I take off my summer skin,
peel back bronzed afternoons
and cleave through
those muggy mornings
you were still here

but not for long.

There are holes in my brain          and I shovel words to bury
                                       that emptiness

I look for laughter                                          that's not my own

I search my hometown graveyard
                     the spaces of your affection

I'm flipping through the oldest books
                     ******* in the autumn air;

I cannot find the thing                                                  I lost

There are holes in my brain but I kept you,
                                       Heart,

                    perhaps a different way of craving
                                     wholeness

Crow's feathers like
The exoskeleton
Of a long-nose weevil,

The color of
Mom's grease-stained
Pots illuminated in moonlight.

They're a mind
That's gone dark
With a tunnel straight through,

Like a billion
Ants all piled
On- throbbing

Can you hear
Them *******,
Hear them slurping?

Those oily wings
Writhe in air like bodies
Launched from 90-story trade buildings

They close their eyes;
Sleep forever
Bathing in crow's feathers.

There's a certain wraith
in the cleaning of kitchens
scrubbing of floors
ringing of towels til
the fingers puff up
and bleach seeps
beneath your fingernails.

There's a certain wraith
to all these quiet burdens.

I've been collecting words
for years- cataloguing

feral and oblivion, catharsis and
iridescence. I keep gusto

in the drawer beside my bed.
I put visceral next to the broken

mirror you left. I've hidden marrow
next to vastness as if they are mine

alone. See how they slip out of me
like a ****** nose at just the wrong time.

The word of God
Is neon now-
It screams odious
Love to the silent
Collection of limbs
Beneath it.

Iridescence
Falls in irradiated
Waves, reaches the
Sedate, the wanderers
Of Asphalt Nightmares,
At last.

They can hardly hear it
Over the mumble of voices.
They shift, leave by way
Of saturated, naked streets
Steeped
In weariness.

The new God is
Neon- but all the same
Unheard; It's violent lights
Looking to the morally
Righteous; finds
No one.

Years ago, I limestoned
my way through girls,
cool and completely solid.
As they swayed,
sweet and sweat-inducing,
glossed in a perfunctory pink
at the foot of my bed,
I could feel them sinking
all the way through me,
swaying between
my synapses.

But now I'm crepuscular.
I'm seizing as girls
prism in front of me
like sequins,
like fool's gold.
They leave the door unlocked
behind them.

I was once told pyrite
isn't a lie if you know
it's pyrite- if it shows you
all its sides
individually and with care-

but I still wanted them to be solid gold.

I know a scared God
(I've seen a scared God)
A living-way-up-there God

Slumped outside our orbit of violence
We're wishing you just cared God

Upside while I'm downtown screaming:
YOU KNOW THIS ISN'T FAIR GOD

You're hiding up in nitrous heavens
A help-only-if-you-dare God

As our sins slip into the water supply
You've given us nothing to bathe in God

These California fires; these 2 a.m. stabbings
All this suffering isn't rare God

With nothing else to live up to
I guess we have to wear god.

The mechanism of my body is ticking away the moments:
clinical seconds, dehydrated hours, years washed too clean.

The orbit of my ribs makes its rounds with momentous clicking
felt as a ripple- a forte into seizure.

There's something industrial in the alignment of these organs:
A factory of ventricles straining against the assembly line.

I'm a blood clock, tragic motor; I'm an organism
too mechanical to hold.

With a liver like a coal burner and lungs to expel the smoke,
how can I find a way back to being human.

You're miles apart from
God, I know, but I see the
Divinity in

your careful silences
bottled tight insight
tight-lipped smiles.

I need to stop there.
Stop these abundant
love poems about the sorrows

I cannot fix

I wish I bled messy, black ink
to spill on your computer-coded fingers,
to blot out your terabyte blue eyes
from looking down at me.

I don't know differential calculus
and your ribs are engraved with unknowable equations
unsolvable to me, though I hear them
whispering to your heart in the quiet mornings.

I wish I understood the sighs
that fall from your logarithmic lungs
as they labor so intensely
to inflate your data ridden body.

Beryllium, Lithium, Nitrogen, Carbon
spill out of you like names of lost lovers
but they never sound so entrancing
on my own poetry-stained lips.

So while you chant them like worship
I'll be searching for divinity in those no-use words:
Incendiary, Ventricles, Ancillary, Phantasmagoria.
They fall from my mouth easier than even your name.

The deepness in your voice echoes outer space
Both vast and complicated
cold and distant
deep and so, so far away.

I can't touch you.

Birds of a feather flock together in the sultry atmosphere, whirring in and out of crepuscular clouds as if it were nothing special. feathers more like needles blacked under the godless face of the wind. The cliff's voice clings to their sun-smeared backs, reminds them of his own position on an empty, red planet and they sing back that gravity lament. The sky goes on about the lovely morning air and sunlight marches when all birds want is a place to lie down from that brittle flight, to rest their hollow bones filled with a lost longing.

Midday and the whisper of a chill rode the end of the breeze.
****** feet and a restless tongue; You never knew how to hurt me.
I didn’t know much about human anatomy but I could read charts
of the spine, heart, ribs, where are the unconventional entrances.
I decided on the space between the third and the fourth rib.
Dug in as hard as I could.

I chore by woozy by smoking everything in sight
I chore by medicating and letting the sides affect me
crying at roadkill by owning taking up space not taking care

I burden by poetry by reading you poetry
talking too fast remembering too little
by walking alone     unsafe

I chore by panicking at white trucks and appetite suppressants I didn’t ask for
crying (always) at eight years at five years at 24 months
at the always that keeps shrinking away from me

Now I chore astoundingly
by decluttering by choring myself cleaning and painting and feeling alive alive alive!

Though touching is not a burden to you. Groping is not a burden.
No-chore kissing and hands on my ***
whenever and too much to be frank
give me my boundaries my no's

But you should know
I am not a burden a task to complete dead weight snag hitch knot Loving
me is not a chore.

I wrote in a poem once that you didn't understand about a no one that you saw as yourself.
I felt your beating heart then and knew you now it's true
I can't touch you but it's no matter.

When something dies
We are bombarded with nevers
Never touch, never smell, never feel
Never kiss, never hold, never see
When I lost my something
My never was: happy again
Oh was it true

I used to be hollow and broken and gone from the world
but I found things and people and you
and those things helped me grow new parts
and those people mended the wounds in my head
and you made me want to be

Folding pizza boxes is my favorite part of my job
partly because it's simple
and partly because despite my messed up hand
I can still do it
And not just barely like I do everything else
I can do it like there's nothing wrong with me

When I was in the third grade
I made a list of things you could do
To someone you like.

My mom found it
And gave me the talk
And said, "I don't buy you these journals so you can write things like this."

I still write things like that but
I buy my own journals now.

I emptied myself to make room for more beauty
More loveliness and grace
More feminine glow and fragile perfection
And tight skin over protruding bones
But I lost all my kindness
And my compassion
I emptied my sympathy for others
And now I'm full of rosy allure but not much else.

There comes a time
When you check your blog more than your messages
Because he hardly ever texts anyway
And everything starts to look like him:
Your purse is unbearably heavy all the time even though you take things out of it everyday
And old shoe boxes show up out of nowhere and you run out of places to put them
And the things in your house keep piling up until everything is covered with something  and that stuff is covered with something
And you can never find anything but it's really too much to handle anyway
So you sit in your room and calculate the hours you've lost looking for things
Because it's 9:30 and you were ready at 6
He promised to text you but he may be lost under something else.

I would be mortified
Embarrassed
Shamed
Sickened
Horrified
Paralyzed
Petrifi­ed
Nauseated
Sick at myself
Humiliated
Self disgusted
(Oh what's the word for losing your last friend to bad writing)
No. You can't read my poetry.

I jump into things too much, too quickly
And often regret it later

I don't jump off of things much at all
And also regret it later.

Some days I drown more than others
And some days I can't write a single word
Other days I can write lots of sonnets with lots of words
That don't say much at all

Today I am drowning a lot more than usual
And I can't quite catch my breathe
long enough to write so
I typed this instead

I worked six hours today
And I still find myself
Skipping out of mcdonalds
With my sore and swollen feet
And an obscene smile spread across my face
Unable to make myself act accordingly
Because of you

You say your favorite Eagles song is Take It Easy
But I never liked that one
I prefer Take it to the Limit
Or I Can't Tell You Why
But hearing it now
Reminds me of you
And maybe that's enough to make it the best song I've ever heard

I tried to write a poem for my mom
Filled with warmth and admiration
That she could feel a deep happiness while reading.
I really did
But all that came out
Were a few poems about a mean boy at school
Some ******, unoriginal cliches
And a suicide note

So here it is:
"I'm so sorry"

We could keep driving
And let the wind touch us to sleep
And find ourselves somewhere new and safe

We could lay here for months
Talking about faraway places
Dreaming of a life with no consequences

We could forget it all
Together in a scorching blaze
And cool down slowly and frozen solid together

I could let you know
About these feelings that I've been growing
Inside my ribcage and nurtured so tenderly

We won't
I won't

I. Smoking
I can pull the feeling
Of my lungs burning
And throat sizzling
Into my mind and feel it
Even when it's not happening
And it's half yearning and half
Peaceful knowledge that
This is the most cowardly way to **** myself
And it's perfect for me

II. Stealing
It's not a thrill or
Anything like that
It's more like I'm entitled
To have these things I can't buy
Because I'm so sad and surely
Life owes me this
When it has failed me in everything else

III. ***
I get the most flack for the way
I love people with my body
I enjoy the intimate union
Of two bodies and souls
Feeling each other so closely
And forever tangling their two spirits
Together

Someone at the end of this hallway
Is wearing plaid shorts
And they look like the ones you always wear
For a minute I think
Oh god, it's him.
And I'm not sure if I'm happy or terrified
Nervous or excited
But it was you in that moment and that's all that mattered.

I did an experiment recently
The findings were negative
You actually can't **** your feelings away

My poem started trending
And I haven't felt that alive
In months
(Or is it years)

And the girl across the hallway
Is on her ninth chapter of a book she's writing
And I think about how
I'm two years older
And can hardly write three pages in one sitting

Maybe I'm not cut out for this

But what else is there

You're eyes look a lot like home
And that feeling swallows me up
And holds me, not tenderly, but with
A scorching intensity
That leaves me freezing with no way to warm my brittle bones
Whenever you blink
And that leaves me with a fatal hypothermia that I'll never recover from
Whenever you leave

I often build the house we could live in
With massive windows and towering ceilings
And an odd arrangement of candles that I'm so fond of
And you'll never see it but
That's ok.
And I do it all the hard way.
Because that's the truth about us.
It's hard and it won't ever happen but if it did
God wouldn't that be something

I could have kissed you in the car on the way to her house.
With the wind in my hair and the laugher in your eyes and It would have been so mind blowing and absolutely destructive

I could have kissed you in the park
While you were on the bench deciding what to do with me and I was pacing through the mud
Weighing my options like lead in my chest

I could have kissed you standing in your garage
Face to face in a competition
To see who would look away first. In front of all those people; in front of her and It would have been so terribly reckless and wonderfully stupid

But I often kiss you at your desk in biology two where we share a row separated by seas and planets and constellations that no one has seen before; four feet of endless distance.

It's the only place thats safe to lay my lips on yours because outside of my mind you have her. So I can't kiss you now.

I can't kiss you now.