Oftentimes I wonder
       if my essence will
                   c a r r y on
If all of this,
poetry
swimming inside my heart,
          head, will
                             explode
and rain

  d
  o
  w
  n

on the soil.
Will it
d    i   s   s  i  p   a  t   e,    forever?

Do the thoughts I think of
                    now,
were they once
                           somebody's?
Will they be
                           somebody's,
                                                     ­   eventually?

Some people haunt you for a lifetime.

But we're all a little unstable, and
I think we like to dwell in the potentiality.
Grazing their face with your eyes as you catch a glance from far off,
Across the street
Across the city.
Across the well-traversed train tracks of our minds
Worn down, rusted,
Built over the bridges of our neural networks;
Prepared to feel how we've always felt,
Emotions keeping the tank of our fleshy bodies pressurized.

We dwell in the what-ifs more than we dwell in our realities.
We unclothe ourselves and swim naked, unapologetically
In the condensed droplets of our thoughts
Conforming to our bare hips, collarbones
Aching in the tension
of our vice,
Potentiality.

Upon dread and dried soil,
It rained ashes
Every particle swirling in misty
Fogs of hellfire
Sun a burning orb enshrouded
Blazing salmon and sunrise
Stripped and blackened umber
I stood in the falling fractals
As my membranes scorched of smoke
Veiled, ****** light reflecting through the ash
Situated, if only briefly
A particular kind of
Doomed beauty.

The lacy veneer of mortality drapes about my shoulders.
The cluttered mind is the beautiful mind,
Cognition the wax pooling in calderas
Of candlelight.
Transcendence is stifling--
I never realized it could hold such irony,
Now fused like a copper plate
To my inner skull.
Continually we starve ourselves,
And the starvation is reminiscent
To everything we've lacked throughout life;
The metallic taste under the tongue,
Bookcases of beating hearts.
The desire is absurdly overwhelming
To give a shred of my soul to everyone I encounter
Before I disintegrate and have nothing
To leave behind on this world.

Then realized the noise was within her.

Leaves fell like bricks
Onto puddles of thoughts
Littering the sidewalks.
The thoughts shattered.

Everywhere was nowhere to her
Nothingness pierced her organs
Black and blue
She was lost in her room.

Thick clouds of doubt blew in like smog
From the second story window
And light shot out from the places pierced.

Nothingness alighted,
Ashes of darkness lofted into the atmosphere
Nothingness was the only thing that made sense.

It left her, with a layer of film over her skin.
She always cried before embracing change.
The sunlight rested on the fall leaves,

And so,
She cried.

Leaves fall
The bud turns black
There is a sobbing under the wind.
The gurgling of water
Chokes to death and dies within.
Onto the filigree of leaves
Paper bark crumbles.
The onset of disease
Is most delicate when time,
Like the dried spines of grasshoppers,
Curls in on itself.

It's difficult to see anything without
Watching how specifically light dances
Which way the clouds are moving
Voices tepid, brushes on canvas

Noticing the severity in a word
Underlying meaning in unkempt rooms
Bones, steel, fragments of sentences,
The blood-red rose in bloom.

Lyrics the cells wasting in my skull
Personification the melody in my veins
Clawing at meaning in a meaningless world
Skeptically observing unadulterated pain

Ripping apart the flesh of grammar
Feasting on the perhaps and what ifs
Strolling down the graveyards of potentiality
Heart whirring through malleable to stiff

This is a poet's mind,
Scattered as the winds reverse
Beautiful and dark as the new moon
Scarred, beaten and perverse:

A blessing assuredly, albeit a curse.