The lower back arches
Muscles tangle in with the spine
And intertwining curvature sneaks between vertebras
Creating a vineyard of sweet spirits
That I could drink from the palms of your hands

As though the gentle and rough intentions
Had forever been engraved in a fate
That the universe hadn’t even planned for it
Otherwise the circumstances wouldn’t have been

And so foolish, I looked onward to the lit pavement
Walking between the crowd in hopes that
The grasping of my soul would stop from being tortured
In ways so tender that I wish I could expand in to the millions of atoms I am

Your skin felt like a warm liquid
That washed over your bones structure
Your eyes, those brown eyes
That looked at me with a shine that
I wasn’t sure if everyone else could see
And the light freckles and tinges of skin tone
Pixelated the platform of your body
And I, could look at you forever
Without even thinking twice about tomorrow

Often times I’m staring
Awing in the curves of full blooming lips
Carved jawbone covered with deepening dark moss
The journey through the damp forest after warm rain
It is all awake alive and breathing clearly
Rising and falling like the rare drops from deciduous leaves
I cannot tell you how inhuman you feel to me
Your skin darkens around your eyes from nights up
Long evenings too many and whiskey that never even made it to a cup
Sometimes I cannot break a gaze from the casement around your pupil
The pools of honey drip further toward me
My feet find it impossible to remove themselves
So much like quicksand but sweet calming and warm
Smooth and simplistic in youth the way skin drapes
Hangs over structured bones in the most phenomenal way
Just as your eyes are lavished in graham brown
You stay glowing even in the cold weather from blessed ancestry
Down to tender arteries and muscle where I’ve placed lips a thousand times
Shoulders swoop outwards like broad boulders
Distinguishable markers play connect the dots toward inked surfaced skin
Permanence of scarred lines forming a hot air balloon and anchor pulling it down
It’s from your favorite band, I’m noticing synapses collide on the concept
Elongated extended vines lead to tools that hold and create masterpieces
Strong slender hands with fingertips that press and pluck strings
Coat themselves with paint on late evening or early mornings
Tread lightly on my skin and illuminate my face with a coaxing touch
You are the rain forest from sunrise
My heart thumps to the sense of danger behind a corner
But I know such things and if they were to **** me,
I would be treasured in becoming a tall Kapok
With roots buried miles deep

It seems to be
That at one time
No one cared about the sewers
The ****** and manic-depressives
The postman who exploded his brains
Tragedy in shadows
Pieces of people

Romanticized, it is
To die in effortless affliction
To die in parts
The end is perilously attractive
Cradling the unknown
As for love
As for hope
Happiness, joy
Savagely attacked
It is too easy
To be sad

Complexity in its finest
I’m glancing between the shapes of your eyes that tell stories of history and past excursions I’ve been wanting to know
You say your eyes are just brown, but nothing is just that with you
I think, despite the simplicity in our difficult discussions
Nothing is easy they say
They, the people who’ve let us down time and time again
Its so easy to say they and create a placement test for their behavior
Destructive as it may be and deteriorating within, I am so happy blind
That they haven’t gotten all of you
And honestly if I were in your shoes and walked the 18 years to reach a destination with no map no compass no tour guide
I hope I wouldn’t be too bitter
I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy
The verge of losing humanity felt like a weight of those tons of feathers, thought to be light but gravely succumbed as much as a ton of bricks
More of them than of us
Brown just like the tan of your skin as you hope for it to be opaque but
******* ******* I’ve never been more appeased by looking at something than with you
It’s not just a body its not just the brown hair, brown skin, brown eyes, not just the shrug, eye roll, smile, laugh, pressing of lips, open mouthed, heaving, tired eyes, grinning from cheek to cheek, infinite
Like that song, I’d try to stare at you like the night sky, but you just go on and on and on and-
Looking at you or looking to the same direction via docks and benches and waterways or the caked up fingers from painting with no paintbrushes or pursed with a stick of Pall Malls, night sky scenery or early morning sunrises
****, cups of coffee make me think of you
My daily intake and I think the dosage keeps upping
I’ll sit in bathe in the sunlight reflection of how you can’t be real and none of this seems real
Between it being too much to comprehend or other things being so shallow
odds against the favor
Open and part, attempt to prepare for something crazy infinite
knowing how relationships and losing them can get
and I’m standing aboard this boat with you on it
pretending like I know the waters but honestly
Mother nature is a *****
She sends things every which way at random at last call last moment’s notice
But I’m sure if we stand close enough we won’t fall off
at least, even, we'd dive right in together

Smile, he said
Absolute stranger
Complete alien to my world
Announcing in declaration
Invasive species
All in one anxious
Interrogating rigged grin
Hovering below low light

Smile
Is what my mother did
Covering up depression
Fixated anxiety rendering her
Washing, drying, washing
Inability to tend to her
Inability to get out of bed
Earlier than noon

Smile
Is the look of despair
Across slit wrists and monkey bones
The wide-eyed stare of vacancy
Wishing and hoping
Someone would check in a room

Smile
Stands awkwardly on sidewalks
Making visual displays of arrogance
Oblivion and beyond
In pure ecstasy of making
Each woman
Each human being
Feel their soul being molested

So, no
Absolute stranger
These cheeks will not turn upward
My teeth till not show and my brow
Will not cease to crease
Because smile for you
Is not what smile is for me

I cannot help but stare when I see you
I cannot stare and hope that one day you will invest
In me as much as I do in you
I cannot hope but wish that you will notice how I cannot
Stop talking about you
When you're not there
To myself alone
I cannot stop talking but I keep my chest tied shut
In the awaking hours that you see how cut up it is in there
I cannot keep myself standing but only do to prevent you from a fall
One that I don’t think you can handle
And I will cradle your needs even when
Mine feels like a heavy brick
Already sitting upon
An asthmatic chest
I cannot breathe from the dust covering the bed we used to live in
But I do.

What a fool to be afraid of falling
Asking for reassurance as though I needed more
than response, a hand held, a kiss planted
drunken nights and sober days
"If love is not passionate, do not participate"
What a fool to not have trust in yourself
a foot hovering above a pool or
Pacing thoughts trying to ride a skateboard
Trust yourself, but do not trust him just yet
but what a fool
To be say it is as though I haven't fallen already
18 flights of stairs, each individual bump
From every single height we have watched the world from
The cliffsides of the Appalachians
The 1800s towers of Bowman
the landscapes that connect beach to sea, wondering when we'll reach over there
An abandoned building east of the city enamoured in fluorescent light
A skytop birdsnest of an arboretum
from the back of old Reggie staring onto pavement in warm summer rain

I fall from such great heights
clamored on each step,
I do not know if there is a bottom
but I surely hope not

The world has given
a lot of things for metaphor

The desert's dry barren ways
with oasis every certain degree of a turn
a mirage that elludes, distracts
one step forward and two back

The ocean's beauty, captivity
freeing and expressing, pushing
dark caverns only the dangerous enough
can explore, submarines and
scuba gear not yet strong to endure

The antarctic that freezebites
those who underestimate and suffocates
who over prepare, overthink
white - so much white - can
make a man go insane
all that is left within selfdoubting blame

The tropical jungles' endlessness
the danger so imminent
emotion provoked so raw and indigenous
instinctual carefulness required
some men make traps but some
found ways to set themselves on fire

A mild tempered calamity crosses my mind
my location is nothing as extreme
I try to find some place where
you most likely seemed to be

I soon prepare for finale of nothing
a very anticlimactic scheme
as I recognize you and yourself
not complemented by nature enough
to be a part of her more intense scenes

Seven
Stay lucky, get lucky, feel lucky
Seven has been just the opposite for me
Still a beating reminder of required change

Even when time has paused itself in your presence
Eternally, the seconds tick in my mind with
Endearing memories and happiness that felt like our
Endeavors would be infinite

Verifiably distraught with knowledge of the
Vacancy that soon would destroy both of our
Vessels that held hearts, hands, and futures we in-
Vested in each other so certain, so real

Either the number or the letters within held
Experiments with the chance of the game or our
Eyes could not see what exactly was in our hands
Eradicated the problem to reveal truth

Never had the trail felt continually
Narrow, the unraveling rope formed
Nooses in the number that haunts me, he
Nurtures the time, while I stay standing

Seven months since you left me.

I look at my cracked face from too much sun
Or smoke or fake glances and smiles at strangers
Empty eyes that usually are glazed over
From the collection of half empty beer cans
Display of *** chata and whiskey in concealed flasks
Do alcoholics feel as happy
How water erodes the beaches and how nature takes back
What belongs to it I feel like the glass bottle
That takes millenniums to dispose of
Or maybe a heavy metal like aluminum or lead
Commonly evaporated to brains and malfunctioning characters
I think I’d be depleted uranium to all that weeps
Seeping deep to DNA contact level of danger and hazardous waste
It’s a lot of responsibility to be just as secretly unhappy
A bird returns to it’s nest to find it’s eggs scrambled
A joke with no humor and sarcastic crucifix type of beautiful typography
I look at this polaroid, shaken not stirred, and this intoxication consumes me
The one I didn’t deserve. The one I ****** up, I tell people, because deserving aside
It’s rather bleak for a love story
It’s always a lot more than what I tell people
The whole story isn’t all there
But hell
Neither am I

You are the waking up from a bad dream
The minutes feel like decades in sideways holes
Empty things trying to fill empty things
I'm running out of consciousness
Away from whatever has been chasing me for lifetimes once and time again
But I recognize this imagination
And I bring myself to life
I blink, I fade out, and roll to the side
And feel your arm around me
You are the waking up from a bad dream
And I gawk at the thought of inception
But at least you're here for now

The moon cannot see
The sun when it is night
But it knows its out there somewhere
The balance between the two
Is unnerving
To believe the other inexistent
Would feel foolish in itself

But the sun sees tides
The ride and fall of waves
That crash onto the sand

It feels the motion
pressure
gravity that pulls
And pushes it closer

In turning point of daybreak
And closing times of dawn
The sun and the moon
Catch a glimpse
Of something soon to be gone

So maybe there are lovers
Who feel the existence of love
Whose passion crashes on skin
And maybe by chance
Their minds break open
With an exchange of a glance

I feel nothing
As my eyes wince, looks at bubbles
Of green and blue
Sent and received
So easily a message
I should have never seen

And maybe
I would stay ignorant to the idea
And we would progress years on
A cover up of last nights mistakes
Or months ago of mistakes
That were meant to be relayed
But that song on the disc never played

So sorry
I feel trembles of fingertips
The urge to touch but never own
Something I couldn’t have but I gave
A heart that easily could heal
Except for when I invested it all to you
It is not something I’ve been through

How long
Could this sense of lacking
Asking if you’re alright
Tell me whats wrong
What is going on
And were all those excuses an additional matter
To the problem at hand
Or had that bird over oceans never reached sand

Clean start
The slate may have been erased if tried
But nevertheless people have seen it
Drawn written scratched and erased
The sense of my comfort
That happiness will never come back
Remember it, for what is it that I lack

And I will never see someone else
Aside from that person who caused me such unease
Not even pain, just doubt
And that ever creasing forehead of contemplation
Will never know
And I need answers to the things you no longer see
And it will hurt my heart for years upon knowing you
And this headache of mine will only cease a few drinks in
And this bed will never make itself again
And just like a bird who has never touched ground
And just like the chalkboard will scratches of past mistakes
And just as I’m begging please
There is no release.

We've been trying to find ways
ways to burn out
ways to burn brightly
ways to show we've become
more than the falling rocks of our mistakes
more than the meteorites that destroyed us
more than the path of destruction
planetary elements that've sent our futures in to gloomy regions

but here we all sit
staring down from deep space
with such momentum to cause catastrophe
moving at a rate of a projectile/motion formula
but that is just it
we are in deep space
and there is no oxygen for a spark

I. can’t. wait.
Birthdays inviting ecstacy
The inevitable hardships and
The kisses that breach my space
The ones unwanted
Over the shoulder the back
Turned on you my headaches
That conquer imperialist land
Make you fall less in love with me
more loud bass and trembling
fright on a rollercoaster
our wedding
violet purple combining of our
favorite colors blue and red
absolute opposites but I wear blue
more you wear red
spiral of your conscious I
know it surely fails because so
does rain and rain doesn’t stop
for just anybody
I
Cant
Wait
For funerals that we hate going to
The churches and god we don’t believe in
Houses or homes that hold
My hand a little more tightly loosely
Push pull me a little closer farther
Lets have a cup of coffee for me tea for
Two and four and six and eight
The ages of our kid(s) and we
Wait
I can’t
Right now my the time is going hours down
The wrong pipe the wrong turn
That frown upside down and smile
For now, we have you and I and the unraveling
Paper towel that you cant seem to catch up with
Time is not linear neither is the truth
Hard to hear? I love to hear your mindful
Insight I love to hear your midnight mumbling
Hmghrmghr speak up love I love
I can’t wait
When is now?

How do you make love
to a body
Once you have felt
someone’s soul

We have been there
That space between fore-thought and post-thought where you think a million things per minute and you don't know if you could explain it even write it down
The empty dry heaving silence when the person you're talking to is at loss for words and you're gasping on the other end like that nothingness is a black hole ******* the oxygen from your throat cavity
Holding a bottle of Tequila or *** or wine or any poison that never makes it to a cup let alone the table top, thinking its some elixir like the 1900s where they thought it would cure you of syphillius or something
Maybe they weren't half wrong, it's to forget yourself for a while. The biggest disease there is - you. And you're ******* down this bottle hoping to be alone hoping to be somewhere else hoping to be someone else in a different place but no matter how many seconds you can chug after pulling an Ace you still feel like the Joker - and we don't even play that card.
Standing in front of a mirror, turn left, right, lean forward, **** in, pull grab and tug at sides thighs bellies too full and too blatantly open. Buddah is plump, but zen does not come in size 10 or up
From my knowledge you can fill your life with empty faces that you know their name and how much ***** they can drink, and challenge them to drink more, and have them think so positively of you for an alcoholic personality
Laying down on your bed early evenings with plans cancelled plans never made and it’s only Tuesday. Wondering what else you could be doing with your life. There’s people jumping off cliffs, hang gliding, booking a plane to Amsterdam, and you’re sitting here fantasizing about the far-fetched possibility of leaving your bed to be spontaneous and have a cup of coffee.

I had been eye peeping sleep hoping
that counting sheep would send me
elsewhere and an attack of
messages erupted my phone
a lot more than that erupted from within
rush
exhileration
that rumble from screaming throats
pouncing at falling waters
my hands shook
my breath didn't know what it was
the door seemed weightless and heads snapped
but mine looked oh so far for oh so much
more valuable than the cost of pool time
you looked at me
and it hurt
eye contact that pierced
that night I left something
that night I saw more
that night I remember
you whole
and that night I felt
like I wish I cam back the
year before

Your name comes up
like that bill you forgot to pay
the idea of forgotten plans
the ones you didn't make
the want to stay in anyway

2 am and I demand myself
a clean demeanor
a thousand miles per hour
Dim lit room, raggedy people

stepping on set I pretend more
I pretend to not notice
white tee shirt, tan skin
I pretend to not feel your heartbeat, a hug delivered
a reconnaissance of memory, bitter water
I pretend that I am well, I am wearing white
I pretend I don't think about you often
I pretend to not regret
I'm stepping on a line between two skyscrapers
Close death at far range mistake simply made
Breathe is deranged at any second I could slip
Stomach sinking faster than me
Before I reach the other building centimeters away
I turn back, a tightrope much harder
and wish I could have been pushed instead

He stood up to the lion
that roared inside me
had eaten men who had coaxed
her longer and more

He was firm
with reason
was not locked in the cage

And this time
she purred

Dense cream for invisible stretch marks
Marking and paving the road your body changed its ways
So have you, the way you see yourself
Cellulite emerging from the cell phone you drown in
Even in pools of commercials that are ankle deep
Make your lips better by damaging them, hell even inject
Yourself with something like a ****** it’ll get you high
On lack of self-awareness and they say the beautiful people feel
The most shame
Get more plump here and anorexic here asking how long does
Food take to digest so you know the timer on the clock before
Exploding yourself from within
The clock is ticking to another rhythm and you have alarms set
Before the actual alarm
you’re craving something so insane so real
So tangible or so it seems from airbrushed porcelain characters
They have just a mask on I’m sure they Photoshop the smile
For every single ******* one of those pictures framed ecstatic
Numbing process, they grab a little piece from everyone
It’s a collage of insecure little girls and smaller adults
Marketing its child exploitation *****
One day we’ll have the perfect person
They assume
We’ll change to be what they ask
A chameleon with neurotic behavior wondering if it could lose a few
Most of us have lost more than just that

My head has become a very hard place to survive in
It is not a wasteland, no,
It does often grow these flowers
But acidic waste does sometimes
Drip in the rivers and streamlines
Of thoughts, floating carelessness
Down canals and connecting neurons
Under bridges that young couples walk over
And the older ones stop to peer to
It oozes bright yellow
Staining the rocks and sand
And bird’s winged-tips
Dying the world a mess of
Fluorescent greens and blues
Illuminating the cloudiest of days
The characters of my brain
Enjoy the toxicity
Jump in the pools formed from acid rain
Raise their faces to the red burned sky
And let each drop absorb into their skin
I do not know why my head has become
An expert on chemical excesses
It is survivable if you let it all
Soak in

I want to kiss you with
Wet
Sloppy
Tongues
Grab the back of my hips
Rough
Calloused
Fingertips
And play me like the strings I watch you
Pluck
Caress
And press
Deeply in to, my hands drew over your
****
Illuminated
Body
I painted you in my mind over and over in
Picasso
Gogh
Steadman
And when you woke I stared into your iris
Smoke billowing out the French cigarette
I have never felt so loved
As
With
you

You will encounter
Endless situations
Where what you say
Matters a billion more times than you’ll know
And the words will come out perfect

You will encounter
Endless situations
Where what you say
Will feel like it means a thousand times more than it may
And it will come out all wrong

What I have noticed
Is that it’s always hard to say
Exactly how you feel
Perception has consequences
But its not always what it is
Or how you do
It’s that you said anything at all

That silence that grows
Achingly, weeding it’s way from your open mouth
To the heart of the person in front of you
Silence speaks in volumes
And I am glad
That even if the response doesn’t pertain
(even though it always does)
I have exclusively
Listened, been listened to, and communicated
Lopsidedness aside,
And understood so precisely

I ask
difficulty in hand
There is discomfort
in his voice
I feel the needWANT
to say we are
or maybe areNOT
I can't decipher what is not there

I have been
               with people before
and
               not once
                              made them pancakes

You could not have said it any better

At first it was only words
written on paper
surrendered from heart to hand
But then it became hand to
a dissolved in acidic waste
Flesh to the tendon, tendon to
muscles and nerves to
Melted body part solutions
pretentious misgivings
And to the heart
floating in chest cavities wide open
bit by bit
removed with surgeon credentials
And then it was even the paper
printer working on overdrive
jammed and out of ink

I knew exactly where I was
sense of dead silence between
two people wrapped in conversation
between the breaths of sentences and words
that required another gasp
there is was
if you stopped talking
I think we'd both suffocate
between playful mater, responsible or
unending unnerving problem after
problem
I wish I called you
I wish I got out of bed sooner
so quickly and unprepared
even that 30 seconds more I would've had with you
would be worth more than a year with him

I made the mistake of searching for answers in love poems
I made the mistake of searching for answers in poems
The either realist or idealist finding meaning in love
in life
that is neither here nor there, it may be entirely fiction's compromise
Assumptive righteousness in lines that speak ten forms of beauty
simplification of a word people have been trying to conquer for so long
with no map, across seas, looking for jewels in desolate wastelands

I made the mistake of searching for answers

I have been wondering about dreams
where my voice has dissipated to a very much lacking shriek
When everything is horrible
I must scream
My mouth opens the widest it can possibly go
And I muster up the breath in and out as strong as I know
But the release does not happen and I am unable to shout
I notice that it is not because of the terror in my dream alone
But because I feel someone, in reality, has been sewing my mouth

The neighbors dog hit by car
Down the block dragged for four more
Twentyfour ****** overdoses six deaths
Half-life response time of paramedics 4 minutes
Medicinal cabinet next to the microwave
A whole four shelves
“You’d just get sick if you took that whole thing
You wouldn’t even die, just wish you had.”
Public programming on twenty-eight channels
An attack on US soil post 9/11, it’s not even them
9 mo. Infant ***** to death
petition for the murderer to be publicly hanged
who would be the executioner
as the mother remains unconscious
on the sidewalk down the street
neighbors dog hit by car
dragged for four more

I had to leave you
because I could
not love you enough
I hope you understand
that I have locked
my attic, my basement
my mind, my soul
the key, I have swallowed
it's somewhere in me
but I must find it

Poetry has taken me to faraway
fantasy places
none of which I can ever truly achieve
none of which can ever be true

You are
such art
I wish
I painted you first

hovering your foot
over pool water
wondering how deep
cold unknown wonderous
it can possibly be

if they dive right in
why can't I?

You do not-
Have- to accept
Your lot in life

Even if it is all-
That had ever-
Felt right

When your work has sprouted from the cracks between the blacktop cement
It only makes sense to write when a new coat of tar rolls over the weeded plant,
a sunflower composite that seemed to have ignored the signs of the inescapable end

I do not know if it shifted the soil underneath,
A mixture of clay and dirt, bursting with life
from ants and beetles and worms moving like clockwork
without reason but knowing a purpose
Perhaps they captured a seed, passed from
The ants to the beetles to the worms to
The designated placed underneath the back top cement

I do not know if the weeded plant as a seed
Had died many times over underneath concrete, tar
Or how many years of pushing in to the darkness
Not understanding why, it was there and so intolerable to move
Weaving around blind in the underground hoping for a weakness
To explode through it, breathe the air it has been deprived of,
To feel the warmth of the sun, finally
Exasperation of holding your head underwater for too long
Not knowing where to come up at

I do not know why the weeded plant has sprouted
Perhaps it has nowhere else to be, perhaps it was meant to grow
In black tar places, knowing a purpose in it
Perhaps it cannot not be but to grow and push through possible cracks
It’s inability to die, it’s contract with cyclical nature to take back what belongs to it
Containing something far too important to give up to the pressure of the tar lying on it
Containing something far too important

When your work has sprouted from the cracks between the blacktop cement
It only makes sense to write when tar has rolled over the weeded plant that has
Sprouted in survival
In an inevitable beginning