And I'm back here
again
at the intersection of foreign language and familiarity
Choking down gum like a four year old memory
And it's not because my head's been somewhere else lately
but because it gets me thinking
about the difference between loosing you and knowing someone else found you
I keep opening umbrellas inside because I can't seem to get away from all this rain
and I've been in the gutter for longer than my father stayed but when the flood water comes it's not gonna be clear it's gonna look like mud
And it reminds me of being waist deep in an unfamiliar body of water,
trying to sell pieces of my old self back to the new one,
like history doesn't repeat itself
and I wonder if you dream of burning family photos and wearing the ashes as perfume too
Like somehow my inner child isn't gonna drown within you,
like somehow this mess will mean something
Like somehow the fire will end and the sky will stop burning

I keep having this recurring dream
where you're there
and I'm there
and we're hiding beneath the sheets
because that's the only place
the light can't find us.
You're brushing up against my face
and I can feel your chest contract
with mine.
I look at you
and I know it will be the last
but I just hold you
And your heart beats against my throat
and your breath expels along my skin
You're alive
and I can feel you
and you can feel me too.
I look into your eyes
and I see the ocean

I'm on the beach
and she's walking behind me
humming sweet songs of adolescent love
she's happy.
I dive into the waves
but this time it's different
this time I'm drowning.
I'm drowning and she's not there
I clench my fists and count to ten
but I'm still drowning.
I call for you but you never come

I'm in church
nine years old
and the pastor swears I am pure
he swears we will be forgiven
and I turn to mommy
ask if Jesus will forgive daddy
for the lipstick on his collar
but she doesn't reply.
She's in the bath late at night
she's crying softly
dropping her cigarette in the tub
I try to make her smile
but she's still crying
Daddy left her for a *****
and she's still crying.

It's you again
This time you're holding my hand
and we're walking, just walking
you plant a kiss upon my forehead
and we keep walking.
But somewhere in this version of my terror
I'm still drowning
and you're screaming from the surface
that I deserve it
That I finally know
what it feels like to die
and you're not going to save me.

I wake up
in a place that my body knows as hell
and your gazing at my corpse
I'm chained against a wall.
You're crying
you're begging for my help
but I can't
I tug against the steal
hanging like anchors
from my wrists
but I can't move
You're bleeding out
across the floor again
calling my name
but I can't save you

I awoke to a symphony
that reminds me
in every filthy way
that I have killed you
I am reminded of my brother
trapped in an unforgiving youth
playing spin the bottle
but here
he is alone
kissing the wounded parts of himself
in hopes that they will heal
I am reminded of my mother
and how she still thinks
I don't notice the empty pill bottles
in the bathroom
and she still can't seem to stand straight
without daddy by her side
I am reminded of my friend
and how she gave the broken parts
of herself
to a boy who didn't give
a ****
a boy who kissed all the girls
that tasted of *****
and had no scars along their writs
I am reminded that people leave
in every conscious minute
of every hour
ever lived
people leave
people leave
*p e o p l e   l e a v e.

Winter hit
The window panes turned cold
Bricks around the drains began to mold
Frost stuck to sidewalks
And the tip of your nose
Protected by gloves and cotton clothes
I watched your skin fade to grey
Like the trees outside my house
But not as beautiful
The church bells rang every Sunday
And the old man down the block sat in dismay

The veins in your neck turned blue every time it rained
I loved it till the veins in your arms did it too
I could see your heart pulsing through
But those were only the sirens for the tornadoes in your chest

Winter never felt as cold as it did that year
When you started praying to a needle and broken skin
And it tore you apart limb from limb

Where the sunset stains the ocean,
And the mountains meet the sky.
That's where I wish to be,
While he sits beside me.

Hidden deep within the woods,
Formidable and hushed.
The smell of our blazing fire
Spreading ominously throughout,
While we make love against the flames.
That's where I wish to be,
While he sits beside me.

Between our barricade of covers,
And his sharp, shy eyes.
Lustful skin on lustful skin,
And still urging closer.
That's where I wish to be,
While he sits beside me.

He's not a man of many graces,
fewer teeth than tongues
but he won't say much with his lips.

He's at his strongest when you push,
but never from a kiss.
See,
he's stubborn in every way that doesn't matter,
in every principle that has no lesson.

I've bent the spines of fragile men
to see how far they'll go
before they break,
before they'll form into a crest
of his back that I can't dig from my head.
I've watched them fall in love with me
because I thought that maybe
one of them would empty me,
but they didn't.

He is an ill-mannered world,
the kind that breads creation.
A manifestation of passion and fear.
With eyes that dug twelve foot tunnels in my veins
and went there to die.

A man of simple needs,
plesantaries and shaky knees.
But he doesn't want to see you quiver,
*he only wants to know it.

Your arteries are like correlations
Possessing fragments of my brightest moments
Protruding right against your skin
And an abundance of my darkest thoughts
Crawling viciously through your lungs
Infecting your every breath
Just to fill the empty spaces
Between the blood that pulses through your veins
And the twisted bones that keep you straight

The craters in your wrists
Hold masquerades of celebratory pain
Where crisp and lifeless voices
Hum out screams of your trauma
Like meaningless smalltalk
As if you were a resemblance of the weather
Just another galactic disaster
While their idle hands of Devils play
Scrape knives along your spine
And feast formally from your flesh

There's a manner in which you breathe
Or maybe a manner in which I perceive
When your chest picks up the covers
In harmony with the way your eye lids hover
That robs me of my own sweet and steady breath

I can always hear your heart pick up a beat
Like it's roaring defeat
When I rest my head on your chest

And I never fall short of noticing the small curls of your hair
Dangling above your eyes, moving well with the air

They wouldn't believe me if I told them
And I know you wouldn't condemn
But there isn't a moment in the day
When the light doesn't hit you at a perfect angle
And it makes my brain mangle

I love the way you love to touch my face
And give my scars a trace
Even though it rips me apart
To hear the crack in your voice
When you say it breaks your heart

"You are a beautiful piece of art"

Sometimes I wish you could stay
But I know you must always stray
You're not one to get too comfortable
And you prefer to remain untouchable

**But would it be alright
If inside your chest, I pitched a tent?
See I fear my fingers may blister
(I'm willing to pay rent)
Just for the winter?

"My darling," he said, "I think we've lost our way. Take my hand, you're getting cold."
"I'm drunk and you're sad. Who's going to lead us home?"

The bottles been polished clean and his lips are still shaking. He said he likes to forget but can't, it hurts too much, and he has to sleep with the radio on. Daddy taught him how to shoot, showed him *******.

"I don't like death," he'd say, walking past the cemetery. "Why must we be so morbid?"
"Death validates life," I'd say, "And morbidity justifies the bruises on your bones."

He sighs."My dear, I fear you may have forgotten, we don't have a home."

It's just,
              I think
                          He may be
                                              The most  beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Someone once told me that life is just a series of moments,
that the past is merely a story we tell ourselves before we fall asleep.
And so I look at him and I am reminded that I am not who I was a moment ago,
and that I shouldn't try to be.
I fear a reality of fiction and distortion,
where my life is a blurry foreign film and he is the fourth wall,
always broken.
I have written of lovers and their seemingly intangible hands for so long that my concept of time is impressionable,
one might even call it sacrilegious.
I have bled dry every metaphor capable of embodiment that I wonder if it ever meant anything,
I wonder if anything ever will.

I want to write him into a scripture of meaning, of something other than illustrated angish.
I want to write about something that isn't love,
that isn't a thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
I want to write about the way he leads me into rock pools,
like a child being baptized.

I look at him and I am reminded of the ocean,
as if his blood can only move in waves without devotion,
more like instinct.
I want to write about something that isn't love,
because this is more like inspiration.
This is not knowing what could possibly come after his tide falls back.

I am aware that literature always ruins the ending,
that finishing a book mid sentence is the only way to avoid the loss of its final words.
I am aware that beautiful things can never stay,
but maybe that's what makes them beautiful.
He is a picture of my perfect faith,
but he doesn't make me want to believe in religion,
because I know god hates the competition.

For so long I had thought that I was never going to feel anything new,
that I had exceeded the depth of emotions,
like anything that follows can only be a lesser version of something previously felt,
but here I gawk with a mouthful of blasphemous teeth.

I couldn't tell you about the snowstorm he evokes within my chest,
nor the locust plague that raid in his name.
Because this is not a love story,
at least not just yet.
This is a man that has grown roots where I have only planted seeds,
a man that scripts his stories on the soles of his feet.
*And so I look at him,
and I am reminded that I am not who I was a moment ago,
and that I shouldn't try to be.

I was lost so innocently in your eyes
Completely
Fooled
By love itself

So,
I guess that explains why your words
Pierced
My
Gut
And left a suffering so deep
That no drunken novelist can explain it

Like you set fire to my kidneys

Bathed my lungs in citric acid

You know
I loved you more than I had thought possible
And my fingers will
Never
Feel
So at home
Again

But it's been a pleasure to have your hands be the ones to
Rip
Apart
My chest
And break the bones that make up my rib cage

It was an honour to love you

But

This is my final tribute to you
My final goodbye
The last time I put your inflections to paper
The
Last
Time
I
Ever
Miss you

I have traced the war torn lips of death
But never the relief of her graceful intimacy
She found me in a bed made up of morphine
With a stomach still regurgitating loss
Her undertone was pitiful and the octave never changed
But she was full of a warm embrace
By the skin of my teeth, I have touched her only on days that consist of threes
The hour of the unholy
The hour that god sleeps
And he plays my preys on repeat
But humanity still hides at the thought of my farewells
They reside between their bones and mourn their probable loss
They hold no flowers of remorse nor confine
But rather weep for their own, still and barely shifting
Leaving me to soak in fears and fright
They hold their lives in such decay, survival fit
And disregard my uncertain departure
In the face of death, many run home to hide beneath their beds
To mourn the loss of a soul not yet left
They fear the loss of their own in simulation
And will not give up preys for reconciliation
Leaving me to throb, to pulse and bleed dry in a bed made of white

I am not everything you said I was.

He abandoned you for no-mans-land
For ****** souls and bullet holes
With blood as thick as water
And it wasn't the first time you drowned in shallow seas
Your wounds won't clot unless you touch them
And you won't find plasters between sheets
History repeats itself
And you're becoming your mother
But if you pull apart your skin for long enough
Maybe you'll find solace
Or maybe you'll bleed out

I tell strangers in fast-food restaurants
that my existence begins and ends
with you,
like my life is some sick joke.
(Two past versions of yourself walk into a bar.)
But they just scoff some rhetoric and say
"are you going down with the ship?"
Like I just woke up from that dream
everyone has where all their teeth fall out.
And there's a little girl
at the end of the docks
unmooring all the boats
because she thinks they'll float away,
but they just sink.
You see,
no amount of blood can change the colour of the sea
and nothing makes sense if there's no you and me.
I want to show you that I write like I ****,
with wide eyes,
both hands
and all over the house.
I want to tell you that I've been in love with you since I was 15,
that I want to sings songs to you from the passenger seat,
I want to make your bed and watch you fix the tv.
I want to look you in the mouth
and not worry that you'll walk away without looking at mine

Notice she's kneeling to the cliffs of a river.
The cracks of her jaw give a quiver.
The sky collapses behind her.
Through these eyes tainted in blur,
I see the sand man is singing.
These delusions he's brining.
Polystyrene flowers,
With sights that devour,
Of purple and gold,
Beauty spoken yet untold.
Entwined through her thigh,
There's always a death to deny.
"Could you lead me to the stars?"

Cotton wool sown clouds,
Hovering above crowds,
Towering over his head.
His lungs fell dead.
Leaving a voided space,
For a lit bomb to interlace,
With his soul.
He's a self-awarded black hole.
"Second to the right,
And straight on till morning ends the night."

He was a civil war
and I died trying to be a soldier

He speaks in  splatters  of speech
In a voice that resembles a man
I once loved before
His words dissolve into the walls
Crack his jaw and shatter his teeth
All while trying to hold his bones in place
And stop the wounds from leaking out

His hands are getting weaker by the drink
And the violence is only getting worse

But beneath his twisted tongue
And inside his clenching fists
Weeps a man
that cradles
in his fear
A man that cowers in the dark
Stretching desperate arms across my sheets

I took hold of his limber spine
And shifted his nerves back into place
I took his face into my palms
And planted a kiss upon each cheek

Held him close up to my chest
Until the mere feel of my skin
Became the scent of his

I sleep beside a broken man
The kind that shivers in the silence
And I stitch him back up
every day at midnight
Hoping I will awaken to a body
bound together by my touch

The world gets so much bigger than the back of his car.

it is not enough to love,
it is never enough. you must sew your fingers shut
like treasure.
mold into paper, heart like memory foam.
you must lock
the doors and change the keys, even if they don't visit. make your first drink in this palace a delight,
mount a bottle to the ceiling - decorate
with pale pink everything.
build a fist fit for windowpanes
and break no glass.
remember that a laughing bird will never fly at night, cranberries won't grow on trees and
his blood cannot stain your teeth.
young girl your are so lucky to sleep,
so lucky to dream and so lucky to love.
but it is not enough to love.
one must also learn to be.

I just want you to know:
There are days                where I forget to miss you
              and there are days           when I think my cuts and burns are finally healing
        But then             there are days             when the feeling returns

And there are days                                         where I see imagery of you again

Of you               behind the bar
           Pulling on a Camel Light

Of you                       standing outside my window
The sun           dancing coldly           on your skin
Of you looking at me
Just                          
                               ­       looking at me

And it was like         you saw                  straight through it all

You said                  it was going to be okay
                     And I've been repeating that phrase                  ever since
Because       no one      will     ever         quite          ignite         such great hope inside my chest
The way you could
But I'm just trying to       help       them
              The way you helped me
The way          I should have                  helped you
I miss you       more      and        more
                                Ever since I let myself think of you again
And I miss you         less      and       less
                          When I tell myself               you're just a dream
   But I guess      I just want to say
That it       kills me             everyday
                  Even now
To know that    I    did    not    save    you
       And I'm just so ******* sorry
I'm so sorry that I let you slip away
                          that i let you die
But now            you're long gone
So I guess it's too late
          And I    hate    myself for it too


                                 Just know that I miss you


              *I miss you so much

Life's entirety - bled out across bed sheets
A soul as dense as my morning coffee, still in its infancy
She buried him beside the shed, beneath the Mulberry tree
Storks brought no bundles to any doorstep that Summer
For Winter murdered everything they had, and the next Autumn was very foreign

They named him Angelo, before or after - I am unsure
Mother Mary was there, ghostly floating above his head
The coffin didn't fit right, left it open
She couldn't take another foot to holy grounds thereafter
Not since God took away her son

She wrote it in a letter - before she bit the bullet
*"No Church, No Gods, No Masterpieces
This is sacrilegious"