The only thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is that love is inescapable.

Love will find you. Find you naked, shaking in your darkest caverns clinging to heartbreak and faded polaroids with trembling hands. Find you locked up in towers fortified with fear. Find you upside-down. Find you alone once again walking the streets at one in the morning praying for street lights to fade behind you. Find you standing before tombstones or ice cream trucks or a preacher man. Find you hiding from your mother or God or both. Love will find you.

Love will take you. Take you to the place you parked your car that night and noticed for the first time the way their skin in the moonlight had the unspoken power to shatter your own. Take you through the annals and ventricles of your heart and peel away at the scars like super-glued band-aids. Take you to the hills and home again. Love will take you.

Love will bind you. Bind you to your family like the pages in the cookbook your mother used to prepare your favorite meal. Bind you to the girl who makes you shake when she's cold or the boy with eyes warm and clear blue like hot springs. Bind you to yourself. Love will bind you.

Love will break you. Break you down to jigsaw puzzle pieces your grandparents attempt on Friday nights, hands shaking with arthritis, and leave you incomplete. Break you away from your callused convictions and shove a blunt fist into your softest spots and leave you covered in scratches. Break you the way earthquakes break buildings or alcohol breaks families and bones; unforgivably, irreparably. Love will break you.

Love, desperate and strong, simple and tenacious, fiery and fierce.
Love will find you, take you, bind you, and break you.

And you will not escape.

A girl with dark hair and true eyes.
A girl wrapped gracefully in self-confidence
and unconventional beauty.
A girl with a heart so heavy it takes two to hold,
and with a hole in her soul she tries to fill
with poetry and sad music.
A girl who will sit on the floor
at odd hours and listen to old records
and not say a word.

Seeking:
A girl who knows how to love
but just barely.
A girl who is too **** sad to care
because I can't care either.
A girl who knows I can't love
and will learn not to love me.
A girl who will lie next to me
and lie to my face.

Seeking:
A girl.
A warm body and a soft pair of lips.

I was never one for silence,
Those times I hear nothing but the earth
moving along with a wheezy breath
pushed wholeheartedly from my chest

I was never one for quiet,
the heaviness of unmoving lips
the weight of every moment held
on a tight, tense string

I was never one for stillness
I revel in the way chaos moves
with steadiness and deliberation,
she makes no mistake.

I am sympathetic for Pluto
Not because I've lost my long-standing planetary status,
But because I am aware of how it feels to not fit Earth's criteria
and society's standards

I am not all a planet should be.

I am a leaky faucet in a flawless world,
Drip-dropping chaos into the absurd
I am a quiet brain saturating in happiness chemicals:
Serotonin and slow love songs.

I am an observer of the malicious mankind
Building, destroying, and leaving behind
I take quick visits to the sky
When I am lost in my mind.

I am a collector of things less than fine:
Quotations from poets and antiques from cloud-nine
I am the comforter of Plutonian souls our simple world forgot
I am supposed to be a planet, but a planet I am not.

I have never crossed an ocean,

there are parts of me the world will never see

I may never conquer mountains,

fierce ranges scraping thundery skies.

Or forge paths through matted jungles

sticky darknesses and wildlife.

Forgive me, myself

for I am not yet of able mind

to be the adventurer you wish to be.

It is a strange feeling, wanting to die but not being selfish enough to **** yourself. It is not a good feeling and it is not a bad feeling. Just strange. Like wanting to step out of a moving vehicle but the door is locked, and you're the one who locked it.

It's liberating, in a sense. To sever those stringy limbs that are clutching on to life and all its irrelevant attachments. Unbinded by society. The friendly release of death, all the familiarities of living still in tact. Immortality stolen directly from the suicide note. Shot through the heart, but still very much full of life.

Some pathetic hermaphrodite of irony and despair.

I think it stems from this futile awareness of a futile existence. I could live with a futile existence, but by some divine cosmic punishment am forced to be aware of my place within society. My place being an insignificant cell in a cell. And no body cares about a single cell within it. If one cell dies, it won't even notice it's gone, but simply continue as it was. But I refuse to give it the power to ignore my death. To stay alive is rebellion. To love and to live, in spite of life, is pure anarchy.

I'll call her the beholder
Because there is beauty in her eyes,
And for the price of her infinite touch
I will linger, clinging to her side

There once was a boy with too much substance.
He breathed mostly in sighs
He battled heavy eyes
He had too much substance.

He thought life would be easier if he was like the rest.
If he didn't over-think everything
and if he didn't fall in love with every girl who smiled at him.
He sighed.

He wished he could listen to happy music
and that his bed was warmer.
He thought the substance should keep him warm.
It did not.
He sighed.

He did not consider himself to be particularly intelligent
or better than his peers.
He longed for someone cursed with substance.
He was lonely.
He sighed.

He did not wished to be loved,
but to be understood.
He sighed.

He wished he did not have to write poetry.
But poetry has substance.
He had a strange love for metaphors
and hidden meanings.
He sighed.
He had too much substance.

I was asleep in the backseat.
At least I pretended be.

The man in the driver's seat
began to spill insecurities
on the cold steering wheel
and into the woman's ear
about how his children
judged him too harshly,
were too emotional.
That he'd done the best
he could with what
he knew.
That man was my father.
At least he pretended to be.

I was asleep in the backseat.
At least I pretended to be.
But my mind was wide awake
flashing angry colors I couldn't
comprehend.

I could not comprehend how
the man in the driver's seat
believed that his actions,
his infidelity,
would roll off his children's
shoulders like warm rain
water.

I could not comprehend how
he felt sorry for himself
because we would always see
him as the bad guy,
the cowboy with the black hat.

I could not comprehend how
he'd expected us to feel.

But we were all okay, now.
At least we pretended to be.

I believe in the sound of raindrops
applauding humanities imperfections
on tin roofs
while simultaneously washing them away.

I believe in the bellow of thunder
like the beckon of temptation
and the satisfaction of giving in.

That  I don't need forgiveness for sin
I don't regret committing
and those sitting in polyester pews
mindlessly reciting don't's and do's
only feel regret because their preacher
tells them to.

I believe in you,
and me,
and the galaxy we created,
or the realities we imitated,
at the very least.

That no great beast
lives inside me
and that no great being
cares.

I believe in long-haired lullabies,
hidden desires in perfect disguise,
in loose little lies
flying free from loose little lips

In magic singeing fingertips
playing songs
on nervous skin,
tracing directions to where our homes have been

I believe the walls are caving in
and our generation is not to blame,
we were given a broken toy
and asked to play,
Inheriting debts in a broken ballet

I believe that either way,
we will not be stopped
by crooked cops with too
much power,
raining gun-fire like a
meteor shower,
or by faithless politicians,
lies like ammunition,
vanishing voices,
like deep pocketed magicians

But I believe that it's not as bad as it seems.
I believe in that goodness, innate
that our children our taught to hate
but don't need to learn to love.

I believe in love.

I believe in love.

I believe in love.

When you're up to your neck in the tears you have cried
And you offer your envy to those who have died
And accept that your truths will be taken as lies
You haven't got time to look back.
The children can see but we choose to be blind
And the flower still grows from the sidewalk crack

Now the ones that protect us are turning away
And a powerful people are turning to prey
The reaper has come and we've asked him to stay
We can use him when we attack
The battle will rage and the warriors will pray
That the flower still grows from the sidewalk crack

And they usher our souls through industrial farms
Led by the grasp of invisible arms
But they pay us real good while they're doing us harm
In their favor, the odds always stacked
You can blow all the whistles and sound the alarms
But the flower still grows from the sidewalk crack

So rush now to the booths, make heard your voice
Pencil in your favorite illusion of choice
Both sides saying nothing, commercialized noise
Shades of grey, not white and black
The machine keeps on humming and the cogs they rejoice
And the flower still grows from the sidewalk crack

So the end of an era greets a new one again
And the old and the young must soon become friends
One versed in the past, one staring ahead
It's time to pick up the slack
If we don't come together, then we come to an end
But the flower still grows from the sidewalk crack

You will find nothing here.

I am a balloon in the slippery hand of
a child standing idle on the boardwalk
and in seconds or years I will be released
into the grey sky

And for a while I will fly there
Hell, I may even die there

But for now I'm lying in the darkness
letting the summer ants crawl on my skin
and in the s p a c e s between sad songs
i ask them their opinions

and they tell me
You will find nothing here.

Sometimes I pretend
I never met you.

I pretend that the laughter
that occupied my head
is now just an echo
of an irresponsible child

I pretend, when you contact me,
that you are a stranger
you have the wrong number
no one you have ever really loved
lives here.

I pretend,  when I see pictures of you,
that the feelings are not scratching and biting
their way to the surface.
You are just another
S̶t̶u̶n̶n̶i̶n̶g̶.̶ ̶G̶o̶r̶g̶e̶o̶u̶s̶.̶ ̶B̶e̶a̶u̶t̶i̶f̶u̶l̶.̶ Pretty face.

I pretend that your words
are not engraved in my disfigured skin.
every sound that poured out of your mouth,
rolled sweetly off your tongue,
is now smoke in unforgiving wind.

I pretend, when I write poetry,
that I don't always think of you,
That my words will not give you
the satisfaction of knowing
I think of you always.

I pretend that my lips
never met yours,
and that I am, in fact, able to stand steadily
when I think about it.

Sometimes I pretend,
Sometimes I wish
I never met you.

I don't want to *******.
No, I want to be the midnight air
seeping into your pores,
witness the horrors
of your mind
and make them no more
I wish to row,
                    row,
                           row,
gently down your stream
of consciousness
and to arrive safely
at the solutions
to all your heart's
conundrums
and hope to God
that I am one of them.

I'll make love to you,
if you want to, too,
or lie silent in the night,
syncing heartbeats,
never touching you.

But I don't want to *******.

I want to set sail to your words,
to conquer the ebb and ride the flow,
establishing allies and vanquishing foes

I want to know the history
of every mystery
that you find compelling,
to correct your m̶i̶s̶p̶e̶l̶l̶i̶n̶g̶s̶  misspellings.

To be the lyrics to your favorite song
to be the sunrise when the nights get long
Yes, I long to be the object of your sideways looks
and to sleep between the pages of your favorite books

To stare in admiration at your eyes
like constellations
and wish on every star
to know every part of who you are

To have my sun-baked skin
be consumed by the waves
on the curves of your face

To trace and map
every landmark
on your effervescent skin
and be the nervous sweat
that clings to it

I want to let your strong lungs intake me
and let your cool air sustain me
and pray that you might save me
a spot in your heart

I wish to start pulling your mind's
fibers and wires
and to start a fire
under your frozen tongue
and be the unsung hero
who rescues you from yourself.
I want to silence your loudest thoughts
and embrace your silent tears
and I want to make this clear:

I do not want to *******.

I want to be inside you.

"Have you ever seen someone create a rainbow with a 12-Gauge shotgun"

10
I'd thought about that new year's kiss
even during the months no one cared
about the holiday
Only to find my crush
with her ex, trying to decide
who's tongue tasted better

9
And while my ex
is receiving cute texts
from a new man,
I'm higher than I've
ever been
nurturing a borderline
****** relationship
with a bag of Doritos

8
And my friends were laughing
in the back seat
because I said
"The moon is sideways"
and I guess
they couldn't see the
poetry in that.

7
And though I didn't receive
a midnight kiss,
I'll most likely be receiving
a ticket for Indecent Exposure
in the mail.

So it wasn't a total loss.

6
And instead of wishing for happiness
I wished for the ability
to properly express the rest of my emotions
in hopes of achieving it.

5
And I hoped to dis-acquaint
myself from feeling lonely
in rooms so full of people
I can't even move
or think

4
And my friends are close
and I think they were
expecting more

3
And my sister
inadvertently became the
goddess of drunk girls

2
And seeing love fail
in nearly every direction,
I closed my eyes

1
People shout Happy New Year
but only truly wish it on
themselves

i could tell you i miss you
until my lungs collapse into
sharp fragments
reflecting every moment
you took my breath away.

but you've heard it repeated
like a sacred hymn
whose tune no longer
stirs you.

so tonight i'll say "goodbye" instead.
and "i hope he's worth it."

To touch and to feel seem to me, two opposing forces.
And a hundred men may touch you
in a hundred different places
but that does not mean that
you will feel a thing.

To look and to see are acts, it seems,
committed by two different organs.
So when their eyes fall on you and
you do not feel the catastrophically
heavy weight of them, please know
that they have not seen a thing.

To hear and to listen do not coincide.
And though they may smile and nod
when you tell them about the first time
you fell in love, it means nothing if your
laughter is not swallowed like it's the deep
blue water in the desert of their lives.

To know and to understand,
to know and to understand
can be as different as rain and fire
and while they may know exactly
what to say to make your insides
ignite, that does not mean they understand
that there are days when your skin feels like glass
that could shatter in an instant if his skin meets yours.

And when I'm filled with solitude, silence, and sin
and the warm smell of nothingness seeps its way in
I hear the bell tolling and your voice in my head
so I start to clean up all your words that I bled
When I reach out for you, feel the coldness of air
Miss the grace of your skin, and the smell of your hair
And the raindrops start falling, mist in my eyes
Find there's nothing as hard to swallow as that last goodbye

Now your blood floats in my veins, sweet toxic cleanse

Give my best to my family, and the rest to my friends

You're the cold flesh of winter, the ache in my bones

Watch the blacks of my eyes sink away like they're stones

So please tell me, please let me let myself in

Now my shoulders are heavier, than they've ever been

Burn all the photographs inside my head

Malevolence and memories are better off dead

It's like floating,
sinking in a deep pool
of potential raindrops
that are destined to fall
on your head.

I watched the sun quietly collapse
and heard it plea through gasping breaths
for a few final seconds to repent.

What a thing of beauty.

Tonight my room has me pondering
how something still so fresh and foreign can also feel very my own.
Cram a couple of out of tune guitars
and a dozen dusty books into four walls and I will call it home.
And I will wonder of those before me who had also called it home,
and of those destined to
long after I have gone from it.
And we will always share
this deafening bond
of discarded skin cells clinging to the walls, buried clumsily under the thousand secrets we've thrown at them.
How many prayers have been whispered that only they could hear?
How many tears soaked up by the floorboards?
How many pleas for redemption have they ignored?
Painted in the shades of our voices howling our favorite songs,
stained by those erratic epiphanies that blew our brains all over them.

To the Great Big Something,
Please send my sincerest good feelings
To my Wall Brothers and Sisters

You know
I still remember the sweet release of quiet chemicals
into my pulsating brain
the first time I kissed you.

You know
I won't soon forget.

You know
I still feel the silent tingle of your words
on my skin.
Desperate hands reaching, longing for you.

And you know
I can feel the warmth of the sunlight falling through your bedroom window
delicately wrapping us up together
while your head rested on my chest.

I can always smell your hair
when I inhale
and I love you
when I exhale.

But you know that.