Shadows circle their captors without ever finding an exit. There isn't really a way out, but it's never stopped me from searching. I live under puddles of rainwater and in window reflections. Everything's backwards, so it makes more sense. Here time is slowed down and no one ever leaves. You never have to feel too much and not enough all at once. Your train of thought can be traced and you can always find your way back to the place you started. I don't know where I belong, if anywhere at all, but I have found a temporary home where I can rest my bones. I won't come up for air until I have to.

how easy it is to write a poem
of unrequited love
an ode to that insatiable hunger
that lives unwelcome in the pit of
my stomach
and slowly eats away at me
gnawing a black hole into that space
an emptiness i couldn't look at
its darkness burned brighter than
the eclipsed sun
who always called with the most
beautiful voice and promised that
if i simply stopped averting my eyes
i would most certainly become one with you
and i forsake my sight
to have your heat
your radiation from all parts of the spectrum
to burn my traitorous eyes right out of their sockets.

how different it is to write
of contentment and perhaps even
a love that i can reach out and touch
without having it sublimate each atom of my being
and reduce me to a radioactive ash
scattered to the wind.

it's a love that i can submerge myself in
it presses in all around and the
mega-Pascals of pressure simply reach
a placid equilibrium with my porous skin
i breathe it in and my lungs
somehow learn to pull the oxygen from
the molecules of liquid desire and vitreous joy
and it fuels my body
infiltrating and inhabiting every cell
feeding my muscles as i
sensuously move my body
fluid as the frigid water around me.

it’s interesting to think about all the right people who might’ve come into your life at the wrong time.
but then again,
i often wonder if time could’ve saved or wrecked us at all.
maybe from the start, we were destined to be nothing more than strangers.
even if i had been weighed down, glued to one spot,
nomadic tensions silenced,
it seems likely that, still, our friendly smiles and cordial jokes would’ve been
limited, somehow,
by unseen barriers,
by the cruel overseer that is fate.

i think i meant something to you, once.
not a lot, but something.
and now,
now i’m just there.
a solid. something that takes up space.
you still sit close to me,
but not as close as you did when we first met.

and i wonder, sometimes, if i did something wrong,
if there was something i could’ve done, or not done, to change things,
to make things better,
to stop us from drifting silently onto the end of the growing list of tragedies my life’s friendships have been.

but maybe there was nothing i could do.
that thought, while terrifying, is perhaps the most comforting one.
after all, it is better to be left helpless from the start than to be burdened with the knowledge that the stones you threw became part of the landslide.

i hope, maybe, that we can salvage what’s left,
perhaps even grow it into something better.
but somewhere inside, i know that’s fool’s talk.
i doubt i ever meant much to you, anyway.
i always was, and always will be, just another shadow,
another stranger,
another change of season.
i suppose i was your winter —
a barrage of snow and ice that danced in clumsily,
not bothering to think about what would happen once spring came.

i hope you’ll remember me when i’m gone.
even now, it’s nice to think that i cross your mind as much as you cross mine.
but my hopes seldom match my reality.

so, still, i am just another.
watching.
waiting.
being.
i am nothing, and in being nothing i suppose that i, too, am everything.

but i will never be your everything.

and i could say that i regret that,
but perhaps i’m still holding onto that last bit of hope.

always the optimist,
and yet even more so the pessimist.

i thought you might be both, too.
i thought we might find a way to complete one another,
much like how the land completes the sea.

but i suppose i am left the earth without its ocean,
the ground without its rain.

it’s a horrible thing, detachment.
my roots never quite find what they’re looking for in the soil.

i had just hoped you would be different.

(a.m.)

I see shapes in your sunken eyes,
pressing like last night's lifeline,
telling you to keep your heart safe,
but I have to look away.

Please don't cry,
I can't possibly turn tears to gold.
I'm not the type to indicate
what should fill these empty spaces
and I don't know what to say
when you don't say it first.

When the shivering starts you'll see,
I can't be your blankets and late-night radio,
or anything you used to believe.
When those eyes mean oceans in mine,
you'll see how nothing I can be.

I guess she was a part of you. When she left, did she take a part of you away? Tell me, were you trying to fill the gap, the silence, and the darkness with everything in reach? I wonder if I was music or noise to you. Whatever I was, it wasn't enough to keep you close to me. Perhaps you knew you couldn't grab hold to that little ray of light, just like how you couldn't hold on to me. We've crossed paths and I'm still at the intersection where I last saw you; long after you left, I still see you everywhere. These songs are getting old, ringing like background noises that I got so used to- I still can't get used to life without you. Were you trying to convince yourself or me when you said you had gotten over her? Have you rid the emptiness or have you filled it with an even deeper abyss? I was a wreck, just a **** shaking with the breeze. You swept me off my feet, set me on fire and threw me away. The smoke is choking me and someone's screaming, "why'd you set yourself on fire?" It feels like a third degree burn is etched on my consciousness each time I go to places we have been. Sometimes, I walk exactly the paths we took and I can't bear to pretend you're still next to me. I'd choose to believe you did everything for my own good. The thing about missing someone and hurting is you don't mind it at all. And I never yearned for it to end. Time hasn't healed you and I don't know if it will ever heal me. All the would've been, could've been, should've been. Did I mean anything to you? You meant so much to me.