These little children
Run through my head:
Nameless, naked
Bare to the bleached bones
Mouths agape
Hungering for meaning and
Eating it up like air
Screaming and clawing
In the dead of night
Pleading for light
And a home to stain—
So I fed them paper
And they left my brain.

The chair is always empty.
I imagine faceless men there,
Watching the muscles in my
Face shift like tectonic plates.
I dream up their arms big and
Strong like oceans that wash
Against my continents.
These men have no shadows,
Just bodies. They speak in
death grips, keep me sane.
Seconds spill into the night,
And I am still alone. I stand
To leave and they remain
To haunt me when I wake.

they massacred my
words, little infants,
reduced a family into the
most valuable survivors
to publicize, capitalize
upon, and, once seized,
demolish all tangible
ties to its siblings its
heritage its truth its
web of conversations

No one could be red
Quite like her, a crimson-
Caped gal full of rogue
Thoughts like fire storms
That burned for revolution.
If I wasn't so afraid of setting
My dry-leaf life ablaze, we'd
Be more than just two grey
Facebook users playing the
Block game. But from those young
Days and long nights, the vague
Inklings of camaraderie linger. I
Remember her velvet soul, a fine fabric,
Tough and royal but always
Twisted. She kept roses in her
Wild hair but thorns in her
Tongue. Light refracted through
Her ruby body, beaming out every
Color of the human psyche,
But all I remember was the red.
Perhaps I saw the blood in her
Lips, the glow of passion, the
Spark of something I couldn't yet
Understand. Perhaps I was nothing
More than my fears. Perhaps I
Simply mistook her for a mirror.

Regret washes over in oceans,
Drenching a hot head with
Unholy sorrow and disgust;
Time reigns over as Almighty Queen
Who casts a permanent chill over
The land, the mirrors, the soul.
The molten mistakes cool solid
In the prison of our brains—
Forever materialized, measured, weighted.
A prideful ego never dies—
It's only masked by alibis.

Two rivers flow from my heart:

One famous to the people—
Revered, acknowledged,
Relied upon to renew life
In those strong, able mothers,
Whose water is playful and tame;

The other only known to the
Beasts of the forest—the exiles,
The infidels, the disillusioned
Sinners since birth, and the
Secret prophets who understand
Love and continue to preach it
Across treetops, under skies,
Through minds and closet doors
And kitchen knives and civil[ian] wars.

Bless their souls, those words of peace
Shine brighter than the sun
(Rumored to rise over everyone).
My rivers breathe life within me until
The source depletes, and my heart is still.

We stand back to back
eyes closed
hands pocketed
hearts filling with the black air.
I sense your attention drifting
in clouds
surrounding me
begging me to dream.
I must escape your poison
atmosphere
smelling of love and
infinity.
I must sever the threads
of one-way desire
that bind me to your
luring shadow.

slowly, warmly, we
crane our soft necks,
catching the droplets
of sun while reaching
for palms, sticky skin,
interlaced fingertips—
outgrowing our shells
that drop like sky pillars
around us, blood racing
through veins in a dense
forest, our romance like
infinity in water tubes,
a melody in ocean waves,
the gravity in his words
causing me to accelerate;
the world divides us into
night and day; the earth
mistakes us for air.

We are two sublime entities
pushing boundaries shifting
shapes drifting through life
stomachs eager for the madness
of digestion smoke & acid
billowing pillowing spillowing
against the organic walls
the defenses so thicc & sticky
we scratch our heads calmly
patiently waiting out the silence
conversations can't understand
so comfy we love our close
nothingness our joint voids
our abysmal futures

Seconds fall fast
fleeing forever I
feel evermore forgetful—
we dance on our delete
buttons hoping all is
well capitalized forever
assuming quality can be
quantified like ***** drug
money, stopping to wonder
why fear is America's Most
Wanted why nothing sounds
infinite why I hide behind
commas why thoughts don't
shoot like bullets how
poems are made when the
words will finally flow
free of doubt, full of fantasy,
fighting the force of friction
I feel the world falling fast
as the mind collapses like
pillow frames a second too
long, a spark too alive—
we live for sightless speed

the way sweat
lingers on my
eyelids makes
me wonder if the
sun loves us all too
much. the world is
a crowd and he is
not a river—just a
hailstone tailed by
blue. twice a week
my eyes watch for
opportunities encrypted
in that spiral pattern; i've
only seen it's crystal
shadow. my light shines;
i love too hard;
the sky begins to drip
while I gaze; we melt; i
wish i could be moon.

I hear San Francisco loud and clear—
The trolleys chug by in childish gulps,
The steep hills catch the wind's yelps,
The cramped stores house a profound history.
The city cries tears of joy so subtly
That people throw gentle smiles to the earth—
A postcard has never wept into such reality.

Like the shutter of a metal screen,
The sun descends in a tessellation as
Brilliant as the city who silently sleeps
With its grand eyes wide open—
A father and mother at last.

I didn’t speak in fear of saying the wrong things,
Letting my insecurities build layered rings
To protect me from the vagrant eyes of society;
For years I grew up a silent and impervious tree
That feared the men who wouldn’t love me.

But then no, no, then you suddenly came along,
Full of mystery and conversation
In those Watergate lips and eyes like Nixon;
I should never have trusted your boyish conviction
When we met in September and you said ‘Hi Steven”
Like I was the most important person to you,
And how I downloaded a texting app just to
Write “Hi” back to you everyday and how you eventually told me
To change my last name to yours—you made a deep incision
Through every shell of skin I provisioned
For ordinary men like you.

But this is not a love story because
You were just an ordinary man
And I was just an extraordinary fool.
I thought we could drift forever lost
In the desert winds of my dearest dreams—
But love was a mirage and you were an oasis;
I took a sip from the shadowed pool at every cost
And ended up with a mouth full of sand.

This is not a love story because I didn’t know
Two guys could just be friends if they talked to each other like brothers
Because whenever I did, I was called a ***
For trying to pick up where my father left off,
For ignoring me my whole entire life because he cared more about his drug deal
Than his own family.

This is not a love story because you were a guy
And I was too obsessed with being what I wanted other people to see;
I didn’t want to be happy if it meant
Giving up the sweet internal peace that came with being
One hundred percent normal in America’s eyes.

This is not a love story because
It wasn’t written in the Bible.

This is not a love story because we live in a nation
Where having a crush on a guy labels me with damnation,
Where we teach our boys that love is only beautiful if it is in a woman
And that those who see otherwise are sin-ridden;
So many tongues tied to the tips of our teeth
Our nation’s sons and daughters beaten til the love runs red in a river of their tears;
These gender roles wring us out dry and drown us in a shadowed pool of fears.

I can proudly say I was in love with a guy,
But I won’t say it was for the right reasons.
I was blinded by the reality that maybe, just maybe,
Having intimate conversations with a man wouldn’t label me.
And it never will, not now, not ever,
Because I am not an ordinary man—
I am peculiar.
I am not yesterday
Because I am tomorrow night.
I am not a vagrant hiding in a black wood behind the skull
Because I am a redwood, rooted and full
With my outstretched arms soaring high into the sky
Because love is a blind sun that shines over us all,
Making our walls look as small
As the rubble when they fall and fall.

The way you hate me
Just tears me to ****** pieces.
She says they’re all lies, but I
Know it’s all very true—
True I shouldn’t have loved you
And your bubbling smile
And the way your touch goes
On for ten miles
And I wonder why I
Just sit here and cry
On my dampened bedside
Because you hate me inside.

I see dead bodies
Where libraries used to be

I take nothing seriously
Not even this poem
Or the literary value
I don't give a ****
(love me)

Traditional structure is a prison
And I am Andy Dufresne

My pen is a knife and
This paper is skin,
I cut myself open to feel
The poetry ooze like red art

Stardust settles around my livid woe
Hopelessly like divine snow

**(I bury myself in all my falseness—
A poet was never there.)

i let the sidewalk catch
my daydreams as I practice
the motions of love, imagining how
long it should take for you
to fall into my arms, confecting my sweet
words into perfection, testing
the way we cannot fight
the current in our oceans,
imagining life that started
with a kiss—smirks becoming
adventures, worries flattening
into horizons, the contrast in our skin
tones creating a balanced ink, our
oneness a calligraphy that
cannot be rewritten.

and it drifts out in sunsets
from throbbing eyeballs
locked on horizons,
thinking staring
following that double-frame
earthquake spasm
cut to black and blacker
behind the skull

Everywhere
There is poison:
In the drunken ******
That purr at his heels,
In the boy-turned-badass
Smoking and drinking away innocence,
In the woman who's down to die
For any way up,
In the alpha male too friendly
To reveal the toxin within.

On sight of us,
The light captured in an onlooker’s eyes
Naturally retains the gold shimmer
Of your god-like graces

While I,
Opaque with sad demeanor,
Only obstruct the view
Of the glory that is you.

True, the sight of me
Is not an ungainly hue;
My inner darkness is brilliant—
Almost as bright as you!

But in humor, voice, command, or smile,
Your shadow extends more miles.
This envy I bear turns my thoughts into fire—
O magnified refraction, burn this man they admire!

My skin must be made of crystal glass
For you to stare through me so violently
I shake and shatter into a million pieces,
Your missing attention a sound wave
Deafeningly explosive to my ears.
To you, the brittle layers underneath my hide
Are playgrounds for your piercing eyes—
My flesh freezes over and turns clear
By the sheer blizzard of your neglect.

You stare into me like I was an abyss—
A shallow pit, a dark nothing—
And carry on believing it so.
My holes are things to be respected
Yet they are all you ever look through.
Your apathy has my vicious soul
Suspended in a restless air
Until I feel so unreal that I evaporate
And truly, truly, feel despair.

i found you under dim
hospital light with suicide
attempt written across your
stars; faintly i could hear
candle fire burning in your
lungs, a flame wavering in
surrender patterns. somehow
the world put you and i into
orbit, but now we've become our
gravities, always sinking, life
on our lips, waiting for a last
anything, eyelid canvas taking on
the promising color of moonlight.

My culture betrayed me at birth,
Abandoned me on the West Coast
And stripped the heritage from my
Rosy red tongue
                                       the Cali sun
Kissing my ****** skin, carefully, softly,
Wrapping me in her white bed sheets
Calling me one of her own.

love has a language but no
gender; i'm fluent in long
stares into the windows of a
soul, but lately i've been
out of ledges. i kneel beside
the glass and feel the wind
fly flush against the clear
nothing that separates me
from his stormy arrival—
the welcome brewing in my
bones. The minute i find him,
the second his spirit ossifies
into olive skin, the moment
i feel my roads heading some
where that is not my own
darkness, i will capitalize my
i's, enter the unknown and
excavate, feel the rush of the
earth as it spins me in the
cradled grasp of the atmosphere oh
yes; i see him holding up the
horizon, though he looks like the
sun — in time, i will spill into the
sea to meet him at the water's edge.

I've been making deals
with my talons as they
graze my tufts of fur—
perfection is poison I don't
want in my blood. The contract
is written for the weak, the
signature line too divine
for my name. I must learn to
walk with feet, not wings. The
sun is already at a lovely low;
surely my wax frame would
spill into the ocean if I were to
ever attempt to kiss it.

i speak love in
conundrums, map
my innuendo into
casual conversation,
drench my words in
a pool of duality to bait
raw instinct—all in hopes
of catching that double-time
flicker of the eyelid over
dilating pupils: the mark
of a fatal blow, the lightning strike
of confusion, the green light
signal that the games may begin.

some days I write
wild my fingertips
tipsy electromagnetic
light shows in my
kingdom constant
earthquake in my
bones gaps in my
voice but never my
words caverns of
regret where I bury
you hourly trapped
breath & smoky
thoughts
                //
                 to feel you
underneath my skin
kisses like raindrops
soft linens clean
insides the carpet in
every shade of us we
two nonconformists we
two ends of infinity.

Slow down and
Wind back to find your
Core, for
Youth is the salvation
And death is the solution—
Look back at who you couldn’t love
In those careless years
And find me
Hanging in the summer breeze
Like a dandelion
Grown long, but left untouched
Because of your gentle perfection.
You have the hands of God
To all but yourself, yet
I don’t deserve someone as perfect as you
If I can’t deserve myself.
The ugliness in our minds
Bind and mingle,
But you can’t expect me
To stay single long—
I’ll be long gone
Discovering myself on a
Broken road
Somewhere distant and cold;
So please,
Darling,
Lover of the summer wind:

Catch me
Before I do.