If you were to read our story backwards
It would tell the story of how you held me as we slept
How happy we could be with nothing but empty time and a bed
How we kissed, but only a few times and only  real quick
How we ignored how we felt, how we brushed it off
Or how we would talk on the phone until one of us would nod off
How we first met, how silly you must have thought I was
Until one day once upon a time, a long time ago
You forgot about me forever, I wasn’t someone you’d ever know.

I used to write about heaven
Because, I knew that I was the type of person
Who would never see it,
Not one that drinks too much
Swears very often
Smokes so heavily, as I do
I used to think there was beauty
In a place that I couldn't see
In a location that isn’t mapped
I thought that in the absence of the tangible verification
Of its own acuality that
It could be anything I wanted it to be.
It changed over the years
First I wrote of it as a couch of clouds
Blue bundles of cotton
With light pink underbellies
That floated free and molded to only me
Then I wrote it as if it was a movie theature
With pictures blown up in front of me,
Mostly home movies that would zoom in on my mothers face
As some Elton John slow song played in the background
Timed perfectly with my mother's movements
And the popcorn was free.
You read all of these ideas of mine
Of what heaven was like
And you agreed and said,
"They are equally bad places to never be."
Now I don't write of heaven often
I sleep next to you much more
Than I drink
Or I smoke
I still swear very often
But the beauty of a place I can't see and could never be
Seems to have lessened to me now
And my idea of heaven are things I can verify
This bed,
Blanket,
Your head underneath a pillow.

I dreamt that I wrote to you last night. I woke up with paper cuts in between my fingers, lemon juice that stained my bed a ****-yellow color, ink embedded underneath my fingernails,  and every time I reached down to scratch my ***** I left a shameful line of old black ink. I think I’d have mailed it to her if I knew that when she read it she would scream with a horrid realization. A realization of finally understanding the monster she use to sleep next to, before the **** sheets before the ink stained boxers. I’d have mailed it to her if it wasn't just in my dreams. I imagine that the lines in my letter were laced with layers of lucid logic that stringed together feelings that con-caved in on themselves. That ate themselves whole;  but instead of making them disappear entirely they grew twice their size and spilled over the pages and underneath my nails. The diction I imagine I would have chosen to write with would be read with a southern twang.  Slow and drawn out. She would have to read it with extra syllables that her tiny lungs could not possibly hold. It would make her choke, for the first time, on words that weren't her own. My words would finally fulfill the dreams of my hands; constantly wanting to ring around her neck like I was seven again on the playground and her name was Rosie. I wouldn't have rhymed in my subconscious, to me that always seems fake and I can’t really rhyme without having my voice break. I might, however; use from time to time red bold words laying in the middle of long paragraphs in hopes she would remember her red dress. Of how, before bed, it grazed over her slopping neck and slid off onto my floor. In my dream it’s still on my floor. I hope in my letter that I wrote out a picture of her seeing me seeing her put it on in front of our window the next morning and even though that dress was too short for autumn and she would wear it anyway. Because she knew it drove me crazy and because she wanted to remember me even after she walked out my front door. Mornings like that I begged her stay even if we had just fought over how much she snores, even if I had called her a **** one too many times the drunken night before. My letter, I think, would tell her that I wish she didn't have to bundle up and leave that she could instead cut up my bed sheets and make herself a new warmer dress. One that would have matched my pillow too perfectly for her to not lay her head on it and call it a hat. For her to pretend that my bed was the world outside the door. My letter would go like that. It would make her scream at first then make her remember that monsters can love too and knowing that; she would punch her new mattress and tear up her new pillows ones that I have never touched. She would scream, "*******!" preceding my name every time she landed a blow. She would say that so many times that she could never look at her new bed again without thinking of me, and of ****. When I dreamt last night I dreamt I wrote you a letter, but dreams don’t have hands that can hold pens. So I instead sent you my bed sheets, my boxers, I signed them with lemon juice and old black ink. Wear them, sleep with them, read them for what they are worth or toss them out because monsters with words like mine give you nightmares.

"If we were things", he said
"Then what things are we"
I thought on it for a minute
Maybe two
I said to him,
"Maybe cereal
Or perhaps the milk"
A thing that starts off days
"Maybe even coffee"
He smiled
And he said he knew then what he was
"A bowel, a cup"
Anything that holds me before the day starts
The first thing either of us has to touch

Tress grow slower than we do, she says,
They gestate longer in the soil than we do in our mothers
True, we were both at one time seeds, she says,
But trees grew out, while we grew up
By the time we learned to walk
A tree will have only fastened its branches
It will have rooted its self in a home
That, like us, was not self-elected but while
We are constantly trying to walk from our home
A tree is rooting itself in theirs.
We grow up and walk around our parent’s house
Then our neighborhood, our city, our country, our world
Glimpsing only meager morsels of other beings homes
It’s difficult to pinpoint our own, to know it wholly
But a tree, she says, a tree never walks from its home
And through this it knows it so absolutely, so entirely.
A tree grows slowly, gazing at its environment for years
Far past when our timeline has expired
It watches as its atmosphere changes, even in the slightest
It still grows higher and higher at a pace that allows
It to view every intimate detail of the world it resides in
Never failing to notice every leaf, twig, branch
We don't know our homes like that and
It’s a shame, she says,
That we grow a lot faster than trees do,
Perhaps this is why we get home-sick.

If I had a son.
If I had a baby boy
I would tell him, "cry to your hearts content baby"
I wouldn't say,
"If I put you down now will you be a man about it?"
because he wouldn't be one yet and I would
cherish the time that I could speak to him without
response and when I could still comfort him with kisses
he couldn't turn his head away from yet.
If I had a little boy
I would fill his head with tales
of wizards and knights,
of dragons and princesses
so his mind wouldn't know the limits
of existence and his imagination
could have wings bigger than the ones
I would paint on the ceiling of his bedroom
I would tell him daily, "respect your father
and mind your mother"
because your papa ain't no rolling stone
and your mama only rewards manners.
I'd take him to the water and I'd tell him to mind that too because that's where he'll find peace.
If I had a teenage son
I would tell him give valentines day cards
to all of the girls in your class
because beauty is in everyone and only
a fool would see it as only skin deep
and mama didn't raise no fool
I would tell him read all you can write down even more
because each moment is fleeting and best to
remember all these times when you know everything, right?
when he makes mistakes I would tell him,
"Tough."
because thats what my mama told me
and there ain't no point in crying over
a problem that you know you can fix
and if you can't fix it on your own
know that I can help and there isn't a problem in the
world a mother won't fix for her child.
If I raised a man
I wouldn't tell him anything anymore
I would let him tell me
of all the things he has done all the things he wants to do
and all of the person I raised him to be.

The ordinary man
Is always, in part, the villain.
The supporting role for the hero’s story-
They are never adorned with
Fangs or ominous and dark eyes
Their evil is much more insidious
Subtle but complex
Within a man that could easily
Pass for the hero himself
If his bad days did not over shadow the good
If he did not so strongly hold steady
His own beliefs
So that he felt bound to bind them to others
We are all part hero and villain
What casts us in our role as one or the other
Is if we act on the small part of us
That fights to the death for our beliefs
In the face of the popular opposition.

Isn’t it strange how we as humans choose our favorite things based off of their ability to **** us? For some its cigarettes, others choose *****. Mine, my self-appointed executioner is a woman, a girl really. Her face is not beautiful it is fragile, nor is her body it is frail. She looks almost dead to me, freshly buried; hair thin and untouched; skin just now starting to fall off her bones kind of dead. I would think she was but for her eyes. Perhaps they are too close together and perhaps a little too big for her face but either way they echo the most wonderful hue of vein-blue. They are beautiful. They ruin me. They make me want to start a militia. Run down the street naked. Proclaim my love for blood. Open up my veins that on the surface promise one color but spill a completely different one. She makes me hate my body. Makes me realize its trickery, that it would promise me her eyes in my bloodstream but when I cut myself open to see them, to touch them I am left with nothing but me. My body, blood red when my favorite color has always been her eyes.

I cage in God.
With glorious bars
Too small for his fingers
He releases his singers
Plucking chords made of nerves
Swelling with each note served
Undefined voices will swirl
With planetic like twirls
Filling my senses with increasingly
Distrusting incentives.

I never thought of our goodbyes
I didn’t think they would happen
Or if I did I would have thought
Them more as see you tomorrows
Not actual goodbyes
Remember the time when we drank
And sang of our lives forever being lived together
We were living together at that time
And we agreed that time is the only thing
Other than each other that we should value
We live in time, and that’s what we should be saving
We should be putting it under our mattress
And in our piggy banks
See, our lives live behind our credit cards and folded dollar bills
And we waste so many minutes wondering how we will spend it
Me? I would sell mine
I would barter off everything I own
Just to buy some more time to spend with you
Before our goodbyes.

I fell for you
Unconventionally
Because you aren’t perfect
Because you smell like sweat and sawdust
Because an hour with you
Is a guaranteed five laughs
And ten thinks twice-s
Because I didn’t plan on loving you
In fact I fought it like you did
Like a wild beast
With an anger like from being taken from its home land
With its hungry empty belly growls
With demands of its obedience from whips
With the ferocity of a caged lion
But also with the innocent of a boy
Looking at that lion from behind the zoos gate
Because so much of me
Wants to be gentle with you
Just wants to hold your hand
Tell you goodnight
Pour you a cup of coffee in the morning
Tie your tie for you
Unconventionally
At best
And terrifyingly at worst
Because in the middle of the night
I feel like more of a lion than a child
And I want to tear into you
With claws and fangs
Rip you to shreds
Because that’s the only way a lion knows
How to say
You are the finest, most exceptional, rarest person
I have ever met
And really even that is a childish understatement.

The mathematical measurement of emotions
Is based off how fast they run
Set all up at the same level white line
Each toeing the chalky powder on cement
All at once taking off at the sound of a gun
Each running-panting in a race whose finish line
Always wraps around to the start again
In an arena where bullets don’t run out
And the chalk is always fresh
Where the winner and loser always play the same role
As math and measures are stagnant
Offering no hope for healing or progress  
The fast step that tears make
Forever beating out the long strides that hurt takes.

As of late I have felt less like a person
And more like the aftermath of a shattered glass
My body’s innards that were once safely trapped underneath skin
are now sprawled out across the kitchen floor
And the smaller pieces slipped into tiny dust ridden cracks that a broom can’t reach
The parts of myself that used to be neighbors
Have been forcefully relocated to different continents
And no longer recognize one another
It’s exactly like dropping a glass
When the circular base of it
Bounces and shatters it looks like a small jagged crystal crown
Perfectly shaped for house mice
Some mouse king might wear it like I use to wear
My heart.
A symbol of power- of knowing that
If all else fails I have this heart, this crown
So when people look at it they will know without a doubt
That I am good and I am deserving
But now with that piece of my body separate
From my other organs I am not so sure
Being so broken the only hope of reconstruction
Is in that dust pan in the closet
And as it collects my dangerous little shards of organs
I’ll pick up the bigger pieces with my hands
And hope that my blood is thick enough to act as glue.

The moment I saw you
it was if
I had never seen another woman in my life
like all the other women
I had known before
melted into one person
and quietly stepped out the backdoor of my memory
I was aware both by the amount of children in the world
and the amount of drinks being bought by other men at bars
that there were in fact other women
but not for me, the moment I saw you
they all became faded images in someone else’s head
and in mine there you were, and still are, clear as day
standing with drink in hand, mouth moving
and there I was, and still am, waiting for them to stop
just so I can kiss them
like I had, and have, never seen lips before

Dear One, I am sorry to have to appear before you like this.
Dressed in my Sunday’s best, a modest green tie, black coat, black shoes
With silver bracelets clasped around my feet.
I would have liked for you to see me differently
Or perhaps just the same but in a time after this
In a place that is not this, where it is not needed
To have these strong bars and glass not keeping me in
But keeping you out. If only to impede you
From telling me of how much you want for me
Of how your pain parallels my time away
Of how you fear your arms will weaken without my chest
But One, if you have to express this, that which
I already know, when I appear before you I would ask you to
Cover your mouth and to strap your arms at your side
Such formalities necessary to hold in feelings that with-
Would fill my heart too heavy, you see.
Without you it is light and light is how I would like it kept
For when I appear before you like this
I cannot have that weight in my heart collapse me
In arms I won’t feel for years.

I fear a rebellion beginning within my body
The succession of my skin from my muscles
And armies of muscles that will then leave my bones
Who over the years have made such a strong ally in each other
That they would never fight for my heart alone
My heart, whose only comrades are my frail ribs
Bent, bruised, and broken from my lack of care
They stand as the last line of defense
A brave bunch no longer virgins to war
As I have after done battle with them many times before
When my dictator-like brain forces
My skin
My muscles
My bones
Down my throat to grab my heart
Commanding that they snap off my ribs
And use them as swoards
To claim that pumping ***** for its own
But my ribs they never move, they never break
My ribs alone know that a heart that belongs to a mind
Isn’t really a heart at all.

There is something horrifying about being up high
When you look down at things and people that
Are suppose to be bigger than yourself
But then suddenly having the roles reversed
And then it is you that is God to them
But a God that would die none the less
Just to meet his darker equal
I think-
I hope I get to meet death
To shake his hand
Look him in the eye
And say, “You aren’t so scary now”
To be free of terror finally
And know what it is like
To live without expectations of horror
To be able to go to the empire state building
It would be nicer then, once dead
I wouldn’t be afraid of heights then
And really death would tell me then,
“It was never the height you were afraid of.”
He would be right.
It’s the death that puts the fear in heights

Why did you leave me here?
In a wool coat with
Wheat straws still in my hair
To fight,
To be captured,
To be captured, and
To contract the fate
Of most
Who find themselves
In the same
imprisoned war
But for you it was
Far too soon for
Both mine and
Your liking.  
And it was far too
Inglorious to die
With your heart in
An angry fist.

I loved her body
And I used it up
The parts I liked
I drank up with a fever
Of thirst
That left her
Dry and frail
And I would have felt bad
If I wasn’t so
Dry and frail
When I met her
And now I suppose she’ll
Go
And find someone else
Whose parts she likes
And after that we’ll both be hydrated enough
To look at the parts we aren’t so fond of.

I’m the luckier of the two of us
I get to see you
In a way you could never see yourself
The better way to look at you
A way that’s not in a reflection
Or in a photograph
In a way that allows me to see how your eyes light up
When you talk about your passions
How your smile crinkles more to the left
When your eyes are closed
How every part of you glows when you feel love
And believe me I crave every part of that glow-
Especially your eyes, the kind you could get lost in
And I guess I did
And since I am the luckier of us two
I promise to always look closely
And to always tell you intimately
Of all the things about you, you aren’t lucky enough to see.

My breathing is heavy.
A force straddles my body, it pushes and thrusts over my chest
It starts to apply pressure to invisible heart wounds
I would not have known were their but for
The crushing weight intended to stop their bleeding.
Now feeling dry of blood I wait for the elephantine like force
To retreat, to allow my breathe back into my chest,
But as I look down at my chest I don't see wounds
Just you. I ask please get off.
And your weight still sits unapologetic-ally over my body
My breathing has slowed now.
Your pressure reacts and heightens as it moves higher up my form
Now it is perched atop of my neck
Now I can’t speak, can’t tell you to move, can’t vocalize
How your weight aches.
How I would ask you to please get off
My breathing is undetectable.
Bricks of your flesh rest atop of my head, now you've moved higher
The weight of you ebbs into my pores
Travels through my veins and pours into my thoughts
You and your crushing pressure have been absorbed
And now weigh on my mind
And to be frank you are quite heavy
So please get off.

I have this house of a heart
Each pump of blood
Blows open a window artery
Leaving all the rooms a bit too drafty
And I have never been able to find a sweater
Because there is no light in a rib-caged heart
It is not a sanctuary of a place
It’s one that keeps time and rhythm, yes
But the rhythm is only echoed back into itself
Confusing my muscles red as brinks
The rhyme throws off the time
And the record that places in my house of a heart
Skips and repeats its song
So I can never remember to feel around for a sweater
Or even to wait and feel that it’s too cold.

I love you in ways
That the word love cannot fully carry
In ways that that word could never hold
Without buckling over from the weight.
Sometimes I think it’s because there are not
Enough letters in the word love
And all that I feel for you cannot balance
On a number as small as four.
Sometimes I worry they will loose their footing
Way up there on love, too big for only four foot holes
And they will fall down to earth
But I love you in ways that don’t make me afraid
To blow away the crumbs,
Dirt,
Pieces of dust bunnies,
That cover the thing that is more than love
That I have for you
I will rub it on my heart
And keep it there clean
Until I find a bigger word than love
To fit between I and you.

one of eight strapped to this tree
with threats of knifes that turn bark into skin
branches into limbs
if only the connections deep as my roots
did not entangle my own mortality if only they
could be severed easily as my leafs in fall
then perhaps my pinch dripped heart
would not punish those who hurt it
whom at first pruned with the promise of love
then betrayed with blades of unrequited rapture
those whom just did not understand the veins between
life and limb.

I’m violent by nature
Where even the fondest of nurture
Has only ever been enough to barely suppress
The violence that slips into my unconscious silence
But all these violent thoughts I keep safe
Sitting on a bar stool alone with them
A couple dozen other people around me
Staring at me buying me drinks
Wanting to lace their
Fingers around the base of my skull
Wanting to pull my thoughts forcefully out of me
But I never let them
I will never let them get to you- my violent thoughts
Don’t worry I’ll never let them touch you
I’ll never sell you out
Instead I’ll go home alone tonight, sed for your quiet company
And lay in my bed and let your circle up in me
Spinning around until you are comfortable enough
To spill yourself out onto my dreams
And so you do and unapologetically unleash
Every single thought of hate and of spite
That in my consciousness you are too modest to show.

Find me a place where heartache ends
And when you find it, mark it with an “X”
But instead of burring gold there
Bury you’re betrayal, bury it deep
In a wooden box with a padlock
So that even over the years
When the salty air and crashing waves
Erode that sandy grave
And that pain surfaces again
I’ll have had enough time
To wash in the tide
The smell of you from my clothes
To baptize myself in the sea
From your sinful touches
To let the waves beat down
On my ears so loud
They’ll forget how your name sounds
When that wooden box floats
Back to me on the opposite side of the shore
Then I’ll know when it’s safe to come back to that place
And I’ll brush off the “X” you put there
Because that’s where the heartache ends.

my spine grows further and further
up my neck it releases seeds of thought
upblooming in my very heavy head
weeds and flowers alike it drops
enwombed in my crescent head
the weeds grow right
the flowers grow left
each soil my mind with beauty and reason
the flowers they speak
of creating and love all other things ascetic
the weeds teach me logic, numbers, and phrases
they warn me of anything poetic
I am inclined to deny my bias for either
For such a balance they create
But as of late I am pruning my mind with deft
And find that I am of Ehud’s left.

You seem like something incarnate
Something like the ocean
It loves, weeps, kisses the shore
It defies all attempts
At being captured with words
And rejects all lyrical shackles
A poet’s only shortcoming
No matter what I can say about you
There is always that which I can’t
You are the ocean and I am your shore.

A eulogy to the somebody
I claim to have used to know
It is scribbled on paper
Napkin
Receipt
Whatever
Behind my wood rotten desk
Under frost kissed drink rings and
And like all the other letters before it
Creased and folded into shoe boxes on top shelves
They all begin the same
And that part I have memorized
As I count the licks
Against the roof of my mouth
The slides of my tongue just beyond
The edge of my teeth
The drop of my head
I match with the dip of my voice
When I say, “A terrible loss”
But the words I have now bent
And smudged across one another
In the palm of my fist-formed hand
Have bled through their paper
And like no eulogy before I have
Nothing to say.
My head hung over what I know realize
Is just some body
That held somebody I used to know.

We were planets that collided
In a perfect black sky
Searching for similar skin to share.

I used to know someone
A someone with a funny neck tie
One that was white
And flipped the wrong way around his shirt
He told me he knew what hell was
He said to me, “hell is the end of the world
When the meteor, or the bomb,
Or the death of compassion
Hits our planet
And you alone survive, standing there
Naked and raw and scared
Senses impaired
Burnt and singed hair
You were the only one spared
But then, then you see someone else
And as they walk towards you
You see it’s you, the you you
Could have become if you didn’t give up
And in this other version of you all you see
Are the reflections of your mistakes and
Chances you didn’t take
And you sit there for eternity
Faced with who you should have been.

I am a mountain.
Oh, the valley of person I used to be
You remember, I was so deep.
So deep that
You  blew off the dust
gently -
From your binoculars
Just to see what was at my bottom
The valley of myself that at one time
Was so rough and so steep  
That when you climbed down to touch the
Base of who I really was
Because  for you a look wasn’t enough
You came up I’ll admit victorious
But bloodied.
The last of you I saw
Were  your red footprints leading away
So since you’ve been gone
I am a mountain.
I have turned myself inside out
Rivaling Everest
Every sore and bump, you can see now!
I have made it so all you have to do is look up.
Now all I do is look down
Waiting for bandaged footprints
To walk beside the red ones
Only in a different direction.

On a Wednesday I bit down hard
Into an apple.
The red ringed hues of crimson
I thought would taste better to my mouth
Than to my eyes
Until the sweet juice dripped down
Onto my chin
Leaving a sticky residue that ******
On my fingers when I wiped it away.
The one bite of flesh I held in my open mouth
Less open than my eyes
That first saw that thing.
That half of a worm that
Still wriggled for life
Hung half out a hole in my apple
Like a drowning man hanging out of a
Bouie waving his arms franticly for help
But underneath the water his
Legs still and deader than what
I can either assume to be the head or end
Of the worm still in my mouth.

I think if you would let me
I’d treat you like the night sky
I’d bundle up all of your wonderful traits and
Perfect flaws and mysterious unknowns
And I’d create a constellation for them
I’d search for it with my telescope endlessly
I know you don’t see yourself
The way I see you
And you still sometimes argue with me when I call you wonderful
But all of the things that you can’t stand about yourself
Are the very things I never want to go a day without
I think that if you let me I’d build you an
Observatory out of hundreds mirrors
Each facing you just so you could see yourself up close
I’d make you sit in front of it simply to show you
All of the other constellations
Who will never have stars that shine
As bright as yours.

Promise me you will not
Spend too much time talking
Forever busy diluting oxygen from atoms
So that you eventually forget
And I mean, truly forget,
How much you love the sound
Of another’s voice
Embrace the ache you feel not when you
Are lonely and miss someone to talk to
But when you are alone and have no one to listen to
Always remember how much
Every word you’ve ever heard has kept you company
And promise that even on this circular planet
When you stand up as tall as you can
And then when you can’t see the end of it
That you will look anyway
To find the people worth listening to
And even if you sometimes slump over the curve on this earth
And your stomach aches with the pressure of your arched body
Over this rounded mass of a planet
Remember that you can ease the pain by keeping your chin prompt up
And your eyes always forward
Place your face in my hands if you must
I’ll hold it steady so you can have a better view
Of this world and the people in it
And every now and then I’ll turn your head
So you can look in a different direction.
And if the thunders of this world are really just the growling
Of your stomach over top of it
Know you can feed that ache with the stories of others
And when they get hungry you can tell your own story
One free from the ignorance of not listening to others
That have taken the time too, to get a better world view
When you do speak keep in mind all that you’ve seen
Promise me to wait when you come back down to earth
And you have something true to say.
Promise that when you’re done saying it that
You will listen even better than before
Even if all they have to say back is I love you too.

I love this part.
When your lips still are brightly colored
alphabet letters and my forehead is still a giant white
refrigerator
When even after just an hour passes
I miss our hands touching
and you might get mad-
and you might say, "already?"
and I laugh and look down at my boots and say,
"yes, already."
then you take my face in your hands
and you tell me, "I like the way you do certain thing, the way you say certain words."
I love this part, when I can still think to myself
isn't it strange that we used to be strangers
I feel like we meet way before that.

How smart we were to eat pieces of one another
To keep small portions of each other
Hidden cleverly inside us
The little bits of you secretly tickling
The inside of my stomach
They don’t feel like butterflies
More like birds of prey
Dancing with angels
Their wings brushing up against me
When the joy of their movements
Allow them to forget themselves
And spread their wings full.

The first time I saw her, her body looked like an exit wound, not physically and now sometime later in my memory I think it was maybe the way she said certain words. Words like “hollow” and “soundless” the combination of these two words strung together with other smaller and slightly weaker ones in between made me think of a match hitting gasoline or of a bullet being loaded into a gun.

The water is always calmest at night, sometime around one or two on the Carolina coast. It’s right around the time the moon has grown tired of pulling the earth towards it; when its hands are shaking from holding in something so big, when the water takes a little bit longer each time to kiss the shore. I’ve learned to love how the water looks at night, it seems more selfless to me than it does during the day when the sunshine reflects the peaks and breaks of each wave, when the water is clear and you can see into every part of it. It’s different at night, it becomes a blackened mirror reflecting only the images of those awake long enough to see it, and it’s much more humble- to show off other people.

My body is a map
One that isn’t pinned up by pushpins
On plenty of pinning boys bedroom walls
Too big to see individual trees but big enough
To hold hopes and dreams
Strung together by red lines and black words
That title places they have yet to have seen
But man, how they wish they could visit me.
No, my body is more of a landscape
Still sitting on a easel that belongs to an artist
Who cannot bring himself to hang me up yet
Who can’t yet declare my permanence with a tac
My body is like that that.
Held in a state of constant change but only minutely
My mountains and streams haven’t changed for years
But the leafs on my branches transform ever so slightly
With aging paint brush strokes
That only I and my artist know are there
My features have no home
No place on a map to pin
They hold a kind of secret place that only
Few have seen but none could not say wasn’t me
But I still look similar to places they have already seen
No, my body is more like art.
When I was born I was naked like you
Pale with promise
And over time I was colored with age
I was wrinkled with paint
And damaged with a sometimes heavy hand
But even with the same wood skeleton as you
My un-uniformed array of colors
Only represent what I really am.

Isn’t it strange how we as writers choose our muse based off of its ability to **** us? Mine, a woman, a girl really. Her face is not beautiful it is fragile, nor is her body it is frail. She looks almost dead to me, freshly buried; hair thin and untouched; skin just now starting to fall off her bones kind of dead. I would think she was but for her eyes. Perhaps too close together and perhaps a little too big for her face but either way they echo the most wonderful hue of vein-blue. They are beautiful. They ruin me. They make me want to start a militia. Run down the street naked. Proclaim my love for blood. Open up my veins that on the surface promise one color but spill a completely different one. She makes me hate my body. Makes me realize its trickery, that it would promise me her eyes in my bloodstream but when I cut myself open to see them, to touch them I am left with nothing but me. My body, blood red when my favorite color has always been her eyes.

You said you keep the best secrets.
No one keeps secrets as well as you.
They are never as safe as they are when whispered
Into your ears to hold.
In that moment all I wanted to be was a secret.
A quiet whisper entering your ears to stay.

Can I be cavalier with a heart
That doesn’t belong to me
Can I afford the same careless
Actions to be inflicted onto someone else
As I have inflected them onto my own heart
Will I not feel knots in my stomach
And pains in my chest if I allow
The dread in my heart
To stain another’s who
I promised to keep untainted
Promised to hold with gentle hands
And look at with kind eyes
To blow off the dust that settles
On it after too much time
Without enough use
I said I would love your heart for
As long as mine would pump
But is that promise broken
If the beating slows so severely
It severs the sound of the second hand
Tick of a tenuous time keeper
My heart as always been my keeper
And it’s working at a slower rate
Than is needed for oxygen
To run through my veins
And into to my muscles
Making my mouth lethargic
And unable to not be cavalier
With the words I love you
And to shy away from someone else’s heart
I promised to love till mine stopped beating.

I remember her red dress, of how when night came it’s thin straps slipped over her thinner shoulders falling slowly into a wrinkled circle on my floor. I remember her seeing me seeing her put it on in front of our ice curtained window the next morning and even though that dress was too short for autumn she would wear it anyway. I think because she knew it drove me crazy. She would hide it underneath her long winter sweater like she was keeping safe a secret that was only just for me. When she put on that sweater the light from the dawn would sneak out through the tiny holes in the fabric kissing sun-ray freckles on her pale unmarked body. She pulled it over her head ever so slowly. The leisurely motion in some way made me image a 9 year old boy I who for the first time that winter hesitated to pull but his snow boots over thickly crocheted socks.  His feet look like her head in some way. Both are somewhat unwilling to slide into warmer weather clothes; hiding a secret warming joy.

And so it happened the
Brisk slip into intimacy
Into the non-peaceful intrusion
Of our souls
And surely it should have  
We made each other question or choices
Skew our realities
Change our day to day lives
And mark a before and after in our timelines
You aren’t Che Guevara
You aren’t Pancho Villa  
You’re a normal person
Who managed to revolutionize my life.

You pledge allegiance to a certain type of government.
A nation that is ruled by fat men
in ***** dens who fill the air so heavy with smoke
it tears up your eyes so you can water their poppy fields
and all the while with your right hand over your heart
that beats feverishly with the influx
of toxins that mix with your blood
and dilute the red poppy petal
with clear atoms that bubble on spoons
in the shape of bone crossed skulls.
They rule with iron fists clenched around
green paper that they take from you only
to sell you back  fresh needles as necessary happiness
to counteract the sadness they have created and placed you in.
They sit there with smoke rings coming from o-shaped lips
that ring around the perpetual cycle of
supply and demand-
supplying addiction and wrapping it in itches
and demanding your free left hand scratch
and you do, you scratch so hard that your skin opens up
and the pain requires more relief.
The nation you live in waves its flag with
173 stars representing the heating point at Celsius and not celestial
because space is far away from this place
and it offers too much unknown for you to think
that there is a different world besides the one they own
and maybe there is true happiness there
somewhere where hands are free from swollen veins
that act as puppet strings.
Where bail and bailiffs and bars and blame and
bang your head into brick barriers aren’t standing between you, brother.

The best things in life are free
The littlest things in life matter the most
This poem was free and it is little
It is for you the best thing that matters most.

I think I knew you as a child
not then you were young but when I was.
you weren't a child at all to me
in fact I think you were something else entirely,
a haunting shadow at my back
less peter pan and more boogie man
I could feel you growling at the bottom of my ears
hot breath wet with spit whispering things I couldn't understand yet
you were frightening-
the reason I slept with all the lights on
and the closet door always either wide open or completely shut
my fear of what you were slept in my dreams
it manifested your face in my imagination
as I had never been brave enough to look at it
as a minster with fangs and claws
gills and wings, things that couldn't exist together
that somehow all lived on you.
I was seven or so when I first felt you
and not knowing what to call you I shouted at you all the names
of all the four letter words my little ears had hear
from much older mouths
I used to hear you though, your feet bumped to the beat of my
heart like you  wanted to match my pace
like you thought I walked with my heart as my feet
your breath was as heavy as mine
and sometimes I swore you lived inside me
how else would you know the structure of my organs so well
I lost you around 20 when
I learned that monsters weren't real they were just something that
bore from vivid and growing children's brains
a year later I meet you again
I didn't know your face but you felt like
something I felt before
you made my heart race,
my fever pace around apartments and staircases
my breath struggled to keep up
and so did yours as you chased me
matching my foot steps and labored breaths
acting like a shadow around noon that reapeared again
after you thought it left
the monster I had known as a child
really was you wasn't it?
something powerful and scary and unknown, but familiar
I wish I would have looked under my bed sooner
I wish that instead of having fear for fangs I had strength to see your eyes
yo find out sooner that monsters don't live under beds or in closets
and they don't exist solely for children
that monsters can live inside us
and if we just look at them without covering our eyes with fingers our blankets
we could see that the unknown isn't a masked monster
that what is masked could be love,
be it scary and unknown
it lives in us just the same
wanting to be seen for what it is and what it is is what we are
apart of ourselves that never changes or ages and
knows us wholly as us, even down to how or organs are structered.

I want a love
A love like the moon has found
In the sun
The sun, who dies everyday
So the moon can live
And the moon who dies every night
Just the same.
They extinct themselves for the others existence.

The time will surely come any day now
When I walk up to the front door
When I arrive I’ll knock feverishly, almost impatient
And from the inside I’ll hear it; I’ll turn the **** and open the door
I’ll greet myself and we’ll smile at the recollection of ourselves
We’ll sit down at the dinner table
And talk candidly of memories we share
We’ll eat and drink, I’ll pour another glass of wine
After I’ve politely asked for more, and added “this is delicious”
I’ll excuse myself early and I’ll understand as I give a kiss goodbye
Then I’ll shut the door slowly with a wave between the crack
I’ll wave back and backs against each other we’ll
Walk back to our separate lives lived in separate times
Knowing that surely the time will come again when our stranger past
Will knock at our door to recollect our shared collections of time.