1
High speed and truly unlimited will soon be so 12 seconds ago
in the largest network ever

I mean let’s head on down to
Mylife.com
And see how well it matches with
Yourlife.com
Toss in a daily couple’s horoscope
And make magic

2
Nature has a knack for making connections

There is a redwood forest
With trees so close
Roots so tightly woven
Biologists can’t truly tell where one tree begins and one ends

It is one of the largest living organisms ever

But I could only tell you which tree I’d like to maybe climb
If I weren’t afraid of heights

Which is good because you are afraid heights too
I learned this on your profile

We are thirty percent compatible
I did the math

3
High speed your lips my way

I wish I had told you that 12 seconds ago

I mean
I’d like to dock in your port
And double click until you GOOGLE

Don’t worry about an overload or a virus
I got some burly surge protection

Unless this is too soon for you
Then maybe I can play with your thumb drive
Nibble on your wires til you’re ready for a MEGABYTE

4
It’s what we do
Find reasons to touch other people
Operate at high speeds til we crash
We need the crash
Pass by near hits
Some people I pass by and never see
We are praying for the cooldown

Sit with me a little while
Have a cup of coffee

You have an eyelash on your cheek

I am lying
I just wanted to touch your face

I sometimes wonder if we could be like play-dough
And I might melt into you if I wasn’t careful

You laughed when I asked you about it
Shifted uncomfortably

I think everything happens so fast
I’ve stopped amassing information

I just wanna single-cell feel this life for a while

5
In twelve seconds
I can be unlimited

It’s just long enough to be charming
Long enough to make you laugh

12 seconds ago
I farted
You are smelling it now

You do not say a word about it

In 12 seconds you can learn how polite someone is

My heart will beat fifteen times
In that same amount of time

Less if it skips a beat
Less if I am dying

6
Pretty soon
This life will pass you by

And god will quit texting long enough
To say

Unlimited?
Welcome to forever
Sorry you missed out
On the debauchery
And the laughter

You’ve all had your heads
In electric clouds so long

Keeping touch
Without the touch

Now join the light
You won’t feel ****
Maybe happy
I dunno
This ball just keeps getting bigger

7
Life is high speed
Feels like twelve seconds

I’m not saying we should always stop to smell the roses

Just **** more often
Touch more often
Look someone beautiful in the eyes without being afraid more often

There is only now

Now there only was

The movement of her body was entirely too loud

She is desert throat gasps
When the water is so good
She doesn’t stop for air

Can hear her comin’
Her rusty train wreck tremble
On loose tracks

Her collapse is a cinderblock rain
The crumble is so much quieter than the crash
Her crumble is so much quieter than the crash

Her hands shake as she swipes her EBT card for the fifteenth time
She puts back the bacon this time
Throws down 5.50 for the Marlboros

She talks to herself
Angrily
Slams ever door she enters
Every door she exits

Her children think she is crazy

She is crazy

She is a body built
On passive aggression
And the threat of a shaky foundation
When the earthquake hits

Any day could be my last day you know

Her son turns up the tv
Her daughter plugs her headphones into her cd player

Do you all think I am talking just to hear myself talk?
And if you don’t stop sleep talking
Telling me you’re going to **** me
I am sending you to the hospital

The boy mutes the tv
Dries his eyes before they’re wet
He shakes his head
Begs her not to do that
Says he doesn’t know he’s doing it
Says he doesn’t want to **** her

She walks away
And he is left wondering

I remind him later
That we were not raised on truth
So it’s hard sometimes
To trust people

I put a lock on his door
Tell him to shut himself in at night

As for the mother
We don’t talk anymore

Like I said
She’s crazy
And I’ve got too much of that myself already

Somewhere a door is slamming
Somewhere cinderblocks are crumbling quiet
There is a sizzle like slowly cracking glass

I feel it crawl my spine
It crawls his

The girl misses it
Head buried in pop culture
Going deaf in trying to drown out
Her mother’s noise

Do you think I am talking just to hear myself talk?

As a poet I ask myself the same thing

Ask how far the apple can fall from the tree

If any one of us are lucky

It will be just far enough

I tell the rain beneath her eyes
A story I know

With my forehead pressed to hers
I can feel her thunder building

She is still a natural disaster
Beautiful and dangerous

I know some things you can’t control
Like who comes and who stays
Or the moments you do everything you can
not to cry
And you burst like a balloon
Caught in the rain

I speak a story into her mouth
About a boy living in a hospital
who wouldn’t let go

So a woman came to see him
The doctors called her a specialist

She was dressed in
A calm riptide

It ****** the air outa the room
But begged everyone to stay
And drown


She rubbed his hands

Rubbed his boney kneecaps

With her index finger
She ran circles over the giant bump in his chest

The chemo goes there?

The boy nods his head
She asks him to close his eyes

He is seven
Already has grown in his adult teeth
because his child’s ones have fallen out

He smiles like a man

I want you to imagine
You are jumping on this bed

She pats the bed
Her riptide coats his skin

He imagines it

Now imagine you’ve jumped to your own bed at home
You jump so high

Now you’re on your parent’s bed

You’ve been jumping for a long time
You’ve been jumping for seven years
It will be your birthday soon
You can’t jump much longer

So you jump off
You jump off

The boy falls asleep

I tell her I slept for two days
before I woke again

Nature does not take orders

I tell the rain beneath her eyes
To fall warm, wet and heavy
I rub it away with my thumbs

There will be days when tears aren’t enough
To wash things away

You need a riptide
You need a flash flood
You need a natural disaster as beautiful as yourself
To make the dam break its promise
To never let you flood again

Sometimes even god needs to be a liar
In order to rebuild

You need to be helpless
Then when all hope is lost

You need to accept
You’re going to survive this

If only to prove that you can

She said
When you're done slaying dragons
and fighting for thrones
will you come back and stay for a while?

But there are not enough puddles
Not enough dirt

He is the king of the living room
when the carpet is lava

Don't come out of the kitchen
The carpet is lava mommy

She says okay
and watches as he jumps from couch cushion to chair to tile
to save her

There will never be a man in her life who can save her like he can
No man who knows the exact distance from doorframe to bedframe
so the hands underneath will not get them
if they jump right

No one's ever thought to save her
From the things she cannot see

I wish I were old enough to use a saw

He is stomping a tin trashcan lid flat
Cuts kite string with his teeth

Discovery says its duck season
If I have armored wings
and get hit by a shotgun
I'll still be able to fly home

I wish I were a shark
I wish I were the wind
I wish I was a lost boy but didn't have to be lost
Can I be a boy forever
and still get homesick?

If peter pan came and offered to whisk him away to neverland
The hardest thing would be for her to let him go

Maybe he can be a boy like ten more years
she thinks

With fistfulls of crayons
and constant pleads for one more of everything

Just one more night as a boy
Just one more day as a dragon
Just one more day as a bird with steel wings
One more day as the wind

But she knows he'll be a man
And he'll visit
and call
talk about
The damsel in distress he met in college
When he saved her at a party
How she spent the whole night laying on his chest
While sleeping on the grass
And for some reason
The cold biting air smelled like home

She knows mothers raise the best men
Because they know what they want in a man

It's not always okay to be your father's son

She says,
When you're done with dragons
and steel winged flights
and being emperor of the living room

Be honest
Women love men who are honest
Smile about everything
Smiling is attractive
and sometimes it's all you need to make yourself feel good

Call me now and then
Or I'll call you every five minutes

Now go
*The wind is calling you home

Oh so I guess it was infected
On so many levels

Probably my fault for loving
an angel ****** Scorpio
who gives ******* like a greasy exhaust pipe

who swaps ****** fluid
like a last ditch transfusion for a cure
done in an ally in Mexico

I thought you could save me with your shameless passion
The vibrating underwear at dinner
The dare to straight face in public

You were *****
And you were *****
And I was trying to make a mess
So cleaning myself up might look drastic

You were an adventure I can’t shake

The kind of adventure you can’t catch twice
Until you catch it twice

I have been told
Learning is a change in behavior
Learning is finding ways to not make the same mistake
Over
And over

Clearly
I am still learning

Still infected with
With the self-inflicted wrong decisions
Of loving people who don’t love me back
And filling holes
With the parts of myself that are designed to do that
Hoping mine will be filled too

I’ve put a pillow in my open chest wound
So you might still think it’s safe to lay there
So you won’t hear the heartbeat race of hope
That things won’t hurt so much later
Won’t feel like a film on my skin that doesn’t wash away
When I watch you leave me in the morning
And all I want to do is beg you to stay

Stay and pretend this is real a little longer
I’ve never been one to tear band-aids from wounds quickly
I pick scabs
I have scars
I am ugly
And I am still learning
Still trying different ways

To love healthy

So yeah,
I guess this is infected

Looking for love in different faces
Looking for love in carnival mirror beauty

Alex does this
Tells himself that she might actually love him back this time

He sees them all perfectly
Falls for their touch
Can’t tell the difference between passion and love
The difference between being caught up in the moment
And when the moment actually ends

I am going to ******* as hard as we hate ourselves

It takes a long time to actually make love to somebody

And being caught up in the moment hasn’t ended yet
So Alex doesn’t realize this

But it ends eventually

Ends with him wondering

Why is there so much wrong with me
When all I wanted
Was a warm body
Because I don’t know how to sleep alone
I don’t know how to sleep alone

Alex looks at this new girl
Gives her his weight
In patience
In presence
In hope

She doesn’t bite
Doesn’t take the bait
She smiles and removes her clothes
So he can see her carnival mirror clearly

He only sees himself
He wants to stretch her out
So he can make sense of the lies next time

He knows
If he were really broken
She wouldn’t see herself either
Wouldn’t run scared at her own image reflected back
Alex no longer has a carnival mirror

The truth is the scariest thing on the planet
Since like
Ever

And Alex is honest
Knows
People don’t shatter when they feel broken
They melt and make harder
They stretch out

It takes a long time to love yourself
It takes even longer for someone else to love you
Like you want to be loved

Alex has been waiting around
For almost that long

He hasn’t seen that yet
He doesn’t know what his own reflection
Really looks like

But if he’s lucky
He will

If I could say one last thing you'd know I was different

You’d see these walls as something else
You’d see the holes for footing

The scars on my shoulders
From the grappling hooks I’ve shaken

It’s a reflex
I’d like to reset

If I could
I’d rip the seesaw from my spine
Break the balance in the fulcrum of my chest
So when you jump away
I don’t fall from you

Call me swing set
Give my arms monkey bar bravery
So I can shimmy close enough for you to see
I want you here

I won’t try and nock you off
I am done playing chicken

I am done playing chicken
Foot on the gas pedal beggin god I run you off the road
Again

This path I am on
Is lonely

I know this

I want to tell you I love you
When I know you won’t say it back

If you could
Shake the dust from your knees
After my walls reflexed a shiver
In your embrace so hard
You fell to the floor

If you stuck around long enough
You’d see
All the cotton I swallowed
So when I heard you leaving
You wouldn’t hear me say

Stay

If I could say one last thing
You’d know
I was different
Was better
Might be ready
With enough patience

Please stay