The flickering fluorescent
Places accent on the life we could've shared:
Laughter creeping through every drunken little recess
Of the ****** apartment on West campus

As my sister sneaks off with her boyfriend,
Leaving me with the continued potential energy
Of everything I've known lately,
I can't help but allow the thought I've been
Repressing for half the year
To worm its way,
Like the first decomposers into a buried coffin,
Into my mind

Maybe you are really
Happy without me but as I sit here,
Forcing smiles and drinking beer, eating guacamole,
I miss you anyway.

Somebody turns off the lights, saying that
The flickering light hurts their eyes.
Somebody else screams at the dark, in jest
And I'm thinking that at least
The darkness is consistent.

Sometimes in fleeting moments,
Usually after you’d been drinking,
And often during those quiet, dark nights
When we’d lye in bed together,
Hands tracing only absence
On one another’s skin,
You’d look at me in this sort of
Fantastical way.

For me, it was always sort of like
Looking out at the ocean
And thinking for a second that you’re seeing
Infinite blue,
Though it’s really just the color of the sky
Reflected.

Even then, in those transient instants
Of eyes meeting for a second too long,
I’d sometimes think just that I’d miss you
As the subject of my poems.

Then the ice storm came.

The slickness of the roads kept me from you
Days before the storm and days after it,
Such that the sharpie and permanence,
With which I once marked the potential for our love,
Is faded now too.

My heart is a million different places, pieces;
A million different people,
Subdivided like America
To its breaking point.

But I brought my pen in from the car today
And the ink is thawing now
Despite the fact that the next love poem it writes
Will be for someone else
(Which is okay-
I think I’m okay.)

At the top floor of the skyscraper that touches the sun
A man sits with his bourbon in hand, looking out over his creation:
The world in which people shine like glass

Something in that dark yellow of the bourbon reminds the man
Of that time he saw the world’s last tree
Twenty year before it fell.

It was when he was still young and naïve,
His visions of eternal life and glass people,
Still on the brink.

Some instinctual twitch in the back of his brain,
Passed down from the apes, guided him to climb it
But the first branches were too high
And so he cried,
Like a child who cries after stubbing his toe.

It’s while he’s still thinking
Of that first and only time
Seeing a tree beyond a screen
That the man takes his final sip of bourbon,
Though the glass is still half-full.

With the first gunshot in two thousand years,
The bourbon drops to the floor and
Shatters

The snow wasn’t beautiful
Until I noticed the snowflakes
And the way this blanket too long associated
With the cold and the sad
Hangs on the branches,
Draping itself over every twig and tiny piece of bark
That keeps it from the ground
And up and glimmering ,
Miraculously,
In the upper canopy,
Whose complexity
It also takes the snow to see

Today it fell
Like stars across the land:
The unfixed permanence
Of Earth's ceiling
(Just a dome with
Little pinpricks of light)

Ask: what's the weather like
Outside?

My hand raised over my head
To hold my father's.
I skipped across the blacktop
By the playground
Thinking that those red streaks
Looked like the meteors
I envisioned falling
Through the solar system.

It's interesting:
It can be both a blue pill
And a red,
Taking me away
But leaving something more honest
In my place...

Walking through the parking lot today,
Drowning in the sea of smog,
I open my mouth and stick out my tongue
To taste the rain
Like I once could-
But now instead of a smile
I send the sky
A whispered apology
And walk away, still trapped
Under this irreparable
Dome we've ******

To Hushpuppy in the Bathtub
I’m sorry
That the best I can do
Is offer a meager apology
And say
“I’ll remember you”

I’m just a rich white boy
In the depths of corporate America
And my lone voice shouting out your name
In the cacophony of passing cars
Might not make it very far
But I’ll try anyway, Hushpuppy

I pinned those wilting flowers to the wall
And a month later
I still smile when I see them

We'll see what December brings