I keep your ring because it’s a fantastic memory
but what's a memory good for
if you’re never coming back*

It’s a mantra

Too many young people not living long enough
She says

It’s true

She tells me about how a boy
Was found dead in his car the day before
at a community college she goes to

She knows life is fragile
She feels it in the ache in her knees when it’s cold

Her eyes are painful
In their beauty
And understanding
Of the things our stupid bodies do

Our bodies are stupid

Insanely stupid

Cancer is the body attacking itself

And so often we can be cancer for ourselves

In the same way we love our livers
Just to feel numb for a while

Because I’d have never spoken to you
If I still wasn’t a little drunk the day we met

On dance floors
In bars
At house parties
We need something to give us an excuse to **** up

So we can blame it on the cancer
The kind that breaks the ice

This is me breaking the ice
This is me letting things go
This is me doing everything I can
To live for a living

I do a lot of stupid things
Just so I can tell a good story later

and in the end

Even if we get in our seventy
Punch out perfectly

It will not have been long enough

Just ask David
Who knows he will never naturally feel as good
As the coke
And the adrenaline pump of near death experiences

Tells me
About happiest day of his life
Was when his father for the first time
Taught him how to tie a fishing knot
Tells me his father’s hands were the kind of comfortably rough
That only certain men can earn
Rough from the labor
But soft enough never to hurt
Anybody

He regrets not being able to be that man

Don’t let a day go by that doesn’t remind you
That you are made from the same things stars are made of

That at any given moment
You can shine just as brightly

And please **** up
Shameless
Excuseless

**** up for the love
For the smiles

No one ever thought badly of someone who tried and failed

Trying is the bravest thing any one person has ever done

I dare you to try

Try to find something to live for

And live for it

And in the end
I’ll grab her crippled hand
Worn from the life that
Broke them down perfectly
Worn from the years of sign language
And the holding of heads

If we are going to be cancer to ourselves
Let the break down mean something
Break yourself down to make things better

She knows this
Has shown me this

Now I have something to live for
I live for the poetry
And the laughter I cause when I am an idiot
I try so hard to be an idiot
Work my body rough for the laughter

In fact

I live for it

My heart can’t hold
True
To anything

It has been rumored that if you hold someone long enough
Their heartbeat will match yours

If this were the case you would have seen me for who I am by now

Hearts are ugly blood pumping engines
Keeping us alive

I’d like to say you keep me alive
But you don’t

And if this works out and I lose you some day

You won’t

I mean
I am tired of the love poems
About the longing
And the passion
And the
If I had you’s

Love happens in stages

That is stage one

And you are stage two
After we drop the five acre metaphors
All forming like words from the mouth of a man
Who is still learning how to swoon something honest
Still learning what it means to make things right
Still listening for the flaws in his passionate stutter

I have counted them all
Made notes on my own
So let me learn yours
So I can write about
The years of learning

The study of your mistakes
I will write them beautiful
Even if they’re really bad
Even if they make you really mad

Woman
I know I am broken
If I can’t change me
Then you can’t change me
I will write about your stinky feet if I want to

Maybe they’ll smell like the miles you
Walk on sunny days
Because you’re trying to lose weight
Maybe they’ll smell like losing weight
And therefore
At least for you
It will be beautiful

I will always think you are beautiful

And stage three is when you finally leave me for good
Even if we have been broken up for years by now
You leaving
Is you leaving
Is your heart finally failing at doing what hearts really do
Because if me holding you causes mine to beat like yours
Then I’d be leaving too

Here is the truth
I have been told
The heart is deceitful above all things
This is the truth

And I or you will be left
To pick up the pieces
Still alive
Still breathing
Still bathing in the stages of love

But I am still stuck in stage one

And you beautiful future deathbed lover
Are stage two

In a sea of lost souls
I can’t believe you haven’t found me yet

I mean
I’ve never seen so many people
Get so close to each other without touching

And I want so badly
To tattoo in thick black letters
Over my heart
The word

FOUND

This is for the people who
Are still waiting to be found

For the boys who thought they had her heart
and lost it

This is for the bravery of trying
For the bravery it takes to let someone hurt you
On a chance that they won’t

This is for the bootstraps
Caked in the dirt that you fall in
For how white your knuckles get in the rising

For the ones who have something to give
But think they have nothing to give

For the ones who have nothing to give
And try and give anyway

You will always have something to bring to the table
If you are willing

This is for the ones who’s walls of strength
Are so thick
They can’t feel the touch
So it doesn’t have to hurt when they see you leaving

Press harder
Press until you hit the soft
Find something worth holding

You are worth holding

The game of tag and all its variations
Were just preparation
For the time you spend hiding your heart diligently
Until you see the joy in being found

Know
If you are reading this
I found you

Which means it’s your turn
To find someone else

I know it takes courage
To touch someone
In a world where no one touches

But you did it once when you were a kid

I know you have doubts
I have doubts

I don’t see in me any of the things people see in me
I own a mirror
I mean ****
I shave me
No one knows how ugly this mess gets better than I do

But *******
We have got to be found

Know this is the year you do everything right

Ask someone to dance
Show them how they’ve been swimming all wrong
In this sea of souls where everyone feels so lost

Even Christians have to find Jesus
A man who can only save them
After he is found

I challenge you
To write a letter to a stranger
Telling them you’ve secretly loved them
Remain anonymous
Only send one

Hold a door open for someone

Smile like you do when you read a message
From someone you care about
And don’t realize you’re doing it
Until one of your ******* friends asks why you’re smiling like that

Smiling is ****
I promise

Do stupid things every chance you get
You’ll become a good story teller
It will make you interesting

Shake the dust from your tired shield
Let your walls fall like the crumble was healthy
You do not need walls in wide open places

Know whatever you have been made to believe
You should always love like you’ve never been hurt
You should not be afraid to be hurt

Know
Love is yours
If you want it

Want it
I dare you

Tag

I found you

Now find someone else

The snuggles and the kisses stopped the pain for only so long
Until one day
They didn’t stop a thing

Around the time you stopped using the word snuggle
Around the same time you tried calling her Carol instead of mom

Around the same time you learned
If you lick your own wounds
You heal just as quickly

We are practiced in healing
The small miracle of single cell resurrection
And finding enough blood to fill the deepest heart fissure

And sure
You scar up sometimes

But we are also practiced in remembering
Everything but the pain itself
You can’t physically remember pain
But you can-recreate it

Unless you’re practiced in remembering
Then you won’t

The sound of you chewing broken glass

The way it crunched beneath your feet after the mirror broke

The best way to get blood out of clothes is
To accept that you can’t

On good days
You are a gumpy smiled
Heavy footed
Head hanger
Curls that branch out like leaves
So much weight your neck branch hangs heavy

And I know there are days you want to die
Like Friday

And I’m glad you are still afraid enough of leaving
That you got your palm instead of wrist

In the tremble
In the passion

We wrestled on broken glass
Until I pinned you down
I’ve never had someone else’s blood on my face before
It tasted metallic and warm
Sprayed a fine mist when I blew it from my lips

Every page in every book
Remembers the tree that it came from

We stole life from the same tree
So many of our pages come from the same story

Of father who left mother
But came back to care for sick son
And made you

Thanks to me
He made you

I think how crunching glass
Sounds so much like ice breaking
And how cold the floor we both lay on is

And how you kept saying

I want to go home
This isn’t right
I hate you
I hate you
I just need to go home

To keep calm
I remind myself how some people
Chew with their mouth open
Sometimes
They chew on glass

Ps. I also have to take a ****
He says

It’s what best friends do
They tell you things you don’t want to hear

Like
Ps. You’re being a ***** right now
We both know how badly you want to
Just ******* kiss her*

You are sandpaper laughter
So much grind in my double over we both tear up

This is the stuff I’ve been trying to tell people
For at least 12 years now

How we are so good at following each other’s lead
We get lost in the process and crash into a heaping mess
Of what the ****

Like when I pretend to be gay Christopher Walken
And you are his best friend some Australian guy
And the whole room laughs like this was a joke

I have stenciled SAFETY in microscopic letters
Around the outside of your mattress
For the days I can’t sleep at home

For days where rest
Is the warmth of 3 blankets and a room heater inside your freezing granny flat

You satiate my soul
Like the 12 packs we **** alone in one sitting

Inside your throat
There is a harmonica exhale
Tuned to the key of gritty

It was designed by people who have learned
The true definition of lonely
And It calls to them a song that has only one word

FOUND

I feel found in your ***** harmonica voice
It gets me
Plays my song when slow dancing alone
With my beer belly is all I need for company

You so much an ambidextrous best foot forward
That you occasionally forget which foot is your best
So you remember where your heart went
Always the right place

We might be a cacophony
Of whale farts
and silly accents
and ***** mouthed prayer
to everyone else who meets us

But I have only ever loved amazing people
And I love you

Ps…………. I hope you pooped well

Corduroy
by far
is the sexiest fabric

Zipper wisp you thighs a bit faster
You cat-call of body language

I wanna hear you coming

You are not a denim ******
Not cotton soft

My hands are rough
Let me feel your texture
Of parallel lines that go all the way up

Let me lose your button

You can find it later
Keep your innocence like that bear
In that children’s book you might read
To your own kids someday

Corduroy is ugly
So are we

Has texture
So do we

Is made from finely twisted fibers
Like DNA

Corduroy makes me sweat
Literally

And figuratively
If
We were trapped under a blanket of it
And could not tell the difference between

Scar tissue and fabric
Hair and fabric
I will have to bite you to notice the difference

Unless you holler like corduroy
A sound you could beat me with

Then we would just be a transcendental blanket
Of
This should be burned later

So
When I tell you
I think you’re **** like corduroy

It’s a compliment