The clouds today remind me of your skin.
Soft and folded, they're rich with chemical abuse.
Faded like your hair from one shade to the next.

These clouds are full, as big as your heart.
They stretch long and thin like your veins.
A heavy blanket and me waiting for your fall.
I'm holding you up thinking,
"Gravity don't do this to me."

With the slap of impact
I fight the sadness that's
Hit me through you.
I feel your pain deeper
Because you can't feel for yourself.

I'm sick of this mess like
You're sick of yourself.
Your touch is buried deep,
Like Sanskrit on cave walls.
After a night next to you,
Curled up and comfy,
It's hard to leave in the morning.

I hand out this pain via pamphlets
And now you don't know what to do.
As a religious prophet I am no longer welcome.
These white knuckled clouds are looking restless.

Searching for proof of life,
I want to reach up with a nice firm hold
And curl my fingers in hard.
That'd feel pretty nice in this ******* weather.

Aside from a few thousand miles and tattoos like a grocery list,
I’m still that girl breaking horse hair on cat gut.

Full of pizzicato that rises and rests I remember hot summer night sounds.
I miss staring into red suns behind black bare trees.

Running through dark alleys full of your curls we’d sing and cough with liquored smiles.
Put my notes in an envelope and send me off with your Sunday best.
Label it with Scotch and your cigarettes.

Let our life fade into the sea, winding through the surf.
I love who I was but this is not who I am.
Pressed into books half made and abandoned, my heart collects the film of glass.

I will keep treading water, inviting you to stay with the sharks I’ve come to know.
Bestill your landlocked mind and stretch your limbs into the sea.
With wind cool and strong, I scatter my thoughts in every direction.

You wanted it..

You wanted it so bad that happiness took a backseat like a newborn

You kept it safe and buckled

Hoping that at the end of the ride it would still be there.

And it is..

But you sped on

You missed every turn you shouldve taken

You ran every red light

Waiting for it to blossom as you travel

you kept it in the backseat

You kept it

She left Reno
in a satin slip
the color of hot coins
pouring from slots,
wearing chewed-up tennis shoes,
mirrors multiplying her,
the marquee burning out
letter by letter,
a hush pressed between her teeth
as if saving the last note.

I followed,
a gangly shadow,
mother’s voice in my ear:
life is not a freeway exit.
But she was the exit.
She drove west
through a glittering throat.

In Tonopah she was a waitress
with red stains on her wrists,
the sleeves tugged low,
coffee pouring thin as blood.
In Barstow she was a sun-bleached Madonna,
halo blistered, mouth lit in stained glass.
At a gas station in Needles
she shimmered into a coyote’s shadow
and slipped behind the pumps.
Everywhere,
a new disguise,
a flicker at the edge of vision.
Not the whole leap,
just rehearsal.

Casinos blinked like electric relics.
Truckers called her sugar,
greedy hands counting her ribs
as if she were a paycheck
sweating in their fist,
but she slipped away each time,
her silhouette already moulting-
a serpent skin, a smoke-trail,
a saint’s shadow burning off the wall.

By Malibu the night
had softened to velvet.
The pier at Zuma
leaned into the Pacific
like a broken rib.

She sang once-
low, cracked, unfinished-
and the slip fell from her
like the last lie.
Her body cut into the dark tide,
this time there was no disguise.

I waded in after her,
ankles bruised by rock.
The sea lit with jellyfish,
not lanterns but wires,
each pulse a warning,
each glow a wound.

Standing at the highway’s end-
no exit left,
just the Pacific’s mouth
closing around her.

Life is but just a number.
A day given, to each and every man.
A day to be born.
A day to die.
But each day is just a number.
So as each man knows not the numbers of his days.
Let's live each day, with love and care.

Soon
Worship nothing
Before a false idol
Consider these signs
That I’m seeing
As vital
Flatlining
And idle
Of minding
Its business
Its dealings
Provoking
The pulse
Of the polls
To its feelings
For fear
Is the sheep
To the slaughterhouse
Martyrdom
I am the bomb
In its first class’s
Carrion

You filled one of my ten cups to the brim. Thank you!  

I am no longer greedy in my youth for you. If ever a cup is knocked over and spilled, I know I have a lifetime to fill it up again.

Thank you!

My cups are brimming, and I am collecting everything you and others gave me

Thank you!

If I am ever in town, I’ll be sure to stop by and thank you

I saw love wearing shoes in the rain,
but it dripped backwards and was fire.
She handed me a hand full of worms
and told me it was my heart.

I tried to kiss her shadow as it faded
the shadow starred at me first.
It began as we argued with the moon
about whether silence could bleed.

A staircase appeared,
spiraling into my throat.
Every word trembling,
I climbed until I reached halfway
and there she was,
sitting at a table of clocks,
feeding time to the dead
Pigeons.

She said:
“Every orchard is an eye.
Every fruit, a dream.”
Then she gave me a mask
made of feathers and mirrors,
and whispered:
“Now love will see through you.”

The sea tried to listen,
tried to feel,
tried to touch,
but it had no ears,
it had no hands,
just a mouth wide open lips,
so it swallowed itself instead.
While looking on in disbelief
I drowned on dry land,
laughing,
Laughing at all that was once before
because now her perfume
tasted like absence,
and every word a song,
that I knew the melody,
but had forgotten to sing
She just smiled
as she would walk on bye.

Love is not love
this is madness
it is a map that eats itself,
a candle flickering that refuses to die,
a bizarre adventure,
a journey for the travelers of the lost,
A begin with no ending,
only doors
that open into other doors,
and every memory another oil painting nailed to the walls of the mind.

Life is short, this is true
remember that.
Yet it’s the longest road
you will ever walk.
Find someone to walk beside you;
nobody is perfect,
but it is better to walk alone,
even in the wrong direction,
than with the wrong person.

Many lessons I’ve learnt,
some I’ve misplaced,
others I’ve forgotten.
But one remains,
like spirals in the sands of my mind,
like truth carved deep in my soul:
there is nothing more lonely
than spending your life
loving someone
who did not love you back,
or at all.
All the possibilities passed by
while you held their hand
and the lies you whispered to yourself,
“It will change,
there is time”
becoming a prison
you built with your own hope.

Time is not the enemy.
It never was.
It is the choices,
the unspoken ones,
the moments forgotten.
It is the blindness we wear,
the mask that hides
what mattered most.

Not knowing which seconds
to hold forever,
not knowing which to release,
like moments slipping
through weary hands.
I wish I had known then
which were the ones to cherish
not now,
digging through scattered thoughts,
scratching at shadows
to piece together
what was,
and what was not.

The people I saw,
the hands I shook,
the embraces I shared
had I known
this was the last time
we would stand together in a moment,
I might have held on longer.
I might have breathed it in deeper,
honored the minute
a little more.

I could craft a metaphor,
a clever disguise,
to polish this into poetry.
But these tears, this trembling,
falling as I let go
of what I carried too long

this is already a poem.
And it is more
than enough.