bandanna knotted in your hair,
you are
eloquently attired, and almost
always a little late; it ok.
you aren't
beholden
to standard notions of
punctuality or
Americanized dreams of
mechanistic triumph over the
virus of Nature.
you are more and less and equal to
the sum of your
constituent parts and
you are exquisite.

he's
tripping, but not
coerced by gravity;
rather a Molotov cocktail of
endorphins lobbed straight at his
prefrontal cortex.
some find this
distasteful,
some find it
deplorable;
god help me,
I find it adorable.
(it's the only time he'll
admit he loves me)

step one: mark out your
territory, bordered by
sea surf on the one side and
beach towels on the other;
dig a moat to the left and right so
no one can intrude upon your
Fortress of Solitude.
step two: build a sandcastle.
ignore the imminent
tides and the omnipresent
ravages of gravity; they are
irrelevant to your
Dream of Isolation.
step three: come to realize
that you are not
happy despite
getting exactly what you wanted:
welcome to the real
world kiddo. I hope you
found what you're
Looking For.

it's not even noon, but
my thoughts are drenched with
***, bound and gagged.
you're dancing around the kitchen, clad
only in a pair of
lace ******* you paid
too much for at Victoria's
Secret liaisons by the
seaside, sand sieving through your hair:
all forms of metal-backed currency taste
like ***** on your fingertips stuffed
roughly in my mouth,
call me a ****
pretty please?
promethazine slathered over
watermelon sherbert and
soaked in Sprite; put a lid on it and
shake vigorously until well mixed.
Xanax exacerbated migraines mean
naptime for me, and I forgot to tell you
the Gatorade is spiked with *****
(or maybe tequila; I've well and truly
forgotten) and all of this
is just another means of
replacing you.
you're wrapped in an
ecru trench coat,
cinched at the waist over
concealed weaponry:
unlicensed pistol and wet coral *****
constrained by a black leather holster and
cobalt cotton.
you kissed me with
******* in your nostrils and
nosebleed on your lips;
you killed me with
contempt in your mouth and
venom on your nails.

my ***** Little Secret, symbolized
by ***** words and little idiosyncrasies and
secret secret liaisons;
je c'adore,
laying Control alongside
cast off clothing and kicked off wet *******,
heartbeat aflutter beneath your
oh so deliberate ministrations and
thighs aquiver beneath your
oh so deliberate teeth.
my wrists chafe; bound by bitter steel to demure wood,
powerless
or rather
entirely in your power.
you've always loved it,
the thrill of exploration, of
Newfoundland, of
conquer and subjugation and ravishment;
your tongue flickering against my
**** like eiderdown,
fingertips tracing spirals and Möbius
Strips upon my *******.

they're nothing alike, but they both rejected you in similar ways and that means that they're more alike than you'd like them to be. parallelism is everywhere and try all you want you can't avoid the syncretism of the universe, the constant assimilation and recreation, the mundane Phoenix, no ashes but still - rebirth. you know if you listen to drake right now, tucked under the covers and spooning the pillow like a lover liable to leave, you will be sad all night, possibly through the morning, bleary-eyed in chemistry and barely aware in rhetoric; you didn't do the assigned reading and haven't started looking at apartment leases yet. my roommate's shoulder is healing and mine is just now beginning to ache; parallelism is everywhere, and try as I might, I can never seem to outrun it.

about to clamber
into bed when I looked out the window:
no moon hangs sky-side

the full moon was just this week,
wasn't it, and yet
I can't spot Selene
anywhere in the **** sky,
***** was supposed to be here
by 10:30 at the latest,
and now it's nigh on 11 and my
lunar lover is impossible to find.

cellular abuzz:
tragedy mixed with twitter
notifications.

"What's wrong with you?" he asked through a chuckle, and then it hit me. I knew exactly what was wrong with me. I was passionate about things, and never about people. I had loved people, but always platonically, or platonic and gilded with a crush or wrapped in lust that I always brushed off with innuendos and flippancy. I had never loved another person the way I loved twisting my brain around a calculus problem or constructing a flame chart. I had thought of people in a romantic sense more than I had evaluated people for science bowl, but lust and love had never consumed me as the issue of organizing practice and evaluation and cuts within the handspan of a month. I always fell in love with things, and never with people, and that's why already, not even 16 yet, I've reconciled myself to die alone.

phloem in your veins;
your tongue curls around
the syllables of my name
erotically, and I'm
daydreaming about
your tongue curling around
my ******* while you talk circles about
calculus and chemistry.
woodgrain and
blood veins and
gun-splattered gore-brains,
the kitchen counter
saturated in sherbet and
awash in girl-***
while you writhe next to the
fruit bowl, in flagrante delicto.
we conquered the universe with a
steady stream of xenon ions, probing
deep into the velvety wet folds
of the galaxy, *******
to the laws of physics, *******
stretching you out.

the metro came
clickety-clack, clickety-clack,
velocity spit out by metal wheels
and metal gears.
and I thought about
How It Would Feel
jumping in front of that
mechanized Titan.
(loving you is not easy)
brutalizing pain and then
nothing but ******* blessed silence.

then I realized
I already knew this sensation.
(loving you is not easy)

liquid crystal display
glimmering salacious self-imagery at you,
your lips parted and breath
staccatoing along, flitting just
behind the beat, like your aunt's
first dance at the wedding reception (before
she's had enough to drink) or
her last (when she's had
too much)
she was in the passenger seat
on our drive homeward, leaning in
to the driver's seat conspiratorially,
oblivious to your beauty splayed out
exhausted in the backseat.
"she's my
baby niece, and you better not
**** with her
heart, you hear me missy?"
and I assured her I wouldn't as you
laughed and laughed, bell peals
in the backseat and church bells
echoing in my ear, past and possible
future, sodium vapor lights
slipping away along the highway as
your aunt slid back into the passenger seat.
"so"
"so"
"she's quite a
character," I say, bemused, and your
eyes crinkled at the corners like
newspaper redesigned during crumpling as
kindling for the fire, blue and blue and blue
in the backseat.
"that's true"
"just like you"
"just like me" you agree,
crossing your legs, legs that go on
for dynasties in thigh highs and
your dress riding up too high for my eyes
to focus on the taillights ahead of us when
paradise is in the rearview:
love is
cold lobster bisque
in a big bowl in bed in the morning,
two spoons and a carton of orange juice
arrayed on the covers atop our
entangled legs.

my whole mouth tastes like metal,
copper pennies from before
The Great Zinc Switch
filling my warm wet mouth.
cigarette smoke hazing
my sinuses like a frat rush
and I'm desperately in need of an Advil.
let me place my coppery lips
on your bronzed skin,
Amman to Atlanta,
nails like knives and
The Book of Biology
teasing hormonal touches and hydration.
iron oxide keeps flaking off my
skin, eczema and psoriasis in rust, and
the guitars in my ears are ******* furious.
and still:
sweat and *** in the sheets, your love
lingering on my palate like a
too sour wine; you fermented and curdled
in my mouth, and
to taste you now
is agony.
time is dilating around me in ripples;
I cough until the gas in my stomach releases itself; crystal abrasive.
it's all drugs and
tinder matches these days,
****** kids...
total sunbeam, in my opinion
there's still enough for
a couple more
hits, it's still rolling,
words cloud around my head like
so much weedsmoke, Storm clouds
on the horizon of my parietal lobe
and I feel fine.
I am fine.

I always hated art.

as a kid, the forty-five minutes
every ******* Friday and Wednesday was
excoriating. even though
the other kids adored
fondling their fingers through paint
swatches, it just wasn't for me.
until I met you, my muse and my
canvas, your shuddering skin a
cream tableaux for my
lust to reimagine
pointillism cubism impressionism
le renaissance haut
in scratches and bites and
streaks of saliva criss-crossing
goosebumped skin.

I always hated art.

princess,
don't you know your castle is a prison?
you may live comfortably,
but you live chained.
let me take you away.
I cannot promise you luxury;
I can only promise you love.
I know that this
[love]
is a trifle to trade kingdoms for,
but I ask all the same,
palm upturned and hand outstretched.
let me take you away.
I promise to make it
worth your while.
(I promise to make it
up to you)

the death
of self, exhaled, borne upon
wafts of
air, and
I, with my self-conscious
prose and pretensions
of intellectualism,
and I, dreaded I -
there is a beauty in
ideology; even wastrelism,
being the muck of the earth and
much reviled by Proper Gentlemen,
has its allure and adherents
those disciples of Dionysus,
bacchanalia becoming banal by
sheer repetition:
*****, *****, *****, shotgunned beers, and then-
TEQUIIIILA!!
crowed at the top of their lungs,
memory expunged by
hepatic-processed organic compounds.
of course, these mannerisms are simply
beneath you, disdainfully
catalogued by keen eyes:
no, your form of forgettance
is much more forceful, much less
fanciful and romanticized:
your amnesia is
absolute,
it required nothing less than
total dedication, mortification,
death of self as you
expatiated lusts, loves,
aught but ambitions remain,
and now, you have triumphed:
you stand solitary, skyscrapers
shining for your personal
pleasure, yet you can find,
none.

I remember:

you, in black lace ******* and
little else, crushed close
by gravity,
weak winter afternoon sunlight
streaming in and out of your car,
HD Netflix in your backseat.
my fingers drumming insistently
upon your collar bone,
my mouth pressed against your shoulder
as I sing so softly in your ear,
a concert for one.
((only you're invited))
your hair all over your bare
back and black
lace wedged up tight against your
muscle. your lips are
cold against my skin and our feet
are ******* freezing and the heater is
all the way up but not nearly enough.
I let my fingers parse through your
vertebrae, Dr. Lecter planning
a meal; slice here,
cleave there, remove viscera, season and
cook: magnifique.
time and history are
mercury in my clenched fist;
my nails are biting into my skin, and
liquid silver moments gone by are
flowing freely from my slackened grip.

you were never an artist;
I'm sorry but it is true.
once, you sketched me
(sharpie on loose leaf, 2013)
and while I was touched by the gesture
[labor of love that it was]
it really looked more like your older brother.
now, your art is shared for mere
moments
(stylus on snapchat, 2014)
but you are still no artist.
you are an auteur, a lover, a curator,
finessing your homages to your youth
[pokemon, zelda, batman]
you may not be an artist
but I love you all the same.

she smiled at me
through lab goggles and
a light, latex-gloved touch;
I blushed, looking down at my feet;
I caught sight of
the unseemly lump of
flesh on the table between us.
strange, that this dissection was so
[Russian Nesting Dolls]
meta; two brains with bodies
dissecting one without.
technicolor dreams drenched in
formaldehyde leaching out
upon the stainless steel table
parietal lobe corpus callosum Brocke's
area god I think I love
this girl I

poetry isn't just for white people, Vivian
isn't a girl's name, and I will
wear these white jeans past Labor Day.
we forget that we could
touch the stars if we *******
tried, but instead we are
here, drowning in atmosphere,
choking on our inhibitions.
there are ten pills tucked
in the very back of your desk;
you love them but
they're about to become a
crutch, and you are frightened.
I don't **** with that
new ****,
but it's not like you care.
I'm still the same *******
idiot, total trash, I
deleted your number
and I won't send you
snapchats,
I wonder if you
deleted my dickpics.
lost intimacy, windowsill
cacti, a Ziplock full of ******* stuffed
inside your pillowcase;
I went for a run, your
name traipsing about my
prefrontal cortex, smashing
memories, beheading roosters,
screaming incoherently about
subprime mortgages and
credit derivatives.
the government is lying about
9/11 but no one really cares;
the government is arming oppressive regimes in
Missouri but white people don't care;
would that I had such
willful ignorance, the right to
ignore the slaughter on our
front lawns.
my parents started from the
bottom, they survived in
America, decapitated birds on the doorstep.
I do not have their strength and I am
washing Xanax down with Gatorade and
refusing to apologize.

"I have a religion
I just don't ******* know"
so spoke
the blonde boy
across the aisle
in the beanie and the falcons shirt.
(he's a high school freshman
and already so
disillusioned?
would that I had been so wise!)
and that's my problem
I just don't ******* know
(no one ******* knows)
where is
your spiritual magnetic north?
where did you find your deities?
in the bracing wind
shearing slantways along your soul?
in the crackle of sparklers
arcing towards the ground from burnt fingertips?
in the murmur of dawn
crossing the horizon-threshold with trepidation?

"write poetry for me" she said
but how do you
write poetry for someone
whose splendor eclipses
the magnificence of the sun?
trying to encapsulate
You
in words would be akin to
"caging" a lioness
in a prison of fine china.
so perhaps instead
of trying my hand at writing
about you
I will simply say this:
I Like You A Lot

laying in bed with ephemeral kate:
her hands are
brazen, fingernails clenching upon
my hips beneath the sheets,
her grip barely elucidated beneath
buttercream bedsheets.
her pale pink *******
cast aside hours ago,
and now the sun slants
westward upon her bedroom walls.
I laid waste to her skin,
ravaging her with lips and tongue and teeth,
and I am
sated, if only for the moment,
scent of her skin upon my tongue and
her ****** a badge of honor upon my mouth.
her bedsheets are ruins,
UNESCO World Heritage Site
waiting to be uncovered and reclaimed;
if it wasn't oh so lovely,
laying languorous limbs
asprawl, your stomach pulsing beneath
my thigh, her chest
rising and falling, rising and falling,
beneath my head; I always boasted I was
cutest when sleepy, and she always
murmured assent with a halfsmile;
that ******* halfsmile, playing
around the corners of her
endlessly kissable mouth,
lips glistening with a mix of
lipgloss and ***.
the sun dips down towards the horizon,
a girl hurrying homeward a minute after curfew;
her nails traverse upwards,
scouring my spine; my mouth is
pressed against her neck, tentative
words and laps embossed upon
the hollow of her throat.
she laughs, she sighs,
endlessly inimitable kate.

After your lecture on
polyphase something-or-the-others
we meet at my house which is also
your house. We were going to make dinner
but
you're wearing those square black glasses and
a tight lacy blouse and
that **** pencil skirt that hugs your ***
and those black stilettos and
I can't help myself. I lean
across the stove and twirl
it off, condemning the pasta to half-cookedness
and then I
grab you around the waist
pull you flush against me
and kiss you breathless
one hand on the small of your back
the other
on your *** kneading and squeezing
eliciting gasps from your parted lips that
end up between my teeth.
your trembling hands frantically
unbuttoning my shirt as I unzip your
skirt and throw it to the corner your
blazer and castaway your
blouse and then you're in your
bra and dampened *******, fingernails
scratching and raking and clawing at
the small of my back with your
legs spread in an inverted triangle and your
tongue in my mouth. I unsnap your
bra and moments later your
******* are under lipsteethtongue and then
lipsteethtongue
kisssuckbite
lower
and
lower
until
lipsteeth­tongue
kisssuckbite at
your ******* and your
***** until
gasping squealing moaning
you ****** your
juice in my
mouth and on my
lipstongueteeth.
The pasta is wasted.

rivers of salt; saccharine silicon and
iridescent nightmares;
kids carve their names into trees
because their concept of forever is
three summers forward;
entropy demands a tithe, a
forfeiture of lives; decimate your herds
and still
no, it is not enough.
know it is not enough.

don't keep your sweet little mouth
open too long; sugar attracts flies,
and pretty soon your
teeth will be teeming
with maggots and rot,
streptococcus sanguis
cheerfully wearing down your enamel
like you wore down my inhibitions.
"it'll be fun," you said, dropping
one hundred milligrams
on your tongue, firmly grasping the back
of my neck, and applying your lips to mine.
one hundred milligrams
slide down my throat, and despite myself,
I laugh, because even when I'm scared
I want to be with you.

the Black Angel is God On Earth; she is
lonely beyond belief, and I give her a hug.
people forget that monsters have
feelings too, and
God?
God is the biggest monster of them all.

God is entropy, and she is
unimpressed by the pyramids
on your dollar bills; she will devour
the stars and the planets and newborn
babies swaddled in blankets,
and she yet hungers:
redwoods and sequoias and aloe vera,
microchips and inkjets and MacBooks.

we are crowded around the bonfire,
s'mores and cheap liquor, your hand on
my thigh; the heavens have
opened up, drenching us
in starlight: I have never felt more
beautiful. you raise my wrist to your
mouth, placing a gentle kiss on my
scaphoid and my lunate; you swipe
your tongue across supple flesh
before clamping down with your teeth;
I am seeing stars and feeling lovely
and I am so, so enamored with you and
so, so happy you are here.

I am Atlantis, and you, the sea.
I am glorious and ethereal; you are tangible and serene.
you are rhythmic yet unpredictable, flowing into every crevice and crevasse of Me you can.
I am not nearly as impressive without you, the force of You bearing down and on me in every way, thirteen atmospheres of pressure holding me in this ideal shape.
one of these days, you're going to crush me.
one of these days, I'm going to let you.

you were my Doctor.
your touch my own personal TARDIS.
guiding me through new worlds
of pleasure,
introducing me to new species
of endorphins.
(I've never been
so ******* hot
in my life)
you made me feel
gorgeous.
(if only for a moment)
you made me feel
special.
(even if you've had
other companions
before)
you unwound me
lay me bare;
I was like a padlock beneath the
sonic screwdriver of your
delicate
oh so deliberate
ministrations.
(please come back)

I'm entranced,
your hair gleaming like copper
in the summer sun.
(I could swear you never
looked so good)
your laugh is floating on the wind, like
infant arachnids with silk parachutes.
(I could swear nothing ever
sounded so lovely)
your freckled shoulder is exposed to the world,
dappled and *flawless
(Atlas himself had not
shoulders so strong)
(I could swear I was
in love with you)

the trees are rustling,
whispering welcome, aerodynamic
flutter shuddering leaves;
there is an insect
traversing my backpack,
up one strap, across,
down the
other; moss covered Buddha
staring serenely at me,
myself returning the favor and
silently scrutinizing him.
it is tranquility, dyed yellow and
dying leaves floating to cobblestone.
birds chirping: sonic reminiscence of
Migos songs played at too-high volume
in your car, riding shotgun,
screaming punchbuggy and
stealing kisses at stoplights.
my legs are folded like
a lotus, albeit less
colorful and more
awkward edges, bamboo
casting shadows beside
me. wait- was that thunder?
are those raindrops?
or perhaps a signal that
talking about you
and photodocumenting my life
aren't going to do any good.

we built our love like Rome built an empire; we built it over years and generations of pregnant moments; we built it to conquer; we built it to last as if unaware of empires' propensity to crumble around those who loved it best. maybe that was the problem, that we loved our empire of adoration and not each other. perhaps we were too enraptured with how good we were together: we always made your friends jealous, we took the best photos together, my parents loved you better than they did me. maybe we were too wrapped up in We and forgot to worry about we. we fought our battles, our Pugachev's Rebellions and our Glorious Revolutions. we were so secure within the city limits we forgot there was a whole world out there, and by the time we tore down the walls to find a world awaiting, we were obsolete; we thought we hadn't needed anyone, and now no one needed us.

I learned fear watching a twenty-something white man with three goody-goody sons and a wife of a teacher or maybe a teacher of a wife sermonize on hell clothed in the black cassock I imagine death decreed all pastors should wear in reverence to the end-all be-all. fear was realizing that all your friends that shared the same skin color were bound to hell by an omnipotent and benevolent and above all merciful god who couldn't tolerate any dissent. we were children, we were taught, didn't Jesus love children best of all?
I grew up, and then it wasn't just my friends who shared my skin color; no none of my friends believed in a higher power at all, and I was unsure I did.
but fear of eternity in hell kept me devout and that was when I learned that there was something worse than hell, there was heaven. how could I be happy without the people I loved? would God make me forget all about them? how could you be perfectly happy in a utopia with no problems to surmount? how could an eternal God judge mortal crimes so harshly? and then I realized that not even people who had dedicated their lives to preaching the word of god knew why God would allow it. I heard ******* arguments that hell was God's last great mercy, allowing those who did not believe in him to not have to be near him for eternity; I didn't believe them for a second. people are full of ****, but only because god created us in his image.

there are two types of girls,
or so I was told:
church girls and
bad girls, and my mother
said this with such finality it was
clear they were mutually exclusive.

of course,
you know this is
Not True;
you once characterized yourself as
"the type of 'church girl' to light a
blunt in the bathroom (just sayin)" and
that single quote says more about you than
all this fragile wording, this silica dust
heated and wrought into intricacies and
metaphor and conceit.
You
are far more than
a bad girl,
are far more than
a church girl,
will never be
my girl
and this is how it should be.
you are not
to be domesticated
a la Robin Thicke; you are
uncontrollable, your lust and
disdain for monogamy
twin hurricanes, destroying
New Orleans in a heartbeat and
rendering FEMA
impotent in the next.

there are two types of girls:
other girls, and
You.

there's basically
no difference between
clouds and fog, and
thunderstorms and reduced visibility
have both put the fear of God in me;
loving you is all
pain and lust, interchangeable,
interchangeable. slippery
squealing synthesizers, aching
for your touch and
dying to throw these
LCDs and LEDs and private
snapchats into the Recycle
Bin,
and I am glittering in the dark, swerving
across the median, drunk driving
on the thought of seeing you just a little
sooner than never.

every breath tastes
rancid on my tongue;
fun fact, if all you eat is
raspberry yogurt and
hypersaturated strawberries,
your ***** looks like
Jackson ******* plus
Picasso's Rose Period.
has anyone ever told you
that drunk texting you is like
standing in front of a Caravaggio;
it's dusky and dark and sensuous and I
******* adore getting lost in
translation. Cezanne draws solely in
molecular geometry, tetrahedral,
trigonal pyramidal, octahedrons
scrawled across the canvas and doused
in living color. Thursday night already
seems so intangible,
a bad dream that didn't dice up my liver
like a ******* sous chef. Thursdays
have come and gone, the weekends
ever-beckoning, and the scent of Smirnoff
stays in my sinuses.

I started dreaming in black and white.
you never seemed to
belong in this
technicolour drenched era,
an age of blood
carnations and sapphire Bomb Pops.
***** yellow cardboard boxes in
fluorescent refrigerated cases:
there are goosebumps on my arms and you
hated grocery shopping; I made the lists
and I made the buys; you made the
money, you made love.
we bought a Cezanne print for the
great room; it hangs above the frozen
hearth, grey sunlight filtered through
the cellulose blinds. there is a too tall
glass of scotch on the coffee table beside
a too empty scotch bottle and a too full
bottle of benzodiapenes: I haven't been
self-preservative, and you've been
self-prescribing.
we weren't cut out for this era,
an age of ***-coated lips and
onyx Benzes; we would've been better
in black and white, where our
color-saturated demons couldn't come, where our gem-studded cancers couldn't
eat us alive.

after tastes like aftershocks,
pineapple lips and papaya tongue.
sunshine sloshing
all over us like liquor and
your hair so like shale
soaking beneath the sun.
Artemis is goddess of the moon:
where did you think lunar witches came from?
xanax bar after xanax bar
laid upon the vanity, crushed
and powdered up, snowdrifts
in blue and white.
oranges and blueberries and mango
in your lap, juice
across your thighs and earth in your mouth.

paint on callused fingertips,
paint dyeing German beer,
paint flickering fluttering trembling
across bare canvas skin as you
finesse, ink and watercolor at your
whim while you work. you are no
Caravaggio, much more a Gentileschi,
but Michelangelo himself would be
awed by your radiance, the subtle
art of your face and
brushstrokes of your curves,
spine sinuous undulating while you
dance for him.

I've been begging for you
to tell me something new for
months upon months, to tell me
that you are not the same,
that you cannot stand me,
that "I love you" was the Great Lie;
but you will not no never
you're too good for something so
base as hate or someone so
base as me but
you're still here and I
love you
and hate myself for it.

out goes the tide:
seafoam remains,
sticky white flecks caught on lips
of rock; how
sordid.
you traipsed on,
barefoot, undeterred by
pools of ocean-***
splashed upon every
cove afforded by
soaking wet sand.

you love
oh so many people,
but you only love them
by half-measures.
you've never been able
to be so exposed,
to love someone wholly,
to risk that you would
give someone your
all,
your end-all, be-all,
and find it
unreturned, simply
kept upon the fireplace mantle or
perhaps on the bookshelf,
unimportant ornamentation.

I am here,
laying in the grass,
eyes on the clouds and
mind in them.
I watch passing planes and their
twin streams of water
vapor arrow across the azure expanse
and I wish
I had
someone to share it with;
I wish
I had
shared it with you.

instead,
I am here,
laying in the grass,
daydreaming about boarding
a twin stream producing plane
and flying
the **** away from
here.

"you may keep small electronic de-
vices on, but please make sure all
cellular capabilities are
switched off."
then they switch off the cabin lights,
and I am here in the dark, iPod assaulting
my eardrums as iPhone assaults
my retinas. this is
How It's Meant To Be

me and my ephemeral avarice, my
electronic yearning;
Bethany Cosentino is crooning, a
private concert for one, I wish
Allen Ginsberg was my boyfriend;
the other boy isn't like me, he's
prettier but that's nothing
new is it?

of course, Ginsberg is dead and also
forgotten, by and large; same for
D. H. Lawrence, Caravaggio, Joan d'Arc,
all those I drew upon for my Wilde
persona. there is only
me now, and I am
alone.

how eager we are to forget
where we came from,
as though we weren't
dirt beneath God's
meticulous manicure mere
fractional eternities ago.
you stopped talking to me
just days ago, but
it feels like epochs;
time dilates in strange
manners, it truly is alien.
there are civilizations
that simply do not
measure time; things happen when
they happen, and that
is that. foreign concepts and
foreign languages slipping across
the tip of my tongue, while
foreign tongues work their way
into your every orifice.
I'm laying in bed, last night
was a bust, I drank a
little bit of whiskey but
not enough, it rained but
only briefly, and I
did not have fun but
I cannot complain;
at least I don't need
you anymore.

the wind whips
at your back like a
slave master;
the water trots
at your feet like a
dog scorned;
the pavement shoves
at your being like a
puberty-struck bully.

this violence is what you
live for, the constant
back and forth, back and forth,
of man vs. nature vs. man vs. self
round and round and round
you go,
laps at the criterium, muscle memory
firing, lactic acid eliciting
yearnings of tranquility you
push yourself on
just one more, just one more,
never allowing yourself respite as though
you were fleeing
Death herself.

my mind is cyclical,
Battle Bot on Hamster Wheel
installation art soon to be in
Tokyo, San Francisco, New
York, Chicago: every city
I had the languorous pleasure of
kissing You in.
being unkind to me is terrible and
yet I love being able to vent
my emotions like so much
sulfurous smoke. [redacted]'s in
his bunk bed, 30,000 feet up and
only 1 girl is invited;
****** brain frizzed out, wasted
girls coughing kush while we
contemplate wasted opportunities.