Keep your eyes closed, we are blind tonight
You can sit on the floorboards,
where I've bled,
naked and dark with me.

"Where are you from?

"Me?"

"Yeah. Where are you from?"

"I'm not really sure. Somewhere. Where are you from?"

"Here. Well, I was born here. I don't want to be from here, though."

"Where would you rather be from if you don't want to be from here?"

"I don't know. Anywhere but, really. Maybe Alaska."

"Why Alaska?"

"Well, I don't know. I'm not sure. Well, you see, they have a month of darkness every year. Just complete darkness. Some people think it's miserable. I think I'd like it, though. That way everyone could be just as invisible as me, even if for only a month out of the year."

Do your parents love you?
Are you religious?
Do you love everyone except yourself?
Are people nice to you?

Swim into me, swivel in the air
your eyes are penchant stares
Try all you can,
let everything and everyone caress you
Let the cold wind blow
and the warm wind undress you.

"Do you know what you did wrong?"

"What I did wrong?"

"Yeah. What you did ******* wrong."

"I-I...I'm not sure."

"You have to be ******* kidding me."

"I tried my be-"

"Shut the **** up. Shut. The. ****. Up. If you want to be something, if you want to get ahead in life, then you can't rely on me, your mother, your friends, or anyone except you. You have to know that every decision is your own, and every consequence that comes along with each decision, is your own to handle. No one will help you, and no one needs to help you because it's not their responsibility. You handle your own ****, and you do better than your best. Perfection. If you aren't perfect, then you aren't anything."

Birds and flies swivel around my head
you sit under a tree with thorns in your hair
I say, "Hi."
You say, "Hi."
I sit next to you, and you don't get up.
You smile and say, "Where have you been?"

And death shall have no dominion?
Is that so much a hope rather than opinion?
Under the windings of the sea?
And if no air breezes by, for you and me?
And if the resolution of my lack of evolution keeps me free?
Is there any hope in harmony. Is there any hope in harmony.
Is there any hope in harmony. Is there any hope in being me.

"Dreams are dangerous, Josh. They're sedatives, not cures. Choose reality. Choose the bitter pill. Because whether you believe it or not, you will end up having it whether you're forced to take it or whether you choose to take it. No matter how much talent you think you have, no matter how much stubbornness that you mistake for ambition, you will be unable to attain your dreams."

"What if you're wrong?"

"What if I'm wrong? Well, let's see-"

"No. What if you're wrong? What if you say all this because of your personal experience. What if you believe all of that because your belief in yourself was stripped by those before you? You could have done something bigger, but you gave up on yourself. You could have been someone. You could have been happy, instead of what you are now. Don't take away the only thing I have just because you have nothing."


Fear is a deadly thing to bear witness to
The hollow spot in the wall,
the eyes staring at a coffee mug,
the words, "I promise."

Tear apart an inverted heart,
and disappear into reverse midnight
All alone with a telephone,
"You're still there, right?"
Dial-tone silence followed by
fist to wall violence
and to sit alone in a bathtub
crying
is a new form of living yet
dying

I can hear violins amidst the violence
And I can see your eyes in the dark
There will be hands shaking
To you, for without, every burn
that's been allowed,
a night to relieve
your weary mind from unkind
lovers, mothers, fathers, brothers
and a hope that you retrieve
yourself in the debris


"Why do you care so much?"

"Why do I care?"

"A better question would be: Why do you care about people so much?"

"Because there's more beauty than desolation in humanity, or at least I choose to believe so."


Sunset sonata
*** in empty beds, in empty heads
Our sweat is a stranger, just like you
and just like me
*** is like society
And we're so focused on ******* each other
no matter how badly it ******* hurts us in the process

I cut myself on the future
I thought of kissing your picture
I detached myself from
lullabies and sorry eyes
only to realize:

I want to make love to you in November,
just before the empty of December.
Where snow blankets
and suffocating leaf-beds
aren't the only dreams
to fall asleep in our heads.

I could hear your voice trip
as my hands started to drip
around your hips and thighs-
You could tranquilize
with your lips and byes.

You look so sleepy-headed
Many words I have threaded
to weave a dream
desperately
but you prefer my
reality.

Carcinogenic gasps
between photogenic thighs
create esoteric muscle movement
that moves me inside.
Your parents are therapists,
and mine choose not to be alive;
the words they say
don't work for moments we hide.

Jesus Christ before the sunset rust,
if I'm so alive
then why do I lust
absence.

There's a place
where I'd like to drown
every Saturday.
The water's warm
and thick in my lungs
and I'm no longer afraid.

Colliding with epinephrine,
your neck thrusts forward;
you kiss the steering wheel.
"Do you know
how much
you mean to me?"
Your eyes meet mine  
before disappearing in the glass mist.
I love you.

Sigh.
This is hard.


My eyes are getting heavier with each passing day and the boy I see in the mirror
looks almost like a man.
Almost.

I am thankful for all the unkind words.
They made me strong and they made me carefree.
But when the lights go off and piano notes dance around my room the sheets feel lonely and my room feels cold.
When I close my eyes, my fingers are running along your cheek and my lips are brushing your nose.
You're not here.
I don't even know...

who
you
are.
But I hear myself whisper your name.

I know that somewhere in the universe, pieces of our souls flown through lonely tears and childhood wishes are are dancing with one another in the rain.
...kissing after dinner...
..making love after a fight...

I am so madly in love with you and I have no idea who you are.
Whether you even exist at all yet or whether I pass you every day.

I make no promise that I will caress your skin.
I make no promise that I will hear you laugh.
I make no promise that I will ever find you.


But I promise to always keep looking,
so keep your eyes open too...



With all my love whoever you are,

Joshua Haynes

A bird dropped down out of the sky and landed in my head, and though I listened as it sung, I couldn't fathom what it said.
I'm sure it spoke of hungry fiends
wishful things
and childish schemes.
But deep within those singing eyes were vast and universal dreams.

Then he flew away in music and I just listened to the silence.


**Newly established Sailor Joshua Haynes here by the way. It is good to be back

it's a short  dance
between the night and, say  
the morning
dreamy hope  
moon trance  
missing heartbeats
scary haunting prowls
distant shards of darkness
and a soft release
with a hint of silence.

My drugged fantasy
follows the rhyme masters:  
trans-Atlantic dwellers  
icy treasure keepers
sights of sacred mountains    
and powerful embracing
(never self-effacing)
of half-life, half-death.

My pen poised and struggles:  
such a crazy evening  
such seductive welcome  
sights perfectly imagined  
and accomplished howls  
of the gospel sayings.  

I'm a northern demon
painting ashen skies
as I watch vampires of dark past returning.
  
Such a hard unlearning:
memories
are future souls burning
that whisper to us  
through the ancient dust
of painless forgetting
freedom fragments chasing  
precious bonds of wisdom,
perfect dreamy angels.

God* knows I'm a (ship)wreck.

But nonbelievers do not sink.

Just another name scribbled in the corner of my notebook.

why do I buy books I won't read
maybe it's the same reason
I fall in love with people I can't have
I never reach out quite far enough
so that these experiences are tantalizingly
untantalizing
and maybe I select a great deal of books
in the hopes of finding one that I will actually enjoy
and I read such a small fraction of them
that I seem to be misspending my money.
but I will continue my vice and form a collection
of books that were
never intended to be read
to sit forever on the bookshelf of my memory,
quiet and untouched
maybe there only to be in stark contrast
to the ones I have opened
and destroyed.