professor told me the chemicals and minerals in this paint could leach toxins into my skin if I let it stay on the surface there
but the way I see it I've picked my poison
either it's paint on my skin or you on my mind

he walks around suburban streets afraid of breaking things; toys, bones, lives
she sees herself as the problem because that's all her mother ever yelled at her within paper thin new development plaster
they get it implanted deep inside them somewhere along the way that everything they touch is tainted and I don't know how to enable them to see the radiance that is exuded by the things they presumabely ruin

Letting you go is made easier in knowing you're not the same person I let in

spring runs at night
when the air feels like summer night air
air that's been warmed up by the sun and then left to be consumed by stars and darkness
it always reminds me of night swimming
in summer night water
because you hit these patches of cold and warm when the air or water can't decide which it will concede to in the time of transition

I can feel my heart rate slowing
my thoughts caught between going a million miles a minute and lounging in the tempered water of those smarter than me
I am simultaneously comforted and overstimulated by this modern artist who attempts to explain himself in a media foreign to him: words
His reality exists in color fields and weathered linen
In re-stretched canvas and the gentle pull of paint layering itself before him in a matter so beautiful that he's afraid to **** it-ignoring the fact that he's bringing it into existence
To see his work and grasp a whisp of what it is he is trying to convey
This is my drug of choice
To be drunk on the sobering reality that we equally overthink the merging of memories and hapinstances and movement; light and shadow, tints tones and hues, a balance between respect for what the art is trying to do and trying all the while to control it in a manner that it may capitalize on its investment in itself-on our investment
of time, of thought, of failures its taken to get here, of learning
Why would I go searching for something to stimulate my mind when it's nearly 3AM and I can't get it to stop?  Nor do I desire to make it stop
May I be strung out on this gift all the days of my life

What if fate forgot about us?
In the grand scheme of things she forgot to intertwine our broken lives
What if this isn't how it was supposed to end but
We slipped through the cracks and there's no going back?

"Hanging a song on another wind
It was timeless and timed all the same
These words are a blessing a breaking away away
And all of the stories of why you came, they get prettier every time
You are something special you sing the way we sigh
And  I thought about changing my name and then moving far away
And wherever you are I know you feel the same
And love is a pattern of drifting wood in its own kind of watery smile
Who hides with the maker of night and stays a child
And saving the best of what's left of ya for the one who has stolen your seat
And too many questions will grind away your teeth
And I thought of the sun goin down over there and thank it for the day
And wherever you are I know you feel the same
The longer we're standing here breathlessly are we making a bigger mistake?
By taking the matter at hand into the grave?
But wouldn't you want to know anyway?
Where your heart was just dying to go?
And hope is a whittling down of what you know
And I thought about something we might have said about doing whatever it takes
And wherever you are I know you feel the same
The colors you drew in the country air
Like a willing and shattering fire
Too hard were the benches, too cold for your desires
And tell me again what you're doing these days with that beautiful, curious face
The lines of your memory are breaking away away
And I thought about nothing particular and down came the rain
And wherever you are I know you feel the same
And wherever you are I know you feel the same"