I wanted to write a poem about flowers, so that's what I did.
It was short, expressed how I feel, and cut like glass.
I showed my father "Flowers" and he thought it was mediocre.
And I said, "No, "Mediocre" is the poem where I talk about dying,
and I'm trying to stay alive, so I wrote about flowers."

Flowers strangling soil plots with their roots, with their existence.
And to hurt something you love with your existence is a terrible feeling.

My heart dressed in polka dots and dark shades
Hair and hurt sitting on shoulder blades
Across rose-colored skin,
I brush my fingers over bumps and scarred perfection.

Dance with me in a pit of quicksand, rockabilly babe
And help me understand that I don't need to be afraid

We are children with short attention spans
and short term parents,
and it's apparent, in this short span of time,
I love you.

Ours was less an Arab Spring
and more a half-hearted coup d'état.
There was no immolation,
no burning desire on your part;
no passion in the streets of you.

You stole in at night
through a window I'd left open,
a crack in my need
for something more than mere
existence.  From me there was
no resistance.

I let you lead, and followed blindly;
my voice I raised on your behalf
against all that I had known before.
Your words, your whispers
alone could incite me to storm
against the strongest walls.

Now, as summer comes
and this sectarian affair,
this spring uprising
that we called us has ended,
I sweep the streets of our debris
and wander down
the empty avenues
of you, half-hearted.

r ~ 6/5/14

Drinking summer skin,
I hear the voices in the night sky
I'm a slave to the darkness around the stars,
and I can't remember why

One, two, twenty-three percocet in my soul.
Ambulance lights breathing throughout the mist.
Pump my stomach like the sawed-off shotgun
that I was too afraid to use,
because what if I 'miss'?
What spectrum of desolation to be traced with lips;
to kiss away the desire to exist.

Mirrored reflection injection causes the resurrection of my imperfection.
I see me for who I am, who I was, and who I won't be.
It's the collection of
my eyes dilating and my knees speculating their arrival
to the blue and white tiling disguised as neo-survival.
My mind is evaporating. My body begins to convulse.
I am a ghost in a machine. I am without a pulse

The carpenter builds
Spilled blood on a board
And under his nails
Smashed black and blue
Indigo on a page
Words sharp like a saw
Cut to the bone
Twice measured then honed
On the streets
Alive with a beat
A rhythm and rhyme
He's counting time
With a rat-tat-tat
One nail at a time
Straight is his line
He drives it on home.

r ~ 6/2/14