol
and linens
peeled off scabs from our lips
left there by words we never said
blank objectives
cleared our schedules
cleared our wasted minds intoxicate from pine
wine, girls with confidences and odd mirrors
of *******
we wanted winter to kiss us
leave us frozen but not that she already had
we wanted to remember like an old photograph
like a worn out stretch book
a L shaped couch left behind burned
like we did
there are tons of things we needed
but what we wanted was a good ******* a really
good *******
Something to keep away the suspense
The terror, the anxiety
the failure
we are tired of saying anything
cursing is our second language.
sarcasm is our first
and a blank page is our third
We’re speechless
We’re exhausted
We’re afraid
We’re old
We’re young
We’re tired
We’re loose
We’re *****
We’re yearning
For it
Whatever it is.

She would sprint to her house and tell her about the windy weather
And the two of them would bike to Lake Erie—
watching the trees undress themselves in the water
using their feet to flirt with the waves
they felt so restless in the process that they hijacked golf carts from the course nearby
and cruised around the neighborhoods
Millennium Falconing it through suburban Michigan,
spray painting quotes from Ginsberg, Milk and Lucas on the rich white walls
dubbing it “The Battle of Detroit ”—
and eventually they would afternoon on the asphalt, cul-de-sac, kissing.
Making the sky blush purple—

their mouths full of Jolly Ranchers,
and necks full of bug bites,
some from each other

Watching the childish sun being tucked into the night slowly,
While shining one last time through The Ruins of Detroit

Maybe because you look cute in
A purple bra
Maybe because it’s just the image of you
In a bra
Maybe because you have *****
And I can’t distinguish Love from ***
Tonight
But tomorrow I’ll hate you
I might hate your hair changing so much or I might hate
What you text late at night or I might hate how often
You talk about yourself
Which are terrible things to hate but I just might because
It’s you.
The truth is it’s late, all the windows
Are closed, I ran out of ideas, 2 hours from now everyone
Will wake up and
I want to call you

Here to a lifetime of laughs
A lifetime of wondering
why you’re still here
your past is full of cobwebs
and there nothing I could say
to make the spiders go away
there’s a future, where you never finish
your books, watch only the first
half of movies because you’re afraid
of endings
you’re underneath a waterfall made from
tears you’ve collected over the years
and your body cups it
holds it in-between the spine
and heart, where they’ll never find it

One day, after a year
you were walking on a path coated
with fallen leaves
along the sides magnolias grew
endlessly
there was a bench that you sat on
holding tattoos from people
that didn’t know how to express
the way they felt
so they whispered it in to the wood with pens
or anything sharp
and this guaranteed them a way back
you sat there reading them
running your fingers across the markings
back and forth slowly like hieroglyphics

One day, after your first year of college
you found him tucked behind
the corner of the library
reading encyclopedias about the modern world
and you asked him
“Why are you reading that?”
and he said
“Because I want to know if the ending’s good or not.”

I want to be able to kiss you
And now feel like the sun
Is dying inside of me
Want to wake up to the sight
Of you and not remember
How long we have left
Want to hold you for as long
As possible
Until I can feel the thunderstorms
In-between us
The sheer weight of an anchor
On my stomach
When my heart drops another meter
Filled with stones that you’ve carved
Words like two years or six months
On to them
6 shots of ***** will make me throw
Up
I hope 10 shots will lighten the weight

I haven’t started to pack anything yet
trying to find a way to bring
you with me first
only to discover
that airplanes can only carry so
much baggage
so set it down
plot it in the Himalayas
where it belongs
it’s not about letting go
it’s to make sure a part of you stays
when you do
they will always tape that yellow line
in front of you at museums
and at train stations
the difference is whether or not
You're brave

I’m tired of these poems that talk
About dissolving in to the bed together
About spaceships on the ceiling
And dust on your forearms
I’m tired of these poems-
And tired of the crushing weight-
These poems that talk about love
As if it’s something we can taste
Or touch or smell or melt or dissolve
Or fly or crash or destroy ourselves into
I’m tired of these metaphors
The double entendres
The verses
The prose
The ulterior motive to sleep
With the girl next door

Stop talking about love likes it’s tangible
Like it’s something you can find
In the creases of your sheets
Or the pores on your skin
Like it’s something you can hear
In the tone of his voice
Or the pitch of her laugh

Stop looking outside
Stop telling her she’s an ocean
Stop comparing him to a rain storm
Stop howling your stanzas on rooftops
When they leave you
Stop expecting for the wind to be there
Love does not exist in the air
Or in your heart

Love exists when you learn how to-
When existing becomes the only thing you love
When you stop setting yourself on fire
To keep him warm at night
When you stop letting her freeze you
Just so she can keep you there

Enough of your Nerudas
Your moons
Your suns
Your mountains
Your stars
Your inhabitable forests
Your deserts
Your fires
Your oceans
Your seas
Your lakes
Your rivers
Your Niles
Your Paris
Your talk of good destruction

I have seen them throw their voices in to caves
Desperately wanting to hear an echo

Toss aside your shallow skin and knee deep words
So you can no longer hurt and no longer drown

I was sitting outside on the curb in front the venue
With Spaghetti string lights that curved into shape
Spelling out Baby’s Alright
Spilling out green and blue, green and blue all over the pavement
And thought if Care-Bears could ***** it would be like this
The band was finished and they were packing up slowly
Reluctant to leave
Maybe because they had a four hour drive ahead of them to Philly
I was smoking like I do after big crowds
The sun was setting here and rising at another place
And I was thinking about what to do for the rest of the night
Because I didn’t want to be alone but I didn’t want to be in a crowd
Everyone was talking about drinking and if not drinking, smoking
And if smoking then eating and all roads leads to Rome
So if they wanted to **** they might as well have just said it—
But I guess they wanted to be nice first
It was cool outside and the wind was kind to let me smoke in peace
I kept staring at the schizophrenic buildings changing voices one after another
Which is to say I just eavesdropping on the windows again
And I always have this strange habit of thinking that the people in those buildings are free
Or willing to spend sometime with me and talk about whatever
Like they had sometime to waste and I would have taken it

Gnarl your toes,
Know that you can’t catch everything
That comes flying through the rye
We are rosebuds trying to
Find the right window.
The right person to pluck us apart bit by bit
Trying to make up their minds
Yes’s or No’s
Gnarl your toes
Because either way, you will face
Him, Bruce Wayne
And cast your conscience in to the dark
but somehow you’ll come out of it
Harry Pottering your way through the darkness
finding her in front of you
And you’ll show her all the reasons
To the hate the sun
You’ll pour galaxies in cups
Trying to measure what this feeling is
You’ll take her words like nebulas
meek and hazy swimming inside your
ears
Show her where the stars sleeps
Where they go when you die
tell her the stories that your
parents told you at night
you will love her until the snow falls
upward
and when she’s gone the streets will no
longer be slippery
So gnarl your toes like you use to do
For there’s plenty of things to be scared of
Plenty of things to be angry about
Plenty of things to corrupt you
To change your mind, to make you Darth Vader
Down the path you did not want
and if you do, know that it is fine
because you will grow like the universe before you
and in that process you will find
poetry etched in between chopsticks, lips, fingertips, maps of big cities
and small towns. first loves and second dates .
you will find them on the places you hate—
On your parents graves.
know that they were the ones that left them for you

When I was thirteen
I had this awkward habit
of texting you at 1 o’ clock in the morning
about some crazy idea I had during the day.
And you would get so mad at me
that you’d reply in all caps and exclamation points
to which I would laugh so hard at.
But really, you didn't mind
because you would stay and
we would text until sleep claimed one of us.

I remember back then
I use to play basketball all the time
and you would always come out
when I was there.
It was annoying
because you would always steal the ball away
and I would have to chase you
all around the cul-de-sac.
Until you got tired
collapsing on asphalt
and I not wanting you to get hit by a car
stood guard right beside you
and you would always laugh at me
for being so paranoid.

I especially remember the night
when you were outside laying on the grass
wearing nothing but summer shorts and a tank top
Your legs gleam in the moonlight like neon
I thought you were the most beautiful
Thing I've ever seen
I remember asking you
“What are you doing out here?”
“My parents are fighting, what are you doing?”
“Taking out the trash” I said.
You asked me to join you
and I did and so we both laid there
cushioned by the thick uncut grass
covered in shining nightly dew
as we stared upward towards infinity.
and all I could imagine was you
climbing on top of me
giving my chest a reason to expand

We spent so much time drawing on sidewalks
with chalk
leaving messages for old friends
threats for enemies
and instructions for our future selves
how many years did it take us to reach the end of the pavements
spilling cheese puffs all over the place
the clues were on your fingers
once in a generation there are kids who always speed when
they turn 16; reckless loose and free like an avalanche
towards the sea I made a bet with you that I could swim to the horizon
but I can’t swim
I’m a body full of empty threats
but I always kept my promises close to me
did it take long for you to forget
so many nights abroad with them
once in a lifetime for everyone
the world swallows the sea
so I didn’t need to know how to swim that night
there was you and you would always wear sundresses when you went out
and when you died they donated all your clothes to the children's hospital
sometimes when I go there I still see you running around outside
drawing on sidewalks