There are few things I hate more than watercolor,
I muse to myself
As I sit watching
A rigid man
With the perfect posture, really,
Casually watercolor the coffee shop around him

As if we all are just the backdrop
To a life of routine normality
Succumbing to the occasional confrontation
With hot beats of caffeine--

A subject to be posthumously entombed
Executed marginally
Flattened and kept in a sketchbook
That will,
Most likely,
Be a dust collector given one year's breadth.

The cynic in me
Hopes he mistakes the water cup
For his coffee cup
In his feverish efforts,
Sitting slack and unaware
Right next door.

But unintentionally,
It's the bias
Creeping in.
Secretly,
I've never really been
That *good
at watercolor.

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.

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.

The moon rose,
    and collected
    like dust
    on the back of his
                                    neck.

Be gentle to yourself.
You have fought for this skin,
These eyes,
This voice.

Be gentle to the child inside of you.
When it comes to you, looking up at you
With large, watering eyes,
Brush that loose strand behind the ear
And tell them

Everything is okay

Because no one else will.

Let your thoughts devour you
If they must,
But remember to come up
For air.

Be gentle to the tiny voice inside of you,
That makes you leave your bed every day
That only wants the best
For you.

In the end,
You are all you will have.
And when you leave,
You’re going alone.

Be gentle to yourself
I’m sure if you were able to,
You would swallow this world
Whole.

I came to,
Slowly and softly
To a world full of corduroy ferns,
Wet woodland floors,
Emanating the insects and must of
earthy cycling,
ground churning.
Dripping leaves of wax,
Glossy shellac of fruits and buds
The murmurs still me.
I find myself enshrined in the dessicated tree trunks,
The blankets of mosses spun like drapery
over the hollow dryness of changing seasons
Tufts of winged seeds break away
As browning stems slip back
into the soil.
But here,
I am ripe
And the forest
is fertile.
My skin is crawling
from my bones
to join the orchestral decaying
of the moist,
warm earth.

Laying among the saturated soils
Amidst the dry leaves and briers
The wood around me sturdy
Tulips urgent in growth
How can everything around me be so brave
When I am not.
When I am but a tightened voice, a hushed mind, I lay still and do not have the courage to whittle my way through the frost.
Resilient and beautiful in the decay of rock and withering thorn
As these things close in about me
I could only wish the transference
Into my own doubt.
Justification is a long-spent nightmare
Wasting closely by, sinking into the earth of my skull.
Catkins and the spines of gum trees hesitate in the sky
With no breeze, and no self-fulfillment
Never searching or wincing at another open sliver of bleeding heartwood.
It's funny how the moon has always been there, perchance
As it dangles now in the evening air
Full and light like a swan breaching a blue lake.
Almost breakable, almost surreal in strength.
Things grip to life in these woods.
Under my body thousands of dances for survival.
And here I feel it the most
A yearning that is not there, was never there,
Never born into me and never settled in my marrow.
Turning upward,
I speak my truth.
I can only be so much these wires of thorns
This tumult of leaves
Until I acquiesce to the night.

Thoughts, like the shadows of clouds
That pass below you
Pass above me:
White heat blaring like telephone wire buzzing,
Control box popping
Everything I own
Has been bleached by the sun.
My legs keep up with the crickets
Crescendo desiccating the atmosphere
Incessant buzzing, that telephone wire.
Molecules reverberating around my eye sockets
Hollow ear bones click and chatter.
There is a language here
Unbeknownst to any welded frame
Human or just wavelength
The last breath of Something we all hope for
Transpires on the air--
Air like bathwater.
We assume the return of everything.
CO2 in our lungs, sleep, the seasons
But one day these things will not arrive.
One day, Spring will not show up.

I can't help but feel

I am coming into something.

I think it's stupid
How I refuse to use straws
Because of a video I watched one time
Of one stuck in a sea turtle's nostril.

Or how there is really only the illusion of choice
And statistics from unreliable resources
Making us feel better or worse
About our decisions.

I tell myself to quit sugar
But honestly I just like my lattes
Sickeningly
Sweet
Like the love stories I thought could be under nooks
Around the corners
Of everyday life.

I like ice cream on winter days
Hot tea in the suns of summer
A walking talking irony

A bulb on its way to burning out
Sputtering in the half-eaten room
No one wants to go in to change it.

It's not my fault
The walls dissolve
And that same chord is continually played on the piano
In the corner of the upstairs closet.

It's not my fault
Cameras don’t bring me security
But sensitivity to my own identity.
Dissolution into absolution
Abolishment of egocentrism

And always,
The illusion of choice
Hanging in the rafters chattering.

Moon,
drench me in December.
       Feed me the briar,
Trail the icicles of gravity
       down my spine.
Ground me in this
       hardened
      dormant soil.
Give me witch hazel flowers
      sprouting from my hair.
Adorn me with Yule's gown
      of brown
      and gray.
Speckle my eyes with
      Mercury's shadow,
Give me Owl's voice,
      Crow's rigid
                   wing.
Bejewel my crown of dried
      Oak leaves
With Taurus' red eye
          Aldebaran,
Beetlejuice, and Andromeda's
                   armspan.
Embellish me with a solemnity
         of solitude
So that my soul can sing
in these hours
        of renewal.

I am
      becoming
the shell of the hickory nut
Instead of the entire tree.
A sprout that has shed its excess drapery
My life has outgrown me.
The sapling progressing in the dappled
     light,
And me,
Decaying silently
    on the ground
Watching the encroachment of night.

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?

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.

I feel my soul peeking out of its hiding place, for the first time in a long time.
Bathe in the chill that circles, and massages my feet, welcoming me home to a hearth filled with smoke. A detached, reposed heart that chides like a lover, hushed voice, to the molecule ****** of stillness around me--
Irememberyou.
Youcamebackforme.
The cold clamps down, an outstretched hand viced into a grip
Yes, you--
I call out
Where Orion always is,
Pleates, Signus, Cassiopeia
How many sudden kisses happened under this sky? How many warm ****** touches exuded from the Earth, into my shedding layers of skin?
How many times did I mistake enrapture for love,
Heartache for lack of fireplace...
I've loved so many under this set of stars that the solar system is lapsing in on itself
Creating a distant dark void
out of me

I watch
as the ghost of you
        freezes
        to death
                       on the sidewalk.

I want to be the rare sunshine
Through a summer rainstorm
Bioluminescence
Columns of delicate light
Peering over the ocean
A beam
A tinkling
Anything

I don't want to be
my past

Anymore.

There was a clearing in the darkening wood
Where my beauty would come to meet me
Blades and grasses of sentience in which I stood
Hummed therein a lyric of unequivocal destiny.

Tonight my beauty would find me
Even when crossing over the yellowing musk
Tripping through ivy's tangled eaves.
Reverberating seed and floating husk.

Even if it was terrified of the darkness,
Pinholes in the ceiling extending out of reach
Purging the tiger lily, weeping catharsis
Veins swelling within birch and beech

It would come, following trail and print
Drifting with cicada, down feathers of phlox
Treading across fragrant stems of peppermint
Into Fear's waters, Truth's rising equinox.

The sky was a wounded rabbit punctured through,
Crippled and limping across thinning treetops
Tracing spattered blood of evening dew
Breached forest's sharp edge and came to a stop.

Dense, wet footfalls swiftly soaked my spine
Impaling me with a realization consumingly remote
I only so much became the fireflies within the pine
That swayed my limbs and took my throat.

Autumn blows against winter,
The in-betweens of transition.
The underskirts of gold and ruby
Shedding from the Earth and skies
The woods, half-bare, half unguarded,
Almost fully vulnerable
To the terminal winter.

Some deciduous trees hold on
To summer's carbon,
Leaves clinging to the naked buds--
They call it marcescent,
Unable to abscise completely
Even when the rest of the forest
Has moved on

Left dried and clutching
Holding on all winter,
Through the biting frost
Against howling nights
When the world is dark and lifeless.

To be in the same room,
To be within inches of someone else
To only feel a universe away.

My poetically
heartwrenching problem--
Entire disassociation.

It used to frighten me,
The crippling weight of
Weightlessness

Inessence and non-stimulation,
Bearing down on my soul in what I felt
To be a repentance of past-life sins--
For what did I do to deserve
Non-feeling?

The burden of nothingness
Is
By far
More burdensome
than the accumulation
Of feeling
Everything
All
At
Once.

It's just me and a thousand bugs this afternoon
Enjoying the autumn usher in the browns and umbers
The earthen kiln, ashes burnt like the ground, the trees on fire.
Decay begins here.
The sky is thinner, clouds inhale the last plumes of warmth
Circling in the cirrus above.
Propeller seeds and crackling bones of leaves
I sit in the shivering sun
It's just me and a thousand bugs
Scattering across my knees and arms
This afternoon, in the waning life of light.

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.

My childhood bedroom was my womb
An artist's mind trapped within the warm blue paint
That encased me.
A twin bed of wrought iron
I drew names on in sharpie,
Lines of fragmented musings
Littering the space between breath and being.
I gestated myself there,
Beyond the touch of others
I was everything and nothing
A ball of hope and pain
A rudimentary cross-stitch of dreams dying early
Stuffed animal nostalgia
And my first trips into womanhood.
My carpet a sea of tears,
Broken discs and sighs that never even reached
The windowpane.
In the youth of my room,
I waded through my own fantasies
Thick enough for rain boots.
I intricately spun webs of delusion,
Of love.
I conjured up my own demons
In the absence of fear--
In the safety of my enshroudment.
It became a lesser known evil
Staying within the basement of my body,
That still floods me
With fantastical depression.
I left it when I was seventeen
Young enough to still feel the overwhelming weight
Of life,
And never walked back through the door frame
That held so much
For so long.
Eventually,
Posters were ripped down
Drawings painted over,
The last scraps of who I was
Given to charity.
I'd like to think that room remains somewhere
Composed and preserved
The day it was left,
The day my innocence was
Abandoned.

I waited
Pulsing against the bubbling gray caps
Of the shoreline--
As each wave lapsed
I felt my skin growing
older.


In waiting,
Every duct crusted with salt
Valves corrode,
Hearts rust

Everything is crushed and worn down
Grinded densely into particles
That cling to the
Grains of sand
In each battering of ocean wave
That will continue
Longer than humanity will
Care to exist

as I stand
Waiting

I would lose myself

Even at a young age I knew
To struggle with reality was a losing battle.
I gave myself to the solar system, the dark matter
Mars that burned above the horizon.

I watched night come and go.

Stars wander and fall,
Always finding their way back home

I plotted an entire life
Detached
Living in my darkened sky
Feeling the things I could not feel
In the light.

I wandered as the stars did,
Though I never found my way home.

I passed my retrograde;
I spun too passionately,
Feverishly

And fell off the edge of the universe.

Wistfully I sit across the table from you
Praying that something will leap from your mouth
Cognizant of romance--
I wait for fire to lick at your lips,
A shutter of ice to make you tremble,
Words that will release you
Uncaged you
Let you fall towards me,

Cascade
like a waterfall down my back,
Swell against my hips
Like a ripening seed pod
Drip like rain

And watch as I unfold, petal and stigma.

But you stay sitting there and I stay watching you
Cold calculating eyes and
thin firm mouth
While my insides burn like fireflies in the light of
a midsummer's eve

In the moon,
I pulled the grass over my head
The fragrant musk heaving
Bespoke the circle of beginnings
The circle of infinity
Carefully, gently threaded
A single translucent silk
Deliberately stitching the pieces
All of the broken parts
Back
Into whole.

Like the moon, we pull through phases
in the midst of our own dark atmosphere.
Waxing towards a new creation,
long nights synchronizing into the fluidity of wholeness
if only for a moment in time before falling into waning,
pieces of ourselves detaching and falling across the sky.
There is a moment of perfection, a complete chrysalis,
beautiful and blinding
powerful enough to drag the seas and every molecule of water upward.
The turning tides our blood within,
pooling and receding
brimming with the magnetism of potentiality.
The moon, like us, like our hearts,
is pocked and blemished, unprotected and standing alone
distant, entombed, a book of history.

This vacancy feels like
lukewarm coffee.
What happens when I hit my threshold
What is out past there
Swimming about in the darkness,
Waiting to latch onto me &
Suction out my remains
Is there really a point of light
Even infinitesimal
In the black
Or is it just vacancy
that tastes like lukewarm coffee

My entire life I have struggled with reality.
It is a darkened street on a full moon
Where banks of fog encircle my small existence,
I can only see a few feet in front of me, and
As I glance backward, only a portion of my immediate view
is unobscured.
I squint, but
I cannot look into the future
I cannot look into the past.
I can only see my fate as it unfolds, step by step, in front of me.
It is only my footfalls, the drapery of water droplets on my skin
Swirling in and out of my lungs, pressing against my eyes.
I walk, and I feel myself strangely enough
trust in my own steps,
trust in the moonlight I cannot see.
Like the whirring of the contemptuous wind that rattles
The valley below,
A hindrance tugs at my soul
The brushing of fibers at their very tips
A chalky, dusty substance that irritates membranes
Something has constantly bothered my soul.
I've written more about death
Than I have about life.
I've written about what could be stirring behind the edges
Of that fog.
I can make out the shapes of bare limbs and branches
Suspecting this realm of which I walk
Is but one forest in the infinite galaxy
Of my consciousness.

It came sweeping over instances
Brushing against subtle moments
Of circumstances and places
We can never quite remember.
It bled through the darkness
Each time the moon rose
And met with her pallid face.
It came with the winds
That suddenly picked up,
As I stood alone, and
Watched the world sway from above.
Through nights of fragmented dreams,
Enveloped through watery thoughts
That awoke me with such prominence,
I had only expected to be at the bottom
Of the saltiest lake.
Refractions of light that would come
Pronging through waves
Breaking sound with immeasurable brightness
From the corner of my eye,
I recognized you.
It was that same foggy hue
Glistening silvery white
A fish jumping in the morning
The ring around the moon
I had recognized on you.
You are different than I,
But white moths keep flocking to me
Cumuli build within my eye sockets
Like a lightning storm over the desert,
Rumbling purple and billowing smoke.

I cannot ignore
How beautiful different is.

I fell from you

A limb overburdened with fruit
Spring's ephemeral light, windswept
that trickled in from first frost
left the juices of our bounty
Dripping from my twigs.

The ripening ****
passed her prime,
too rotten for the birds
Mulching the rootlets that lay
at your feet--

I fell slowly away.

Sluggish to snap free
Quick to embrace the descent,

I let go,
and the bliss felt
once I was returned to earth
earnestly began the decay of me
into a much more beautiful
Happenchance.

I had fallen between a waking state
And a life I believe I entirely imagined.
I imagined you, because at the time
It was everything I thought I had needed.
If only I could have one more thing
                                   If only I could run and
                                   touch you
                                   taste you
                                   scream everything
I thought you were.
My thoughts were a continuous sea of moonlight,
A familiar, nostalgic ambiance
I wrote about you beneath
so long ago.
When I believed moths were faeries,
When the fireflies died
And the eclipse kept me awake in the dissonance
of night
When my heart felt giddy,
I thought-- then, now,
I had finally held a shallow coal
That burned deeply, vehemently
I wanted to swallow it and feel it
scorch my insides.
Finally, I had become delirious
For all of the right reasons.
At that point I was simply looking
For an excuse to slip quietly
past reach.
I would rise and wander in the early hours
Of morning, and would blame it
On you
When it was merely my own soul
Screeching, bleeding
Clawing at the sad, impermanent baggage of flesh
Popping my seams undone over every pore,
Unstitching my sanity
Wanting so viscerally to be let out, escape--
Freedom….
Is what I wanted.
I don’t think I ever truly wanted you.
A lust overcoming
Was my body's way of rejecting humanity's
Trivial circumnavigation of romance.
Laying on the celestial floorboards
Watching my whirlpool of scars
                                       And all of the screaming…
I kept hearing it.
The incarceration of my dreams,
The inferno of desire I wanted to burn forever in,
Sat so prettily upon my heart
I never dared move it.

I hold the soles of my feet
Wondering if there's solace at the bottom of me
Even the part that touches earth,
Filth &
Mud

It all feels like a crackling can
Left over effervescent
Growing stale
When I rattle myself
There's the sound of rock hitting glass
Coins on sheet metal
And not much else

The face feels heavy after
A long day of lying
To myself
Through my teeth,
Even bypassing that soft
Gellatinous puddy
Wadded up in my core

I'm sure it use to be larger.

Maybe it came from the sky

Or the place juxtaposed
In an immediate instance
One gulp of fresh air
Below my curved,
Bow-line feet.

I’ve been walking around
With a broken
heart
For as long as I can remember--

But I think
everyone
has.

I think everyone carries
              sadness
Inside their bones
Like a
second shell
of cartilage,

Like a bird
thrashing its wings
against
a cage,

Like crickets vibrating
hollowly
against the
darkness,

it consumes us

Piece
by
                  piece.

We aren’t sacks of
flesh
but
bags of
longing,

                  Hopelessness

Held together by
blood
bones
The flutter of
                   thoughts,

The pulse of wind
rushing
through

nothingness.

Humans:
Large sacks
of flesh;
****** bags of meat
Encased in a thin, stretched
filmy layer,
Like sausages.
And here I am,
An evolutionarily pre-packed sausage
Stuffed full of blood, bone and fat
Ambling around
Like everyone else
Indignant to deterioration,
Ignorant to the passage of time
Eventual collapse of functions.
Immune,
Even to love.

A wisp of
smoke
Billowing
in heavy gusts
of wind.

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.

Is insidious
Once you let it in.
It crawls into the empty spaces
Fills the cracks and settles.
It constructs webs that firmly snag
And draw
Other thoughts near.
Those inky fingers are impossible
To eradicate once it spreads,
The mind begins to look like a
Rorschach piece
Blotted out by the shadows
Of unwelcome solitude
Within the soul.

Thinking of you is like taking a large gulp
of black
bitter
tea.

I cringe before I consume it,
Before it consumes me.
Before the acrid bite wallows in my stomach,
Churning a pall of disdain.

I never liked black tea.

I write about you
Not to breathe life into you
But to give myself a wide berth,
circling your truth.

I want to feel to solace in knowing I suffered
for a reason,
Though unbeknownst
Still—

As I carry your blood, your genetic coding,
The feet that look an identical version
to yours.

I tell myself I forget,
And for the most part,
I do.
I don’t know where you are,

What you're doing,
The state of your health,
Physical
and
mental.

Your thoughts, day to day
Empty musings,
What makes you laugh
What makes you
cry

If you even still do those things anymore.

I carry much more than your feet,
your hair,
your chromosomes;

Nuances and habits of my youth
Things I do or do not do
because of
you.

And yes,
I have secured my self worth
Long after you discarded me.

Yes, I'm doing fine

And maybe one day
I will have a little boy
That looks just like you,

A reminder of my past
of how I came into this world
of what is still
inside of
me,

That you will never
know.

Like a battle being fought between a ship and the sea
You continually crashed into my hull
Ripping up my planks
Casting my rusted nails and wrought iron into the froth.
How was I to know
My most difficult enemy would be myself
Merely thrown together with thought
Continually romanticized.
My sails petals of the softest rose,
My stern of stained glass
I have always built myself so delicately
And foolishly.
I have fortified myself against nothing,
With the downfall of my optimism
In thinking the waters would remain calm,
That the wind would only blow gently enough to catch me
And drift me to and fro.
I've built myself out of keepsakes and memories
Old shoe boxes my cannons
An artillery of wind chimes.
My ropes knotted together with all of the love letters
That made a special place in the corner
Dusted off and given a second chance.
I've sailed the sea so passively,
I've been blissfully unaware of its dangers,
Its violence.
And so now, as my pieces turn to flotsam
And the breakers turn the roots of my keel inside out
You tear me down
And the regretful parts that float among the wreckage
Can only cry out to my demise and recollect
I have always been my own undoing.

I keep chasing my demons
afraid to watch them
tire of me and
leave,
Because what would I be
Without them?

Your skin is
sharply hot,
like steam
         rising up
through vents.
You hold a piece
of sunshine
inside,
Full of beam and
radiant vapor
It reminds me of
how cold I am.
You are the sun
And I am a raindrop
welling,
about to
           fall.

In the cattle field,
Millions of fuzzy racemes
Are dying.
The mullein and goldenrod,
Rusty heads of petal
Shoot up towards the heavens
In immutable cries,
Brandished swords quivering
Against the onslaught
Of changing seasons.
The tide of fall creeps upon
Summer's shores,
Slow, sad rhythms
Weeds of changing patterns.
A clammy chill rises up
from the womb of the earth
****** organs regress and exchange the flitting energy of evolution
For foundation
Thick, coarse roots burrow deeper and tremble.
We're all afraid of something
bigger than us
For even the trees shake in anticipation
For a growing colder
Darker night
That lay in wait
Just beyond the senses.

"Talk about it."

How can I if my soul is dripping with sweat

If every beat is an empty room

If the calcified interior of my mind

Is aching to find the darkest corner

Of the deepest place

And lay there quietly

Watching the world pivot above

In its starry dying dreams

As I stay

far away

And watch my own

With crackling lungs

Take a last, bird-***** breath.

I put on arcade fire and smoke and try to conjur the exact point in time
I became this way.
Right when it all rusted down and snapped and changed everything
inside of me.
I was formed from the salt of an ocean side town.
Rivulets of moon and star caked to the sound of waves,
pallid scape of sands.
It took all I had to not be washed away every night
fantasizing of forgotten wreckage with my soul plummeted deep
never to be recovered
That town stood quavering
listening to the winds change and the insects shift
as if we were all sitting on our last breath of air
From that acquiescence it takes moments like these
to recall how I broke
How I became the sad little girl,
How every granule of salt is still clinging
to the inside of my eyelids,
Asking me to sleep
So I can dream of things out of existence
That make more sense
Than this.

We are blending
And melting
Into harmony
For the first time in
three years.
There's a springboard
In my heart
Save me
Forever

Sparkling effervescent
At the bottom of a spring
Shot through with dioxide
Frothing in the mist
Of sleeping morning fog
I sit awake, alone
And witness you.

Pages rippling,
Quickly pushing through the years
My mind is a casino shuffling machine
Rapid fire, every card is
Every face bleeding through
Anchored memories, subsurface stillness
Reality is the crooked blade--

I now realize
I was always looking for
Everything that wasn't them
Different hair, different eyes
Why are they all blurring together

Old slides on a movie screen
Staring back at me.
Vindictive, hostile, blaming.
I was scrambling for the ideal of novel,
New and transposed.

Enough to break me down into molecules,
Toss me into atoms
Throw my essence against the starstuff and dark spaces between--

But there is no ripple effect.

No unseen unclothing me.

The faces keep bleeding through
I keep wading, riffling, sifting through the sands of time

It falls;
Between and all
around me.

I look out over the crests
Undulating like the ribcage of a
Subterranean creature.
Breathing in, exhaling the spittle of brine
Caked onto my lips and eyelashes.
The sea is different today.
How it moves, wildly serenading me
With the forgotten
All of the things I have forgotten.
Pieces of me have fallen into these waves,
Cracks of skin like the chipped linoleum
On an old kitchen floor
Drop heavily onto the sand
Sink into the shells,
It weeps.
My vertebrae stretch ever so further
With each fragrant rush of salt air
And I recall those poems
That wafted from afar and came to a rest
On the tips of my fingers,
Like rosebuds that were *****
And shrunken dry with neglect
But beautiful in decay.
I watch the sea today and it is a startling
Stranglehold
As the sounds of the pouring ocean floor
Grip into me with razor teeth
I know
I have left too much of myself behind
In this very same spot.
Yet the emptiness that drifts within, and
The old self
Brushing against my ankles in the sand,
Like an abandoned blanket
Is reassuringly the most naked elegance
That flutters through my chest
And expands outward
Into the gray.