And I know one day,
I'll look into her eyes and say,
"I love you"
With body language, with touch,
When the way she laughs becomes too much.

Fingertips like felt rolling over
Stitched feelings of brokenness,
Diamond eyes catch the unraveling
Of confusion into wholesomeness,

I'm mended, I'm alive, and goddamit
I'm swollen with #pride

I am the skyline,
I'm the night littered with stars;
My shine roars for you.

her body rusting -
yes, they call me vagabond -
prisoned to wander.

Hips, curves and all,
Spilling and slipping with
Tip-top, filled up
Love,
Baby

Jamming her fingers into the keyboard,
You would have thought that it was elastic -
You would have thought she was digging into her soul,
Searching for something stronger than this
Broken melody.

And as you look at yourself naked in the mirror
For the first time in months
Mulling over valleys of curves
Where other girls might find emptiness
Or the blush of acne
Where modest peach may be found
You begin to wonder - who spun the planets in their dance
And if this earth really wanted it -

Or if gravity's whimsy is really some mad beast
To which celestial beings are found
With zip-locked lips, tight, wide-eyed, forcing a smile
As they are twirled madly about -
As the stars watch their blood stained ballet from their ivory tower
Spewing spells of laughter in things called nebulae -

And as you look in the mirror
And gaze into the eyes of a girl who's seen
Thick and thin wrapping her bones like a trend
You ask yourself if the earth threw a tantrum
When it was handed it's stack of seven,
It's crummy hand,
If today it is still cursed to watch
A stumbling, shuffling race
Breeding life just to slaughter it,
And not thinking about where they plant their eucalyptus trees,
Blazing trails with their talk of taxes and alcohol-stench -

If the earth is left to bellow in the currents of it's winds
Or dream wistfully of the moon in its tides
If the whispers of the breeze
And the uproar of the hurricanes
Was just a way to say
WHATS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?
If it ever cursed it's luck from the draw
To burden beasts of salt and volumes of soil,
If it cried and howled to the stars above
When it wasn't given it's way.

He was all tattoos,
And cigarette breath - knocked down,
Drowned beneath his charm.

I'm still miserable.

don't get me wrong -
there are pauses, and there are breaks.
there are beams of light, there are glimmers of hope
and there are days where happiness is so golden,
I can practically feel it salting on my tounge,
dancing in my brain
and some small part of me almost begins to believe that
things have changed -
it's going to be better now.

but of course, night is still well and alive,
in it's deathly gloom.
and of course, the petals always plunge through
in a sickening cold snap
and I am brutally reminded that
spring
is just season, not a way of life.

and although the why is given a different name -
boys, alcohol, displacement, bad job -
i find myself surrending to the currents
that is winter days, where sunlight
burns to cold, midnight ash within a few hours.
every few weeks or so, the darkness returns
pinching out the flame that i had spent so much time trying to reignite and
oh, not again.

but again and again, the night falls,
the stars spiraling out of place until
the cold and the heaviness have anchored in my chest
like a yawning need for eternal day -
I'm suddenly left wondering if i should even fight it.

oh, what a carousel it'd be
wedding veils, red roses -
what a carousel it'd be
if i was more than your late night girl.

I guess I'm scared because
When you hear my voice
You don't hear wedding bells calling,
Only empty howls for naked nights.

Hammered with wonder -
Enamored by all the stars -
Beauty, not so far.

And it's all over.
All of it.
Thudding our way down the rabbit hole,
We finally found the bottom.
It finally came to a flaming end.

The many years of perfect storms, first emotions
And raw desire
Have finally reached their drought,
Silenced with the recent memory of an apathetic stare.

"Is this doing anything for you," he said.
And I, with a "No," stopped all motion,
Stuck in position that may have once
Driven him wild.
But there was nothing, now
And everything we once had seemed to sigh in that moment,
Gray and tired.

I was no longer his goddess.
He was no longer my muse.
We had exhausted every corner of each other -
And now we had finally discovered the parts of ourselves
Who no longer could give a ****,
Even in our once tireless animalistic urges.

And although it ended sourly,
It ended with a, "good."

The stars are marching out the window,
They are still uttering about
The mischief from the evening before.

Somewhere on the horizon,
Night is fermenting into morning,
And it is calling me for a drink.

and you begin to ask yourself why you fall in love with someone who wouldn't accept another part of you
until you realize you don't really want that part of you either

And you're the one person I miss -
I miss you so much sometimes it makes me sick.
Its only happens around now,
In the twilight of sleeping and waking,
And for some ******* reason
It's just you.
I mean, I've had dozens of loves ones
Stumble in and out of my life
Like wandering ghosts.
And still they utter that I'm a hermit
When they hear the empty din of silence
Instead of reverbing "I miss you!"s
And the echoing "lets get together sometime!"
I am not one to latch on;
I do not reel them in, I do not bait.
I would much rather drink alone
Then get giddy off of shots and beer pong with
Lonely company.
But you -
For some **** reason, you -
You make me sick with longing.

The day is enveloped in the sun's golden lines,
But beneath that blue the stars still shine.

you and your moodswings
swing dancing, swinging me to the ground,
swing swing swinging

you and your moodswings
make me drink myself to sleep

I see myself in the poppy seeds and the playful trees -
In the dying grass,
In the crisp, singing breeze;
Under the breadth of sky,
Atop the breast of the sea;
In nature’s right hand -
Free.

Starry eyed dreamer,
Why are you in the gutter?
It's time to come home.

I feel like I've said goodbye a million times -
Emotions often betray facts, so I suppose it's easy to understand
Why you always avoided them.

You still try to hide that I run through your mind
From time to time,
Sometimes all the time.

I think about you too, babe.
Sometimes all the time.

Today, I am a pirate ship -
My heart, the red and white sails of a head-hardy
*** spilling
Caribbean bound me
With men marooned to a land of
Salty wood and salty seas
Knowing nothing but the sun's devilish smile in
The morning tide
Or an Atlantic storm
Tossing them about like
The horizon's spitballs.

We will brave the whims of now,
The rapid tonight, the slow coming tomorrow
With a voice in the wind saying,
"And I swear to the gold you will find
Or the breast of that distant thing called land
That my fibers will catch the air,
My fabric will not tear.
Unfurl me under cloudless skies
And the charcoal memories of an
Ocean-stripped-to-the-Heaven's-above alike -
I will take you to places you could never even fathom."

I am between two hands
I am between day and night
I am pushing past the horizon
I am pushing past the sky
Past the darkness over morning
Past the seas and land alike
Past the stars floating, swimming
Oh, how my heart knows the strokes of
Those wheeling, spinning stars.

don't ask him to save you.
he doesn't really want to.
he finds you emotionally overwhelming,
actually
and your castle of buried sorrows is so beyond him right now
it's not even funny.
he's got enough problems of his own.

besides, you never really believed that you needed to be saved
anyway.

Stitched to the rose thorns,
The petals have all fallen -
And yet you just laugh.

And would it be so hard to sit and boil in the truth -
To let the regret stir in the tea leaves,
To let the colors spill and rise into the eaves?

Could I let my words be candid -
Or will I be swallowed in the sky and rain
Before my petals bow to the floor in defeat?

Finitude, the luck of humanity
Where gods sit on clouds
Dreaming to be cleaved from eternity

The markers on the highway are singing of night's white gleam.
I am two eyes lifting from the ivory smoke-out
Watching them like a trail of matches you dropped behind,
With your flat-footed nakedness, sauntering, swaggering,
While the dying flames are dreaming of cigarettes you'll never smoke,
While the hungry embers are reaching for that old
Tobacco breath that will never nest in my lungs again -
I don't think I love you anymore -
It is cancerous, bubbling,
It is ripping my flesh anew with fingers like charcoal paper,
Like roasting meat,
Like wood waiting passively for the fire's whispering touch.

You used to roll your own tobacco leaves.
I am crisp and frail, reaching for them,
Never sure of how the flaky touch would one day boil to ashes.
The mountain is tugging me, the tumbling mystery,
White markers ablaze and all;
Light is spilling from the sky, gray and misty
As if night and morning are distilling themselves
Into hovering phrases, half-*** excuses -
I'll fix it one day, I swear -
The fog is barely unsticking itself from the rocky peaks,
My jagged heart is watching as the dying haze begins to leave,
And I am wondering if that trail of cigarettes will lead me home.

And I'll be there when they lay you in the ground
Six feet under - arms crossed - legs closed
Finally laying your back
In that straight position
That I always expected of you
Those tickles and chuckles the soundtrack of the cemetery
When the stars sang on your fetal-curled nights
When your lashes ran away like pollen on a breeze
When the life and the breath of a lover eddied around you
When time stopped
And our freckles and mind and lips all met
In a soul touching kiss
I transcended my flesh
And so did you

But you're in an ivory white bed
You're six feet under
You stopped breathing one day
You just stopped
And I hope your face is marred with wrinkles
And I hope your body is caressed with scars
And I hope your bad days really left a hickey,
a punch, a bruise
Because although I won't be there for it all
Please embark on a beautiful life when you open the door
I'll face the landslide
And I'll face it alone
And so will you
But just try and live a beautiful life
Okay?

Why do I introduce her to my bed,
Two fold and larger than she's ever seen,
Swimming through the sheets to meet diamond eyes and bare shoulders -
Her hands are spring's cold river currents as they meet my skin,
They are icy splashes singing the heat from my flesh.

Why do I put down my drinks in strange wonder
To watch her intoxicated dance,
To watch her hips shudder and sway,
To see the darkness burgeoning beneath her eyes
As she lives in the shadows of her depression.

And why do I watch idly
As she scoops shallowly into the sandy waters of her soul -
The salt and the ocean just keeps filling back up
Every time she tries to live in the antithesis of
Him.

Four years, she told me
Then here she is again,
Six shots and two bourbons, *** and all,
Whiskey running through her veins
Like a race to forget how broken her heart truly is.

She is bent over the toilet hurling up the memories of him,
God, they are splashing wildly
They are reaching for her face
She can barely keep her eyes open,
Her face is bone white.

I ask myself about the night she falls asleep in my car
She is wrestling with her slumbering breath like repose isn't so easy,
Inhale, exhale,
The rise and fall of her chest spinning the night in motion
As it flings itself about painfully outside of my windshield.

Why do I stare at her, putting my coat over her,
She has closed eyes and her lips are ready to kiss.
Why do I let her toss me about, why do I let myself bleed.
Why do I let her etch her sorrows across my flesh, watching the ink as it dribbles down my spine,
Why have I become the paper to a broken melody?

Its 2 am and the streetlights are slowly crawling by. This song is humming from rooftop to wheels. You are passed out in the passenger seat. You lost count of the drinks you had tonight - the numbers lost their claim when you were toilet side, hurling the night back up. But you dont care. I saw the way your eyes spilled with her laughter, your words soupy with her speech.
You called me up because you know I'd come to. Because I always do. (I sometimes wondering if you know I keep my ringtone on during nights when the drunk texts stream through.)
This song is playing. I ask myself what sort of prisoner I have become, and where you dropped the keys between the drinks? I move to stroke your hair like before, but I stop myself - do I wanna know? Repose kisses your cheeks, and the stars dance on as you sleep with ease.

Please restrain me
The sky is too big
But oh, how the sky is too small to be free.
This restless heart is pumping dreams through my veins
They are white, they are clouds, they never stop
Soft and slow, always coming,
Do they ever fully pass through?

Please clip these wings
There's too many cars in the city
So I crave and claw for something blue
I mean, these trees were once young too
How did they satisfy their hunger for something new?
So nourish my roots, clip these wings
Maybe I really just shouldn't be free.

barefoot on the clouds,
i chased you all the way home -
i'm crazy for you.

Hi, you've reached my voicemail-
Dry spells, waiting,
Tucked in bed and shaking,
Dreaming of the day we are eachothers shadow again,
Bickering and snickering over bragging rights,
Over little car fights,
Outnumbered by the years that have passed
Since things were alright,
Invariably in tears because that's right,
There is no end to the lonely night!
The stars are blinking out faster
Than I can make up my mind
And is it worth it, old friend?
Was our last goodbye really the end?
Are the feelings mutual,
Or is it all in my head?
Does this muffled silence
Really mean that it's dead? -
I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

:DIAL TONE

I can't keep doing this -
Spilling on you like keroscene -
Setting my heart ablaze -
Just for you to feel *okay.

Stopped moving, final twitches -
****** dry -
Colorless -
Eyes still open, tongue hanging free -
"Dead as a dog" -
just cold.


No I don't want to linger on the cliche of death
But I still wonder how the life ebbs away, silently
How it unsticks itself
How the limbs, once stiff with life
Resign into the shadows
With that final sigh.

wordsmith,
pull me under the grainy pages -
show me how the ink bleeds

I drove you to the gutter.*

Now I'm drowning in the sewage water,
Flailing about,
Stupidily and hopelessly in love
With just a memory of you.

I wonder about you sometimes -
What happened - where it went wrong -
The metamorphosis.
You spent all those years peering through the looking glass.
The world would bustle around you,
Hell, it could have been embroiled in flames,
But still you'd sit idle,
Unaware of the fat fingers of fire pooling at your toes,
Seeing things about me that perhaps I couldn't even see
(The things you said were always so sweet).

But I think somewhere along the way
The single-star nights
And heaving sobs in the car finally broke you
Something in that lens suddenly cracked,
And you got up from your cave,
And it never occurred to you that when things break
You need to fix them -
No, no, never.
You never looked back,
Almost as if looking through that chipped glass was something beautiful,
Like a mosaic, a kaleidoscope,
Pretending the shards weren't gouged in your eyes,
Shedding blood.

I wonder about you sometimes.
I wonder where your words roll off to now -
Who's pages are they sinking heavy into?
Who's cup are they filling?
Do your fears still make you writhe at night,
And is there some nurse-like shadow of me
To wake you from your nightmares?
I wonder about your kaleidoscope eyes,
And why the ******* don't see things the way you used to.

Study me.
Be the restless scholar
Glasses turned upright, hair in knots,
Dizzy with sleepless nights beside the candlelight,
Coffee stains strewn like Christmas ornaments,
Where you study my pages
With relentless curiosity
Leaving your eager fingers shaky
Spellbound and hungry for the end.

Find me.
Trace your eyes over wayward maps,
Over my skin,
Seek me beneath the epilogues and endless chapters.
Read between the lines to see me
Waving and giggling, (or sobbing and quivering).
Write papers on my patterns, on my stanzas -
Tumble down the rabbit hole of my syllables,
Where ink is branded in the roar of rising-and-falling flesh.

You carry eternity with you everywhere you go
Like an over sized bag.
The eddies are swirling beneath a dozen zippers,
It sinks into your arms, its all you can do
To tip over, nervously, shakily,
Before it drops
And melts into the earth, you with it,
Limbs and all.

I hear in the simplest phrases -
How was your week?
I swear it drips from your lips
Like the blood was too thick to wipe away.
It's this raw, shuddering hunger
That leaves you trembling
Every time your forever dips its hips
On the wayward wind.

When they sent us on our way,
They told us the path would always be clear -
Blinded by faith, we listened.
No doubt in mind, we kept on.

Now knee deep in the ghostly twilight,
The stars and the sky have all lost their hue
And the trail has ended.
A howl rises in the night -
*"What has become of this?"

"Tell me how to feel about you now -
Let me know!

Do I suffocate or

Let You Go?"

And you were born from the ivy.
You were bruised black and blue from the sky kissing you all over,
Feet to hands,
and everywhere inbetween,
With her arms wide open,
And her promises to run from horizon to horizon
So as never to be out of sight.
You wore the crown, pleasure tickling your cheeks.
You were free to leave.

But somehow,
Even after the diamond speckled,
Moonlit crescent winking banner
Had waved and left,
And even with the sun spitting fire
Too close to the ground,
Somehow,
You stayed.
You stayed, you stayed,
Swinging your smile wide,
Ribs pressed clean and open,
You stayed.

And even when the nights pinched
The fire from your eyes
Like a long burnt candle,
And even when the midday hours
Drank the life from your cheeks,
You knew where to look when the clouds
Ran, loud and puttering.
You stayed.
You stayed,
Floating with the stars
Dancing with the sun
Even after knowing
The dizzying taste of touching the sky.
*You stayed.

Call it experience, self-protection
Or even just "listening to their gut" -
But people can smell self-hatred
Like a pile of dog ****

And all the street lights at dawn always looked like pinned stars
Hanging low enough for man to touch
Under the pink swallows of sky
Barely loud enough to make me wonder
If God had sewn diamonds in our eyes
When we went into the world
And made it our own

You are so full of joy -
the kind in youth that spills on to skin in winding ink,
creating the din echo of forever every time
you see your arm in the corner of your eye.

Its a bright sort of joy, like the kind that unfurls itself down isles,
trumpeting and unraveling as a veil
twisted too tight too soon speaks of codependent dreams too softly.

I remember when I was a blank canvas, when I was
Stuck in dusk - something gray and in between.
I think the world only knows innocence
Like shooters only know a shooting target
Because it wasn't long until colors were flung,
Spilling into the sky -
Red's passion, yellow's trepidation, blue's deep-seated sorrow,
And green is the dreamer that wants to know them all, isn't he?

I will never meet those days of gray,
I will never know charcoal hearts drinking in phantom
Images of rainbows from afar.
I will never again be a dull, cloudy sky
Lost floating on my idle waves
In awe of a distant idea of iridescence flaunting in the sky.
I will never again know the weightlessness
Of being untouched by this twisted
Artist of a world we live in.

You were never my thunder -
Loud and bellowing
Sprinting from horizon to horizon
But proof by existence only in the sound
Of your footsteps - angry goodbyes.
You were never rapping against Heaven's gate
Violently, vehemently,
Fist to the earth
Sending the stars rocking in their seats,
And babies shrieking in streets like dominos.
Never once were you the
Rage blasting in the ebony sky,
Exploding with dreams too great,
Memories too loud -
My thunder.
No, no.
Not you.

No, you were the silent slap of light
In twilight's hush.
You landed on all fours, claws etched in the soil
Spewing fire from your fingertips
Every time our skin met.
You sought me out,
The lonely scrap of metal left to rust,
You rattled my fibers
And taught me how to orchestrate warmth
Before I ever knew I could.
You never needed to knock down the doors belligerently
Letting the song birds and howling wolves
Hear about our privacy.
You never needed to - no - never once did I see
The cloud's confetti, and the moon's gaze never needed to be interrupted.
You ignited my currents suddenly, subtly
Ripping through the night for only a moment
Before letting your eyes sink into mine.
You are the mad scribble across the sky, deadly,
Wiping smirks here and there that smudge themselves in pastel shaded sheets.
You break the silence not with voices heard,
But with the electric language of flame -
My lightning.

The rise and fall of the ocean
Is pushing the air towards my door,
It is scattering it's salty-breath over our skies.
I drink in it while stumbling over parking lots,
Smacking my lips over the enigmatic taste.
I reach for it behind secret alleyways
Never quite tall enough to ****** it anyways.

The rocks are swimming beneath my toes
And I ask myself if I am a body of water -
Is my flesh a rippling mass of liquid, too?
The pale moon will love me, if I am.
With its ivory gaze,
Dancing and turning in its silent ways,
And its tug-o-war under gravity's haze.

I can dance like the ocean,
I can breathe currents, I can exhale rain.
I can swallow the stars when the sun rises,
And I can free them like butterflies,
Diamonds in my eyes,
When night comes again to reclaim the sky.