Above all that is radiant and bright,
she floats above the New York night.
Neon signs and grey faces
look up, pointing, exclaming,
'Look how amazing
the human race is'.

Phantom girl floating, sifting
past and through all that's drifting:
empty eyes and the cracks on
every sunken, cigarette *******
ivory American cheek-bone,
belonging to a person, who
feels like any person: here
but sweetly alone.

All that is radiant,
all that is bright,
think what is beautiful
is flying past and
out of sight.

Tie your powder blue checkered sheets,
and dangle them out of your
splintered window frame.

Wire bodies scrambling down,
you and your sister, tan and loud,
bringing ultra-light cigs and
burner flip-phones,
promising *** without
the feeling of being alone.

This is for the chips on your polish,
much like you: red and drawn
by a shaky Saturday night,
where I'm your friend,
unsure and twenty-two,
driving through muddy water
like a submarine submerged in time.

The stereo shouts out Minor Threat,
neon and done, are we, the naked,
parked outside the park
where you wrecked your bike,
we threw mixtapes off the bridge,
where we had fun.

I can still hear our theme song
beyond the headlights
beyond the moans.

Sunset orange spilling onto
the grass-splattered grotto;
where silicon body lay, wading,
and the ******* float up,
hovering bone-white ****,
emerald eyes towards the
galactic-gutter ceiling.

I.

Their knuckles drag the dust,
kissing broken boulder.
She wraps ***** arms around,
as she rests on his shoulder.

Birds swing and spin like
fleshy, fluid tops.
If you study them
with your tired eyes,
their dancing never stops.

II.

The cactus juice helps them
see each-other, and they
sing of spontaneous Gods
that torment the desert floor
they swim upon, waiting for
her, whom wades amongst stone.

Movies and shows, albums and
singles splinter their psyches;
what could you remind
that sneaks from behind,
and nibbles their Nikes.

III.

I remember the ways
she lied, his face cracked,
but I forgive her. I forgive
the other men she loved
instead of me, I forgive
her for accepting me,
I forgive myself for
believing that the
greater I hurt,
the deeper I loved.

Little girl scratched at the sand,
looking at him, her hair as dry
as the plants scampering by.
I have always loved you,
she croaked, I have always
been more than a child
in the dreams I share
with you. I feel as coarse
as this wasteland, existing
only to us, her, and a thread
hanging suspended from time.

IV.

Their bodies plopped onto
the moist, coffee soil.
They drank the ground,
their blood pushing faster,
racing the rushing tide.
And in the distance, a shine
before the eternity, a hope
beyond the shore.

A skeletal fist wrapped his wrist,
at the end, she asked him to forget.
But he dove and swam towards
the rock cave tomb, breaking
through the electric waves.

Little girl fell, knees swallowed
by the baptismal sand,
she wept and asked him
to come back, please
come back.


V.

His face brushed the stone wall,
he kissed and called until
wine-red smeared his face,
until he tasted copper
swarm his mouth.

A brief moment, he felt himself,
he felt the world photographed.
Rays spit out between the cracks,
rocks explode, vomitting over.

Shard of slate speared his stomach,
and he remembered October:
Santa Fe, where they fought,
she shoved, he begged,
battered lips brushing past,
leaving photo albums and a
note, in blue ballpoint,
stating that it would
never last.

VI.

Dying moments consisted
of anxious pulls at the shard,
cutting his hands open,
adrift towards her lifeless
pearl, pure exposed rib body,
begging, kissing, shoving,
proclamations of forgiveness.

Bleeding out, he shook her,
asking to be loved as the wall
closed, capturing their bodies,
preserving the desperation
of his broken nature.

You'll learn to love too much
when smiles turn to distant glances;
as distant as the galaxies
she'd used to point to and say
'that means you and me':
speckled and splattered
across your milky way of
coordinated highs and byes.

You'll learn to love too much
when the words you seep
are dulled to a different sleep;
one that used to put your
fleshed-whole-soul to bed,
but now keeps you up
regretting what was never said.

And when you hallucinate,
to escape the bronze lonerism,
you may will yourself to
a golden-childlike-aura,
believing you are brand new
and are never blue, because
the love you splurged
can never hurt you or
never be enough.

She has a shaved head
that reminds me of a
crooked-smile-ex;
that choked on cigarettes
and words too contrived,
painted in a negligence
for humanity and a
belief in uninformed
nothingness.

Her body curves like
backroads I've been lost in.
Skin as pale as an eggshell,
I'd imagine she'd shatter
under the olive robe
she calls a dress
and bounce under the
kickstep of organic flats.

Eventually she will become
too much of an idea, she will
evolve into a misogynistic
poem, and if I were
to imagine her naked,
guilt would flood our fleshly-
alcohol-stained-continents,
angry between every slur,
loving between the shadows
of phantoms I once knew.

I feel like a folded symbol,
inside the chipped-cherry boxcar
that is my damp, June mind.

A fetus seizing in the womb,
hooked up like a cheap monitor.
A foreign strandedness, wrapped
by a boa of dark country back roads
and sterile air skipping across grass.

If I stop, If I sleep
the sweat seeps from my pores
like a sterling grey squad,
oxidizing in the fog,
swimming around headspace,
guns melting with claymation cheeks,
howls into the night, darling deadbirds.

I am now happy and remember
only other happy memories.
Over a decade of depression
and now this.

I feel unfinished, unwanted
by the quickness of life.
I feel like a grain
caught in a gust so swift,
I may never adjust.

I, the empty-headed boy,
causing jet-black glass
to appear on sand,
to remove my footprints,
and incase them, phantoms.

Slumping over their shopping carts
like porpoises on parade.
Baskets overflowing with
fritos, doritos, and sugar-ade.

Reckless the dream that changed
what they couldn't,
to swim through foil bars
soaring from cash to vein.
Girl with scissors, cutting hair,
to reach a new brain.

Sofa-living, so much thwarting
thoughts of inadequacy.
Streams of image, money
-- and American Honey,
I think you are fine
the way you hurt.

Dead names scarred onto the mouths of trees,
teenagers as stripped as the bark,
fenced by the flutter of the leaves.
I once loved a girl who loved
to remember the old me.

There's a storm, scurrying across the saffron.
You'd have to ask if this would always go on;
the broken hair, grape jaw, leaky gums.
An embrace, tortured knuckle,
all before the Sun, the bodies buckle.

Incurable beauty explained by the hunting game:
Is there a God who molds the fumes,
escaping from my brain?
I don't want to think, that all my thoughts
are all just the same.

Ma and Pa,
lover doves,
kiss with fists
and hug with shoves.

He protects his phone
but not his ***.
Sitting on a cherry
withered-wood,
it's good to remember
that in December,
he waited for this
tired world, to pass
him by, for his mother
to 'please come home.'

Casper, undercut with curls on top,
plays a greyed banjo while wearing
the green-chestnut flannel his dad
wore before he disappeared into
vermilion sky, only remembered
with lullabies from a hopeful mom
that smelled like Pall-Malls and
factory-soaked-heartbreak.

White, chiseled with skeleton intention,
he sips from within himself,
hoping to harness new direction.

The ***** ate into rocky soil,
pushing through clots of dirt.
It reminded me of
the girl I love
from two-thousand fifteen
and how she
struggled to be clean,
because of a needle eating skin
burrowing towards vein,
against what was within.

My fingers pushed on it's ribcage
-- I never found out it's *** --
only forcing brief breathes
and gasps flowing from
my grasp, knowing that
I can't save her and that
I can't save him.

Patches of white were
framed around squid-ink clash;
fleas fleeing from
an ever-slow dying of heat,
hopping onto me,
a host with a heartbeat.

She never had a name
and all I can call him is 'it'.
It's paws fluttered like
a desperation dash across
the invisible wall of life,
a borderline between
eternal logos and
dimming pathos.

Whiskers brushed against the
plastic, grocery store bag,
destined for celery,
destined for dead cat.

And as the shovel
drank the soil,
And as the bag fell
into nothing --
Heaven or Hell --
I feel so tainted
for a life so fleeting,
for a love so wasted,
for everything leaving.

For everyone leaving.

She kisses the boys and girls
that pay the most attention.
The boys play with vapor
and her girls play with tension.
I wish I was the only one
that she will decide to touch
but I am who I am
and, in a way, that is too much.

Sawblade-sunflower petals
wrap around an earthy cushion,
and the humidity hangs in the air
as her beige body is crumpled
and I feel too sober, pushing.

Baby yellow falls apart,
in her hair the flower starts
to trickle onto sheet and pillow,
decorating the absences
that define how hollow
she and I have felt before --
******* like an endangered species
on the killing floor, I whisper once,
I whisper sweet, "Don't you wish
that we didn't meet?"

She kisses the boys and girls
that give the most attention.
I played with vapor
and she played with tension.

Asked to be safe, to be calm,
with the suction-pores of each palm.
Lips in twist with skin so sour,
drawing blood to drown a flower.
Pulling back, to study faces,
shaking out of sure embraces,
her heels kicked out
and her face soon followed,
and what she left,
I chewed and swallowed.

I feel them staring, glaring --
I'm never sure.
My mind rewinds
to a different shore,
where fish have armored skin
that protects them from
pressures of Earthen spin.

They have legs like fingers,
the fish, the people,
that tramples me, samples me
until I'm withered, feeble.

The stares are like bugs,
striding across with curious rage.
Biting, learning, living
in the hollow of my rib cage.

The boulders are freckled along the bank,
sleeping on lime-skin grass, grey and tired.
Fading black canvas shoes
attach to smooth, firm sides,
climbing a planet not as hard as ours.

From the distance, a spinning speck is seen.
With binoculars cupped around each eye,
you can see her twirl in the old, pink thing;
in the mirrors of light, you can see her beauty,
even if she has been blind her entire life.

You can see her rest her shoulder on a boulder,
gasps trying to grasp galloping breath --
and in between each choke, you must wonder
if you co-exist in this world
or separately, infinitely.

When you are drunk on the altitude,
it's time to step down and walk to sea-level.
Scurrying down thrown-up mountainside,
you should try not to trip on nature
or your own nature.

There's a difference in these woods,
drifting between grey, scabby bark,
sifting into the moist, wormy soil,
beckoning for purpose,
breaking into the sound of a
becoming yet battered nature.

The footprints can be light, thorough --
almost a trait granted by the torture of eternity.
With head-weaves buoyant above tree-leaves,
a hyper-vigilance stemmed from the abuse
of a darkly philosophy weaponized;
an extension of the elbows, forearms, wrists
of huntsmen seeking inferno.

A hollow is an ideal resting place,
beyond the greased veins of trees,
fingertips delving into clustered black,
grasping an illusory livelihood,
only to imprison itself,
hoping for only a thoroughness
granted by the torture of eternity.

When love enters the picture,
it's best to fade into the skyline,
becoming a blue phantom,
hiding behind q-tip clouds,
balanced feebly, anxiously,
unable to realize
how easy you can be seen.
How easy it is to underestimate
your own significance.

You can drag a razor horizontally,
thinking the ink of space
will pour through, staining yourself,
watching yourself disappear,
hoping for only a thoroughness
granted by the torture of eternity.

-

I dance with her, a light caramel mutt,
in a purgatory of racial tension,
between black and white,
living in the grey area of society,
not knowing that it's okay --
and she is like me,
I've just realized.

Your crooked smile flows upward
and I can see it from the ground.
Haunting myself with
a film teacher's creature feature
in black and white,
an old orchestra for sound.

You said you'd get nervous
when on our clunky telephone;
saying that customer service
could hear the fibers
in your voice
rustle like tall, dry grass,
with a wind whispering through
confirming, with every breath,
that you feel alone.

We'd recite fifties sitcoms:
Honey, do you --
do you have the keys?
Well, gee whillikers,
I could use someone to
open me, close me, and
dispose of me, please.

I write this for no one,
which is the category you fall in.

Sincerely,
signed Issues,
P.S. The television
is in color,
and I don't miss you.

- There ain't hope in the U,
the S is for Show me your soul,
the A is for Always forget:
the United States of
Killing it, Killing it -

Sheers of shimmering gloss grace her torso.
And I have broken her bones,
imploring that I love her so.
Blueberry lips belly the cold;
hold her too deep, hold her I'm told.

I.

He says Call me Mr. G.
G for Gore, Greed, that Green.
An atypical stoner
with hair wetter than his mouth.
With more ******* than a pound,
he says, With an understanding of
all the suffering in the global delusion
that is the Earth. Mr. G, his name.

Oily brunette, Mr. G., would smoke
Marlboro Green Blend -- menthol --
and spit shot out between stained lips
after each extracurricular exhale.
The saliva would land, tremendously,
and puddles of Rasta shooting stars
would lay, stretching across concrete galaxy.

Hazel eyes invaded and shamed him,
for he wished to be green, like life,
but only envisioned a contradiction:
death (see nature),
for which he learned to embrace, stoically,
like a shepherd of an endangered breed
meant to die among skewed perspective.

II.

This house could be mistaken
for a cinderblock purgatory;
between color and absence of,
eternal and temporary.

A raptor laughter purged the tension --
he abided by no accommodation of civility.
As smoke followed his hyena howl,
the landline lay suddenly of purpose.

Resin raided the clunky, black buttons;
a voice was whispered like a blue phantom:
*******' cheese, pineapple, pepperoni
-- no, extra ******' cheese, extra pep --
Sure, add some more pep with your driver:
he, she -- honestly, man -- they better have
pep-in-their-******-step-you-feel?

Minutes passed like sentient matchbooks
dropping towards a skeletal fire.
G threw the phone across the room
and, like a disenchanted drunk dance,
his words wobbled over each other,
I ordered a 'za, a pizza for the layman.
About thirty, probably thirty-one
minutes, that is.

Passing me the flower-stitched ****,
I ****** in one, maybe two, three,
blasts that I swore
had some sort of nano-insects
bite and burrow into the holes
of my sponge for a throat.

Wringing my rubbery neck,
watching my words leave my toothy cave,
I found out that G doesn't believe in beer.
Believes in souls but not beer,
believes in green men, not beer.

Alcoholic splash is what we all need,
at times. So I told him the obvious,
I'm going to get a case of
(Insert your ****** choice)
and I'll be back as soon as possible.

G stared at me and made a guttural noise,
Do whatcha please, I'll stay here and
protect us from vampires.
You know, blood-suckas.

Pale stoner vampires.


III.

The leather painted door was wide open
like the legs of ominous spider cave,
but the doors of a car
I had never seen before
were as closed as the lips of a VCR.
There's nothing but silence in these situations --
is this one of those situations? Grassy knoll?

Approaching the mouth of purgatory,
I entered with the hesitancy of a lost dog.
On the plastic covered couch,
two people sat atop the invisible cloud
above the patterned fabric
and above the fingers of time.

Blonde hair sprouted from her scalp,
raining down upon vanilla shoulder blades,
her chest a harbor for two pale, freshly mounds,
with crooked, beige diamonds in the center.

She trembled when G said, Meet Steph
-- can I call you Steph, Steph? --
Meet Steph, the artist formerly known as
Stephanie, holding up her licence,
Vanmeter, of 441 1/2 Locust Ave.

That's creepy, huh, Steph? Locust Ave?
Are you something that lives in the ground,
comes up every several years, making noise?
Has this been years in the making?
Are you bound to make noise in my house?

You know this is a house, right?
Whatsa matter, unfamiliar due to ya
living-in-the-*******-ground
or is it because you share a house,
an apartment, Steph? Is it one of those?
Pizza deliveries ain't paying the bills?

G gets up, I, a coward, approaching him
about to say -- Hold up, brother, he says.
Not another move, pulling his hand from
behind her shaking, confused head,
a silver cannon an extension of his arm.

She's here to **** our blood,
She's here to ****. our. blood.
Whether she means to or not,
I know you don't think you want to, Steph,
I know you don't mean to,
But you're here to
drain-us-like-the-Red-Cross.

I tell G that she isn't,
What have you done, G,
You need to let her go
before this gets worse.
That cliche dialogue.
Because these things always do,
cliche or not.

Brother, you don't understand these things
-- It's impossible for a godless man
to understand the mechanisms
of something bigger, something holy --
but you need to listen, G said, You need to --
she tried to move, quickly,
but G grabbed her by her blonde strands,
pulled her back towards the couch,
She swiped at his eye, drawing blood.

There was a pause, a deathly silence,
by the hair, she was rendered motionless,
Oh, no, he echoed, Love, you shouldn't,
You ought not do those things.
Looking at me, he asked me to listen,
Always remember this wasn't your fault.
Sometimes, you can't be in control

Holstering her neck with his gun hand,
G picked her up, slamming her,
head first,
into the drug covered,
resin sprinkled
coffee table.

He dropped on top of her,
Looked at me, Remember, okay?
and beat her head with the **** of the gun,
until the cracking of a larger M&M; shell
muffled towards all eardrums,
maybe even hers.

With blood,
that could be mistaken as war paint,
swimming across his jaw and neck,
and sprinkled on his forehead,
G whispered, You are free,
and I was never sure
who he was talking about.

My feet left before I did,
I was suddenly in my car
with only the ignition
and G's voice registering.
I passed car after car,
pastel metal wagon after
metallic matte creation,
not sure if I ever saw him,
not sure if he ever existed,
if I ever existed.

IV.

Sheers of shimmering gloss grace her torso.
And I have broken her bones,
imploring that I love her so.
Blueberry lips belly the cold;
hold her too deep, hold her I'm told.

Waking up in a cavern darkness,
my dreams disintegrate from my eyes,
swirl in my headspace, evaporating to
heaven knows where.

Scattered pitter-patter
drowns midnight Seattle,
killing and washing away
cluttered, modern filth,
******* carnivorous minds
into hungrier gutters.

This is the part
where the screen of my life reveals:
SIX MONTHS LATER,
in yellow, stenciled letters.
But what it wouldn't say is
how I still feel like I'm dipped
in the ink of Ithaca, NY.

If this were the indulgent
autobiography of my life
it wouldn't say that
the distance doesn't matter,
because that'd be a lie;
I feel like I have only escaped myself.

The rain swells, sounding as
thick as blood, swishing around
the veins of the city.

Stephanie dies every night,
disappearing and reappearing
behind secret doors only she can open.

When she comes to me in sleep,
she is baptized in green, head caved,
Forget-Me-Nots sprouting
between fragmented skull
and select spots of brain soil,
the flowers singing jazz
with a different voice, every time.

One time she spoke.
With blueberry lips that belly cold,
she sounds like my mother:
I am so proud of you, she statically says.
You saved me. Remember.

V.

To be continued.

I know the horror
how you can't undress
without feeling like
a ******* mess.

There's got to be something
more than this,
just write until
your thoughts aren't as heavy.

Everyone glances
but nobody reads:
Pour your emotions
into a glass that
nobody drinks.

There's got to be something
more than
vulnerable words in vain:
a medicine
that increases the pain.

I know the horror
how you can't reveal
the fullest extent
of how you feel.

There has to be something
more than a glance,
to help you feel heard;
to validate your world.

Just learn to write
and let it all go,
even if nobody notices
or nobody knows.

Because there is something
more than this.

It's loud.

Violet, Blue, and Green lights
scatter across the floor,
across a canvas of house music,
echoing back into itself.

She crawls towards me,
wearing only poorly inked tattoos
and the lights that kiss us all.

I touch myself,
wishing it was her.

- I leave the room,
the music fading away,
like retreating from
sound-carrying-birds -

The smoke that comes from the cigarette
forms a skeletal web, reaching for the moon.
With rain slapping the dark brick walls,
hugging and creating an alley reminiscent
of a salivating, crooked-cement mouth,
I stand drenched in silver forgotten.

I drop the cigarette in a petrol-colored puddle,
watching it sink, become hard to distinguish,
and fade away.

- I reenter the room,
the song has changed
and is more mechanical. -

It's loud.

The lights are now
Bubblegum, Aqua, and Tangerine.
She lays supine, watching dollars
drift down, slowly, almost frozen.
Then the splitting of the air.

Fat-Man's body does a half-spin
as I lodge a bullet into his obese shoulder.
The music still blares, almost meaning more, now.
Regrouping himself, Fat-Man is weaponized,
drawing a greasy, inky blaster, desperate to spit.

A supernova erupts and quickly disappears--
like the aftermath of blowing birthday candles--
as his black speckled, crewcut scalp peels back,
letting fragments of chalky skull and pink penne
***** out of his square, boxed head.

Blood appears black under these lights
and instantly whips across
Samantha's still supine body.
The remaining people in the room
scatter like light exposed roaches.

Haunted, she is a toppled statue.
My steps move with the rhythm of the song.

Fat-Man's leather jacket
holds more meat than some mouths.
I plant my hand inside all pockets, find $6,480
in greasy, bloodier-than-usual presidents,
and move towards her, with the music.

Crouching beside her, I wipe the blood.
I clean her pale, tense torso
and help her up.

On two painted feet, she looks detached.
Silence exists, now, despite the music,
while she studies me with the same brown eyes.
Her lips quiver, she remembers
and wraps me with much thinner arms
that used to exist in nothing but memory.

A radio perches on a mahogany end-table,
singing like a mechanical bird:
bellowing fuzzy jazz, reaching my ear.

Its sides are rounded
like the curves of a classic car.
The antenna is *****
like the arm of an eager child
I've had swinging in-between
phantom-bytes and sonic slush:
my mind: inexcusable and mush.

A deck of cards shrugs it's shoulders
before it climbs on top of the radio;
it's rigid joints straightening and angling.
It tucks the tab back into it's head,
concluding before singing along to
'Somewhere beyond the sea.'

The voice of the deck rattled and squeaked,
like a caged mouse doing a capella.
Shot spit of it's mouth,
like a translucent spaghetti noodle. Bloop.

- I stormed outside, inaudible to all,
unmoved by few, chosen by none -

Today I sat across from a girl --
across the room, not across a table
or across the universe --
Her hair dangled like a carrot's wig,
a carrot's impersonation of a blonde girl.

Of course, her skin was closer to orange than pale --
but I like that stuff. I want it rubbed off on me,
physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally.
Old-oxidized-green-coins invaded her eyes
and settled in the center of eggshell-white buffer.

Pants were as denim as a brush of shale
or the picture-pose of a flannel-clad beard,
holding a pick-ax and a dusty journal.
A journal of my thoughts, timeless
in their irrelevancy, until discovered
and claimed by someone else,
someone with a beard, a daughter, a smile;
See: Things I will never have.

What could I mean to this person?
How could I be desirable to her?
What am I but an alien,
coasting a galactic sea,
unable to relate to what I see?

- And what was your prize,
in this life? To be loved?
Or to be conquered? -

The deck of cards disappeared.
And I, I without consequence,
rummage through dust blanketed boxes,
hoping to cut my hand on something
I have mistaken as dull.

I have been told that my mother inhabits this box,
somewhere, sometime, somewhere, sometime.
A framed image, a polka dot cloth, a forever
unprecedented by a sunny-day funeral,
where I am the tail of the dying snake
that is my family: last to perish, last to wait:
a corrosive ingestion of unadulterated isolation.

My beige fingers wrap meat and bone,
but also a cheap-golden frame of my mother and us.
Our glasses are all too big, but we were all too poor.
My mother is wearing her wedding ring,
but I don't know why.

So young and vulnerable,
held by a freckled, strawberry blonde.
I don't even know her, any more.

The deck of cards reappears.

- But I've been alone for too long.
Even the winds have stopped whispering.
I have become a witness to my own death. -

Money melting in a spoon,
let's shoot it into our veins.
Flashing Kardashian lights,
streaming into our brains.
Donald Trump! He's our man!
Mark Muslims is the plan!

All-you-can-eat-
Pile. It. The. ****. High.
When you walk or
When you talk,
let the words squeak out
like they're between
Your thighs.

Thighs. American thighs,
Dreaming next to our Calvins.
Our slacktivism, our regurgitated ideas
spitballing out of our McDonald's mouths
into our peers' ears, distilled by years
And years of "almost-knowledge"
that we quasi-ascertained,
if we knew what that meant --
but we've been left behind!
No child left the **** behind!
We were left behind and there's no
possible way we slacked off, that we're dumb,
that we aren't the movie stars destined for
Lamborghini cars, five-star bars, designer bodies
for designer you and designer me:
the most special of the unique, the
Pearls that have been made in the
darkest parts of the sea, the darkest parts of
origin. Origin. ******. ****.
American ****: virginal ideals sliding around
the muck of a marketable ****, fuckfest,
******* of the American mind, the
congratulations of the American ego,
the proud mother and father tears associated with
buying and lying, "trying" and frying our food,
our ideas, our friends, our neo-impressionistic
children in Jordans, skinny jeans, on tumblr:
the unknowing cousin of Fox News, surprised
by its own wit and wisdom: they're ******* twins.
Carbon copies, unknowing, unwilling, un-un-un.

The romanticism of mental illness.
The close-up of reality-tv emotion.
The manipulation taught to servers
from managers.
The manipulation taught to customers
from society.

All we care about is ****, image, and ***.
Self-preservation: **** Donald Trump
and *******.

Maternal French kisses
Mental illness defines her
Pretend to forget

This reality, different from yours.
Sandpaper ice-cream cones sold
in engulfed, aflame stores.

This body, tense yet soft
tears underneath
the rub of rope.
My friend's feet swiped
a flailing chair,
And her neck did snap,
feces everywhere.

This sky, wrapped in saran wrap,
becomes pregnant when it rains,
the plastic weighed down by water,
slumps down the aquarium sky,
we slump down as it kisses us,
crushes us, mashes us, thrashes us.

- It all changes here,
from god to god,
from year to year -

Her hips lay like cursive,
pale, promising, pent up
like the shoulders of
an anxious angel.

Her hair a burnt brown,
wrapped around a whatever-count pillow,
like a L'Oréal snake, sleeping sullen,
drifting off into a designer dream,
unsure of this, unsure of me.

I see her as a child --
No, I see me as a child --
No, I see us as children.
This. This surreal feeling I get
when you're around me.
When the world is around me,
vibrating underneath my Toms.
Vibrating in my prescription bottle.
Vibrating between her legs, my ribs.
Between each page, so much is hidden:
my early swearing that my late love
is slowly draining.

And I am tortured by regret,
things I've not done yet.
Thinking this defines me.

And I cannot deny
that I'm terrified
of fading to black.

I used to cherish every doubt--
now unsure in what I've found:
my instability was transparent
and now it's apparent...

And I now keep the lights on,
lay in a cold bath until warm.
My lips, so purple and svelte,
have sealed all I have felt.

And I stay a static transplant,
a homely nomadic infant,
stumbling towards the abyss,
thinking it's what I've missed.

I used to utilize the past,
stretching time, but at last,
the only fire I've consumed
will soon fade to black...

The bloodied marble is
where the youth was sold.
I sit and wobble on
a mind of gold.

Burn the end
and pass me a thought.
Pale smoke differs
from state to state.
Top forty hits;
songs or cigarettes.
What was your dream
but an isle of regret.

Your tears were insects
burrowing into your cheeks.
Red painted hands
and yellow stained teeth.
I could've remembered
that I had sworn.
I never found your death
a place to mourn.

Fire. Orange flames waving towards the sky
with blue bellies and a hunger for havoc.

Split foot bottoms sprint, infinitely unable
to stop the annihilation swallowing whole
stained, splintered floorboards
that held sand-speckled toes,
extending high,
as embraced but separate never-lovers
kept thoughts of together
in the sky.

Gravel flickering from under heels;
might as well bounce into a void:
a place happy in its tornado-time.
Where sounds escape, return home;
abstract assurance: kind of alone.

White siding peels off
like a smoldering fingernail.
The roof holding heat
like the lid a *** kisses.

Her head halts,
with an ash blonde swoop
flailing by.
Staring and learning
the world is a skeleton dream.

Never knowing when it started.
Never knowing why.

Yellow soap for a yellow me.
I don't feel like being pure
means being happy.

- I scrub scarring
with more definition
than a dictionary.

Moldy bread kissing
gravid navel oranges,
in a cherry plastic rib cage.

- Can you find me altruism
hidden in the heart  
of ecstasy and rage?

Satellite bobbing above
the air supply,
are you out of reach or am I?

She was taking pictures
of us in the aphotic zone.
Saying, it was the only way
to capture me vulnerable.

Extirpate my species
to save my life.
I am saturnine for
the only adoration I accept  
is mine.

Altogether, the night we wove
a trickled treasure, tangled:
skirted legs spilling out from
the teacup of a denim lap,
validation in the vacuum cove.

- Dusty Nikes before the dusk,
who art in heaven, my god
he thrusts.

- Why'd your mother
let you talk that way:
You smoke cliche cigarettes
in such an unfamiliar way.

- The hanger left welts, weeping
into post-relevance landline love,
body lay like the hands on the clock,
copper landmarks seeping.

What a feeling, ever so same.
Arched eyebrows, a trademarked shame:
like a fighter, like ****** oozing.
Like a functional inability,
divine in its losing.

The darkest fields, an interlude
to parallel sparkling, suspended
watching eye upon vermilion sky --
like a harbored god pretended.

Killing trees, roots eating deep,
my father mercilessly alluded:
branches high and branches wide
found the sky and intruded.

Some people die in Texas.
Some people die in Spain.
Some people die in their sleep.
Some people die in pain.

We were all in love with trauma.
We were all in love with the same
ideas we projected onto people
and disguised with their name.

I don't live in nine-eleven-land
and neither do my peers.
I've been monitored by other people's Gods
for twenty-two ******* years.
Coffee pots and cigarettes
stimulate my day
and keep the thoughts streaming,
that eventually fade away.

Some people die in Utah.
Some people die in Prague.
Some people never get married
or have the family dog.

We were all in love with status.
We were all in love with goals
that would make life poignant
and make ourselves whole.

I don't subscribe to the thought
that my thoughts necessarily matter.
If life is a horror movie,
then I'm the fake blood splatter.
Bible thumps and dead eyes,
are all part of my design,
and how I live and where I die
means to separate my mind.

A ***** hybrid clouded his voice;
a southern drawl
and Midwestern daydream.
Mutt to himself, a fire to others,
a redundant reverie about a home
-- any home --
with pictures of bloodletting,
forgetting mothers, Adidas clad feet
belonging to hooded killers.

His hands sway in church
but his soul doesn't.
No belief in either concept:
God or soul.
Annoyed with the Christian claim
that one needs the other.
He speaks a voice that echoes,
then evolves into a rarity
too tame to flounder and fight,
too wild to sit and stare.

Her eyes were yellow love
when she walked away.
Her pearl skin, thousand count;
so taut, smother ***** pound --
the steps beyond thought process
sullen, floundering less and less...

And when she becomes real again,
the hollowness, whatevered wan.
Broken, broken: he loves you
without any soul.

Look at me:
I'm the captain
occupying borrowed space.
Thrown on fading campus,
grown through the cracks
of a forgotten place.

Maybe we're from the same scar.
Maybe the same galactic gutter.
Maybe the same pulpy punch.
Maybe you were my sister
or you were my brother.

Maybe there is a place
where we used to go
to plant our feet
in what we didn't know.

Maybe there is a place
where the whistle grows,
the voices chatter,
the stillness slows.

And maybe, somewhere
or the whistle grows,
the voices chatter,
the stillness shows.

And maybe, somewhere,
or this place, you said to me,
"I hope you remember
that this is a false memory."

There is a couch and it is where I fall.
My seventeen year-old legs,
bandaged with bumblebee knee socks,
arch like ****** pink lawn-flamingo joints.
Crookedness meets at
cigarette skin thighs: grape-kiss fingerprints,
like mental leprosy, projected.
My eyes meet at where fingers told me to stay
and where the knuckles followed.

Acorn ***** hair sleeps in a tuft,
woken by the brush of a thirty-three year-old soccer coach.

-

My Vans grip sandpaper tape,
preceding clicks: sliding up and down,
like graduation day maternal comfort,
like dirt-under-the-fingernails *******.
Clicking wheels, sound waves
smacking across asphalt jungle.
Sounds escaping and reminding me
of how I'll never.

I'm not in love --  not sure if I can,
be affectionate towards the things
I don't understand.

I'm not in love -- even if I could,
I don't think I'd care like I should.

Homegrown but hermetically sealed
from people, places, ways to feel.
Dropping a tablet on a tongue,
Korbel divides around pink sponge;
swallowing four or five, to avoid feeling alive.
There are cars leaving trails of thoughts.
Dare them to drive,
drunk on moments,
stuck on other people--
her freckles could fall to the floor
and turn the tiles into an oceanic remembrance.

-

We are lost trees, reaching out
but stuck where we say we'll soon leave:
rooted even after death,
relying on escape so much that hope
becomes our prison.

My breath is barbed;
skeletal strings shift into smoke,
drifting into the shadows
as the darkness will choke.

Pearl snow stuffs my skull;
my grandmother in an earthern womb,
sleeps under it all.
A tombstone the last thing we bought--
a report card of her life:
She is with Him in Heaven, In Paradise...
With Him, Without Pain--
is speculation but turns into thought.

The icy steps do not deter me
as I sit on the crooked concrete spine;
speaking to her, hoping the snow
does not make her cold, any more,
'I can stay a while longer...
I do not have to go home, yet.'

-

Eco-friendly light spills from under the door,
forming a pool as yellow as diseased skin.
The brass doorknob is like a girl I once loved:
******* the outside, hollow in the inside,
unable to be moved and okay with it.
Fury from a faucet fills the bathtub
and rings my ears with its intent:
to fill a void and go away when cold.

She lays in the water
the city treats better than us,
wading in a wealth of watermelon wash;
her body flushed from fading flesh,
pores swim and stretch around
cursive carvings, kissing cursed curves--
and I sit upon a bone-white curb,
stirring my finger in the soup of her day;
watching the drain ****, wondering
if she'll, too, drift away.

Her eyes are like a bowl of cereal:
swirled with sweetness, soft but cold.
She lays in the center of a cobblestone intersection,
as tires bounce like knuckles off of teeth.
And ruby ribbons run from her mouth,
heading down the street that breathes south.
The sky above her stretches like notes from a guitar,
spitting acid rain tunes that'll turn into the pitter patter of a musical monsoon,
washing her body away from my sight and yours,
cleansed from our memories and the city floors.

Ashland is a small town
on a small planet, in an
ever expanding universe.
The people here are bitter
and so is their spit, from
full-flavored cigarettes
and diluted kisses spun
from the lips of significant
others, that didn't listen to their
mothers, and married because of
irresponsible reasons, like personality,
respect, love, and other, 'Jesus, **** me
the **** now, so help me.'

Abstract thought is dangerous--
to the mind it's cancerous.
Alone and thinking about
melancholy shaped memories or
kisses that would echo through
your lungs, stomach, ******* soul.
Don't do it. Don't you invite the devil,
killing yourself is so concrete, it must
mean more than a concrete floor,
hovering above a rumored hell and a
definite uncertainty so delicate that it
eats into you with its sensitive meandering
disguised as beauty but, really, a violent,
violent, murderous host, hoax, fake but
eating your superficiality, programmed by
someone else, telling you it's you.

Ashland is a small town,
aren't we all a small town, inwardly.

At first I did love you,
but then the rain caught up.
Always thinking of you,
laying dormant on your crest.
To drink until you blurred,
until as velvet as the mist.

When I grow up, I'll be cool.
Smoke until my lungs float.
Drink until my body's a pool.
Think of people with three felonies,
singing the same penitiary melodies.
Think of girls that said no,
love that diminishes
while a fetus grows.

I'll think of my dad growing up
under a different circumstance.
Think if my mom could hear,
she'd probably like to dance.
Think of my grandpa and my brother,
one isolating, one with too much love--
I wish it'd smother
me, under a Christmas tree,
whispering, 'I wish I could give more,
but all I have is me.'

At first I did love you,
but the frame spills metal guts.
Always thinking of you,
the way your eyes, wide shut.
To think of a turn,
I watched it blur,
the glass shattered.
The paramedics mimicked me,
lifting me up,
'What's the matter?'

When I grow up, I'll be dope.
Find a nice blond and maybe elope.
Shake into her what was stirred into me,
and tell her not to mistake it for chemistry.
And bleed no more, so she doesn't believe,
that there used to be a weaker me,
but it's hard to control a certain circumstance--
like, what if my mom wished to dance?

Mass graves breathing,
like beached jellyfish.
Ketchup packet pastels
painting a diner dish.
I sit and imagine
so many things and more.
I smoke ribbons of grey
that dance around
the diner door.

The people move
and have so much to say.
Watch them scurry and hurry
through the invisible day.
The sun's colors bounce off
weekly washed windows.
And I suffer from the certainty
that my fulfilled dreams
will fulfill me,
as I flick ashes into the world
for the wind to carry away,
dragging shadows.

White american men with
gold retriever dogs
smoke black hatred,
not recognizing a grey smog.
Scared of black, brown --
all atheists are ill --
but not afraid of greenbacks
or guys named Bill.

Okay.

Here's your day job. Here's your pay, Bob.
America the great.
If terrorists equal Muslim
then Christians equal hate.

You say it's not victimization.
You say it's not a hunt.
You say it's not intimidation,
but sometimes I think you
see people as witches, ****.

Christ is the answer, indeed.
Without Him we're all lost
and our souls will never be freed.
Like tears frozen in the frost.
Bibles, crucifixes to fix the diseased mind.
How much does a prayer have to cost
to be genuinely kind?

Chemtrails stain pages
and bleed as curses.
Gay rights to be denied,
according to bible verses.

Nursery rhymes and cult games,
all in the good old King James.
Archaic and inane,
like an alter sheltered brain.

Here's your day job. Here's your pay, Bob.
Use the check to pay
angels and evangelists.
Protect yourself from ideas,
and buy a white picket fence.

Chocolate colored Toms, Cool Blue and Navy, too,
North Face jacket, give me some individuality
I wanna feel ethereal; violently, annoyingly
happy. But the sky is as black as lonely cancer
without a soul mate; I know what it's like
to kiss as you erase her.

Hauntingly, melancholic instances ingrained
into my gelatin mind and
stayed.
And the smolder
from the brand on my shoulder
frayed.
I wish I could alter my reflection,
but the mirror I've bought,
somebody else
made.

I lain in a half-sleep, hearing my grandmother's voice.

When she died, I was jobless,
sleeping on her couch,
and a few months out of the ward.

My mental instability helped me lose friendships, love, and my identity.

I used to hope death would touch me
and I did not know why I wanted it to.

Death instead touched her,
drifting like a gas, underneath her door,
into her lungs, erasing consciousness
like lavender being blown by the wind,
into marked a detergent bottle.

I lain in a half-sleep, hearing my grandmother's voice.

A blue shock spread throughout me,
like the ocean swallowing animals
and forcing them to adapt.

I began drowning in water that looked like gas station slushee,
my ribcage hugging frantic gelatin organs,
beating alongside the spindle of time.

I lain in a half-sleep, hearing my grandmother's voice.

My carcass became Sun-kissed from the burning of change --
my grandmother died before I could succeed:
my grandmother died before she could see me live.

I crawl through the coarse, wheat-dyed sand,
hoping the blood I trail can be measured in her love.

I hope to make her proud, to learn to work hard,
then harder and harder and harder.
To become fully healthy,
to become what she stayed by my side for.

One of the few.

I lain in a half-sleep, hearing my grandmother's voice.

She said she was proud of me.
It probably was me and not her,
but at least someone is proud.