I was right outside
when she pulled the trigger

and I remember

crashing sound, in my head
my knees, my shoulder blades. A turbulent din
heart beating like a cave collapsing
air desperate to escape from my lungs

and silence.

Light falling away,
slowly like snowflakes
with the weight of dusk
and me standing
staring at the holes that were in everything.

Suddenly, everything was a mountain.

and I remember                        it

---------------------------------------------------------------­

I sit here and watch as if I couldn’t reach out and touch it
Can I?
The decay is not in your heart or your mind, it is in your soul.
Its coming out on your face. Gray stains forming around your eyes.
How do you get rid of that?
Your playful (terrified, i’m so scared, i’m scared) voice.

In 3am empty
sitting on the floor by the window gasping for air.
How can I reach out and touch that?
I watch the nights wash you pale with insomnia.
Strings of black hair. White face. Cold morning light.
How can I reach out and touch that?

I sit here across from you at the table, watching your eyes look through me.
Words are coming out of you that I don’t understand.
Words that don’t fall on deaf ears
but on deaf hands
making me suffer like I was paralyzed.
Your lips barely move as you speak.

There’s a sharp edge to this
its cutting the line between consciousness and sleep
you’re saying
The days have been good to me
you’re saying
I am just going to get older.

I can feel it in me
death is in me,
and I cannot
get it out

For a moment it is quiet. You sit there, like something meant to be on its own \
and I sit here, like an empty chair.
How could I reach out and touch that?
My mouth opens
Be okay.
I’m saying

Please be okay.

--------------------------------------------------------­-------------

its gradual            ,           the darkness is invading me
filling the back of my eyes
the depths of  my ears
the pores of my skin
until I die.

I take another dragging breath.
feel my bones bend the wrong way
too far

These days feel so old
this sky is so heavy
this wet air tastes so much how it did
last winter sinks in.

and I remember                   it       so well    .

---------------------------------------

today, a new offense
I could not believe it
the sun pulled itself up out of the ground
without you

january sun
light without bright
day without warmth,
burning as dull as a nightmare remembered
following a shallow line that is far from equinoctial

time passes like strangers faces on the street

already,      fall falling falling
a falling scattered hush
night, again

with my heart
and when it broke, my soul
and with time,  sacred and ethereal, that too
bent beneath you

then it was with only with might
that I was able to hold your head to my chest
as you cried and as

in passing,
you overcame that too

impossible: still I loved you still I loved you *still I loved you

Standing in the kitchen window late afternoon heavy in the Southwest United States and he is looking at her and he is thinking and he says it out loud
You are looking so much better
And more so much more
Alive your cheeks are less like the caves and more like
The peaches in the orchard that we walked before the innocence was taken

Through the window old trees converse about the passing breeze and there is a chill in what they say for it is never for us to know.

She turns from the pane and she looks at him and she nods her head and she says
For a time, before it happened, I believed that all things passed and that was so wrong for. Nothing passes, nothing heals, and nothing fades. It is all right here in me like it were the minute before. *She quiets for a breath.
It was not until after, long after that I learned this
That this meant also that nothing dies                                  she looks straight at him now
Nothing dies she says again
Nothing dies and I see the most beauty ever to weigh on my heart
in the face of an illegitimate child disappeared in a swinging screen door or in
the time I am alone awake before anyone wakes up
Or in the neighbors along the way putting a candle in the window for Christmas.             do you understand?
I don’t know why but I live to see these things
I guess because someone must see them. When they come I am the only one that is there to see. And when they pass, they justify my place here and right now, for I am the only one that saw.
The last syllable of her sentence is uttered in a calm note and everything follows and is right,
ugly as it is,
it must be seen and every part of the story is and will be what it is.

They in this moment in this place
among a million
always passing but never passed
always they share the same air, the same words upon this page.

*He has nothing to say so she turns back to the window and its okay and he thinks that he loves her but he does not say it out loud this time.

You've got a lot of black hair on the top of your head
that drips down your neck
shining rivulets
makes pools in your collar bone
ready face ready eyes like
I'm looking straight at you Mr
You've got weird skin that you pick at with white teeth
a smile that spreads across your body like an infection
You say sorry with a downward glance
pausing a stare that presses into my lungs
A voice that sounds like the taste of a peach
lips that taste like the sound of turning pages
If anyone could taste them. Ha
Clothes wrinkle in lumps draped on your angled frame
awkward and embarrassed out of place they seem to try to slink off
They don't like you for the lacking length of you finger nails or the way

You sit in the doctors office

Askew           where the **** do I put my feet and my elbows?
hoping for something grim to come falling past
yellow teeth and purple line lips
parchment skin cracking a purse
(dribble drabble shibble shabble,
your face does something funny
phonetically
when it spews
truly inspira
ired bravo) my god be quiet
Mr dr sir
hoping for something To match the electricity in your head
Sit down for this Stella this is it is,
this could be it
I'm sorry
but
you know it's time to go
Cause they don't like you here not even love you
I don't think; I don't either and no one here
You don't either
And that's okay   you know   it's ok
It's time
It's okay

Stop talking to yourself
*****.

a touch to skin
a fingerprint on blush
on memory

anxious anticipation, the space between my blood and yours
crossed with all that I know to the only thing I have ever felt
in an inch of movement

the press of your life against mine
white, adored
soft, the subtly of a sunrise
rushing into splendorous day,
your lips hot on my neck
burning that fills my hands and my legs and everything
twisting and tortured
an explosion in the dark
one star joining the night sky, falling to pieces
and melting into whispers

the pause of time locked in the space
where my skin pours into your skin becomes
our skin becomes glimmering
light

At corner of midnight
I'm an ache in your bones
stepping out to say good morning
to morning,
there's dark streaks on the street
(what is it?)
flashing into my face like
the blood pouring from your shoulders and your elbows
and it's real
(stab my ribs stab my skin I wince at the sight and these things I can’t get away from my head falling to the ground in the street, to my knees on the streaks in the street
close my eyes)
I can't say morning now that it is night
these are things I cannot allow to leave me
because they’re (somebody has to remember, someone, no    )
twisting my veins into dying matches
(a, its killing me, though it is)
making me remember
And I remember the urgent black hushes and
trees
drawn towards heaven like the hands of martyrs
in a word november         air of desperation
black lines
flashing across me cold like
the ashes that
ate you up but couldn't steal
your face from me
I wish they could
as there's bits of glass on the kitchen floor
I can't move them with my head
or my heart
A glittering array of threats to scream into my ears
(smashed lines o my hands my face my ears o what have I done o the blood
on me is yours the blood pouring from my
hands I am a murderer)
this glass gives flashes of light they reflect your silent moments
bitter and tearstained tumbling knuckles
(these walls won't be pierced)
, you're whispering and I choose not to hear your voice
I choose through fear and that moment alone
is enough to die
but there is this too,

You were someone who breathed
and looked into mirrors
(they shatter now to meet me)
A little boy who sat outside and watched the traffic
outside of that house in the city he misses the one with the garden his mother tended
(she's gone and left him now she's gone and killed
died)
A boy without a coat in the snow saying to us that his hands are blue
but he has no need
A man who woke up and had to shave
to be presentable to himself
who stood by a church yard waiting for the bus
imagining a muddy new grave in a life passed
(one with my name on it. how
long? how beautifully short
no matter how beautifully short)
in a church yard by a spot where the bus stops
A boy drinking wine
drunk to shame the halls of mind of diligence of strain
***** on the carpet
You were a man smiling walking between the river and the
lawns which you are not ever to walk upon
smiling at a scrap of paper clutched strangled by broken knuckles
dreaming of Russia
A man who would leave and not say goodbye
no not goodbye no
N    o            good
night.

One purple flower blooming for every day someone should have said
I love you                                   /iloveyou
for every time I smiled while you cried
every time I smile now
For every night that passed by
the sad man
who fell asleep wrapped in imaginary arms around
a still cold body (to dreams that sicken waking hours)
for (every night I can remember./o the things I should have said, I the murderer) his nights that went un illuminated by one phrase, two words to a soul,
(an open sky
to the earth and
the length of time                                /two last words spoken noiseless to bleeding ears laid against the floor
to the distance between this heartbeat and your next,
to your last)
two words reached into (stretched strain to broken light)    
infinity

goodnight, starlight

August motionless
like a deep sleep.
One long deep breath  that we took together
exhaled with images of green and blue,
sunlight dancing heavy on a water’s surface above my head.
The sound of slow heartbeats in a warm room filled with open air and drifting light.

Your voice,
whispering aloud to me the words of your favorite authors,
the weakest wind pulls the curtains into the room like phantom arms reaching out for us
from the wild expanse
that spreads away from us outside, just outside.

Expansion to be consumed, to be found out
to find the sun and let it fill us
before it falls away from the earth
before we shut the windows at night
before we wake up.

Walking up away
through green forest away from our nothing
to that lake laying there in the rocks staring at the sun
with an empty face
shattered into a billion silent sparks.

The heaviest moments of September
glittering in your blue eyes
as they slide
and sink
into cold depths of memory.

We are
up late in the static dark, and we are
together
laying in your bed perfectly still,
our limbs filled with movement
Pressed down onto the floor with the weight of imperfections in the air.
Hands and face
filled with blue blood
a silent grin.

can’t sleep

So
we go
our laughter stumbles out into the dark
pulls us out, as we follow currents of sound.
The wail of atmospheric jet planes, lonely crickets,
the boom of empty 3am freeways
a chorus of ***** angels
brings us to stillness.

Laying in the dirt
stars arch overhead from the bottom of my chin to the back of my neck
emptiness like falling
and if you close one eye

you whisper
against
my skin

you can reach out and touch them
so I try it
it feels like nothing

And with a glance,
time shifts
the earth tilts
your silent face,
open to mine.

numb shaking fingers
limbs curled tight into fragile ribs
on a sheeted bed without a blanket
blue icy diamonds closing one last time
from the world
and an exhale
wet watered cheeks
a little shudder
a peaceful                    sigh
                      terrified

this is how I imagine you dying
alone
way too far away from me

You left a gap in your words
expanding between your teeth.
In the lapse of your pretension, I saw your weakness.
I saw it.

the only way I could love
uncertainly.
Hideously open, like a cave-in
and over and over
unbearable compression and devastating release, emptiness
muddy and ****** and thin
thin as our sheets are.
Toast and cracked dishes in the morning
the morning
as it came once more
hollow. Invading the spaces in the skyline
and my eyes.
So we got up and sat, down, if you can call it that
down at our table.
I thought it was something like a reflection, the cracked saucers in your eyes
spilling tears all over your shirt
because you were alive through another night of torment
in a shattered mind
and we sipped tea.

But oh, broken doll, clouded sunrise,
moldy walls, ***** water
crumbling seaside
cliff
how ashamed the white world is of you
how you shame the world
in your aching
terrible
glory.

It hurts worst when I'm sitting in a cafe and a song I know comes on the radio. By insinct I turn to the chair next to me. I turn to your empty chair. Dismayed, I look around for someone to share it with. But nobody there knows the song. To them it's just the gray backround. And I drop my eyes wishing I could make it exist.

Or worst when I'm walking through an empty parking lot at midnight and yellow light is dripping out of the street lamps and washing all over the pavement. The sound of it is deafening. I can't hear it but I can feel it. The weight of it pulls my shoulders down towards my own starving black shadow and makes me think of how the white glow of your skin pulled me down into your arms and made my eyes shine.

Or worst when I'm on the street corner waiting to cross and the rain is pouring over the skyscrapers and down into the canyons of the city. Cars pass like phantoms floating through the fog, their headlights flashing on the wet pavement. The sound of harsh laughter and flooded gutters invaded by creaking busses reaches me as if from the past, and for a second I can hear your voice, humming a song about the rain. And I cross, begging out loud underneath the roar of raindrops for the cars to hit me.

These are the lonliest days and the longest nights. These are the moments when I can feel my lungs caving in every time I exhale. The seconds where a tiny black line dancing to the pulse of time is the only movement in my cold apartment, replacing the warm rise and fall of your chest.

night is coming and I'm sitting at my window watching the sunset die and I don't want to give up  I don't want to and it's getting dark again

Do something you’re afraid of
[fall]

Like the night I lay my head on your shoulder,
I needed you to stay alive,
I needed you in order to stay alive.
The night we saved each other’s lives.

It was everything,
and your heart kept beating (against my ear)
and the tv talked to itself.
We went to sleep afraid that it was nothing.



Like that night you told me you were in love with me.
It was nowhere special.
It was the couch in your room.
And thats what made it real.

I said nothing back
and the trees tapped against the window
and eyes around the world were closing.
I did not speak, but I kissed you.



Like the night you drove me home
after the world broke our hearts.
It was 1am
We were two, two was one, and one was alone.

I wanted to stop moving
and the floating snow brought silence in through the open windows
and the street lights made moving shadows on your skin.
The earth moved as black pavement rushed beneath us.



Like tonight as the weight of moments that were years is breaking our necks.
I’ll pick up my eyes and look at you
waiting for me in the openness of the street
brighter than a star.

Standing there like an open door
and the wind is blowing through your hair
and when every breath is a leap of faith,
I will never stop falling.

It is with the simplicity of a single sheet of paper that these words are coming out of me.

None at all.  

Struggling, aching with potential.
Clouding the emptiness, growing heavier.
Getting so heavy.
Bursting forth, victoriously impulsive and unprepared.
Leaping!

Falling from the lips, and dying, too fragile to endure
the critical gaze of the beautiful.

The senten ces be gin to break apart into syllab les
and then in
to
lett
ers

the     substance of
m   y
int       er actions wi th
oth    ers

dying


in

t
h


e


**mud.

You never looked at me when we were driving.
I got so tired of it that I said your name out loud (just so you would look at me)
Oh god, the way that it smashed the silence,
I squinted my eyes and blinked

You picked up your eyes
turned your head
and looked at me, confusion pouring out of your open mouth
“What?”

Later as we walked down the middle of the street I reached for you and you said
“something’s come between us”
with a smile stretching over your mouth.
It was the soap in the palm of your hand

Right when you were looking down, I looked up
[                                              ]
when you kiss me, let it be
*let it be once

A smile fading into your face
Mirrors the stars fading into the sky.
Moving MOVING at an easy pace
Well hello, (hello!) GOOD bye!

We have nowhere to be and nothing to do
As I’m whispering secrets into your sleeve.
You may feel something like (I love you),
Or your skin might hear ‘please don’t ever leave.’

As hours and days of nearing bliss
Paint the color of morning onto our cheeks,
Just close your eyes and picture this
I’ve been lucidly asleep for weeks.

Hating, biting, kicking, beating
punching, ripping, eating, cutting
crushing, gnawing, pinching, slapping

Taking revenge for love's sake.

Laughing, jeering, talking, shushing
moaning, sighing, calling, *******
Yelling, screaming, slamming, crying

Somewhere amidst this I said "I don't know you but I'm sorry,"
and then I joined in.

I had this friend, he liked to scream
(every kind of scream)
He screamed at police cars, screamed at incoming phone calls
He screamed at the mirror, screamed for ice cream
He screamed over the sound of the vacuum, under the sound of collapsing walls

Sometimes the sound gathered crowds
(it was a truly remarkable sound, never even slightly modest, entirely desperate)
He screamed his nightmares, screamed at those pills
He screamed at his feet, he screamed at the clouds
He screamed at my hands, at the dust gathering on window sills

He screamed his laughter
(what a *****, haunting melody)
He screamed my secrets, screamed into the carpet
He screamed at the ball drop, before, during, and after
He screamed at that word, screamed at a kiss on the television set

He screamed that he wasn’t crazy
(through the crack under the door)
But they sent him away anyway
They told me he wasn’t real

I know that’s a lie because I can still hear him

I wait at the window and I watch her sitting out there in the air, empty and open to the early morning.

I am motionless and I wonder if I went out there and stood looking at her if she would feel in that moment that life and death themselves were the simplest things anyone would ever know and that questions were more fulfilling than the answers. That our brokenness was our only claim to existence.
We would be aware, but untouched. One second would trip on the next and we would surface and the roar would fill our heads again.

She blinks and focuses, she sees me. She looks at me with an apology on her face, waiting for something readable on mine.

Well, I guess I always thought it would feel different in the moment when someone saved my life. I thought I would feel more than this, but all I feel is white.

Limping aimless down the sidewalk
You shattered gait
Smelling awfully of smoke and drugs
You shaved head
Grasping a cigarette in both hands
You oversized ugly shoes

No one likes you
Turn the corner and you're gone and I never saw your face

Do you remember when you sat down next to me with a smile and I told you that you must be confused?

I give more thought to my enemies
I said

You looked down your long nose at me and called me naive
before you stood up and walked away.

But I know you just wanted me to think about you.