A Valentine's Card dressed
With Steve Buscemi's face,
photoshopped onto a child,
disturbing and hilarious,
tattooed on the inside
with once-true truths.
Flammable.

A severed chunk of
35 mm film,
cut in a rhombus,
or trapeze or whatever,
highly flammable.

A piece of cloth
I brought with me,
And the part of
the belt I had to cut
off so it would fit
my skinny ***.
Flammable, slightly.

A dead and dried up leaf,
Impaled on the bulletin board,
From a tree I don't even know what,
That sometimes crinkles with the wind,
If she were alive still,
She would comment on the
Cold thumbtack spear
In her abdomen, and
Sniff regrets at the sweet,
Artificial Vanilla waves below.

I keep my wall of
flammable memories
Above a lit candle,
Every day, I wish the flames
Would reach a little higher, but
Every day, the wax sinks,
low, low, lower still.

I L U like my ***** clothes
Love being forgotten
On my bedroom floor

I L U like chores love the
music that helps them
forget they're chores

I L U like ***** dishes
Love hot showers and
the other side of the sink

I L U like I love spilling
Salt, and warding off the evil,
By tossing some behind my back

I L U like I love
Breaking rules about
my own supposed
non-Superstition

I L U like black cats love
Bad luck, cause to them,
It's just Friday, you know?

I L U like the hot dog bun
Loves staring at the beef patty,
Wishing "if only, if only"

I L U like bread loves
Being forgotten till we're really hungry
And then we're all ungrateful, like
"Hey bread, you remember us?"
And bread is high above us, like
"Always."
Not even a hint of scorn

I L U like the first time I saw
Jurassic Park, The dinosaurs
Were real enough
sans chicken feathers, and
Who needs modern science anyways
when love has no fossil records?

I L U like the weather loves
Surprise parties.
I L U like painful
surprise party memories love
being forgotten on my bedroom floor

I love you like Mayflies love living,
oh so briefly, once a day, every single day,
Chapter one to chapter none

I love you like mayflies love themselves,
brevity and all, stirred by nothing but
the glow of Dawn's light,
Dead by dusk, the Mayfly never
knows its final form.
It dies
in complete
incompletion,
but that's okay.

It drank the salt ocean,
it breathed the living air,
And that's how I want to L U

It's like
I haven't seen you in so long
But even that's a lie.

I've seen your past in pictures
and I've see your present
In Facebook updates.
Seen your new happy
so close to your old sad.

And even when I tear myself
from the screen,
there still remains
the imprint of your face
burned into the inside of my
eyelids, so that
Everytime I want to look at NOTHING,
I see you.

Everytime
I rub my eyes,
or wash my face,
I'm haunted by your look.

When I try to sleep,
I see you staring back.

It's like Everytime I sneeze,
my body wills me into
catching a glimpse of you.

And even when I beat myself into dead slumber,
you burrow through my optic stems, claw into my cortex,
and sink your teeth into my very dreams.  

I wake up, too shaken to scream,
too weak for words, and still,
somehow, I manage to spell your name
on my back and on my sheets,
in trickling droplets of sweat.  

You linger in my mind like nuclear fallout.

I tell myself,
Maybe one day
I'll brave Old Chernobyl.
I'll pass by the radioactive signs,
the wise warnings, without fear or worry.
I'll use my coward's camera to capture
preserved pockets of the past, looking,
helplessly, for the secret to having loved you,
and maybe even the secret
to forgetting you.

But even that's a lie.

The light of the television
dimly lit two
lovers,
but not really.
He stunk of wine
from the lips and
mauve teeth,
she stunk of wine
by proxy.
her legs, only slightly
unshaven, he stroked
gently, which they
both enjoyed, but
not really.

***** pots, plates, and
cutlery lay placid
in the sink.
They'll be washed
sometime soon,
and put away in  
cabinets of wasted
white wood, very soon,
but not really.

The floor, like them,
began growing clothing
like wild moss or ivy,
and claimed the room
& claimed them too.

The movie, he'd recall,
but, then, she would
not.
He watched the blood,
and conflict,
and at times laughed,
and she saw him,
and conflict,
and didn't laugh at all,
which he knew was strange,
but not really.

On the dim, small, screen,
The lean and hungry man had his
Nemesis on the
sepia-tone ground,
and finished it all,
with rage and mercy,
with a stomp
to the
heart.

They watched, her eyes wide,
for she knew this was
them, her on the ground,
and him in the air, and she gripped
him a bit tighter,
which he noticed,
but not really,
which she noticed,
but not really.
In the dimly lit room,
they could not see
they were alone,
and it was true,
only Bruce Lee & He,
and She.

For all the earth in the world,
For the varied chunks,
shapes and shades
of brown, keep an eye out!

There, somewhere in the dirt,
Next to the writhing worm,
Gasping at pockets of sunlight,
Green life ruminates, and
pushes, pushes up,
through the soil,
intrepid, unlikely.  
It abandons its old husk house,
what little safety it knew,
and, daring to dream,
thrusts itself into existence,
and feels the day's cooling kiss,

a multi cellular masterpiece,
when yesterday, there was only
dirt.

You looked at me in that way
That a dog stares helpless
At the unrelenting traffic passing by.

You looked at me, and the gusts
Of winds blowing this/that way,
Seemed a bit more certain and sure.

You stared at me, trying not to
Linger on my eyes, and opened
and closed your mouth, almost saying.

You, again, and forever,
Walk away, and before you leave
You turn and make time shatter between us.

And you mumble something,
Under your breath, I can only understand
"What do I know
Oh god
What do I know"

It was the summer.
It was the summer
Of roadtrips
And heartbreak,
Of wave breaks,
And road rage,
And sunsets,
And guilt trips.

It was the best of times
And the fast of times
And the worst of times
And the last of times
It was the summer.

It was the summer of
Tollbooths and
Accelerating cars
And as quick as you go
You pull what chases you
Just at fast,
Newton laws,
For it was the summer.

It was the summer
Of never and always
Of fears and futures
Of clairvoyance
And of foolishness.

To look so on trees,
In Summer's waning scorch
And not see the leaves
Changing, is blindness.
But it was the summer
Of changes unseen.

Autumn slipped in silently,
Not through the back,
Like a servant,
But through the front door,
Like an assassin.

Words were had,

Shots were fired.

Summer is dead,
Cradled in Autumn's arms,
Green life turning to crimson
And yellow, and brown.

The past is only
As good as our last summer.
And this one, well,
It was the summer.
It was the summer.