HOW DO YOU tell somebody
you can't LIVE WITHOUT them
without sounding like AN IDIOT

I'm ******* everything out of my skull
and putting it in a mason jar.
For safe keeping and for secret keeping.

I'm forcing everything I feel into a field.
A field with deer ticks and poison ivy.
And plenty of mosquitoes.

I'm pushing all of the twists and turns in my stomach
down through my legs and into my toes.
So I can do my nervous dance and never
let my heels touch the ground.

I'm filling up a baby pool with all the things I've learned.
I'll do a dead man's float and get a sunburn.
I'll peel away my flakes of skin and
overnight them to my future self.

It's like you took a rag,
soaked it in sorrow,
wrung it out into a bucket,
dumped that bucket
into a bathtub,
and baptized yourself.

I'll spray the paint inside my mouth
and tag myself with my secret gang.

That song we sang and the words we wrote
are lodged in my throat.

And I hope it's not too late to rearrange
this melody so that I can change.

I'm hopelessly, incredibly,
stuck here with nowhere else to be.

You shook me up. You ran me out.
Hope your stupid plans pan out.

I'm okay with being sad sometimes.

And I'm even more okay with not drinking my coffee black.


I think I'm beginning to grow up.

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.

So here I am.
Sitting on my couch
and eating potato chips
and thinking about you
and what might have been.
Wallowing in self-pity
and artificial flavors
and carbohydrates.
The only things comforting me
are my fast metabolism
and the hum of the air conditioning.

Come crash my stupid party.
We'll sneak into the basement
and share swigs of gin and
swap spit and oxygen and win card
games we don't even wanna play.

Today I learned the hard way
that my way or the highway
won't fly, but fly away with me
(but not in a gay way).

Not to sound cliché, I wish we
had wings or capes so we
could soar and swoop
through space and I could
score at hoops in space
(like Space Jam). And we can
pretend that rabbits and
carrots and green circle stars
have magic and real far away
our ending's tragic, but we don't
have to think about that yet.

We can go home and roam
around and let fun abound
until the right timing to quit
whining and open our eyes
to all our lies and do grown
things like answer phone
rings and own up to our
feelings, but let's hold off on
that for now.