And I think the easiest way to explain it was that I was drowning
Drowning in the waves of my own anxiety, my fear of my disarming disabilities
Gasping for air with my face raised to the sky, arms reaching up with hope as soft as a sigh
Flailing legs that turn left and right, eyes open wide with death in sight
Mind gone limp, my body surrenders, but
My lungs accompany my soul in screaming
It’s a mournful cacophony, a silent screech,
Something so harsh it leaves a gaping hole, broke a five by five wall into crumbling pieces,
Shot a blazing bullet,
Until the surface could nolonger be seen.

Sure, it'd be nice to walk
Along the shore of the beach
And watch the sun set
With you.

But I'm happy enough to run
In circles around the track
And watch the grass wilt
With you.

Sure, it'd be nice to cuddle
While eating junk food and snacks
And watch a horror movie
With you.

But I'm happy enough to sit
While laughing over your shoulder
And watch funny videos
With you.

Sure, it'd be nice to be
The one whom you call "yours"
And to be loved back
By you.

But I'm happy enough to love
The perfect person you are
And savor the moments I spend
With you.

is like crashing onto the shore
getting pulled back by the waves
with water in your mouth
and your vision going black
and it feels like somehow
it's never gonna stop

you keep on sinking
and sinking
and sinking,

but you never
drown.

i fall in love with melancholy—
it undresses my mind and ushers out words
i didn’t know i had in me

there are some things that i can only say
when i am swimming in loneliness,
but not drowning

but sometimes it’s too much;
sad songs don’t caress the wound anymore

they poke at them,
make them bleed,
worsen it

i guess they were right, after all

when you feel darkness
knocking on your door,
don’t let it in—
it is not your friend

you deserve more than this sadness.

I wish I could write a poem about
how clever and interesting and utterly
human you are; alas, I cannot.
all I can think about is your
******* hair, an entropic tangle of
dying cells and pigment catching solar
rays and background radiation in
every ******* selfy you take and
I am sorry that is what I fixate upon
but how could I not?

my apologies, for usually I am
a far better man than this, yet
even then you are
a far better man than I and
I commend you for it.

stay tubular, young lad.

stay ******* tubular.

oh
honey, with your
butter cup smile and your
butter pecan hair, you're
bound to make me fall
in love with you sometime.
too bad, because it's
evident that would be awful
on both sides. for me,
because you would not
reciprocate; for you,
because you could not
reciprocate; c'est
la vie, ma chérie, trop méchant
et n'est pas sympa
mais Dieu t'aide, tu
l'adore.

you *******, with your
smirk and your bow tying fingers and your
****** classic fu-cking rock music:
who let you in here, to lumber
about the lambs like
Putin and Crimea ??
why do you bother
introducing sophomores to
Oedipus and pronouncing the
center O (like it
******* matters; linguistics are
more organic than
carbon-based chemistry) or
teaching seniors of
Two Vast & Trunkless Legs of Stone
standing alone in the desert,
artifice of arrogance just as
graduation and self-congratulatory
partying and revelry and diploma-framing.

I think I know:
masochism is your middle name, and
maybe, after all, it is worth it,
when a collegiate who barely remembers
your face and never remembered
the color of your eyes, or his homework,
name drops Hemingway and Faulkner
to a college professor, blossoming an
argument, and later, a companionship.

maybe, after all, it is worth it.

there are two types of girls,
or so I was told:
church girls and
bad girls, and my mother
said this with such finality it was
clear they were mutually exclusive.

of course,
you know this is
Not True;
you once characterized yourself as
"the type of 'church girl' to light a
blunt in the bathroom (just sayin)" and
that single quote says more about you than
all this fragile wording, this silica dust
heated and wrought into intricacies and
metaphor and conceit.
You
are far more than
a bad girl,
are far more than
a church girl,
will never be
my girl
and this is how it should be.
you are not
to be domesticated
a la Robin Thicke; you are
uncontrollable, your lust and
disdain for monogamy
twin hurricanes, destroying
New Orleans in a heartbeat and
rendering FEMA
impotent in the next.

there are two types of girls:
other girls, and
You.

the wind whips
at your back like a
slave master;
the water trots
at your feet like a
dog scorned;
the pavement shoves
at your being like a
puberty-struck bully.

this violence is what you
live for, the constant
back and forth, back and forth,
of man vs. nature vs. man vs. self
round and round and round
you go,
laps at the criterium, muscle memory
firing, lactic acid eliciting
yearnings of tranquility you
push yourself on
just one more, just one more,
never allowing yourself respite as though
you were fleeing
Death herself.

you've been derisively labelled
"basic" before, but they had it
all wrong your acid tongue could
eat away at the
solid steel of the most
guarded hearts end
my solitude devour me
please oh god devour
me I'm so pathetic and
unworthy why are you still here
you should have left me
months ago and now months
have passed yet you remain,
unmoving, though not unchanging,
and I am unsure what to do.