Watching people perform
Their poetry
Is my favorite thing
Your sharp inhale
Breathing the words
Exhaling art
Your hands
Fly around the room
Grabbing thoughts
And pulling them together
Your body moves
To the rhythm you speak
You look like
You feel at peace
You look so at home
Even though your hands shake
Your voice quivers
I love watching you read
I love hearing your voice
It's smooth like honey
Addictive like nicotine
My favorite thing
Is seeing
Hearing
People perform their poetry

Have you ever walked into a room filled with people
and found a bit of you in every soul?
Have you ever observed how their bodies sway
and how each twist and turn has your essence?
Have you ever come to the realization that you aren't
unique?
Have you ever, ever wet your pillow after that realization?
Then,
*let's burn away,together

my brain is dousing itself with kerosene, tempting thoughts taking
form of unlit matches,
yet to spark
how do i learn the art of
living under extradited energy of this fire?
the elementals of exhaustion, oh,
how it rests as the black hole in the back
of your head.
it smells like last spring break, you know,
crazed.
i began carving
myself into something other,
you began eating less and
vomiting more.  
i wanted to believe in god,
waking up at 12pm on a sunday to
slug the nearest bottle of red, maybe,
it'll get me closer, maybe,
maybe i'll taste him
i'll become so numb i'll start to believe
i'm living for a purpose,
that theres some drawn-up reason for
my little existence,
opening old wounds or
leaving without closing any doors, any at all,
touching stove tops,
praying to 'anyone' that this is already hell, that this has
gotta be the worse, this can't
get worse,
punching brick walls to break knuckles, only to watch poems fall out,
heaving at the sight of anything and
laughing when remembering everyone leaves, even 'dad,'
shaking hands with the reflection in the mirror, the person you don't want to be, the person you're claiming 'too toxic,'
the person you're afraid to see again

sick in the mornings one thousand times more at night
cells tightening at
the God sized electric pain
coming quick through me like
those five forced breaths
I took them out one two three and on
when you looked out for you, & left me
left my
lungs forced open to contract the corners of
sharp colossal wide open night
left me alone in the middle of the road
when it was coldest in the end of december,

the two yellow dividing lines following you out into the dark
stabs of iced oxygen pricking deep where my fingers could
not pry

like that
this pain comes all of it at once
bright black vision of in-utterable clarity
each wave counted out by the swell
the judgement wrath of Chaos
black and silent breaking unbearable down onto my head
but somehow, becomes even more, even higher and still darker
breaking through the very form of the vast!

the rest is more than I can speak
what it was
drifted from the glimmer
pale and in form unlike the forms we’d seen before or conceived
approached where I lay bleeding into the ground,
barely more than a pile of wasted light against little shadows

“go on,
it will get darker yet
do not falter now.
go back to the earth
burn out until you are nothing left
but the bones of your bones,
and can no longer weep.
know beyond the horror and the wonder and the nothing
what you are
only whispered beloved

know it through to the end, where the dark softly turns into something else
further still, to an autumn of final ending, there
throw off your clothes, go as you came
go out into the water
drift from there, away and lost now always
look up blessed through the last evening
do not stop until you are truly gone.”

I Don't Know
he said.

where we've been
where we are
where we are going

what we've done
what we are doing
what we will do

who we've been
who we are
who we will be

why


What Are You Thinking?
he said

sad

Why?
he said

tired

of us?

no

of this?

no

just

tired.



suns go down and we
sleep

the sun that rises in the morning is a different shade
and we stare,
steps away from each other,
miles
mountains
oceans