Broken mood-rings on your bedside table
Cat tracks on your porcelain plates, black side up
Sunny eggs, eat 'em cold, fried green tomatoes
Sometimes waking up blows, hard, grass in the yard
Do the bugs feel it when you run the lawnmower?
Self conscious shell shock, trauma from swung padlocks
A cluster of lovelocks, held loosely
A bouquet of broke tooth smiles, grin back, be choosy
Holding each others lives loosely, why give a ****
Being picked up and slammed by the tides of tears, refugee fears
Just another proletariat in a shuffleboard life
Grief and strife, a taste of all these bitter things we seek
How much weight do you lose being a corpse for a week?
Silver, sleek, something turning in the hands of the meek
Like a knife or olive leaf, I'm not one to critique, just let me speak
Please, just for once

i’m back home for the weekend
and you’re in my basement like always
because, you and me, we’re creatures of habit
before anything else and my feet are thrown over the armrest,
spilling into your lap, and the episode that’s on
is one we’ve already seen
and i keep thinking about how it’s such ******* that we lived
fifteen collective years without knowing each other,
all this wasted time,
and i want to turn to you
and say, “man, i don’t know who’s ever going to love me
like you do,”
but i don’t because that would be too much,
that would be too much, and i don’t want things for us
to be too much.
god, it’d be so easy, though.
so ******* easy.
we have a scary big threshold for what’s “too much” for us
which makes me want things that i know i shouldn’t sometimes.
instead, i run my fingers through your hair
and start asking questions.
stupid **** about your day and your life when i’m not there.
i just like hearing you talk, i like hearing you talk.
i like the way you laugh at my jokes, even the ****** ones.
you always laughed more with me than you ever did with her,
i never understood why you only saw that in retrospect.
man, i imagine us dancing, reeling, singing like,
look at me, oh look at me,
is this the way i’ll always be? oh no, oh no!
and you’d say something like, “well, i like the way you are,”
because of course you would
and i’d do something dumb like tell you that
you’re the only person i ever really end up missing
and how it’s ******* hard to not love someone
when you know someone like i know you.
i’m not sure you’d want to hear that.
we always joke we know each other too well.
the shape of your hands,
the press of your mouth, sloppy and drunk and 3 AM,
the way you laugh and tell me i’m your favorite person.
i like the way you never make me feel lonely.
i like the way you make the unlovable **** about me feel quiet.
is that love?
you make my insides feel like the fourth of july, is that love?
****. you make me feel something, is that love?
but what do i know about love, anyways?
i've never even kissed anyone
sober.

my poetry professor always preaches that brevity,
that specificity, is the hallmark of good writing.
this always feels like a slight to the inside of my head,
chaotic and chattering.
i wonder if he’s ever been to a poetry slam
and seen a sixteen year old try to fit their whole heart into three minutes.
i wonder if he’s ever written five straight pages free verse
and wondered at which branch of trauma to cut out
to fit the word count.
i wonder if he’s even been a thousand people at once,
crawling into stanzas from russian nesting dolls.

see, at concerts, i always have trouble deciding if i want take a video
or just let the night crystalize in my memory;
see, the problem is i'm liable to forget my heartbeat
if i don’t write it down in detail.
that’s my nature,
i am too much or too little
i am bad at letting things go.
i am bad at leaving things behind.
this is my biggest failing as a storyteller.
in revision, you always have to leave something out.
but when you cut the story in half, you muddle the meaning.
so i don’t tell stories,
i read eulogies. histories. anthologies.
i am not a storyteller, i’m a record keeper
and this is not dead poets society,
this a society of poets who wanted to die but didn’t.
i am always trying to explain
the inside of my head to other people who don’t think
in colors and disjointed poetry
and i am always falling short.

sick!!!!!!!!!!!! shaky shaky
can you hear the paper in my lungs
like i can

i can hear it

i can hear it like i hear
the screaming of anonymous
mouths
in my obsessive
compulsive mind
i hear it like the
cries of a pummeled boy
who cries

do you peel skin off your fingers? do you rock back and forth
on the floor in the bathroom on the floor

why am i in the bathroom why did i lock the door????

you run from this i run from this
we all run from this like we run
from uncertainty even when we
make it pretty in our poetry it's
not pretty we're not pretty
there's paper in my lungs.

cut it up breathe it in
listen like paper breaths
sound like violins
what an orchestra these paper cuts
become when you listen
when you hum
and the paper sits in your lungs.