Tremors, filagrees, tendrils
Laughter and lamentation
Coffee conversation
Nonchalant smoking of a cigarette
passed between street-stained fingertips.

He draws pictures in films of sugar
piled high like illuminating sand dunes
on the formica tabletop,
dismissing eye contact as
just one of those things.

Take it or leave it.

The menu we've seen before
in various other places
just like this
with similar generic names
and similar generic faces.

Places a crumpled dollar bill
in front of the waitress
"We'll share a coffee"

Such is the way of life when you're broke and homeless.

If I fantasize about you coming back to me
then I don't have to let you go

my reality
is almost perfected....

I'll choose insanity because it has you in it.

I'll choose dillusion because, there.... you tell me you love me still
I'll choose denial because hopelessness can feel like hope

the only world I want to accept
is the one where, in it, you're lying next to me.

I'll choose insanity
instead of accepting that you left a long time ago.

Tonight.... I'm lying here, nearly asleep, and you're lying next to me.

Perfect

Can't even join the
        rat race

Lonely, sitting here
          caged.

She says the ghost of you is insanity,
that your soul is welcome breath
upon my loneliness,
a manifestation derived from
a mysterious noise
or a distant calling of my name.

The breeze makes me cold
sitting here on the porch where we last met.
I feel like my soul is lost,
whispering words into the darkness,
thinking you can hear me.

There's a streetlight on the corner
that shines dimly upon falling snow,
disguising it like piles of diamonds,
or fragile tears made of glass;
shed only upon release of knowledge
too full of truth to be denied.

Passing cars are seldom,
people clutch their coats around them
tighter,
walking through the alleyways.
Reminds me of the way we hide
ourselves within ourselves
clutching, grasping
holding on,
folding our feelings around us like coats.

And my only consolation
is the sharp intake of oxygen and nicotine
merged into one
to live and to die all in a single breath.

This lingering ritual of watching
nights pass,
like a shuffling of cards front to back,
blows away the memories
in dusty swirls of smoke,
leaving the entirety of your essence
instilled in one moment.

She says the ghost of you is insanity,
that your soul is welcome breath
upon my loneliness,
a manifestation derived from
a mysterious noise,
or a distant calling of my name.

It really isn't a poem
It's a way of life without you in it
choking on words that might have made it different
your resentment and bitterness
still couldn't overrule my love of you
leaving to preserve what was left

For breakfast, I brought my self-loathing undisguised by bruised, hollow eyes and disquieted moaning,
all crunched up into the contours of your hard edges,
like thin-veined broken and browned, misused leaves orphaned from its parent.

My desperate limbs always reaching, wretched, to shoddy fill into the gaps that your self-confidence casual posture had formed on the floor;
empty-air spaces and pervasive shadow caverns I have claimed without verbal invite, promise or asylum.
No self-confidence to speak from, anguish and primal, seeking shelter;
pain entwined with pain making easy comfort in forgetting.

A soul disquieted;
there are pieces stripped straight down, pinned together in different places, unspun and uneven smears of paste that don't ease closed the obvious imperfections.
A harmful machination unexplained, fitted negligently back together,
the design with no catalyst to begin, untended and purposefully without purpose.
No comprehensible enrichment, selfish perversity plodding culmination,
almost complete.
Build, re-build; conspiracy laced with nonchalance; twisted person alchemy.

Any or Each of Many becoming
the godhead of a shallow, malcontented deception,
rudiment contortions to mangle, punish, ruin
an altruistic heart; a beaten wooden phoenix shaped from past wrongdoings and misery.
More burning away, combustion of reclaiming, bones and sinew steeped in the truth of the universe.

Unjustified and never the differentiation my heart once blamed, not good nor bad.
We, two souls alike in circumstance, circumference, cylindrical,
watching the world make more of us, clutching bird-like shoulders merged through a pale waning.
Existent time-limited victims of disappointed alliances,
made in the land entrenched in the business of making monsters who make monsters.

Can I watch you float out to sea
and find the words inside of me
to deeply convey what I meant to be
find inside creativity
without succumbing to my destiny?

If your poison made my words more colourful
I would still hesitate to drink
watching you tread in stoic silence
towards a cold world that ends your heartbeat.

You toe and then slide foot into the shallow end
every time you open your eyes and breathe
your conscious breath
treading tepid water and ceaseless existence
once your poison takes it's hold.

Can I watch you float out to sea
and find the words inside of me
to deeply convey what I meant to be
find inside creativity
without succumbing to my destiny?

I've known you my whole life
pop can tops at 4am while others are sleeping.
Sometimes instead now there is sickness
hidden away in corners so no one hears.

Your chosen drink could transform my words.
I know it opens my soul
breaks it wide open with clumsy insistence
and gives no regard, no boundaries or restrictions.

Can I watch you float out to sea
and find the words inside of me
to deeply convey what I meant to be
find inside creativity
without succumbing to my destiny?

Masochistic plastic people
pit themselves against the massive whole
each one thinks he's individual
each one thinks he has a soul

You're delusional
You don't even know
You don't know me

You say you love me and I feel it
Becoming so confused and hurt
when you mistook my actions......

couldn't see my heart

.....or you refused.

Dimly, suddenly I realize
that the parts
you love so much are the qualities
and persona I have had to adapt
to stop the arguments....the pain
and constant constant blame.

No
I wasn't aware at first it was to
please you
you are a master manipulator
and you finally confessed you knew
a while ago,
that I'd do anything for you.
You knew before I knew.

Like the self-serving, egotistical, twisted
person I have discovered you to be,
you saw my love and slowly started to
mold me,
contort me to meet your needs.

And like the self-hating, twisted, narcissist
I am, once I noticed the sick dark places
you were taking me,
it was already too late.
You preyed on the weakness you
saw in me, and made me like the
fall from grace I now was an active part
of contributing to.

I'm only a fragile paper-thin
watered-down version of the me
I started to be
before you made me crazy.

I hate that I loved letting you.

Your body makes mine

aware

that we are truly living.

I could not find the words
when I think of you, almost constantly
your name repeats itself inside my head
like an obsessive mantra of longing
and I realized the words I needed to express
belonged in the repeating of your name

He sits alone
sticky fingers grasping the bottle
warming his stomach
and pickling his brain
It's almost empty
there
acid clears the body
His thoughts are flitting
weaving in and out of memory
too
turbulent
his heart is madness
always was
He takes it out on us
I know
for I have never wronged him
and when I do
he kills me.

I shiver within the comforting confines of my tattered jacket;
the ragged hood embracing my head
and partially obscuring my face.
Suddenly grateful for the poor lighting;
pumpkin-orange opaque and *****, a parking lot
nearly swallowed by the encroaching nighttime.

You are confused by my excess emotions again.
I can tell by your expression;
impatience folding slowly over your countenance
and your clenching hands needing to hold a
cigarette in order to relax or become distracted.

In silence and my own discomfort,
I look up at the sky and can see the stars

There has got to be
another way
to temper my over-indulgent emotions
rather this prescription