I reached for my phone today
Wanting to tell you everything about nothing
Emptily expressing the deepest details of the ghost between us
Gift me your crescent ear one moment longer
A last call of slurred desperate expression
Forgive me
Drag me out of the bottle
Beat the intoxicants of father from my blood
Show me strength in separating the curves of blurred lines
Spread the gospel of the broken glass ripping at my thoat
Hoping to manufacture and disassemble yesterday
Drowning never felt so everyday
2,920 days of stories fractured under tongue and cheek
Placate my disgusting necessity for reassurance
Crash the ******* plane already
Zero gravity won't lift the weight boy
The blackbox may hear your desperate pleas
There will be no response
8 years of practicing crash landings
I reached for my phone today
How does nothing feel like everything

It was abruptly apparent to myself
Slapstick honest in the chest
Reality became emperical
When pull yourself up by your boot straps
Became an invitation to self destruction
A boot lace golden ticket
To a counterfeit perception of relief

As death became reality
He attempted to convince himself
That if he hit delete enough
Enough people would pay attention
That his flair of calm temperament
Was a siren of helicopters
Berating sleeping neighbors
Wanting everything to be worth more than he believed

Poetey became a suicide note
Causing him to stop writing
With the fear of his words becoming eulogy
Bleeding paper with cut nerve endings
Fist indented desk topping
Proving a impending bad written letter
To people that may never read


Historians have probable cause
To explain what went wrong here
Until then
This man sits in glass bottles and retained thoughts
Smiling broken happiness
Through exhausted muscles
Knowing today won't be enough

I would be lying if I told you death wasn't an option
We can choose it everyday
And most days i argue
On what the best course of action might be
Between Berlin walls and burlesque dreams
My heart has decided it's mind
Into suicide flower arrangements
Multiplying in hope that one of them might be better
Becoming a stem grown mistake
Leaf to sky
Praying to the god we call heaven
And the clouds we call hope
Make me pretty
Show the world my worth
Allow the tender fabric surrounding my inners to bring joy
Break my roots in a wish that maybe the ground can remind me from where i once came
That this earth returns us to form
Not the other way around
Eradicate the suffering so commonly accepted as the present

Another sway implies my natural maliability
Bring me the seasons in whatever form
Allow them to graze the forest in my fingertips
Gliding me in all directions
Always returning home
Roots galloping in the storm
Nurturing nature as it was meant to be
Frosted ice may find my shivers relaxed
I will not say no to this
Or any other thing for that matter
For i am a tree and cannot speak
And I do not believe you would listen
If I could

I have decided to give up eating shotguns
Instead i have allowed myself to consume glass land mines
Now I realize this is not a positive thing
But at least one is socially acceptable

Defining depression and alcoholism can be difficult

One is told to **** it up and get better
Everyone knows life can't be that hard
Please don't share your issues here and now I am too busy
Continue chewing on shotgun shells
Convincing yourself things are improving
Shot shot shot
A conscious barrel bottle battle
Everyday

One is swallowed in crowds of too many happy people
Everyone knows life is better after a drink
Please display your guts all over the bar floor
We know you'll forget by tomorrow
Continue tipping your chin to empty prayer halls
Convincing yourself things are improving
Shot shot shot
A conscious disillusion of distraction
Everyday

Things that I am finally going to probably end up telling myself one day:

#1 you don't need permission to be happy

#2 read number 1 once more

#3 heart break is much less than suicide

#4 glass can take millions of years to decompose, so stop insisting for grabbing  another. So many busted ***** fingers have already bridged that gap. No need to lose another stupid boy to drowning

#5 family can sometimes only be defined by genetics. Not saying I don't love my family, it's just some days it's hard to tell

#6 when you grow up, jon, be a man

#7 still have no idea how the last one works

#8 show up

#9 still searching for something to reach for. The sun has been too **** hot and I think I need a drink

And some days
I am nothing more
Than a refusal to be
Another poorly written suicide note

As the volume settles in this confined cube of a classroom
I lay one sheet of paper on each desk
I tell my students to prepare them for a test
I tell myself they don't need another test
I do it anyway

Now I want you each to answer with precision
Give me your mind and stave the heart for now
Allow your finger tips to work in ways they have not been taught yet
Do this correct
The way they are going to expect

In the top right corner please write your:
Name
Date
Eating disorder
Depression
ADHD
Food insecurity
Anxiety
Family issues
Lack of sleep

Now leave them there and focus
There is no room for those here
Not in a classroom
And not in a test like this
Human does not belong right now

This test determines too much
To show that you are not enough

So good luck on this test
When you are finished
Sign with your everything
And hope for the best

My heart has become the only thing worth writing for

So I'm sitting here, meditating
Focusing on the present
Assuring myself I'm breathing
Each slow inhale
Forcing life into a body less deserving
I tell myself I must fill myself with life
So a bottle appears
It empties into my lungs


So now I'm sitting here, meditating
Focusing on the drowning
Assuring myself I'm not breathing
Each slow inhale
I tell myself this will mask the pain
So the end appears
It's fills my head

I am on a floating vessel and I'm drowning
In a sea of far too loud cries with horn disguises
Begging for an audience to listen to their bravado chest pumped up sililoques
This is the too loud neighbor
The wishing well spell of more wishes falling in an echo chamber
Now is too much and forever enough
We will bend the fabrics of history
Gladly begging our children to swallow our smog
And praise us for our ignorance
One day giving us the proper burial ground in carbon laced clouds
Knowing we were just too much

For we never question the beauty of the sun during its rise, as my love for you shall never waver when I wake.

I wish to give you this skin
The one encompassing
My everything

I give it to you
As an offering
An apology

For ever expectiation
Of yours
That I did not meet

It's writers block I promise
I want to write you love songs
I wish to inscribe the clouds with my thoughts
To deeply embellish is the tide of my words washing over paper
I keep waiting for the right words to say about you
Cliff diving off dictionary back spines
Finding grained wood eradication
This block has become this
A feeble attempt to feel my way onto paper
Driving my heart through this forest
To find its way back home

Our blood was laced with alcoholic excuses from bad fathers neither of us signed up for
We traced our lineage to find disadvantage for the hopeful
And in the end I found a brother
Who was more like my father
A missing backbone
Crutches to limp check his empathy
A hard lined depression drenched in self-loathing
The man much more a hollow cage
Leaking from his seams
Not wishing to get better
A ghost in the shadow of today's tomorrow
We are blood, my brother and father
And some days
Blood is the only thing we have in common

We are empty whiskey bottles
Apologizing for always helping the helpless
Damning the ******
Liquifying any motivation
To make things better
Pouring ourselves out
To soak in sorrows
Begging and wishing
Someone would pour us back

The words filtered in my heart with a slight jolt of unknown

Leaving me awestruck with open heart surgery precision

I wish to know

Once

Just how beautiful we could both be if we dropped expectation for return

If we allowed our love to flow through us as night riders touching each and every fabric of one another

Meet me between now and our forever

Even if forever lasts for just this moment

Wake me with your lampshade heart beat and I will always walk in the light

Thank you father
You were never the man we needed you to be
But you did leave me this gun
In the shape of a bottle

Genetically manipulated to magnetically stick to any addiction within reach
This bottle is strong arm robbing me of reality
Creating blasphemous momentary relief of my pretty great life

I am presently attempting to place bottle caps on broken bottles
Trying to put spilled liquid back into my mangled mistakes
I never wanted to be like you father
But here we are

The hardest parts of me
Need to softest touch of your love

The cracked corners of her spoken too many times mouth bent just far enough upward to be called a smile
Teeth yellow from a coping mechanism you can't quite understand yet
Holding back each breathe just enough
For it it were not for the power in her lungs I wouldn't be here

She says "Boy you just don't understand"

Four years later,
This jigsaw puzzle is slowly compiling itself into a fading picture
54 years of back breaking uphill climbs
Two children who are still on a search to become men
Zero men that deserved her heart
A single mother conquering the branded arms of poverty
Days weaving together begging for refuge
Finding empty responses

She is the shore being abused by the ocean
Never once asked consent for what the body of water has taken
Her framework eroding from view
She has given too much too fast and it will not be given back

Cancer has a funny way of taking something that does not belong to it
Ending stories before they are finished
Cutting to the credits earlier than expected
We are powerless power lines being controlled by the wind

Four year later I hear her saying
"Boy you just don't understand"
You are right mother
I still do not understand
Why you are not here

He told her

It is the beauty on the inside that counts

Her response

Then why do my insides continue to find themselves in the wrong place
Lifted into white porcelain gods
Asking anyone to compliment my withered self
Please make love to me
Tell me I am better than the acid on my tongue
The regret powering my mind as I struggle down my dinner
Inside is where I find these thoughts
Thoughts powering my actions
Into a spiraling pit of self loathing
Tell me I am pretty one more time
And I will show you my insides to prove it

Pressed between book ends and whiskey bottles
Our drunken breathe baited for affection
Wanting love to find ourselves
The unabridged version

We search glossary definitions looking for a respite of tainted
Cursively speaking alcoholic cacophonies
We rode the light energy of 5 in the morning
Leaving behind the pages of insecurities

That night we confessed the unthinkable
Begging for our names to written in the manifest of history
Wanting nothing more than to be each others sunrise
Slurring our last names into one, till death do us part

The sand mustn't worry
for the wave will always return

Maybe we are in love with emptiness
Which explains why we feel it so deeply

Love me like I am no longer broken bones in a working body
Find that I am still whole yet divided
Forgive me for never loving myself
This dream I have still projects itself
Knitting the sky together with plea agreements
Begging for you to finally see me clearly
The rain is gone and we are still here
Broken bones heal and I am still alive
But know that I am trying
Trying to be better than me
Working at building a future out of hand grenade pins
Pulled from mistakes thrown out of my life

Allow me to be found
Between book ends and whiskey bottles
Creating mishaps between the both of us
Dreaming of a chance away from here
Echo the hallow chamber of our bedroom
Finding every lost chance we had at communicating
Ghosts
Hoping someone will take notice
I am here
Just a passing ship in the night

I am nothing more
Than brittle bones
And a frail heart
Praying
For someone
To make me better

Losing your mother at 22
Realizing she was more to you than yourself
The only saving grace
Excusing itself from dinner early
Forgetting to push in their chair
An empty spot yet to be filled

Maybe death feels like this
Forever without you
The light refusing to enter darkness
A slip of too many tangles
Staring into too much of nowhere
Still wishing you were here

As I take a look at the book on the dusted end table.  The pages hugging like too many people in a subway going too many places all with the same stop. The cover being the perfect misrepresentation of its contents. Comfortablely controlling the chaos that lays upon its tree filled inters. Words have been violently thrashed on to each page. Filled with names, verbs, destinations all of which were unexpected and uninvited.

I cradle this book into my dry palms. Run my imperfect fingertip across the spine with a chill. Pry back the very protective cover created to keep strangers from entering it's home. My eyes cast over the detailed words implanted on the inner walls. Absorbing each and every miniscule idea from the stationary knowledge upon each page.

Days pass as the final page has arrived. The book is placed back on the end table. Lonely and longing. We are far too similar me and this book. We both share a cover used to show too many people too little about the brilliance we hold. Too many people have passed us up without giving a second thought. There have been words typed into my brain stem without me asking for them to be put there. Every single person that explores us will find different knowledge

We ran out of words
So we spoke with our bodies

These words have bled through my mind for two years
I love you I love you I love you
The constant thumping rhythmic sounds of your heart beat
Filling the jagged corners between you and me
We became two in one
A Formation of unconditional
There will be no boundaries between today and tomorrow
Lets create our eternity
Fill it will elation
Become everything we were meant to be... like whole
From present to future
We will live without restriction
For this love we share
Is without limits

Since when did darkness
Become my only light

This breathe and these lungs
Have been used to preach subjects I fully can't understand
Like existence, cats, and why yesterday feels like today
So I told a story about you
It reminded me of your nails
And the memories they held
Each time I try to write about you
my arthritis flares up
My lungs cringe
And my mind turns static
They say there are 5 steps of grieving
What about the 6th step?
The times where your body stops working
They never mentioned the part
Where you find her spirit in everything
The clouds began to shine your radiance
The wind smells like you
Tomorrow feels almost like home
We will never get the day you left back
I have been spending each moment
Elaborately searching for you everywhere
And I have found
You never left
My heart still speaks of your beauty
My laughter a sliver
These eyes glistening
To show the elation
You exhaled into my life
So don't let this be a poem about you
I am still unsure what that would look like
But for now, I wanted to say
I love you

I will not allow you to become a banned book
In an unknown library
Somewhere lost in my thoughts

I have read you over and over
Each time learning to not read the ending first
To use my book light during the day
For sake of not being afraid of commitment
Used dictionary definitions
For loving you doesn't always make sense
My dreams have become chapters
The ring on your finger
A ******
And the family we will someday have
The happy ending

You are my library
The words you speak my light
A leather bound promise of elation

You are tonight's breeze
The only thing worth inhaling

The moment God folded us into flesh
He wrote about perfection in his journal
Put our picture on his refrigerator
Day dreamed about selflessness
Spoke of passion
Wrote a book on love
As the dust settled on that day
God rested for he knew
We were fully broken
Ready to be made right

Her eyes became the only sunrise I needed
Palms a landscape of familiar territory
The hair on her head
The hair on her head
The hair on her head
It suffocates me sometimes
Makes me feel vibrant
Teeth full of star shine
I took to studying the imperfections of her body
To find the stories in her scars
Memorize the curvature of her spine
The swagger of her walk
These things replay in my mind
Just as darkness never falls in the arctic during summer
She does not leave my mind in the present