he went in a man and came out a boy
his eyes crystals
hands tingling
short hair grown long and
     unkempt.
he went in real and came out new
his legs felt still
hands in my hair
face against my chest until we
      wept.

he's a mouth breather
         with thick thoughts
               sinking in his brain
        and a tide that pushes
       him out
      then pulls him back
     again
He's a tongue tied
            trickle of conciousness
                  and a cigarette stain
Naturally numb,
                         jaded,
                                 and cracked.
                                    Broken goods
                             and no way
                         to revert
                      back.
A product of pressured pleasure,
the American man,
for he is a mouth breather
born into a can
             soaked in sour
                    preservatives
and sent off to
school in mom's minivan

when our faces were close and our mouths still
clumsy
your broken tooth always reminded me that I was
alive.
and now I hear you are getting your front-right-
tooth filled in because
the chip is getting to be too much for you to handle
and
you're 'so tired' of explaining how it got there.

what does that make me?

remember when we were in third grade
and we would make it our goal to trample
every single patch of fresh snow that hadn’t been touched yet?
i don’t even know why we were so determined to touch
the previously untouched,
but it made us feel so happy, so proud, so accomplished.
Perhaps it was our first taste of true ownership,
perhaps it gave us a feeling similar to that of Christopher Columbus when he declared
that the world was not, in fact, flat.
Perhaps it was an embryonic stage of rebellion,
a metaphor for a loss of innocence,
trampling and touching and ruining what was once
a pretty, unadulterated patch of snow,
as if to make a statement against anyone and anything
that had ever made us feel
weak and stupid and insignificant, and
powerless.
We were the only two kids at recess who thought of it, who found such
simple pleasure in doing it, who bonded over it, and now,
we don’t even talk anymore.
Perhaps it was a metaphor
for the deterioration of a friendship, too.

electric impulses knaw
at nubs formerly known
as finger tips,
worn down to bits by
the desire to drench
this world with one
simple thing that may
or may not be
everlasting

i'm in search of
a replacement for
flimsy false hopes
and finicky heart pokes,
for flat lined finite
chopped up bits
flying up nostrils
in hysterical hits

even escapists smack
walls from which
they can't slither
through silently,
walls covered in
mirrors full of
faces fueled with
hostility

all the faces are
my own and it's
time i find some grace
before i finally
pull my last astonishing
escape from this place