I am a ghost among ghosts
in an inescapable town filled
with judgmental eyes peering
around sharp corners and
through closed doors. My
pumping pink ventricles
are turning white
with every passing second
that I spend waiting for something
with life to cross my trail.
Unfortunately, holding my breath
for things that
never come has become a
***** habit that I can't rid of,
and my lungs are brittle from the
compressed breaths and
toxic cigarette smoke I subject them
to. They say it takes
twenty one days to stop habits,
but an hour doesn't pass without
me thinking of all the reasons
I am unwillingly invisible and
how you made me this way. The
only thing that acknowledges my
form are clocks,
and they only remind me,
with every tick and grind,
that I am one unit of time closer to
being another collection of
dismembered bones
covered in dirt with a
chunk of stone telling others
my label and a saying that tries to
put meaning in something
that was never going to matter.
Many say that I am being
morbidly negative about my
existence, and maybe their right,
but on good days I like to think that
maybe i was meant to be
good fertilization for lovely flowers
that a senseless boy will pick for a
troubled girl someday.

It has been
seven months, and i
still don't like nature anymore
because it isn't filled with
the branches from your ribs and
the fallen leaves from
your head. I can't
look outside without
craving every part of
your forest in ways i can't seem to
quantify in tear ridden pieces of
paper i always threw away.

Every inch of your bones is
made from the richest soil that i
yearn to plant my dying flowers in, but they just
never seem to
grow as much as you wanted, and i
am sorry. I can never apologize enough for
the countless hours i
wasted trying to find patterns in
your twigs that were always going to
be random. I have always found
hope in the littlest things,
especially the way you said my name
in a tone only Shakespeare
could have described.

It has been a while since
you visited my garden. My meadows
are now filled with
the weeds stemming from the stained
words you said to me that
last night. I always thought
you'd be the one to provide
sunshine to my plants,
but i always mistook your burning
hands for the Sun i suppose.

Now your memory is like a
fog that i can't run away from,
and no matter how many times i
pound at my dirt and
fertilize my trees with other sources,
I seem to only grow from
you.

-MB

I never knew your exquisite features
could **** me in such a beautiful way.

The way your eyes
stabbed my heart and broke it into shards of glass
reminded me of the specks of blue in your eyes,
so I apologized for the terrible mess I must have caused
and the scratches I must have inflicted on your
dreamy gaze, the one I wanted to bottle up and keep
on rainy days.

The way your skin
electrified my soul after a simple touch
and disrupted the chemical flow between my sensitive nerves
made me feel so special,
so I let you
destroy me in the most lovely way imaginable.

The way your smile
caused an explosion in the pits of my stomach
and caused a herd of buffaloes to
slowly rise in the lump in my throat, made me think of
the one time they tried to explain the Manhattan Project,
so I figured the destruction you caused was only
a history lesson.

-MB

Screaming at the moon during cloudless nights has become
the only form of
therapy that works anymore.
I'm waiting for
the night it will invite me to curl up in its craters and whisper every
childhood fear
you brought up into conversation when I told you
my memories could be used to show how words
can be sharper than the
broken bottles
your mother lusted. Sleepless nights are sobering my head and
my voice box is starting to suffer more than
the Mona Lisa, but you never liked art that didn't hand you
its meaning with open arms and
a pat on the back. I wish time did more than rust
the only things with
something of value, but
junkyards aren't good replacements for falling stars and
forgotten chunks of metal remind me too much of
the way you loved with a steel heart and
icy touch. You claimed I could find
refuge in between your
ribs, but every
cell in your body is frozen solid and I never found comfort in the way ice sculptures morbidly melt in the presence of the sun with
crossed arms and
a closed mind. I'm sorry
my walls have grown taller than your pride, but i hoped i would be something more than a quest filled with
ships meant to sink. Consequently, maps have grown to be
sly creatures, and the
darts i'm throwing at the world all end up on your
roof without a scratch. I wanted to be more than your
fading scar, and I hope you'll look at your arms
one morning and realize they could be touching mine, and until you do, i'm just stuck here with nothing but a stomach full of
conscience and
mouth full of words i'll only scream to the sky.

I have always contemplated the purposes
of Mother Nature during nights
I couldn’t sleep due to her tears and screams
escaping the blooming clouds. I cannot grasp
how such a series of complex events could be summed up
all under a single name
and a single purpose,
but I have never had much faith in anything extraterrestrial.
I don’t mean to be cruel or depressing,
but truth is, I have always wanted to understand
how anything could have color when it was destined
to decay into the gray ground
with the unrealized hope of benefiting
future generations. Evolution is such an amazing thing,
but I believe Mother has
made mistakes in the goal towards an everlasting planet,
one that could or could not be alone
in its livelihood among the ever expanding space
of filling emptiness. Simple animalistic characteristics
could have been enough for the world to sustain itself,
and she could have flourished beyond every imaginable garden,
meadow, and dune we dream about, but as we know well,
sustaining only satisfies sadness. I think, for the first time in the universes,
this unattainable event under a single existing name
craved for something more than the “same thing”.
Somehow, and in some crippling way,
she changed the predictable process of change
to create something that would demonize the
innocence of this planet. Scientists always electrify the fact that
Darwin said natural selection is supposed to
allow beneficial characteristics in a species
to take precedent over others,
but has anyone considered the
evolution of self-awareness? I contemplate
this question often long into the nights and
sometimes until the weary sun cleans the black sky of its worries.
I try to ask the monsters under my bed,
the insecurities biting at the edges of my head,
the anxieties pounding at my torso,
and the disorders plaguing my lungs into peril for
suggestive phrases and clicks,
but I cannot get a straight answer because they themselves are
creations of this awareness. I wonder about this
evolutionary characteristic, and I wonder if maybe someday the future generations
will ever be able to escape the horrific results of this
survival technique. I pray that the planet turns in our favor
and allows Mother to be happy again.
I’m not sure this will ever happen, however,
because maybe even the single
most powerful existence we will ever be able to prove is real,
has its demons too.

I often find ways to cherish the lost things in the world,
whether that be from nature
or from your throat. The way something can metaphorically escape you is something
I can't quite word right
through scribbles inside a broken journal late at night under a fire
that I wish came from your lips. I believe loss is at the core of my existence,
and i don't know if that makes me morbidly poetic or ordinarily insane. Incidentally,
my lungs are filled
with forgotten love songs
you sang to me when I was feeling muted in a world full of incomprehensible sounds
and my ribs are made from collections of old words from past lives, and whether it came from broken branches or foggy days,
i still don't know. Most people want to keep things forever and cherish their pulsing cores,
but i have learned that relying
on water from another puddle will only lead to your own drought. Maybe that's why I seem
to be lonely in a world
full of silhouettes waiting to be filled with something other than thoughts that consume them secretly,
ones that have guaranteed them that someone will plant fresh flowers in their dying skins every chance they get. I, on the other hand,
have accepted the fact that death is a part of the Earth and cannot be controlled,
no matter how many pleas I send to God with grasping palms under judging lights in hospital buildings and bedrooms. I tried to tell you this,
but you ignored
my philosophies and continued to refer to death as the five letter tragedy;
the inevitable loss of everything everyone hopes and dreams for. Luckily,
i know that when you reach for the stars,
you don't always get the
constellations you wish for,
and sometimes, you don't even get anything
but a polluted atmosphere filled regretful exhales and apologies.