I like  you.

I like  you  a lot.

I want to be bored with you.

I want to hold weekly board meetings over the topic of you.

I could impress the shareholders. What do you think?

     I think you enjoy honesty, and despise flattery.
Believe me, I know the difference. I hope you do too.
I am no wily flatterer
I would never say something like, “I’ll sail to the MOON for you,”
something impossible and irrelevant. With the consistency of soupy puke.
I should just as soon say,
“I WILL jump recklessly from the top of a very tall tower, and land—perfectly intact and unharmed
… for you.”
I hope I am not the only one who sees a problem with this sort of logic.
So instead I’ll say:

Let the madness of what this fixation has turned me into, fuel my fears and my ambitions and drive me therefore, to construct a missile, with enough space inside to harness only myself, enough kick in the engine to erase my past—and all the laws of life as we know it.
I will have those memorized by then, and plan to have my hands on new laws unforeseen by any of the other
mainstream earthlings;
maybe using my new third eye to grasp at something up there that was previously air —
& I will beg this nonconsensual devotion you’ve evoked in me please grant me the derision to press the button, and launch myself into that forgetful lazy river that contains all the planets, asteroids, black holes, spaceships, a lonely-wandering U.S. radio transmitter, spilt-paint nebulas, one of Tiger Woods’ golf *****, a drunken astronaut, some of the crew from that Malaysian airplane (you know, the one that went missing), and also there are suns (often called stars), and moons, and there has gotta be a little love floating around somewhere with the celestial ants
and supernovas
and EVERYTHING.
and dissimilarly nothing you can grasp.

to the Moon?
sure,
why not babe,
if moon-rocks could somehow make you fall in love with me,
I would plan to rob the Smithsonian (or probably a similar museum of history but one with less security),
and if that ended up a no-go,
thenyeah.


     Mad. Zoom.


straight to the ******* moon for you.

each emotional wound becomes an inkwell of blood.  each crack in my unstable mind lets in sunlight.  each dent in my ego catches rainwater and dreams.   everything is repurposed,all lemons squeezed dry for my metaphorical lemonade.

but no matter what/
I'm not
made of talent
but/ no matter what I'm /

still inferior/
no matter what,  I'll still be/
a shell of wasted/

potential,  each mile / traversed
there's two ran away/
no matter how I /

use and abuse myself,  I /
am still
useless
in their eyes.   /

I hadn't cried in years.  
I was always taught that strength
was not having the courage to let yourself feel but
******* it up, holding it in.
I am sick of "You're going soft on us, honey"
Today I came to understand that
you are completely okay with writing the same poem
over and over again.
This is a metaphor for the way you ****** her in my bed.
This is a metaphor for the night you copy and pasted love letters.
This is a metaphor for what really happened-
I never fall in the same place twice.
Except when I do.
I think the critical difference between the two of us,
critical because there are many differences
but- I think our hamartia, our fatal flaw,
our end scene is this:
if people didn't like my poetry, if nobody listened,
if I walked out on stage and nobody snapped their
fingers, I would still write for just your eyes.
I would still cramp my crooked, birth defect,
quadruple jointed fingers writing to you about the nights
you loved me back,
for a minute there you loved me back.
And you loved 20,000 other people back.
And you loved small towns back and big cities back and the entire west coast
back when you drove through, making temporary homes out of people
who should have been permanent
and I loved you.
And I hadn't cried in years.
Not because I wasn't sad, but because I was taught that showing emotion
was weakness.
So if my father made me memorize the How To's of strength,
if I were going by the book, today I'd be so fragile
you could say hello and I'd shatter so suddenly you'd
forget you were the one that let go.

‘but surely you’ve loved before right?’ he asked her. ‘surely some other
lucky lucky man, or woman for that, has been blessed with your undivided attention ?’ she stared outside the window for a moment, watched the leaves flutter by in the wind. ‘i don’t think you understand. i’ve had plenty of pretty boys to buy me pretty things and whisper pretty things into my ear as they push inside of me with no ounce of warmth whatsoever, driven entirely by lust. and to think that i thought i loved them makes heat rise to my cheeks because the way i feel when you look at me, whether it’s across the kitchen counter as we argue over penne or swirls for dinner or if it’s squinting through the sunrise that peeks through our cheap blinds every morning, makes me feel so much fuller
than the empty skeletons of those whose ghosts still lay on my mattress’

Some people are so dehydrated.
They crave codependency to fulfill them.
Be thankful you can stand on your own two feet unaided.

Know if you grow wings in time,
You'll have a stable place to fly from.
I don't know how to explain to others. It's incredible,
To never be wavered.

*©NDHK

Dear God,*

My soul is feeling idle,
My stomach kind of empty.
Everyday, I have the urge to feast upon your fruit tree
Because in this world of temptations sins are looking tasty.
But if I take a bite, can you blame me for this fault?
You made me in your image so tell me,
Why did you include flaws?

i can still feel his hands around my neck.
the fingers like words and “i don’t love you” and it stings although he wasn’t the first to say it, i can’t breathe.
she haunts our hallways, our floorboards are cracking
beneath our feet, our home is crumbling
between our fingertips and
i can feel her weight on my chest. sometimes
i think that she should just go by the way that her footsteps echo after she’s gone. i remember
a wall full of holes from where his fists
kissed ever so gently.
i think that wall is what my heart might look like but lately
i’ve had trouble finding my pulse.
i can still feel his hands around my neck.
does he know
why i can’t look him in the eye? does he
know
the blue makes me feel like I’ve swallowed too much water, does he know i can’t breathe?
i think I’m still trying to understand why
beautiful things die in my fingertips and why he stomps on every rooting bulb my wilting body tries to plant, why he ripped my roots from beneath my feet and why my hair started to fall out why
he put his hands on my throat and how i still feel them there.
has he figured it out?
does he know that lemon scented bleach would taste better than
her on his lips and the *******
they splatter?
i can still feel his hands around my neck.
i was born into light, into pain, into love and
he wasn’t the first man to leave a mark on my body and i feel like he is the works with the universe to watch me fall
things fall and shatter without you touching them, things break while you’re sleeping and
everything about him and her stings like saltwater and everything about me
bends for him like light.
i can still feel his hands around my ******* neck.
he crashed into her hips like his hands to my bones, like fists to walls, the walls
rattled, my ribcage
rattled, he was
rattled and i can still feel his hands around my neck,
pushing, like me trying to ******* make this work.
what is this?
his hands are like ghosts around my throat,
the memory of her wrapped around his body instead of me
wrapping, holding in place
icanstillfeelhisfuckinghandsaroundmyfuckingneck
i am not stupid you know.
i can only see that he moves like these words write themselves, and he
speaks like music bleeding through a closed window,
i swear, i am still cracked
though i still have tattoos left from the tips of his fingers from those heavy-handed nights,
i swear, they didn’t even sting.

I hope you know that I wanted to tell you.
I don’t know whether it was my Catholic School morals
or if i developed a conscience
but I never wanted to keep this a secret
I hated what he did to you
What I did to you.
Sometimes I still think about it
I don't love him anymore and I don't know if you do
but sometimes I think about it.