Stale cigarette smoke
Lingers longer than you did
Half a pack of death
Half a pack of relief
Clings to my sheets
Like a ghost refusing
to be exorcised

The apartment walls are as thin
As cell membranes
Your life is seeping into mine
Through osmosis

You're room is right above mine
And sound and fury and smells
Come through the divide
Flowing freely as wine

Our clocks are aligned
The car door slams in the parking lot at two am
You drunkenly lead girls up to your lair
Unaware of anyone else in the building

You **** with the windows open
The bed creaks above me
A major seismic event
Complete with a screaming damsel

All my hopes hung on one promise
One impossible magical promise
Everything traces back
To this one point
That only holds up
When I don't look at it directly
It hangs in my peripheral
Out of time, out of focus
Fluid in definition
Like a monolith
It supports me
Like a ghost
It haunts me
Like gravity
It grounds me
Like a black hole
It consumes me

This nature of me,
the skin over my bones over my poetry,
I've missed this tender discourse,
the rhyme and reason of my slight frame held against glass.

I see myself better when I'm not trying to cry,
and I'd left this naked art so long
I could no longer tell the difference between
a night with stars and a night without.

This is buttermilk to starvation,
drowning twice and coming up for air.
The first mouthful aches like forestfire,
by the third I am a gulping animal.

Her eyes gleam in the light
Like stolen treasure
Her laugh replays in your mind
Long after she leaves
She is never there long enough
For the cracks to surface
For her laughter to ring hollow
For you to notice that
Her smile doesn't reach her eyes
She wanders from place to place
But she is not lost
She is fleeing
From the ghosts
That haunt the church
That she left behind
Five thousand miles ago

Old poems dead and buried
In death the words deteriorated
Into things I no longer recognized
Strange arcane relics
Gateways to past minds
Awaiting to be excavated
By wandering eyes

I want to write long rambling letters
Like Ginsberg, Kerouac Burroughs
Stream of consciousness
The sea of unconsciousness

But I have no correspondents
No one writes letters
None of my friends ever have
No one puts pen to paper

Texts are ethereal wisps of smoke
Letters are concrete things
That belong in old shoeboxes
Until the words fade into obscurity

I should deliver my letters to the void
With no mailing address, no stamps, no nothing
Just drop them in mailboxes
Like a single raindrop falling into the sea

The words won’t be trapped
In my head or in in old notebooks
Or in undiscovered corners of the web
But floating out there in the kosmos forever