I spent my days running in place
with time passing like a treadmill under my feet.

If there's one place I can direct you to, it's Nowhere.

If you follow the path of my eyes,
you'll find that it always ends in a clock.

I couldn't believe the pathetic look you were giving me,
As if I was the one who needed saving.
Let me profess once and for all that I do not want your pity.
Once and for all, that you never realized what I needed from you.

Friends,
He shrugged at me when the fiery arrows came,
And he kept my secrets,
but only when I was present.
Friends,
I gave him my utmost devotion and he
dismissed it for the bat of pretty eyelashes
Friends!
He abandoned the sacredness of friendship
For the sake of professionalism.
It's "unprofessional"
to care for someone
Who sacrificed everything for you.

"In the end, all I could really show was gratitude. You were always patient and forgiving, and you were always optimistic and hardworking. You were forgetful and sometimes irresponsible but always well-meaning. I looked up to you, you know. Admired you. Ultimately I was never able to change myself for the better, but because I had you in my life, I at least didn't change for the worse."

When I was a child I picked at scabs, entertained by the idea of bearable pain.

I've been told that
these little things we do take roots in us
(Funny, considering that roots hold the soil of the earth together
and keep it from spiriting away)

And I was thinking:
Maybe that's the reason
I keep picking at the cuts you left,
the reason the bleeding still hasn’t quite stopped,
and the reason my scars have darkened in your terrible likeness.

I followed footsteps and a strong voice
Through a tunnel that turned my words 
into smoky, indiscriminate echoes.

I followed the sway of any icy wind
 that prostrated my lashes

and froze my tears in their ducts

She frequents an air-conditioned room with cabinets full of years,

And other forgotten things.

She rests her elbow on the desk, and her head on the brick wall behind her,

So often that she doesn’t mind that stupid switch plate anymore.

It’s quiet, but not really.

The door opens like a floodgate and drowns the space in noise.
(a high school band room, no less, what is there to expect?)
A room four paces by three and a half suddenly holds the world's orchestra

And it’s terribly necessary—
that sound of simultaneous trumpets and clarinets and dreams whatnot—to dissuade her mind from caving in on it’s own cacophony.

The school bus window framed a weary shoulder and a pensive eye,
All lit up by highway headlights.
It glistened a good extra through the rain.

He wore Sunday best on a Friday night,
surrounded by people who pushed his name through their mouths like loose change through a parking meter.

He went upstairs with no one,
But for some reason it was harder to open the doors.

"It's time,"

Said he, the suited man,
though not its occasion or its purpose.
I made my way down obediently,
as my silent protests did to the floor,

And as I took his hand, he disappeared.

These are the things that guard the frontier of sleep:

the endless flow of the future into the present, and the present into the past;

considerings of decisions I may have made but did not;

The choking sound of a floor fan and simultaneous yearnings for silence and comfortable temperatures;

School;

That six-hour ******* nap I took.