One eye on the sun, one eye on the moon

Envy and insecurity are secondary emotions. There is a root and you must locate it

I lack the passion of a thief
stealing is *****

I am a four page secret, creased along the knees and folds of the fingers. I am a four page secret, folded at the knees and the neck.

I lack the passion of a thief. ******* is my religion. We are still connected by breath. The taste is similar. The attempt is admirable, but
the idea of control is beyond recall. Diamonds shimmering, cutting into my eyes. I can't spell the new language. Please help me understand

I'm trying to write how I speak

but looking to the sky has no sound.

Half eaten breath

sliding across my tongue like a piece of candy.

After years of sewing sentences together, trying to accelerate my youth

you have offered me a new language,

with hope that there is an end at the end, and it will be glorious.

If I ever believe these things you proclaim

I will put the pen down for good;

Nothing more to say, to discover, to spell.


But I do, I do want to write.


Each day that passes, picked, ripe, then rotten,

I conjure up the courage to just kneel and listen to the words.

I shake my memory box

and you survive, you rise to the top each time.

After this thought, there you are, and after this thought...


A particular one, that has caused much disruption

is that

if I ever become someone else,

with pain that isn't mine,

with a different tongue, with different breath

you will still remain the greatest moment of my life.

You hold the last word I will every say,

and somewhere along this life I will receive it,

whispered into a pillow and placed under my head

and as luck would have it, I am unattractively curious about what it is...


Until then,

I try to write how I speak

I've been suicidal for years.

"I took note of what the darkness does to you, but you still find laughter among the living.
Your veins are still full.
Oh, you say that you too have no soul?
Well, I have no vitals.
You have something to lose, I don't."

I put the moon in the bathtub with me last night, just for some company.
While we soaked, I rummaged through my mind; thinking about the times that I could have used your help, if only I had said something then. If only I could take time by the hand and walk it back to those moments. If only thinking this way would provide nourishment of some sort. But it doesn't, in fact it does quite the opposite.
Fully awake in the depths of my anxiety, usually when I have the most to say.
Questions leave my lips in an almost inaudible  whisper. Will I be forgiven, when will my lunar lover leave me, how long do the mosquitoes that feast on me carry my scent with them.
If I speak too loudly, if I open my mouth too much everything will fall out.
Fragments, detached tissue, nightmares.
So I swallow, take in water, swallow.
Cough up some fire, spit out the remains of thunder I had left.
Angry at the water for welcoming the noise with ripples pushing away from me.
Reality set in.
Will you be strong when I'm this weak?
Will you wipe the drool hanging from my lips when I'm finally empty?
No, you won't.
I left the moon my soapy remains, you can have it back now.

September will be waist-deep in restoration.
The rain today was evidence of that.
Thunder for the deaf ears.
Lightening to whip the rigid spines.
Eventually it will break the water's surface.
It will separate souls from the atoms it inhabits.
Pick up the rock, watch the ants scatter
The other half of the bible has been found.
I've seen it, there are no questions left.
Love is coming.
To the influence, I give permission.
Though this heart is nothing more than a fist of lifeless gray matter,
a rhythm of agony continues to barrel through the pathways in my body.
Atoms and assumptions packed into a sack of brown fabric,
I lie awake into the late hours, hoping that we've been praying for the same paradise.

The vagabond will come to you in the bruised black of night so keep an angel close by to reverse the collision in your digestive track. The voice will penetrate your outline, jagged starry sounds from a drooling unhinged jaw talking about something that resembles a spiritual awakening. You will become septic with acid blood, tears running down your neck, attempting to count the visions, pointing with seared fingertips. The first to die from misophonia.
Lock your door.

There's a stabbing memory that I hold dear to me
It's that night you tied my hands behind my back and rocked me to sleep
Barely, drunkenly, I awoke to frozen veins with the cold shakles still on my wrists
I sat, and shifted, and turned and tossed
No matter which direction I faced, I smelled your scent in the wind
My trampled fingers retraced my steps in the fields of hair on your chest until you opened your eyes
You turned towards me, pressed your foot against my body hard enough until I slid off the edge of the bed
The shackles pulled me down head first, smashing against the floor and making a crack in the dark hardwood
A clean break
But instead of resuming the usual routine of a graceful departure
I locked your door, dragged the angel out of the closet
and demanded that he tell me why I couldn't have you
He told me to table the conversation

I expected pain. More memorable than a dull discomfort in the chest. I knew that I would have to purge you, and I expected some fever dreams. I had one about my ashes being carried to you through the air.
Eyes open, aware of the demise I constructed. There was a toughness, a crispness around the edges of my love.

But I didn't know that you could lacerate lifespans into a fraction. My suffering was emancipated and given the greater field to run through. I didn't know that my lust would drive me to lunacy. I didn't know that you would become a vice. I was promised the comfort of satiation, I didn't know that I would become primal for it. I didn't know that I would search for you in the bottom of every bottle, every swirl of wine that I smell.

I didn't know that the tick of midnight would hit differently. The spaces that you didn't occupy torment me more than the ones that held your presence. I expected you to reshape my inner aspects, and give me the most excruciating *******. I didn't know that you would close your fingers around my waist and inject poison into the hot pink. Not once did I imagine any children of yours that I would volunteer to exorcise over and over.

A mental, chemical stripping of the facade, I anticipated. But there was still physiological agony when you released my airway. When my body would catch the breaths that I tried to reject. I didn't know that you would hold me up to the Sun to show me that it's not God after all. I expected pain. But not a pain that would determine my price.

I've given my insecurities a grave.

Hands tied, gagged by the ball of fear you shoved into my mouth. You dragged me to the center of the room and pulled me up by my ribcage. Lips, puffy and quivering from crying.
The pain began to push through the narcotized haze I was in.
Before I started counting my regrets, before I let my mind expatiate the possibilities of my death
All I could think about, the only question I wanted to ask was,
“Were you scared when you lied to me?"
When I did, you threatened to take my tongue out.

At one point I became airborne
I flew into a thunderstorm
because it reminded me of your heartbeat
There were swords and liquids, but not you
Not the you that I held so close
Carbon dioxide fighting to escape my body but it had no where to go
Depression is a jealous God

I was writing for what felt like years with such vigor that the color bled from my eyes
Mountains of texts in every language surrounded me. An island of action, my singular goal was unknown even to myself. But oxygen was inferior, I snapped synapses and tore out parts of my nervous system. I was a writer, **** everything else.

I love you more from a far. I love you more in theory.

If you ask me, he lit the match that set the Moon on fire
It’s not a myth; I was there, when I had no home
And I walked in Saturn’s ring rain for so long it sloughed off my skin
I marched, trying to flatten the crater I’d made
Because I was ashamed of it
I was the last meteor to hit his heart; the loudest
But that was so long ago
The quietest revolutions are usually the most violent
If you ask him, I smelled like Genesis and Revelation from the inside
******* insatiable
I slathered honey on my cheeks and boiled my blood
so hot until my arteries turned charred black
I licked my wounds from the impact and discovered just what the hell was poisoning me

If you ask me, I didn’t know him last night and I won’t know him on the last night
But my God, he inspires me

I used to wake up missing him, as if we didn’t spend almost every waking minute in each other’s presence. As if I didn’t hear his voice more than my own.
“Your shadow doesn’t belong to you. I know where you’ve been.”
“I have no reason to lie,” he would recite to me.
That was our nightly tradition.
I would watch him sit across from me at the dinner table,
telling me that he never did mean to hurt me, with my heart on his plate.
I packed ahead of time, and reorganized my regrets to make room for our relationship.
I crumpled up the letter I wrote and put it in my back pocket.
I couldn’t bring myself to explain why I had to leave him; my absence would be devastating enough.

He would make his fabrications fit into the palm of his hand and smack me with them.
I was born and raised by the backhand of heartbreak so it was home away from home when I ran away to him.
Instead of standing up for myself
I wrote poetry so hot that I would burn his mouth every time I tried to feed him.
He was a better cook anyway.

My grandmother, when I sought her wise council,
told me that I should accept the pain and try to make something out of it.

I remember when I tried to make love out of my pain for the last time.
He clawed my spirit out of me, put it under my head like a pillow.
He laid on top of me, grinding into my pelvic bone, making heat that burned my skin.
The bite marks on my chest stung when his sweat dripped on me.
I closed my eyes and saw the manifestation of my fears.
My body finally gave out after running from my ******, and he came when I did.

As he slept, I cleaned the blood from under his fingernails.