i can't get this image out of my head
and here's your warning,
if you're queasy, there's body horror ahead:
i can't stop picturing
pencil lead
puncturing perfect circles in skin
******
injecting into vessels
*******
on my lips like making snow angels
if i drank a whole bottle of ***** i could smash it when i'm finished
and press damage to my alcohol-infested veins
my curiosity is piqued at the
sight of grey brains
that's a somebody, there, on that sterilized tray.
sometimes i'd like to try my hardest to just quit,
give everything up and just give in,
popping pills and pressing bruises in rock-star skin.
no one will care, just another guitar player with childhood trauma.

quit my job and blow my bank
trade in my grades to be burned at the stake
call myself a witch but i'm only a fake
taking names of all the future saints
shut up already, kid, for god's sake,
quit it with the words, you're making a mistake
but how do you remove the soul of a yesterday?

I THINK MY PROBLEM IS FLINGING MYSELF OFF CLIFFS WITHOUT BOTHERING TO SEE HOW DEEP THE RAVINE IS. I CARE TOO MUCH TOO FAST UNTIL I'M *BURNING

i like to make lists: one thing per month for what i’m looking forward to
(reasons why i shouldn’t die)
i like to start with february (because january is overrated and ******) --anyway:
february: my best friend’s birthday
march: ****--
okay, okay, let’s start over:
february: valentine’s d-- ****. that doesn’t help.
i like to alternate years between being badass and single and laughing with friends over how awful dating is, and buying myself chocolate and watching hallmark movies all day.
pathetic.
let’s try this one more time:
february: my best friend’s birthday
march: spring break spent with friends going anywhere but home
april: rain instead of snow
may: the end of the school year-- finals week ***** but it’s just a week of stress and then i’m done--
june: warm weather
july: so much sunshine that i forget about my depression
august: catching up on sleep that i lost all year (lost all summer staying up with the warm weather)
september: sales on office and school supplies, notebooks and paper
october: halloween
november: half-winter, half-autumn movies, nightmare before christmas, donnie darko
december: christmas and peppermint mocha
january: pretending like everything is a fresh start even though i know that i’ll just be worsening my same old bad habits (it’s okay, my frontal lobe won’t be done forming for another six-to-eight years anyway)
february: my birthday, watching all the scratches and scars from other people and things start to fade.

i screamed into the void until my lungs collapsed,
but she barely gave me a glance when the silence relapsed.
i called out to the stars and they gave me an excuse:
“hey man i’m sorry, it’s me, it’s not you.”

i tried to infuse my veins with rocket fuel,
but the mechanical pieces of my internal organs found the chemicals too cruel.
they rejected everything until i coughed up acid:
“why isn’t this enough? please just be placid.”

so i cracked open my ribs along the seam of my breastbone,
searching for my heart in the empty unknown.
instead i found my lungs, punctured and failing:
“why are you here when there’s stars to be sailing?”

i tried hailing a taxi with the blood on my hands,
but my ribs were too messy for the driver’s backseat to stand.
so i tried walking home but the sidewalks betrayed me:
“why are you stepping on me when you should be saving me?”

i broke out into a sprint through other people’s backyards
but i found myself blacking out and not getting too far.
it was then that i found a fence that caused my stumbling and crashing:
“hey kid can’t you read? that sign says no trespassing.”

i pickpocketed other people’s dreams until i couldn’t hold them anymore,
bursting at the seams with too little to show for.
i picked apart my brain to find the source of my decay,
only to find a note in my own handwriting: “find your own way.”

i dropped to my knees and ignored the bruising,
struggling to find anything i’ve done of my own choosing.
i cried out to the sky and the constellations replied,
“why are you complaining when you haven’t let go of your pride?”

so i swallowed my tongue and cast down my eyes,
rising back to my feet but no longer alive.
i looked up to the moon to give me guidance,
but whatever answers i was looking for, i couldn’t find it.

it was then that i realized that i’ve been complacent too long,
finding new beats but always singing the same old song.
so i stitched up all my pieces and washed myself clean:
“i will be okay. it’s just, i don’t ever dream.”

how many times have your eyes haunted mine?
--a fading dream as daylight finds its way through your window frame,
like wooden fences with invitations to climb, to rise and rise
til you're mountain high,
to the top of the Tower of Babble and touching God.
cotton candy is the texture of heaven on the tongue,
the bite of hell when it sticks to the sweat on your fingertips.
everything is hazy at the state fair,
and no one knows how long they've been here--
your smiles make days blur and slide, like you've painted your nails
with the fabric of space-time.
phantom touches from lingering gazes are all i know now,
extinction of the way that i used to be,
because your eyes won't stop haunting me.

fireflies blink patterns of constellations
like glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to your
bedroom ceiling. sometimes,
home is not where we expect it to be.
sometimes you know that you just have
to leave. light a candle at your own vigil,
your own funeral, then take to the sky
on trembling wings. it’s okay: you can
still visit if need be. but the future is not
certain (you never liked tellers of fortune
anyway.) so stick to your runes and
what your dusty old books tell you, words
in dead languages speaking easier
than the tongues around you. maybe
you’re just too stuck in the past-- after all,
most stars are already gone by the time
the light reaches your skies. there’s
nothing wrong with never burning bridges,
but keep the matches in your pocket
just in case.

falling is feeling alive again on open roads and dusty lungs filled with old bones my closet feels so full of skeletons I got an adrenaline rush from killing a spider today royal flush full house of cobwebs and dead flies and wishing you and I were whole again
the smell of nail polish is ingrained in everything in my bedsheets bottles bleed black and red and gold and glitter
glitter always sticks to hardwood floors and skin I’m sick of things sticking to my skin I am not a spider web stop sticking to my skin
dusty decay painting my nails the color of old scrapbooks I take photos because I need memories to exist outside of me I can’t remember anything except how it feels to dry-swallow pain pills I’ve forgotten to brush my teeth for the 3rd day in a row old habits die when
count fireflies caught in your claws and claw the mouths from any man who catcalls or calls harassment a compliment fight fire with freefalls oxygen masks and steamboats I want to die on the peak of Mount Everest maybe then I can finally rest my hand hurts from my grip on the pen I stopped paying attention again
my hands won’t stop bleeding my cuticles are ripped again I want it to stop again I want my hands clean again I want to take care of myself again I want to be whole again I want to cover myself in nail polish and then fly
fall down the Grand Canyon

let’s haunt houses together, never letting anyone forget who we are when we’re together.
let’s become urban legends together, cryptids whose blurry photos are taken slipping through urban streets with the stars overhead. no one has seen us anywhere but in their own hometown. everyone believes in us without being superstitious.
let’s be the hearts of hurricanes and thunderheads, crackling with potential and mounting the danger.
your worst mistake was befriending a poet, because we hold tightly to everything. your smile will be memorialized in ink that is five tones darker than your summer-sky eyes, june before humidity hits.
let’s get lost together, a tangle of highways that have lost their exits, never-ending in a way that makes people confused about whose voice is whose.
let’s make history together, a documented case of a perfect pair of platonic soulmates, stretched across solar systems and flung to the farthest corners of infinity:
let’s find each other in the empty.
let’s never be truly alone, never knowing lonely.
let’s find home together.

tuck your tongue between these lines like the prayers
we whispered to shooting stars on the nights we spent awake,
afraid that our dreams couldn't be better than the taste
of strawberry chapstick and swallowed sea glass, sharp salt
like the rim of your margarita glass.
good things always pass, but they also tend to find their way back.
-
write poems in your math book for me.
i'll play x, you can be y.
it's always one of us we have to find,
never on the same side of anything.
we're complicated until we realize that there's a trick for everything.

i guess what i'm learning is that you have to have your tragedies if you're ever going to learn anything and i guess i never realized that you were just a lesson the whole time. i didn't want to let go of hope and trust and i have never been able to burn bridges very well after all. i keep matches in my pockets but i've never really liked the smell of gasoline for long enough to keep it with me. after all, i never needed it. i like to keep all my paths open. it was up to you to destroy us and wow you did it so well that i can barely feel it, the decimation of nerve endings like beating a dead horse that can't feel anymore. i don't need you anymore. i can't feel you anymore. do you know what it's like to lose a limb, feel the phantom pains of old heartache that was never really broken but never quite something other than love? maybe for you it was just something to pass the time and maybe for you it was just another smile in a hallway of a maze of old faces that you just don't recognize anymore. maybe i'll be a face you just don't recognize anymore. after all i don't think that i could recognize you anymore from a line up of old haunts and ghosts and skeletons from my closet and memories and the past. i tend to avoid burning bridges but i do tend to build cement walls right beside them. i don't know if you've set that way ablaze because i can't see it anymore, it's behind the thick brick cement that keeps me safe from everyone that might try to hurt me and hiding is what i do best after all. hiding and falling because i can't stop looking at the stars maybe that's why i call myself icarus maybe that's why i feel like a tragedy. maybe i was your lesson or maybe i was just a story, a piece of poetry to read once and then put back on the shelf in its collection, nothing impressive or important, just another part of ovid's collection. you were helios to me and that was my mistake from the start. how dare you make me ever believe you were a god? as if you could ever be close to heavenly after all

step one she

pulls at your puppet strings

wraps your heart valves around

her fingertips. you fall for it every time.

step two she

breaks your heart like a glass

of milk getting tipped from the counter

top, messy and sharp. she does not cry

over spilled milk.

step three i

do cry over spilled milk, cut my hands

on the shards while trying to pick them up

and piece them together again. things that get

broken like that aren’t easily fixed. i’m not here

to fix you.

i am here to love you

and to cry over spilled milk.

who needs sleep when there are galaxies to be seen
teeming with suns spinning with planets with other lives to be living?
there’s a chill setting in the marrow of your bones
where dead flowers continue to grow, under your ribs
like longing, like homesickness, like fighting a feeling of needing to be
anywhere but this
place, this planet, this universe.
no one will ever know the heartache that lives in the lump in your throat
that grows when you look up and know that there is somewhere else
that you’d rather be. you just don’t have a name for it yet.
it just hasn’t told you its name yet.
maybe in the dusty bindings of old books, you’ll find
the secret to a future set in stars
that always seem just a little too out of reach.
maybe a different sun will be better at warming the cold winter
that long ago set itself up in your body.
maybe a different sun will show you what summer feels like,
the way freedom can feel when you’re free of longing.

friendship tastes like
fizzy apple soda,
straight out of a glass
bottle, washed-out green.
it’s sugary sweet,
smoothly carbonated,
but kicks the edges
of my tongue with sour.
it’s syrupy, tingling as it
bubbles up over
onto my skin, sticky.
lick it off, wipe my hands
onto the hem of my
tank top. the feeling
lingers though, buzzing
on my skin like flies.
the bottle is empty now,
and i’m counting quarters,
scrounging up change
to quench my thirst
for green bittersweet.

when you click your heels and wish for home, where exactly is it that you go? i packed away all my ambition in manilla envelopes of faded dreams and sent them away to coral reefs so schools of fish a generation after me could learn from my mistakes. start saving for college when you’re six, a year for every digit, because if you want a higher education then you can’t afford the things that make you happy. (maybe that’s why nemo’s dad didn’t want him to go to school.) sew your stories into the patchwork quilt of your backpack slung across your shoulders and never trust someone that you can’t touch with the tips of your eyelashes.

(start wearing mascara so that you can pretend that everyone you love is close enough.)

when you look up at the stars at night, tuck them into your lint-lined backpack pockets and keep the stardust there like secrets. (no one ever keeps secrets.) sprinkle those stars onto your shoes and hope that pixie dust flies you faster than Southwest or Spirit airlines. mailboxes don’t go in reverse, so everything that you’ve sent away doesn’t tend to come right back without being stamped in red. NO ONE LIVES THERE. ADDRESS NOT REAL. SANTA DIED IN THE SECOND GRADE. nemo, go home. nemo, go home.

(cross my heart and hope to die for i have lived a thousand lives each covered by a constellation that dot-dot-dots me right back to the deepest shades of blue. how different are astronomers from oceanographers anyway? we’re all searching for things that everyone else is scared of finding. we’re all searching for things that don’t exist but have to.)

destination: still figuring it out. destination: a desert built from a river that ran out a long time ago, from everyone that ran out a long time ago, a delta of broken dreams peppered with sandcastles of stories that never saw completion. destination: roswell, because i’ve always loved road trips and maybe UFOs will be more comfortable than the backseat of my carolla.

destination: home. maybe these heels will figure out what that means by the time i’ve finished counting: one (home), two (home), three--

(home).

…
… …
see,
im struggling to even write poetry these days.
everything
is like taking a deep breath only to find out that you’ve actually been
trapped inside a void and there’s nothing in your lungs
and nothing to exhale.
id like to think that i still have my good days
and really, i do,
its just that they get kind of fuzzy when im stuck in afternoon sunlight
wondering what happened to all the people that are usually around me.
i feel like a ghost in my own home
and driving ten over the speed limit doesnt even make the
bitter black box in my chest beat,
so maybe ill push fifteen--
and suddenly,
im going fifty-five in a thirty-five zone because maybe itll make me feel alive
knowing how fast im going away from the buildings that makes me feel
like a ghost,
like im drifting.
maybe the less i eat the better ill feel,
but either way theres some kind of guilt weighing me down,
cement blocks tossed into a lake.
i cut my hair to lighten up,
and its been at least three weeks
since i wrote a bad space metaphor about a boy
with a galaxy smile and, ****.
there goes that, restart the count.
fifty-five miles per hour away from memories that
my mind twists into negativity at eleven-- both evening and morning, really.
fifty-five miles per hour away from the people that might just
make me feel alive again,
but fifty-five miles per hour away from the places that thin me out until im nothing more than
a cartoon ghost outline,
running from pac man.

lightning strikes when your stormy eyes meet mine like it’s for the first time and suddenly everything is charged, magnetic, pulling my blood from my heart to the tip of my nose, exploding embarrassment and twitching hands, the jolt of feeling like falling just before you finally fall asleep. i’m seeing your mouth move but all i can look at is your lips, the peek your tongue, and pride swells like tsunami high tides as i think about you, my nike, my victory, mentally running racetracks and hopping hurdles even though you never agreed to compete for anything. little eyes full of big stars, stretching the space between us until we’re solar systems apart, our hearts destined for different galaxies. i always knew you weren’t meant for me but that doesn’t change the way it feels when you reach for me: we’re the calm before the storm, the way we always have been but we never should be.

i guess maybe the problem lies in the fact that memories are so falibile,
dizzying. i guess maybe the problem is that i’ve beaten this bush a million
times already. i guess maybe the problem stems from the fact that you are always sunny
to me. i can taste grape and feel like i’m choking, six pieces of gum and nothing but overwhelming
laughing laughing laughing.
i can feel the texture of letter tiles as we spell out nonsense inside jokes inside our own bubble
of comfort. i can feel the stitches in my sides: you have always been my favorite, you know?
“every day feels like summer with you,” stitches
stitches in my sides, falling apart at the seams
in the best way i’ve ever known. everything good is with you; every sunshine, warmth upon my skin, cloudless
skies, they’re all you, laughing. laughing. laughing.
i can hear the buzzing in my skin, the beehive sound of a tattoo gun inking your laughter into my
skin. it’s sunny, red, a desert landscape that feels like feels like home.
i can taste apple soda, out of a glass bottle, and it brings me to cemeteries across the street from
price chopper, feeling edgy in our private-school uniforms sitting on tombstones. other people,
other friends. they’re there too, but right now all i can see is you: laughing, sunny, haloed. maybe
i can see sometimes the pedestal you get put up on, and then i open the door to your black kia soul
and i can hear myself complaining about all the trash i have to move. you’re no helios, not apollo.
just
home.

it’s always odd being the off-color, the too-shaded one.
what exactly are we, anyway? not what we once were,
not what we shall be. there’s something odd about being
the in-between. silence is the only thing that can truly
stretch for an eternity, even if it is just within seconds.
their lifetimes are mere moments, and we continue to keep
our quiet. there are many things that they cannot understand.
there are many things that we only understand because
we were given them. a stream bubbles and runs through
the back of our brain, soothing. the cavern of our skull is
a safe haven of calm from the calamity of the mortal world.
leaves rustle and music plays. this universe will not last
for much longer, anyway. the stars are all falling into shade.
it’s okay. we will remain.

has anyone else found it ironic that
we cross our fingers for good luck but also to break promises?

soft whimpers and shaking pains
slow descent into paralysis
struggling movement
silent moments broken by cries

(he's only five)
(i don't want him to die)
(i feel like i didn't
love him enough while i could)
(i should have taken him
to the dog park more,
or taken him on more walks.)
(i should have been kinder,
and softer,
and a more loving master.)
(i should have wanted him more.)

when was the last time you
looked up at office building skyscrapers
and wondered about all the people inside?

when was the last time you
bumped a stranger on the sidewalk and
said sorry without hearing them or
seeing them or ever knowing their face?

when was the last time a
face appeared in your dreams that you
couldn’t quite place because your brain
automatically keeps a registry of everyone
you’ve ever seen?

when was the last time you
thought about how many three billion is?

when was the last time you
saw a movie that used ‘ringing’ to indicate
silence, because the weight of nothing is
just too heavy to deal with?

when was the last time you
thought about other people having the
same name as you?

i am a universe of bleeding ink
there are galaxies inside of me
i am the death of the unimaginary
i am the ashes of a phoenix rising

like the ones who know me best
are the ones who don’t know me at all

like i’ve been staring
at this mirror for
so long that i
can’t remember what i’m
looking at anymore

how much better is it,
do you think,
to be who we are now
instead of who we were?

I CAN’T EVEN THINK OF YOU WITHOUT FEELING LIKE MY CHEST IS CAVING IN
YOU WERE EVERYTHING AND NOTHING THAT I’LL EVER NEED
YOU LOOKED AT ME LIKE I WAS A MASTERPIECE
BUT MAYBE I WAS JUST PROJECTING.
YOUR SMILES COULD LIGHT UP ROOMS AND I WAS A VACUUM,
TAKING IN EVERY STRAY PIECE THAT I COULD GET AHOLD OF.
HOW SELFISH OF ME,
TO THINK THAT YOUR STARRY EYES COULD EVER STRAY EARTH-BOUND,
COULD EVER STRAY TO ME.
NEITHER OF US HAVE EVER BEEN FANS OF GRAVITY,
BUT WHILE I WAS DREAMING YOU WERE CREATING
AND SUDDENLY YOU WERE ON THE MOON WHILE I WASN’T EVEN TAKING OFF.
IT’S BEEN A YEAR AND I’M STILL WRITING POEMS ABOUT YOU.
IT’S BEEN A YEAR AND I STILL HAVEN’T HEARD BACK FROM YOU.
HEY, MAN IN THE MOON,
I ******* MISS YOU.

first and foremost find your friends find the sanctuaries in other people’s ribs count heartbeats and breaths and breathe don’t speak hand to your diaphragm easy now easy gently please with those delicate wings tiny butterfly feathers caught in dewdrops on tulips and forget-me-nots swallow them down feel the weight on your tongue let them crack your teeth and eat shards of bone washed down with blood wine
stop beating yourself up
stop hiding inside other people’s palaces prisons pieces hearts
beat your own heart not somebody else’s

the sun doesn’t wake me up anymore i’m so tired all the time from the ache in my bones and the pull of muscle dry clay cracking and flaking like sunburn peeling feeling red and raw underneath it all i want to be clean it takes 7 years to have brand new skin taste and take and on trial again for old crimes i forgot to commit but commitment is hard these days finding bodies in the empty space like the gaps between your fingertips and the narrow swell of your knuckles
my bedroom is dark usually and it’s hard to let any light in and my skin itches and itches as it flakes off into something new again

i've been tripping through cemeteries again
searching for all the old skeletons
covered in cobwebs
from the depths of my closet
i wonder what would happen if i lose them

i don't know who i am when i'm not
falling for you,
falling apart at the seams.