I am still reeling in mistakes I cast
When I was seventeen,
When I was already stuck in my past and my doubt and
Testing feelings with a likert scale misread,
Misfortune on my heart and confusion on my mind.
I still think in meter, still answer in rhyme, still fall in love with ideas of men
Projected onto flesh  and blood and skeleton,
Carefully crafted concepts of cavernous consequence.
I am still reaching to grasp bare bones without carrying a fantasy complex,
My head weaves a life of it's own
Reality be ****** to drown in my sea!
You see,
I thought I fell for your eyes, but maybe it was the mountains staring back at me.
I could never tell your soul apart from nature's majesty, and
I still don't know if I've ever loved anything.
Forgive me if I've trailed my karmic goop through your bedroom,
I am still learning how to tame my longing.
This poet's mind wasn't built for easy detaching.

my body is too numbed to speak
to my desperately straining ear drums.
hollowed timpani ba-***-bums echo back ad-nausea.

I've found this magnifying glass is a mirror,
and you can only inspect your shadows in broad daylight.

my heart is full and my tongue spits spite,
biting eyes drink the blood of the blissfully ignorant
as I hand out gold medals to the reapers of the night.

can you smell the crisp air that swallows bonfires
rolling in from over the distant mountains?
the turning of seasons has played its magic trick again,
blooming in a cloud of smoke.

as the beginning fades, I slink into the familiar dance
of the incessant machine,
spinning hypnotic hallucinations.

I stack you upon piles of hay bales and whinny at easy lies,
stamp up dust in hopes of maintaining my belief in illusion,
thinly veiled and wearing rotten.

I don old metal shoes to retrace the path carved for me
before I learned to breathe and blink,
it feels like syncing into cracking expectations
and reciting lines of poetry I pretend to understand.

I am static running in all directions,
stagnant and unstable propulsion,
pinning paradoxical buttons to my lapel to scream my confusion
in silent revelation to the audience.

a dusk-lit forest full of branches sprouting car keys walks toward me,
reflecting the blood red moon.
stairs form beneath my feet as I step
escalating me up past
the jangling silver canopy into cool green sky.
night darkens with each breath.
waves crashing through the atmosphere tumble urgently past my head
to meet with the spies of the desert floor.
I sigh out my thoughts in bubbles
and they ping-pop up,
exploding
into stars and planets.
standing at the edge of the thick glass lake
that covers the earth, I spew rainbow jacks out of my mouth
and they echo
tink-tink tinktinktinktinktink
across the darkness.
I watch them splash into the sun's paint bucket
off the end of the word,
splattering
yellow and orange up onto the black glass.
stretching my arms a hundred miles long, I dip my fingers in
the glowing colors and taste it on my spiked tongue.
the lily-pads laugh at me for ingesting poison
as I balloon over them
and the lake.
I begin to float, up up & away,
into the green sky.
when i reach the stars, their pointed corners pop me
and I rain down as moonstone,
running iridescent veins upon the earth.

please don't
look me in the eye,
I'm trying to pretend I don't care
trying
to hold an empty stare
without breaking
the nonchalant veneer
I've smothered my telltale heart in

my skin is soft
satin snagged by hangnails
hung in loosened sails
to catch the wind, but go
nowhere,
nothing can rip me in two
if I am moldable goo,
yet I grapple with ghouls
who snicker at my boo-boos

boo-hoo little foolish one
no one is remembered
once their hands have
disappeared into foreign lands,
a lacerated tongues spews
sinister commands
and my brain swallows them whole,
slip-sliding into the wormhole
to become the nothing I feel so

I am a child with a dusty attic for a mind,
barren but for phantoms drifting through dust motes
suspended
in beams of light sneaking in
between cracks in the floorboards gnawed into existence by
feeble mice mistaking decaying wood
for answers.

I am sculpting my fears
onto bark with the blood of a squid,
outlining the contours of uncertainty,
breathing in-
to quarantined corners.

I have spent twenty-one turns round the sun
searching with empty questions
and a map penned by a charlatan,
blinded and bound
believing my fingers had grasped more than my own flesh, yet

I am huddled in my attic,
scrawling gibberish onto the walls
endless and irrelevant,
swaddled in a flea-infested blanket
of regurgitated beliefs.

"God give us this day our daily intolerance."

I am helpless on the edge of the multitudes,
speechless in the face of unmarked territory,
with wide eyes and clenched palms
in the sight of divine anarchy.