Broke the seal, came to kneel
Carry me through everything you feel
Shallow water, sunken sea
Broken fists and ****** knees
Safe and sound, keep holding me while I drown
I reflect the needles, fistful of pens, take me back to the only place I understand
The safety was never on, the gun has always been loaded and the blood looks like velvet while it runs down the staircase
This is desperation and demise with a smiling face
Playing with God,
Talking him up,
I heard you invited him over for dinner
and asked him to ****
I heard he denied you, told you that you weren't good enough,
you swallowed your pride and then you called me up.
I sunk into the staircase, bled into the floorboards, colored the walls with my shadows, the basement ceilings drippings spelled out stupid *****.
Cut off your ears to spite your mom, cut out your tongue because you know you're ******* ****.
**** all of your enemies, it's only suicide, remember how it costs nothing to lie and everything to die.
Thoughts in the fade, skies swallowed in grey, it never rains and around here we don't believe in pain.
Vibrate this name with your vocal chords and no tongue, beg God to take you back when I'm done.

full circle
I'm laying here with the window open listening to the rain for secrets or something or waiting for you to tell me what you haven't been telling me
like maybe there really is a girl out there with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair and her eyes are the kind of blue that is never mistaken for grey
she touches your chin before she kisses you, real softly or maybe she traces the spot above your lip where we all know angels rested their fingers before we were sent down here to rot or thrive
maybe you talk about gardens with her, how you'd never ever own an orchid cause that ***** ex of yours demanded one every hospital visit
how flowers aren't for boys but you'll pretend to watch football while you're really watching her bend down to touch the dirt like she used to smooth her baby brothers hair out of his little eyes
before their parents decided that it was more convenient to buy them a little apartment and keep money in the safe while they spent their pensions in Florida watching alligators and Dolphins and toucan ******* Sam but never at the same time
you see, I don't drink earl grey cause it tastes like fruit loops
and I don't eat fruit loops cause it tastes like the childhood I erased from my memory by forcing myself to dissociate
maybe this, is something else altogether
maybe this... is not true, another delusion, maybe your hands are busy counting change out for cardboard signs
maybe your feet move a little bit faster, not because you're in a rush to see someone who isn't me but because you're so scared of ending up back where you started

As an infant there was always more tears than laughter and despondent empty eyes from people who were supposed to look at me with eyes full of future and love. The first thing babies automatically know how to do regularly is not smile or laugh, but cry.  
I'm not sure if we all cried for our sins in our past lives or for the ambiguity of the life we were entering.

There were empty rooms in that house, too many for me to count. It always smelled like coffee in the mornings and we made shadow puppets on the walls, he taught me how to make butterflies with my hands before I knew how to love.

Maybe the shadows were made out of needles instead of hands.

Our first best friends are rarely the ones we see beside us on our graduation day or cheering us on at the altar. The ones who kissed our skinned knees with such innocence when our parents weren't around during our first year of school are not the ones that kiss our bruised hearts and broken minds when we lose our stability later in life when nobody is around.

I remember your eyes.

It wasn't the ocean, it was a knock off. It was the most beautiful piece of something cheap compared to a million dollars of crystalized beauty, maybe you saw that thing you love(d) so dearly within it and that's why we went there so much, but it will always be framed inside of my mind. You left the car when I looked at the trailer trash sea from the back seat like it was the most golden beach. The sunset reflected the pulse from the bodies that would be close to mine later in life. I've never felt a sunset like I did on that day. The highway was a different shade of gray on the ride home. I haven't seen that color since.

The first insults feel like bullet holes and sound like nails on a chalk board. You learn with age that you are only what you see yourself as, you are not these combinations of letters and sounds and syllables used to make yourself turn against yourself.

I remember the light on the front porch and the way the air felt. I remember the way I barely saw your face and the way your voice cracked. I remember I kept my body in the warmth and my head outside in the cold where your entire body was, and maybe that's why my head hasn't been right ever since. I remember feeling something sad and not understand why and realizing almost every day since then that goodbye's can be forever and not just see you later's.

We will throw our caps in the air, and there will be a barrier with many cracks in it between me and what once was. There will be an open road with forevers laced like a dotted line straight down the middle in front of me and I will scream goodbye to the sound of my favorite songs,
and I'm sorry, but I don't know how long I'll be gone.

i believe your heart is just overgrowth sworn to a secret oath of her bleach stained teeth, what was and what never will be. i sleep with buckets beside my bed and tear stained pillow cases and a knife under one of my mattresses. i wake up with a head heavy with dread and most early mornings i feel like i could be dead, but i know that i'm not because the knife is still under my bed.
and she kissed my forehead in my sleep and i held his hand under the tree where in real time people never meet, junkies just take turns staying there and sleep. i held a heart there. i held it in my hands and it was beating until there was something like a scream, i still think it was the wind.



the way the sunset skips some houses is really prophetic for the way some families in those houses become too broken to be noticed. the way the tops of the mountains can be seen on the darkest nights at times helps me understand the sounds the strings make and the sounds small creatures make when they awake. this chest is full of unmeasurable emotion that gave so many the notion that i don't know how to love, only curse the things that can't curse me back. i am skillful at allowing you to know my eyes and know my lies and the truth is i will never love anyone like i love the way i can make them love me late at night. i will never love. love never. never enough.

months ago on a friday night the bouquet of different memories we passed around was haunted by this idea that we could extract all of the hard parts from ourselves, all of the sad parts, and create god with it. everyone fell asleep that night and i went outside and buried this bouquet because i know that if there is such a god, he is sadder than all of us. we could never recreate something that's already been made with such disgrace to be full of anymore distaste, so we won't. we never will. our voices stay shrill now and some nights our ghosts steal our voices and run away to be near this tree, and they scream and scream and scream.

i always thought
you were thru traffic
that you were just jet lag
background noise
the kiss in the rain
i've never had
but what if you aren't?
what if this
was the thousandth time
i have loved you?
what if this is just a fresh coat of paint?
what if god
keeps a handkerchief
soaked in the day we met
next to his bed?
maybe theres a reason
i reach for no one in bed
the way i would
if someone used to be there
you know, they say
the road behind us
is littered with things
we couldn't hold onto
i wonder how many times
you've slipped through my hands
like hour glass sand
do you know
how much erosion you've caused?
i heard cupid
stopped keeping count
of how many times
we came together
just to come apart again
maybe it was just a rumor
it makes me think
about how many times
i've almost had you
like if all this talk
about history repeating itself
endlessly replaying is true
i wonder how many times
things have happened already
like the time
i tried talking you
into loving me back
back fired
or the time i could have sworn
jesus & lazarus were playing chess
with my heartbeat
but it was only you smiling
how many times
have i tried to tell you
how many times
have you read this poem
how many times
have i tried not to meet you
in my dreams anymore
it's like sleep tries to warn
me of what's happening
before it does but
i keep having this dream
where i tell you bedtime stories
and each one
is a different way you die
and in every one
i can never save you
it's like you're this song
i have on repeat
and every time it starts over
i forget the words
it's like you picked up the book entitled "us"
and the back cover
said you'd leave
so you never bothered reading it
tell me you aren't
going back in that bookstore
just to do it again
or will you tell me tomorrow?
or is this the time
you don't say anything at all?
if this has all happened before
if we call it quits
before we begin
again
from the beginning
i just want to ask you
to be my fire
because i am tired
of these old lives
and i'd like to see them
burn

i love you this morning
it's a come home safe morning
fog on the road
& no seatbelt kind of morning
the sun is over easy
& nothing's on fire
there's punctuation
where i don't want it
and extra love
in the glovebox of my car
been thinking about being honest
how these poems are all me
but they tell the story
how someone else
might believe it happened
within reasonable doubt
no copy & pasted love letters
no 'who ever says hello first gets my attention for the day'
try a little tenderness
in my ears and today
there are instruments
in the back of my head
i think you love me
because i'm sunburned
felt it in a 'come hell or high water' kinda way, that 'touched from far away' kinda way that 'if i touch this piano one more time one of us is going to break' kinda way
and i drove over 17 bridges yesterday and today i'll do it again
and i think nobody gets
what that means except maybe you
i just tell them i love the scenery
that somebody must've made
these trees blush just for me
you know how i love
to change the subject
i bet they'd love the view
i bet you would too
and all these metaphors
for other things are beside the point
this is a metaphor
for why i don't wear my seatbelt
a metaphor for why whiskey
knows me better than you
could ever try to
all the buildings seemed to sag yesterday and all the stars
are doing that cliche thing
where they talk
quiet jet noise
& some lumbering giant
made everything shake
not those hand metaphors
not another one of those
& keep the sea to yourself
i think it was a train
it's sound hugged the embankment
for a moment
and then trailed off into nowhere
and that's kind of like me
how there's a town called 'rescue'
close to my home &
it's no coincidence
that i've never been there

and i am eleven again
feeling like tomorrow
is a couple yesterday's ago
smothered in cayenne pepper
hot enough to take off taste buds
and tonight i am eating a meal
only worth burning
it tastes like my parents anniversary
it tastes like a zinfandel
left on the counter too long
it's a bad story, see
there's no silverware
'cause my mom sold it
to keep the lights on
and somewhere in heaven
somebody in a suit
doing commentary
on this fiasco
is telling someone else
in a suit that
"you have to eat love with your hands"
so we sit, four plates on the table
for the two of us
my brother's long gone
dad's even further away
& he's not the one who's buried
i carry both their names like anchors
that i cannot unmoor from
while she looks at the empty table
and says something about the news
she says something else
but she's not talking
we aren't proud of this, see
my dad likes to wax his car
he's proud of it
and my mom says
she sees a lot of him in my hands
says, i touch the things i find
like they didn't belong
to people sleeping in the ground
she says i touch photo albums
the same way-
you know,
i never used to believe
that history could repeat itself
not until i could
fast forward seventeen years
and still wake up to smoke alarms
how i would go into our kitchen
to find it empty
and the dinner smoldering
& my mother in her bedroom
looking through family photos
like it's a just another summer day
and the sirens are just the birds
i don't ask, i never say a word
in this moment
i am an archeologist
afraid to dig up the past
cause history repeats itself-
you see
my brother is dead
and my father is gone
they have been for some years now
and my mother
sometimes forgets
and sets their place at the table
like they're still here
and in the confusion
ends up ankle deep
in pictures of how it used to be
she let's dinner burn
and douses it in red pepper
hoping i won't know the difference