I never noticed the sound before
When I stumble into sleep at night
The sound of a thousand
Militant ants crawling through my thoughts
Eating them up
Creating mazes of my memories
Now its all I can do to muffle their mouths
Munching on my membranes
Mimicking movements of mimes sprayed with mace
Pacing through their tunnels trotting past my
Old thoughts and lingering ideas
It’s all I can hear now
When I stumble into sleep at night
The slow decay of the little things in my brain
And the hope they eat you away with everything else.

I want to be your keeper
Offer you a safer place than this planet to live
Come stay with me, make me your home
So that if some days this planet
Rips you into shreds so tiny
That the pieces get caught in the wind
And turns you into confetti
Forever searching for its celebration
Know that I will always be home
Sitting, waiting, looking foolish in a birthday hat
So you know where to go.

There is a sort of romance one can find at a bar
A mysterious sense of love
Removed from everyday life
From work or phone calls home
If you close your eyes you can hear it
The clacking of ice-cube
The clacking of glass
The slow pour of a beer
The faster swish of it being
Slid down to your hand
Bumping once or twice on the uneven wooden surface
The slightly cold drip running down the side of your glass
These sounds are romantic
Hemmingway wrote at a bar
Odds are your parents feel in love in one
First kisses and embraces with friends you’ve missed
They happen at a bar
If you close your ears you can see it
A dingy light from over head
A spotlight for a pretty girl’s smile
The colors that the last sip of whisky
After they’re watered down with ice
The swooshing hues of red and white
Inside wine glasses from a couple a few seats down
The hand of the bartender covering yours
As you hand them their tip
And in that same second lock eyes
Before quickly looking down
A love in a life before this one maybe.
One can find romance in a bar
In the littlest of things
When paid attention to
They hold a sense of mystery.

There aren’t a lot of things in this world that make me truly happy; in fact upon further reflection, there's nothing at all that completely does other than you, things merely distract me from the inescapable fact that I've been perpetually lonely my entire life up to this point. Only the thought of you distracts me long enough to make time without you bearable, to make me hold on just a little longer to see you again so you can fill the void in my soul that has been eating at my stomach since you left. I love you like this. And when you aren’t around me images of you age backwards in my memory and comfort me to the point of almost wholeness and at the same time a vast emptiness. Knowing that thoughts of you aren’t the same as your lips on my forehead and that they don’t fix the loneness I tend to align myself with without you here. When you’re gone I stick my hands in my pockets more. I thumb the hole in the bottom of that fabric feeling for the last penny to my name and realizing that it slipped down through that whole, through my pant leg, onto strange and unknown ground. That is something like how I feel without you. Like how I can remember touching you at some point and wanting to hold onto you for dear life but the second I let go, you fell through a hole that I couldn’t follow you through. So now I am penniless. That is the most heart sinking feeling. Being so lonely that my heart swells with heavy emptiness; it falls through my body down to my feet and I am forced to stomp on it with every step I take. Each stride squeezing out more and more blood so that by the time I have walked miles to see you again I pass out in your arms.  I tell you, “Lovely to see you again, I missed you so much.” Then I am happy and whole again.

I promise to keep writing
About all of this
To document all of our stories
And read them over and over again
Until the stories
Become less like tall tales
And more like memories
Each repetition making them truer and truer
Making them feel like they happened
Like they were real but only like
In the way that a dream is real
And only because you’ve dreamt the same dream
So many times and only ever to yourself

In the darkest days of our humanity
I often wonder why we thought not
To turn on the lights
Why we condemned wrongs and injustices
To small rooms
And only entered them through back doors
Why the judges of damning deeds
Didn’t dismantle the decay done by guilt
And instead locked that guilt away
Not erasing it but not affording it the right
To catharsis either.
Keeping it in the dark leaving it to fester in and from itself
Why not expose guilt?
I asked
Then thought it strange the answer was in the question
Who does that help?
When has the airing of guilty feelings brought on by damaging deeds
Benefitted the one who owns no stalk in guilt
It is the guilty it helps
It clears their conscious and frees their soul
But so
If theirs is the one tainted shouldn’t it be they
Who have to live with guilt - a punishment
That doesn’t have a casualty count.

Time does not heal all wounds,
Cannot make everything right.
All time is—Is future and
All the future does is leave you with
Immeasurable space filled with ****** earth
And the promise of fresh crops
That could be your thriving life
But for your need to think,
To ponder ,
To wonder,
To mull over every decision
Rake over every choice
Picking up and turning over
Every hard as rock thought.
Planting new bulbs tainted with old ideas
As you purge out all of your memories
Just to sift through each one
with your ***** hands—naked without gloves
The muddied clumps of soil riddled with the worms
Of things you used to know
Slipping through your fingers
As you pull them apart and leave them,
The tufts of unfermented soil
There on the ground.
More broken up than they were in your own head.

I know how the final moments of my life are going to be spent. I will be sitting on a second hand couch, one I got from some yard sale after talking the woman down from thirty bucks to twenty. The couch is itchy and fills up half the three hundred a month attic I’m renting out. I’ll have some music playing in the background something slow and hazy, maybe a mix CD I got from a friend whose name has escaped me. I’ll get up only once or twice that whole night just to rub out the scratches on that CD, I’ll spit on it wipe it on my pants put it on repeat and sit back down. Its three in the morning, and much like tonight, I am just sitting trying to think of something, anything else.  The only light that falls on my clasped hands comes from the open refrigerator door; I’ve been too busy to shut it, anyway there isn’t anything in there to be spoiled. The rent is due, bills need to be paid and I’m trying not to think of all that. What I’ve chosen to fixate on is that light and how it changes with my swaying head; a spot light for my angst. As I’m swaying and thinking and not I’ll drift off. I’ve had too much to drink and am so very tired and I’ll wonder who this couch is going to make itch next.

You seem tired of it all
The constant and always puzzle
Of living and doing
Of being and breathing
I am too
Come with me then
And we’ll leave it all far and further away
I’ll knock at your door
With dreams in my eyes
And blankets in my hands
And you’ll still be awake
And you’ll open the door
And if you’d like we’d just leave
I’d take you everywhere that’s different
I’d show you wonderful places
Places nobody else knows
And if you’d like the perfect places of sleep.

Loving me is hell
The brim ****** coal melt the
The rubber base of my shoes
Leaving my soles bare-
And red and raw-
Pulsating with heat-
Pumping blood into my skin in attempts to
Make it alive again.
But my body is faulty
And it does not know the flakes around my toes
Are already gone
And any aid to save them is as useless
As rubber trying to fight fire.
Loving me is hell
Because when my feet are the first to die I cannot stand any longer
And I will need you to carry my rotisserie rotten
Soles to where ever it is you wish me to go
And at first your arms are strong enough to hold my weight
But like everything else
Like the iron on statues like
The wood that built a house
They will weaken
And I will only be a burden of a beast
With soles so black you will wonder how a soul
Could stay in that fire and still be in tacked
And into that fiery hell you will consider throwing my body back
Because loving me is just like that

I hope your love for me is like  
Early morning coffee.
And I am your favorite mug
When you take me out of the cabinet
Pour into me your energy and motivation
All the things that make you smile when you are tired
Will you set me down gently then
Wait for me to cool off
And kiss me slowly with a smile
Sipping the sleep out of your eyes
Walk me around your house
Careful with the handle.
Looking down at the floor
Make sure all that’s burning up inside me
Stays below the surface and
Doesn’t jump out to burn your toes
You wouldn’t care if it did though
You just wouldn’t want parts of me
That you love so much to be wasted outside
Your favorite mug.

The difference between me and her is that I was built for this ****. I was forged in heartbreak and birthed into quiet suffering, but I’ve conquered my demons and I’ve slept with angels. I’ve been taken advantage of, I’ve robbed, lied and lied to, I’ve been hungry and full, I’ve been drug through the mud and then after I’ve washed myself off time and time again. I was built for this ****, to be the stronger person. To be the person who won’t fall apart, the person who- over time will mend my tiny broken and cut up heart till all that’s left is a bruise and I’ll live with it. To be the person who can take rejection off the hands of someone who wasn’t built for that kind of ****. Never think of me as shattered, but rather a mosaic off all the battles I’ve lost and won. That’s the difference. I can take this ****.

I cannot breathe with these words in my mouth.
So long they have lived in my thoughts and too
Long perhaps have I ignored their cries for release,
Too long have they had nothing other to do than to multiply
To feed off one another creating sentences and paragraphs and
Books of their anguish, of their hate for their keeper,
They have swelled too big for my heavy head to hold
These words, they seek room, they seek open air, to breathe free.
They look for it everywhere.
They seep into my eyes pushing out buckets
Of water, eddying around themselves, elbowing at
Themselves for space to be spoken, and I their master
Hold tight the dam they push at.
They drip defeated down my throat as I swallow
The lump they’ve shaped
And in attempts to follow the air they yearn for
They sit at the base of my lungs.
Spawning bigger with time they push their
Way up again my throat, they spill out into
My mouth as I try to hinge shut my lips
They gag and choke my lungs wetting my eyes
Blushing my face. And with irony they fill my mouth so
Fully, I cannot release them.
These words that were so
Simple and few at first, now only spawn
my strong undying feeling of regret, the regret
Of never saying the words I’d always felt.

One’s own personal philosophy cannot be
Accurately expressed in words
Nor can it very well be spoken out loud
The only blueprint offered to guide
One through the psyche of their own mind
Are the choices they make.
It is in their choices do their stances stand firm
And their beliefs made to be believed in
I do not think
I will not accept
And I cannot support
The idea that choices are only two
They are many and they are often
And they change and they are tried by life
They are what shapes one’s philosophy
Because they are the things that
Torture out the truth.

I’ve always been better at writing than speaking. I find the silent confidence the written word is capable of more beautiful than anything. There is something ironically meek to me about speaking. Speaking is rarely done alone and its constant inflation from other people’s responses tend to distort the true meaning of the original words being spoken. Silence is pure- being untouched by other biases allows the validity of it to always be certain. Unlike the spoken word, the written one alone is found in this surety of truth.

With no secretes and with no lies
I love you
Although we have had so many words
Talked about so many things
These are the words that matter
And maybe the other things we say to each other
Aren't so important after all
But that we are alive together and as
Present for each other as best we can be
That’s what counts
Every finger you laced in between mine
Even when they were sweaty with nerves
Every touch of my hand to your shoulder
Even when you already had so much rested on them
Every word we spoke to each other when we said I love you
With no secretes and with no lies.

I think it lives in me
My horror
The eyes of a creator
exiled from human existence
And displaced into dark corners
Of my increasingly less human heart
I think you’ve seen it
After a few tequila shots
In the heat of an argument
In the mumbles of a deep sleep dream
And it frightened you
To not only suspect but to know
That something so dark could live
In someone you held in light
And if this is the reason you ran away
I understand
My horror lives in me
And as soon as I’m sure it is sealed
It won’t be and it will slither up my stomach
And spools itself around my heart
Squeezing my blood into the far tips of my fingers
And the ends of my toes
And I’ve pricked them my phalanges
On the sharpest needles
In hopes I could drain myself of it
But I never can
See- my horror lives as me
And from time to time
I hide it long enough to love
And sometimes be loved back
But my horrors don’t go for that
They are a jealous thing that can love only me

Would it be too much to ask
That we use this bed as a cocoon
And wrap ourselves so tightly in blankets
That we forget that there is outside for awhile
Morph ourselves together  
And only to each other
Finally emerging as something different than what we
Were before
Something easier to handle than two
Something more simple like one.

no one loves like we do
no one appreciates the weight of another's
hand inside our own
nor the wrinkles from another's body
in bedsheets
nor the balance of another's heart
on our sleeve
not quite like we do.

The thing that I think you don’t realize
Is that all I create all the art I make
All of the words I tie into poetry
All of the ink I let seep onto paper-
All the inventions of creativity
I can conjure from nothingness
And from-bore a wonderful something-ness
All of the art in all of the bones
In all of my body
Is all you.

I believe you should suffer in life.
To solidify it, make it solid,
Real.
Even in your sleep.
And even in your dreams
You should dream of knifes and of guns
Pointed square at your heart
The sound of the gun clocking back
The rush of the knife slicing your skin
Should be as painful and drawn out
As when you awake in the morning,
Patting your bed for liquids
Checking your sheets for the blood stains
You could have sworn would be there and
Are bewildered they aren’t.
Even in the sleep where
Your body and mind
Still let you act like a child
With your puckering lips,
Grasping fingers,
Inaudible grumbles,  
Droll dripping onto your pillow,
Should then be invaded by
Dreams of that knife and of that gun
That makes you wet the bed
Where there should be blood.

I love you in ways immeasurable
On timelines that have no end
In cups that aren’t marked
And on rulers that aren’t straight
In some ways I love you like a child
Who never learns that the stove is hot
And in some ways like a student
Reading and studying you all night  
Always I love you but sometimes
In ways I don’t understand
Like how I love you like I love
Salt, and water, and sand
Though the ocean still seems too deep
Like how I love you in my dreams
But not always when you steal covers in my sleep
I love you in strange ways that I fear
Will never be truly known
Like how I love you for years
In one day that you’re not home
Or like how my love for you
Is a poem always writing about itself,
Folding up its words and placing them on the very top shelf.

Promise me you will not
Spend too much time talking
Forever trying to dilute oxygen from atoms
So that you eventually forget
I mean, truly forget
How much you love the sound
Of my voice
Embrace the ache you feel in my voices
Absence when you go away
So that you always remember how much
Every word I spoke to you kept you company
Promise me that even on this circular planet
When you stand as tall as you can
That even though you can’t see the end
That you will look anyway
And when you look you will always be searching for me
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
That you will 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 all you
Can be
And that way you’ll never really have to search for me
You’ll feel me under you holding you up
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
Ill feed that ache with my song, my poem,
My nighttime lullaby that didn’t last long enough
You don’t need to convert oxygen in that atmosphere
And either way if you choose to talk
No one would hear you, so don’t waste your breath.
Promise me to wait to talk 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 to me then
Even if all I have to say back is I love you.

Walk with me
From the sun into the ocean
From the water into the sand
Let’s make our steps as powerful as lightening
And just as bright and when our toes
Touch the shore
Let’s make glass
A purer and more beautiful element
And when the trash collectors pick up
Our footprints and throw them hastily
Into bags
Even the way we shatter will be beautiful
We’ll be glass in a world of plastic.

Do you know how often I speak of you
Even when you aren’t around?
No one notices as I don’t speak of you
In words nor in phrases
But the spaces in between them
Vacant as you are-
The pauses marked by punctuations
When written but when spoke-
Marked by nothing anyone else can hear
They are an empty space in time
To everyone else who doesn’t know
To me they are filled with you
Even when you aren’t around.

My eyes don’t light up when I hear your name anymore,
That fire that would spark in my eyes has given way
To my natural icy blue.
My heart has stopped racing when I see you
And a slower heart keeps my blood running thin
The chills that use to coat my body when you smiled are gone
And I am now left unclothed in the wind
With cold eyes and thin blood and a naked body
But my mind is slowly starting to warm up by itself again
It has pushed you to the back of my skull
And labeled you under a bad memory
Where the heat of your body cant reach my eyes
And convince me to see myself for who you told me I was:
A cold beast who needs someone elses heat.
Without your warm touch I can feel myself
Being able to feel who I am again
Separate from your fire, I can remember how to build my own
And even if I have only just learned how to pick up two sticks
The promise of my own warmth heats me thaw.

There is no passion to be found
In small things
Thoughts, people, places
That cannot hold a word so big
A notion of human emotion
That can barely contain itself
It is not one for small things
Where the strongest of emotions
Are tethered by reins
To chariots hell bent on driving to reason
Passion is a horse that will never trot straight
Will never drink the water
Because it will never arrive to a lake
Passion drives itself- its master is itself and
Uses humans as little more
Than vessels to serve its own means
And I shout, “God, let them!”
Let passion use our bodies and our minds
Let this force stronger than us guide us
To places bigger than our small minds
Will ever take us to
Let us fall into the wild and live off
What passion has been thriving on for years
Trust an emotion that lives longer
Than we ever could and let it teach us something
About making a small life big.

I would call it love.
If you would-
It would validate every feeling
I feel when you are away
I think it would
Remind me that we are two
Healthy organs
In a sick body we named the world
And even through you call me heart
And I call you lung
And even though we aren’t in the same place
In this body
I still pump blood for you
And you still filter air for me
And I’d call that love
If you would.

Sometimes I sit down and I try
To find new things to cry about
Because crying has never come naturally to me
And once I’ve cried about something
I can rarely cry for it a second time
And anyway someone once told me
That crying is healthy- is human
And that’s all anybody wants- just to be human
To be a small part of the bigger humanity
And I try every now and then
To feel the humanity in myself
Even if just for a second- even if it’s just me crying over
One shoe in the middle of the highway.

I wish to be my mother
But I am proud to be her daughter
To be a person
Who has had the privilege
Of hearing her heart beat
From both the out and inside.

Monsters are real, though they are not adorned with red eyes
Not seen with curled upper lips, with giant claws
They are under your mind’s cache appearing only when
Your world goes dark, when they feel safe under blanketed
Eyes and pursed lips covering and concealing
Their tainted dark intentions
They hide under your bones, they sharpen
Their teeth
And the tips of your ribs
Swapping shoulders  
You can’t tell which from which
They encase your heart, no they
Pierce through your chest
They hide in the dip of your voice
When you say things like “love” or “hate”
Dropping syllables of doubt in words
You realize are no longer your own.

Sorry and love are two words you’ve worn out for me
I will never truly believe either again
And that has to be the worst thing you’ve done to me
I broke my own heart loving you
You killed what was left of the good in me
And if I had the chance to hurt you the same
I’d want to, so bad
But I wouldn’t.
It hurts but it’s okay, I’m used to it.

I think some days
I am not wholly me
I am solely my own, I know
but some days I feel like only half of who I am
its not like the other half of me is missing
I know fully where, if I were to split,
where the other half would surely go
it would go with you
and while I am sitting or writing or
doing nothing of particular importance
a part of me would be carried with you
if you knew it or not
I would fold the extra half of my being
into the creases of your pant leg
the underside of your tie clip
or the heels of your feet
so that with every movement your body makes
I could make it too and then at least half of me
could dance with you.
and if there is ever a day when I feel  
a little heavier than my whole I'll know
that half of you yearned to dance with me
some days too.

I feel sorry for the broken
Teenage girls
The ones who, on the inside,
Could have used a bit more superglue
To hold their organs together
Who are instead of strong, are fragile
Fragile and noisy with each breath
The loud clanging their lungs make
Sounds like too little change
In too big of a pocket.

I fell for you
I felt you without you using your hands to touch me
And in the beginning you never touched me
That’s how I knew because I didn’t touch you either
A touch would tell too much
And isn’t it strange how we used to be strangers
And suddenly we were anything but lone rangers
Wondering this plane alone
We had each other at a distance
Far enough for a passing glance
But strong enough for that glance to move glaciers
Without your hands touching me
I felt home shift its meaning from a place to a person
And without you I feel home sick
I fell for you
And you warned me about it
With every half hug or taken back stare
But even if I can’t even be a welcome mat for you
Know I will always choose to live in you
I’ll choose you.
Every time
Over and over again
Without pause
Without so much as a heartbeat in between my answer.

Monsters and hearts are not too different
Their presence is only known by their uncertain existence
Be it, in dark bedrooms or in dark rib caged chests
They are both feared in their tangible appearance
A fear that they could both strike out violently
And at any time, suddenly jumping out of those
Places you can’t see
Only to show their faces to you for the first time
As the last thing you’ll ever see.

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.

I wonder if my mother ever struggled
With whether to give me roots or wings-
If she looked at me as a seed or as an egg-
I wonder if as a child she thought of
Planting me in the earth, letting me grow strong
In one spot she see could always see
And I could always call my home
I wonder if when I was born
She stretched out my arms
Noted their strength and deemed them fit to fly
From one corner of this world to the other-
To her, was I an impending tree or bird
I wondered if she wondered
As she pushed me out of her arms
But then I knew she always knew I could fly.

meet someone you want to write poems about
and instead sit at your computer for hours
taunting yourself with their voice?
feeling it warm the back of your head as their
words flows through your ears?
even now I can taste them sweet
as they drip down into my mouth.

What if when the dust finally settles
And the tides have stopped
Crashing against the shore
And the winds sit still on tree tops
All that remains of you are your hands
Riddled with scars from words
You have written for me
And I am gone.
You sit there for the rest of time
Staring at constellations of scars
On your skin that spells out all of the
Things you wrote about me
And over the ages my face will blur to you
My hair will stop looking to you
Like wheat fields and slowly it
Will look more like a sonnet
My eyes you will remember to be blue
But they will look to you like the third
Ripple of ocean water from a stone
What if when the dust finally settles
You ended up changing your mind
And all that remains of you are your hands
Still scared but you can’t tell
Not when my hands are covering them up.

Like i am not who i am.