My smile is a dead language.
It used to mean many things.
It was interpreted, adored.
It isn’t real anymore
A vestige of a time long passed.
Now it just represents death
A shadow of the happiness
I used to know.

I used to love fireworks.
I could sit out on the beach
On the fourth of july
And watch them for hours
The brilliant flashes of color
And seconds after, the crackling and booming.

That’s love, my dear.
Pretty one minute,
Seemingly endless and infinite
But destined for destruction.
A flash and then,
Before you even hear it explode,
the colors fade away.
if you even blink one moment-
gone.
Then the boom
Lagging seconds behind
The realization that it is over.
Nothing will ever sparkle that brilliantly again.

What you’re watching are elements lit on fire
Blasted through the air in a blaze of glory
Cascading back to earth burnt up and used.

I used to be alive
blissful, free.
But once reduced to ash
I cannot be lit up again.


The language of my smile
Ceased being spoken
When he stopped listening.

The room sleeps
As I lay awake
And as the sun rises
I want to reach out the window,
shove it back down and
Give myself a few more hours
With the calm rise and fall of your chest.

I don’t exist outside of here,
Only between the posts of your bed.
Fabrication
Needing constant validation
From your touch.
And if the morning never comes,
You’ll stay here
And I can pretend to be
What you need.

If time runs
Then I should be able to dam it up
Like a river
Stop it from flowing
Freeze it in place.

But time is greedy.
The moon is too weak
To stick around.

When light fills the room
And wakes it from delirium
The dreamer stirs
And I disappear.
Am I just a dream?

When I’m gone there is nothing.
Just time.

One word from your lips
And my body reanimates
Dances, breathes
then lies still again.
Finally awake.
But alive? Real?
The room only knows.

I am the universe.

I’ve died a handful of times
Yet somehow resurrect each morning
Every nightly loss of consciousness
A sour taste of what awaits.


From where I have come
I will inevitably return
A change of state
Galvanized by time.

Deconstructing, dissipating
Reshuffling, rearranging
From infinity to solid and then back
To infinity once more.

The universe is me.

I am abstract, not concrete
A hologram self
A bundle of dying and newborn cells
Held together by the stars.

Not planetary, but nebulous
A dark matter beyond the grasp of my
Quarter century old mind
Materialized from 140 million centuries past
And an eternity to come.

I am the universe.
The universe is me.
There is no death in forever.

my life is greyscale
yours technicolor.
I pretend to like my movies black and white.


you look at me and see mountains
but under these clothes are holes

you confuse the beams for starlight

there is no starlight
not even moonlight
to complement your sunlight

just reflections of vacant spaces.

I turn the lights off so you don’t notice
that I am more nothing than something
more empty than whole.

I fake it so you stop
before you have enough time to realize
that I am just a ghost.

the breath of life is gone
wonder, awe, all of god’s little blessings
bled out of the holes.

you can try to fix me
but I evanesce faster than you
can sew me up.

I have nothing to offer you
that can be seen, felt, heard.
Touched maybe
but my soul recoils from your outstretched hand.

touch me fast
before I feel
touch me hard
before I fade away.

I thought of you and my ear started to ring.
Is that my body casting you out?
Discrete madness
Desire building up
With nowhere else to go
but in a surge out of my head?

Maybe it’s an echo of my ringing phone
Good-morning calls
Bored-driving calls
Lonely-night calls
Random-2pm-thinking-of-you calls
i-just-want-to-hear-you-talk calls
A disembodied voice carried through wire
Whispers separated by highways
Longing to be breathed into the other’s neck
A love changing by the moon.

Does it mean you are thinking of me?
I heard that from somewhere.
Or is it talking about me?
Maybe it’s both
I know you moan my name
A smoke raised with the fume of sighs
Is yours ringing too?


This is a death-mark’d love at first touch
The fates cackling at our persistence
Our hands reaching pathetically
Out of grasp.

We are so afraid to be alone
So ******* stubborn
That we lack foresight
Sensing the inevitable
But denying, ignoring,
Sitting still as the earth shakes
Apathetic to the world devouring us alive
Attempting to defy the stars.

These violent delights have violent ends.

We danced t o g e t h e r but alone
Hollow, dried up love
Without heartbeat keeping rhythm
Instruments left unplugged.

The crowd buzzed around us
Through us
A twirling blur you’d miss if you blinked
Faint echoes of substance.

We danced with fear of culmination
Eternally shuffling feet
Preferring exhaustion over truth
As our minds floated far away.

The world spun around us
Oblivious to us
Stubborn ceaselessness
A corpse love refusing to rest.

We danced t o g e t h e r but alone
Slowly
Drift
ing
aw
a
y









When I accepted that
Together is lonely,
I released his hand.

The crowd buzzed around us
And he dissolved into it

Broken from this silent reverie
I heard the strumming of a guitar.
And danced alone, but together.