I feel stagnant on the shoreline
watching them adrift on a yacht,
a speck of white against grey and stale blue.
There’s salt in my mouth and
hate on my tongue
and I just want to build up a sandcastle and kick
it over and stomp upon it because I don’t
know what else to do except be childish
and alone
and lay upon the shoreline,
watching the phantasmagoria of lights play and shadowed silhouettes twist in social dance,
until the tide comes in and binds my mouth
with seaweed and my thoughts with tentacles so I can
suffocate my anger because I hate it
swimming here inside my saturated mind.
I want to drag you out like undertow and fill your orifices with foam and
and sea-stones rubbed smooth by years of your rough push and pull.
I’ve balanced my life in the palm of my hand,
but now I want to scissor it from my body because it’s so full of
nothing.

I write on that binder
where you crushed
those two blue constellations
into stardust,
and I watched you pull heaven
into your skull.
I hope for a moment,
you were full
but you seem so empty now.

I guess your
blue supernova
turned to ash.
I guess your past
is orbiting you
as you burn out
against black.

I feel like I'm watching from Earth,
your implosion,
which has already been
and I can only
bathe in the
light
of those two blue constellations
hidden by your eyelashes.

all my poems
have become people.
i've tried the imagery, the
rhyme, the stanza,
the verse.
but i think i'm cursed.

sometimes it's him,
or her,
or them.
sometimes when i start
a line
it twists into a familiar shape
and the poem is a polaroid
slowly appearing.

i've collected people
and things
and ideas
and they all weave together
like a novel.
more and more these poems
seem like snapshots,
or a failed attempt
to capture
all the little things that make
him, her, them
beautiful and real.

maybe i'm on a quest to feel
or on a journey of commemoration,
but the people i've let in
have stolen my pen,
my poem,
my heart,
without an invitation.

You've made your world
of eggshells
and we're all just trying
to walk in it.

What I love the most about you
is my name on your tongue,
through your teeth.
There's meaning in it,
and in me;
you make those five letters
sound like poetry.

There is a time
between the appropriate hour for sleeping
and complete abandon
an hour or two between respectability
and three cups of coffee.

I'm watching the minutes
flicker in the bottom right corner of my screen
there is a hazy sort of
beauty in this in-between,
where my eyelids
heavy and dark
pull taut and wide
my house is so quiet I'm afraid
to breathe or even
type,
hunched over the keys
in translucent
artificial light.

The hour
or two,
is passing from me and winking like a star on its path
to nowhere.
It occurs to me
that I should sleep,
that I'll be tired for work,
that my head aches from
the electronic glow.
But still I sit and wait for some revelation
in the half reality
of this in-between.

But it's late,
it's past,
and now I have to go.

All at once
this pain of being
bore down on me,
like a tidal of feeling
and sat curled upon my chest
like a knowing,
smug
cat.

I think I am transformed,
changed,
estranged from the cold humor
that kept me still.
But I'm filled with fear
for everyone I've ever known.
I see them sinking, drowning
and alone.
And here I am on the shore,
wishing there was more
I could do to drag them
from the crushing
depths of their demons.

Sometimes I'm so lost in people
I forget I can hurt
and  
this pain of being
comes from seeing
the world as it is.
From seeing people as they are
and loving them,
reaching,
even if they're too far out to sea,
too lost to pain,
too twisted to ever change.