Gravel night, nails on a chalkboard,
two styrofoam lids rubbing against
each other in delicious dis-harmony.

I wouldn't call what I do coping.

I thought the truth was buried
somewhere. I dug up your grave,
looking for something real.  

Dead bodies are real, but that doesn't
make them any less dead.

Rope around the wrist, risk surrounding
whim, and the resounding yes.

Just wanna get you drunk off solitude,
want you to know what alone feels like.

I tried to find the more human parts
of me, tried to construct a person out
of the fabric, and spent too much time
threading the **** needle.

Only this, only these nights so dark and still are real. They are the only ones that mean anything. All the rest is just noise, useless noise, and I want to bury myself so far into the earth that I never have to listen to another rotten word of it again.

There are things inside me I don't want
to find you. There are parts of me you
can't have.

Maybe if we whisper, drum up another
name for this, if we bleed a little more,
the world will finally make sense.

I don't want to meet you in the middle.
I want us to push each other to extremes,
test the limits, feel along the boundaries
and find where it gives.

You swear you’re already dead, but I hear your pulse talking, love, a mile a minute, a cherry stem, it’s telling me how the night’s going to end up. Chest of weeds, death the real way, romance-less.

I don't want to forget this.
I want to mourn it.

You backed me into a corner, and I had to
make a new world, a world you could
love me in, because this one is too cruel,
too thoughtless and tiring.

We're weak. We bruise too easily. We’re
jagged and cowardly and sick. Somewhere
else, we are better. We know how to love
without all the blood.

We beam out in all directions, and never
once wonder if it's all a lie.

Romance with the dew, who meets my cheek and mistakes me for earth, the dust of empty pews, the almosts and maybes and sometimes cruel cause I can, feeling for a light switch in the dark, the missing and the trying, and the walk back home. It's the dusting off.

You're waving your arms. You're trying to convince me that words are more than words. You're cracking open peach pits and looking for flies.
You're wrecking the car, darling.

We're finding places in the pavement to rest our heads, and all I can hear is: I told you so.

I'll risk the dying. I'll risk the trouble. I'll risk the risk. I'll take the keyboard and smash it against the wall. I'll call it a poem, and I'll miss you anyways.

Here, from the cracking ribs rattling toward something so close, so cutthroat, to the moment where you finally get to watch the bliss bleed out.

It's all just one big blood-pumping, give-me-now balancing act, and the things that see the walls of your fist are the feeling you can't shake.

So I will hold you tight and make a lunatic's prayer of you, the world in gloss and the *** you said made you holy. It's useless, but I still try.

Our hells may have been the same, but our heavens weren't.

You're waving your arms. You're trying to convince me that words are more than words. You're cracking open peach pits and looking for flies.
You're wrecking the car, darling.

We're finding places in the pavement to rest our heads, and all I can hear is: I told you so.

I'll risk the dying. I'll risk the trouble. I'll risk the risk. I'll take the keyboard and smash it against the wall. I'll call it a poem, and I'll miss you anyways.

Here, from the cracking ribs rattling toward something so close, so cutthroat, to the moment where you finally get to watch the bliss bleed out.

It's all just one big blood-pumping, give-me-now balancing act, and the things that see the walls of your fist are the feeling you can't shake.

So I will hold you tight and make a lunatic's prayer of you, the world in gloss and the *** you said made you holy. It's useless, but I still try.

Our hells may have been the same, but our heavens weren't.

Breath and leather,
ragged, eyes that
smooth over into dark,
fingernails and teeth
that catch at a chest
of two parts whiskey
and three parts grief.

Another scarred fist
perched on a dusty bar
and beer against a lazy
mouth. He left before left,
his skin robbed of promise,

like beginning, dust again.

Candlelight is romantic, unless
you're in a dungeon.

Context changes everything.

Context makes you look down
at the bridges you build and realize
they are plywood: thin, cheap, but
soggy enough from this rain that
they're impossible to burn.

Realism is a myth. Everyone has a lens.

People believe what they want to believe,
or they believe the worst. Sometimes they
alternate, tense and relax at all the wrong
moments, a sigh of relief before the crime
has been committed.

Everyone loves a hero until they are up
against them.

The unforgivable becomes forgivable
in the right context, ****** as self-
defense, or in war. Fear and arousal
provoke identical symptoms in the body.
Sometimes the boundaries bleed together.

Sometimes ethics surrender in the face
of love.