Don’t rise yet, sun
I was just getting to know the moon;
I still haven’t met all the stars.  
There is darkness all around me but the light that I can see is too important not to pay attention to
It’s the little light within the blackest night that holds the most importance
That’s so easily drowned out by your overpowering brilliance.
Some people need the light of the sun to show them their way.
I envy those people, who can look forward to their waking hours and see where the good lies.
I just have to hope that when the nighttime rolls around that the darkness doesn’t consume me
Before the light of the stars are able to show me where I’m going.

Tomorrow feels like yesterday
I don’t know what day it is anyway.
The mountains rise from the sea and are brought back down again
Stars explode as they crash into one another in a brilliant, dying display
But not in time like the time that I’ve seen, that I will ever know.
Ten years is ten days is ten hours is ten minutes is ten seconds,
Why can I feel it slipping all around me like it does?

The moon told me her story, but I am not at liberty to discuss
I wish that meant something to anyone but myself, and I’m sorry.
There are some things that all must learn individually,
Or not learn it at all.
I know you will rise soon, sun, and I know the moon must go
I say goodbye to the stars one by one. Even as they fade. Even as I slip away.  
It was all just a fever dream, a shout into the void
I’ll wake up and nothing will be different and everything will be the same and that’s saying the same thing but yet it’s saying something different entirely.
Nobody knows what I mean anymore, not even myself,
But the moon says she understands
And the stars just wink so I think that means they’re catching on.

When I close my eyes what I see are the mountain valleys
And trees covered with snow
All around me the only sign of civilization are the ski villages
And the air smells like fire in a chimney
With a hint of hot chocolate and waffles at every turn.
I feel myself secluded on the top of one of those mountains
In a cottage covered in snow
Breathing in the fresh mountain air
Cold but only enough that it’s the coziest feeling in the world to come inside to the warmth.
Nothing but inspiration flows in these winds up here
I am as weightless as the thin air this high
And as soft snow falls it consumes me
Until I start and end with the mountain and the sky.

But I blink, and suddenly warm tropical sun is hitting my bare shoulders
White sand resembling snow, but the resemblance stops there
Because these tropical waters are alight with colors other than white and brown and green.
The ocean waves match my hair
And my freckled skin is kissed by the sun in such a way that I swear I belong here forever.
There’s the taste of mojitos in my mouth
And the smell of a scuba mask covering my nose.
Under the water is another world,
One I have never felt so close to
With sharks and corals and fish that all seem to be in such perfect balance
There’s nothing else in the world that matters but the sea and the sun and the sky.

I’m disarmed for a second by the rush of loud noise I at first think are the crashing waves
But then the shrill of a car horn caries and I realize that my feet have shoes on them once again
And they’re touching asphalt.
I look up at the buildings all around me
And though the air isn’t as fresh here,
There’s something to be said about the pretzels in the air
And the car fumes
And the smell of the pavement after the rain.
There’s so much noise, but it beats in time with my heart
And the swell of it all alights my excitement.
There is no place I’d rather be, not in this moment.
My thoughts are as abundant and high-reaching as the buildings all around me
And there’s a world of possibilities that seem to have been awoken in me as I stepped into this city.

The roar of the cars comes to a halt
And all I can hear is the wind though the fields.
My mind, for the first time in a long time,
Has nothing left in it.
I lay here, surrounded by nothing but flat land
Dotted by small white houses
With broken down brown barns to their left,
And stare up at the rolling clouds in the sky.
I don’t know where I am or where I’ve come from
All I know is that one cloud looks like the head of a lion
And the one next to it like a fox chasing his tail.
The wind softly tugs at my hair,
But I’m not cold in the breeze,
And it seems to be a part of me as much as I am a part of this field as I lie here.

Day turns to night quickly, and I’m suddenly looking up at the splattering of the nebulas.
It’s incredible. I’ve never been so close, here on the mountaintop.
I swear that if I reach high enough, I’ll be able to grab one and put it in my pocket. I don’t know why I’m so afraid to try.
The soft waves break against the shore, and there’s something magnificent about the way the ocean reflects the sky
So two dazzling displays are visible,
Working together. One stands unmoving aside from the planes that shoot across it
But the other ripples and flows, ever-moving, never-stopping.
Then I look up and there’s a haze of lights
Some stars, some planes, some just windows from buildings,
But it’s the city that never sleeps
And the stars are brilliant whether artificial or natural,
I feel each one splattered across the insides of me.
I lay here in the field,
Awake but fast asleep
More stars than I’ll ever see in my life spread out before me
And I suddenly feel smaller than ever,
This mortality that I am faced with is hammered into me by the brightness and abundance of all the stars in the sky.
I wonder who I am again,
Wonder how I got myself here,
On this mountain,
On this beach,
In this city,
In this field,
But I cannot find the through-line,
Not in this maze of constellations
And so I stop questioning for just a moment
And instead close my eyes and let my heart decide which way it wants to be pulled tonight,
And the stars oblige.

I thought my love for you was an earthquake
Rupturing in my soul
But as soon as I send this thought into the
Oblivion of my mind
Stuff this thought into a
Bottle and send it down the river,
I expected that I’d surely find it again someday,
But for now,
I no longer can feel
The moving earth pounding my head
Every second of every day.

That was the point of this all, you know
I wanted the emotion gone
Couldn’t handle the aftershocks that would ripple
And threaten to undo the careful
Knots that I had tied
To hold up my shield I need to hide behind.
I didn’t realize, though,
That the river opens up to the ocean
And the bottle keeps moving through and through and through
Until the tether of the emotion to the words
Is severed, gone.

There is no more flowing magma underneath my surface
That threatens to bubble up and over,
And once I thought this was what I desired
When I sent my emotions out to sea
But now all I feel is cut in half,
Incomplete.
The rest of me can’t live without its life source
Which somehow got severed along with my ties to you.
I wish it didn’t have to be this way
But now I’m floating in space
No air to breathe
Hoping and wishing and waiting
For the nebulas to send me into oblivion
Or perhaps back home again.

There’s a biting cold in the air and it attacks my fingers,
But I put on gloves and it seems to calm itself down,
Lightly pecking at my exposed face, only, and turning it blush red.
I can feel the wind ripping at me, but I do not falter
I am the snow that whips around me,
The trees that stand before me
The mountain that my feet bore into
And I cannot be knocked down.

There’s a bright blue sky up above
And the puffy white clouds match the fresh snow on the ground.
There’s piles of it, everywhere,
And the wind blows it in drifts so the land has mountains on top of mountains
That will disappear in but a gust of wind.
The trees barely sway, even though the wind whips,
Even though we are on the top of a mountain where nature is most exposed
They stand tall, sway only when it suits them to sway
They’ve been here for too long to be moved by the whims of young winter breezes.

It smells like winter.
There’s no other way to describe it,
My entire nose slightly freezes, and with every breath the cold jets up higher
There’s tree bark and fresh snow and pine needles
But together all I see when I close my eyes is mountains, everywhere,
Covered in snow, feet of it, white as far as the eye can see.

There’s this silence to the world, too,
Even though the wind is screaming and the snow is blowing
Nature is muted in its brilliant sounds
And it somehow makes it more brilliant than ever.
I find that I am at peace in the way that I feel when I sit under the stars at night
Except maybe more-so, because there’s nothing ponderous about the snow today
It just exists, and is beautiful, and my heart swells with content
I’m not forced to try and understand the universe
Because the blue hue of the sky and the sun that reflects harshly on the white world all around me
Lets me pretend that there is nothing but me and the mountains in all the universe.

I want to sit here forever, I think
Even though I will encounter an icy death this way.
It doesn’t seem like such a bad way to go,
Responsibilities carried away by the wind and covered in mounds of snow,
My heart finally at rest from its constant heavy beating
Instead pounding in time with the rustle of the leaves.
My head is clear, that’s all I know
That’s all I ever have to know.
There is nothing else, nothing ever
I am light
So light I could fly
And something about the snow all around me
The forest of trees before me,
I think I might try.

morning light shines through the heavy canopy,
i know it because the ground is pink in places it should be brown
even though i can't actually see the light for myself.
i swear i heard your voice call out to me
from the other side of the clearing
but when i looked there was nothing but the trees and the wind.
today i woke up and your cologne was caught in my nose
i don't know how you do it,
how even the most physical, real things
are still able to haunt me
even though you're not here.

yesterday was a harder day than today
somehow i'm getting though it all, laughing, smiling
the tears are no longer because of you
i think that i've moved on,
or at least processed it all enough to try.
and yet i'll let my guard down for a moment
this life in the forest is nothing close to boring
but there are moments when all i have to do is sit and stare up into the leaves
wait for the light to poke it's way through in the slight way that it does
when i space out
and always come back to the way that your hands felt on my body
in every place i never wanted you to be able to reach
that look in your eyes
the things that you said.
it takes a moment for me to forge my way out again,
to focus back on the bark of the tree in front of me
instead of the whispers that transport me to the memories i don't want to see
and remind myself that they're only echos
and echos can't actually breathe.

I don’t know why I keep coming down here
Into the dark abyss of these tunnels.
It’s like something’s calling out to me
Guiding my feet without my permission
Like I’m just along for the ride.

Water drips down from the lower level of the 82nd street station—
Downtown B and C train.
I’m in a cave with dripping stalactites
But instead of awe and wonder
All I’m bracing myself for
Is absolute collapse.

The train roars in
Ba Dum Ba Dum Ba Dum
Slowly making its way to a stop
With a whine of its wheels locking into place
And a screech of the doors opening, protesting all the way.

I know I shouldn’t get inside
Should walk the twenty blocks
In sub-zero temperatures
Where at least the light will shine—
But something beckons me from the darkness.

As the train slowly begins to move
I see the red and blue lights waiting, watching, outside the window
The apparent heterochromia of the monster that lives and breathes and is these tunnels.

I’m suddenly sure that I’ll never return.

Where’s your heart at? They ask me
As though it’s not an ***** in my body
As though it’s not beating in my chest and pumping blood to my organs.
My heart can’t be followed
Because it doesn’t move without me
And my heart can’t be broken
Unless it is punctured by a foreign object.

I appreciate the metaphor, I do, I swear that I do
But sometimes metaphors get a little much
My brain is a metaphor
In the way that it thinks.
Do you see what I did there?
Metaphors run my life, run this world
But sometimes I want to shut it off.

Don’t ask me where my heart’s at
When you know that I’m broken and leaking on the floor
And yet somehow still standing firm and tall.
Don’t tell me to follow my heart
When you know that it’s my thoughts that are jumbled in a knotted mess,
Sans heart,
They’re in a different part of the body after all.

I’m tired of living my life in metaphor
At least for tonight
It’s just an excuse for me to hide behind
A way to add beauty to a desolate place
That otherwise would be of concern
And taken care of
And made permanently beautiful instead of metaphorical façade.

There’s a time for poetry
There’s a time for poetic language
There’s a time to follow your heart and see where it goes
To calm the dragon that is your mind
To walk the cobbled windy streets of your thoughts and ponder

But some days you just have to let it drop
And look at the bleak world around you, no makeup, no photoshop,
To remind you that things have to change.