The thick black sky lights up
Like a bug zapper.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
Like touching static cling
or an overzealous strobe light.
The sky splits and bright yellow light streaks through
and threatens to touch the dry ground and
send an electric shock through the earth and the hard rocks.
Deadly and beautiful and quick.
as humans, we long to be near it.
To be so close our hair stands on end and a burned smell drifts through the air.
Strike the ground right before me.
Pierce the humid air.
Cut though the darkness.
We desire a close association to the thin lines of electricity we don't understand.
We'll never understand.
Not fully.
We think we do. We think we can cut it down to its atoms and find out what makes it rush out of the clouds.
And then it changes on us faster than we can blink.
And we realize we can never understand it.
The way it functions.
Shows up in our life one minute and disappears the next.
Beautiful and deadly and quick.
And you want it most as it streaks across the California stars.

One man
can really change the world,
even if it's just by dying.
One man
can really lead thousands
if he kneels down and prays hard enough.
One man
can influence his pale demons
to lay down their pitch forks,
and also to pick them up.
One man
is just a man
is just a father
just a husband
just a preacher
just a speaker
just a man.
And does he truly want to be that
one man
that can really change the world,
even if it's just by dying?

Your feet have no longer stepped along the shiny finish of my floors.
Your smell, no longer seeped into the fabric.
Your awkward presence no longer lingers at the door.
My house is no longer the home you choose to pick.
Your love no longer resting on my bed.
I miss the way your laugh danced around my room,
it loved to kiss my silly head,
the chamber that is now your incarnate tomb.
When you see me, is it still hard to breathe?
When I touch you, does it make you just break down?
Does the way I hug you make it hard to see?
And in the scent of me, you love, you drown?
You're a good actor, fool. ****. Dope.
The way you're acting now is prime.
The way you act like I'm not there, that's what you hope.
And how you really cant see me. How I cry, inside.
Take me back, Imbecile!
We can kiss through the dawn.
Passionate love, kiss me unforgivable.
But you can't even love me when I'm gone.

You.
You did this to yourself.
You cut yourself open and planted the infection inside of yourself.
This sickness is self inflicted so do not blame me for your muteness and deafness and vivid eyesight.
Maybe I'm just all too much like daisy
And you're all too much like Gatsby, and that's the problem.
Only with us there's no past to repeat and there never will be.
Tom cheated and myrtle died and Gatsby was a consideration because he flattered daisy and made her feel in control,
But Tom was always the past and present and future.
Tom was always.
You were never an option so don't get mad that I didn't choose you.
You created the ultimatum inside your head
When really, mermaids never even existed.
And neither did we.

It started hot and passionate and blinding.
Then it ran,
ran from me
faster than the alpine highway or
an Afro over your cute lisp.

And a bus leaves for 13 colonies and 14 days and
pictures are all I have.
Colorful but in
50 shades of grey.
Then never a breath from you
on the home front.
And disappointment marks my eyes.

Running all over town with eyes
like video cameras and
minds like a metal detector.
We wish we could be a fly on the wall or a plant in the earth or a new hair on your chin.
All moments,
every moment,
we know.
My fiend.
Detect this on your police detector.
Little blue Honda that looks tan in the sun.

White Camry.
Up the street then back down.
Serpentine through the neighborhoods
hoping to see a familiar body,
but not be seen ourselves.
Every day
till July 15.
Then waving goodbye to an empty house I once knew.
Where I stayed too long and talked too much about nothing.
Too many memories to remember and flash before my heart.
Then I blink and they're gone and we've passed it.

And finally I've mimicked Taylor Swift
and wrote a song about Paris.
And boys in Montreal.
Late hours. Early hours.
All hours.
Spent engulfed in our own music from our minds.

Military men. Marines that cheat and break hearts.
not enough sleep.
Lots of tire on asphalt.
Up and down and up and down and back again.
Not enough French
and a brand new white iPhone.

And the sun sets on another day
and still the one thing I want
doesn't go my way.

He thought a long while
about the weeks.
Recent weeks, weeks long past,
weeks to come.
Time was always a forgotten necessity.
Cool blue water hardly
protects anyone.
Who knew? Who knew?
Not him.
He dreamed while bathing in the dimming August sun-
about silk strewn across the floor and
betrayal and
the blinking emerald
eye of a cyclops.
Forever was a thing he idealized.
So were flowers and people and her.
and the way he looked at her-
as if the world could stop turning
yet he would be content to just
bathe in her presence forever.
His life was idealized,
the green paper, the sneaking lies,
the stiff men that pressed buttons
buttons
buttons.
But if he could grasp this one thing,
this dainty flower, he could have real satisfaction.
he was dreaming and grasping
and then the phone rang.
But he didn't answer it.

You used to be a daydream.
Now, you're the one that wakes me up at midnight-
foggy and unremembered.
I wish I could ignite it.
Watch your blue sweatshirt turn to ash and
watch that smirk from a moment in the rain that you waited all your life for shrivel up into nothing.
I wish this Hi-Polymer eraser could erase memories.
The white rubber, mister magic,
never met you.
Never. Never. Never.
Never hating you.
Never letting you learn my name.
Never figuring out that you weren't as bad as I always thought.
Never yes or sure or maybe or a nod of my thick head.
Never take your hand or lean into you or feel your embrace for the first time-
Pulled away in the pool and ran away down the street.
Never cared enough to break someone's heart.
Never let your saliva twist around inside my raw and bleeding mouth.
Never let you give me presents or given you my own.
Never given you myself.
Never said yes to Prom or let myself kiss you four times or stay until three in the suicidal morning.
Never let you come back under the blazing sun or bore your way into my core.
Never given you my every piece of me to set in place of your missing, sad pieces.
Because you thought you were whole enough without me.
But I can't take those pieces back.
Maybe I can try and erase them...

I love these ink stains.
These black splotches on the tips of my fingers and
the edge of my hand.
they are tattoos that tell strangers who I am.
And they tell me things too.
They tell me that I live.

Mr. Beeson,
that East and West Egg,
that walking thesaurus, dictionary,
thermometer
peeled back the blank skin
from over my eyes and introduced
a whole new world to me.
A world full of color and black and white movies and
beautiful suicides.
A world of stanzas and strophes and meter.
A world of words that bleed out from fingertips and
create the image of one's heart.
I had been looking for something like that,
a way to create my heart on paper,
meandering around authors and song writing
and trying to be beautiful.
I felt lost, but finding poetry made me feel
like I actually had a place and a purpose.
Poetry is something that has grown close to my heart and soul and mind.
And I write because it's a part of me.
I write because I love words.
Words, words, words.
I love diction and description and exposition and narration and parallels-
oh how I love parallels!
I write because I want to sound beautiful.
I write because I feel all too much and I can't keep all
those feelings inside of me so I drain them out of my
veins and watch them ooze onto paper in ink.
I write because I have so much to say but it sounds better
in stanzas.
I write because I love the way my words sound all
strung up together in clauses and sentences
and fragments.
I write because I feel in love with the way
words look like next to each other.
I write because that's how I put my tears and smiles
and fears onto paper and out of my head.
I write because I don't know anything else.
I write because I write to live.

I don't know how to start
just like I don't know how I feel.
But that's the paradox of the woman, right?
Will anyone ever understand my brain?
My neurons and brain stem and cerebellum,
left and right brain,
and all the lobes:
frontal, parietal, occipital, temporal.
Will anyone ever make sense of it all?
No.
No.
But you try.
You skirt across my hippocampus.
Try to pitch your tent there.
Try to make a life there.
Try to dig up and excavate the things that will make me yours.
You're coming close.
Because I believe in tests.
Yes I am one of them.
Yes I do it to you.
I thrive on tests.
I pull them out of my ear drums and fingernails
and from in between the splits of my teeth.
I pull out the ACT, the SAT
the LSAT, the MCAT,
the Bacceleureat.
Everything is a test.
Every answer
every question
every "please come get me"
and jack in a Styrofoam cup.
The way you walk the way you look at me when I breath is a plus or a minus or a smudge on a scantron sheet.
Three and a half hours later
you can breathe clean air again
and your mind can clear.
Holy smokes, yes, but there is is nothing holy about it.
We wont go ring shopping
we've already been house hunting
and we all know the only thing you want.
Wide open spaces and a bed in the center
and me.
Isn't that right?
Isn't
that
right?

I don't know what I want from you.
I don't want you like I wanted Snow in Arizona,
but I don't want you to leave me alone.
The silent hum of the sleek car,
hands at ten and two,
feet in the clouds,
head in another dimension.
I breathe in the fumes of grease and coconut, so maybe I'm sick.
A tropical disease.
Blood pours from a facet and I'm reminded of Christmas and summer sandwich shops.
I am an Indian in your Chrysler,
dance around my fire.
Careful, though,
you might get burned.
The flames lick flesh and taste the weakness.
That is how they thrive.
On vulnerable, open flesh.

Isn't it exhausting,
living with so much hatred?
Not being able to let go
and forgive someone who once meant everything to you?
Doesn't it burn your skin and seer through your bones?
Eat you away?
Or have you changed too much
from the man I once new?
Now your heart has become numb.

I almost had my first kiss once.
Almost.
It was on a cold December night and thick pure snowflakes were falling.
Falling to be caught on my golden hair, or in his, slightly darker.
I stepped back into the shelter of my front porch
but not into my warm house, oh no. I was a prisoner.
Locked out and befriended by the cold winter.
But it was fine, because I was with him, but not perfect because we were both alone.
He, shooting hoops and me, waiting patiently and admirably.
So admirably.
In my eyes, everything he did was wonderful and exciting.
Worry filled me n the fact that something was off and something was on his mind.
Was it me? couldn't be. Maybe.
The frozen basketball rolled smoothly, almost practiced, off his hand.
and in his stiff voice he mouthed the need to come inside.
I shouldn't have left. I should have stayed and waited only 30 seconds... 45 seconds...a minute longer.
But, like most people, I fear the airiness of awkwardness
and the moments that you stand before a person and draw a blank and have not a word to say.
I feared it and I turned my back.
It could have been perfect. It would have been perfect.
had I just opened my eyes and seen, because I didn't see.
Looking back now, I see.
My first kiss was close.
So close.
So painfully close it taunts me.
It taunts me when I'm siting alone, pondering.
When I'm alone with him and we talk about things.
When my friend bring up their magical first kisses.
When I remember the fact that I still love him, after all these years.
When his hand lightly touches mine or accidentally brushes my back and I realize, it could've been so much more.
But mostly, it taunts me on cold winter nights
when the heavy white snow is lightly falling, catching in my golden hair or landing on his, slightly darker.