...And the night deepens into swallowed thoughts and blurry vision. Every time you forget what it means to be human, the air gets cold, and bites you in the back of the throat. Inhale, hold, count to ten. It isn’t as it seems, and none of it exists anyway. It’ll fade into pale blues and grays with the morning light.

There's a soft grating in between your finger tips.
A thin slot of knuckles, for nickels and dimes
when they drop from pant-pocket holes, worn and guilty.
It's always harder to take than it is to give.
But trash cans never regret.
Purpose: Check.
Validity: Check.
Reality: Hand-drawn check in black sharpie across the steel.
Sink deeply, black ink
welcomed wearily into the soul
through clasped hands,
past kneeling knees
and off the sidewalk cracks into the grass
while their eyes are still closed,
trying to feel the touch of the invisible.
Matter is what matters,
not reality,
or the shreds each mind tapes back together;
the pictures esteemed by an eye forgot.
Points of view are only valuable when they aren't,
And I guess that's a disappointment, with too much proof.

Bending back the slate.
Somehow finding enough force in scrawny half pound arms
to grasp that vision's mostly in my brain.
And if i know the world
and if i know myself
skin prickling lines of hate do a lot less damage,
cause a lot less pain.
Noticing the corners, feeling their raspy edge
as they scrape up your throat
and out onto the ground before.
Self-awareness only helps to see the ****
that applies more
to the one who wrote
than it ever will.

Endlessly getting better seems a bit too tiring sometimes.
You can only look at the world through blurry eyes for so long,
until you start to believe in the blurred carcass of the familiar.
It resembles the thoughts pooling out from the shattered glass,
floating up from behind my eyes
and flows through the room from a dark hole, yet to be explored.
Into the cavern, into the waves.
Into the seams, pulled far by a stretched mind and starry skies.
Pulled wide when we broke up last night.
This morning was strange.
I found hospitality in The Upsides, ironic comfort in the past before the past.
You could never understand, and maybe it was better that way.
But I ******* felt you inside me.
No more, active heart between my bones.
Be calm. Be aware.
Still here, and forever observing the real.

Everything's a ******* square.
My journal.
The rich kid crackers.
My pillows, safe as they are.
Some are seam-stretched,
manipulated by a team of God and tired hands
a more desirable something,
thrown away just the same.
My parents.
My head.
The entire visionary sidewalk-gray sky,
as down is up for most, my neck associated with.
It wraps itself a ballooned cube, square faces
to be pinned over themselves by shapely oceans and unwitting gulls.
******* annoying gulls.
I fed one a firework once
the kind you throw at your sister and it pops on her
and she cries, illogical from her eye sockets in
steeped in the terror of the 9/11 on her swimsuit.
Snatched, exploded
Feathery tears rained,
a little less illogical.
I'm vegetarian now.
No relation.