"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

you *******, with your
smirk and your bow tying fingers and your
****** classic fu-cking rock music:
who let you in here, to lumber
about the lambs like
Putin and Crimea ??
why do you bother
introducing sophomores to
Oedipus and pronouncing the
center O (like it
******* matters; linguistics are
more organic than
carbon-based chemistry) or
teaching seniors of
Two Vast & Trunkless Legs of Stone
standing alone in the desert,
artifice of arrogance just as
graduation and self-congratulatory
partying and revelry and diploma-framing.

I think I know:
masochism is your middle name, and
maybe, after all, it is worth it,
when a collegiate who barely remembers
your face and never remembered
the color of your eyes, or his homework,
name drops Hemingway and Faulkner
to a college professor, blossoming an
argument, and later, a companionship.

maybe, after all, it is worth it.

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.

shuddering: throbbing head
mirroring throbbing sonics, floor
ashudder with stampede of
après-teen feet.
tonight you are
out of your depth,
not a fish out of water or a
drowning man, rather
an exercise-averse astronaut,
muscles atrophied upon return homeward;
you knew this was imminent, yet-
yet.
you weren't ready for
this, and there is sweat upon your skin and
tequila upon your tongue:
you have attained nirvana, and
a huge ******* to the Dalai Lama.
you are
self-immolating in your sorrow,
and no one can help you
because you won't let them.

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.

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.

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.

I am drunk and ensconced in
layers of
bedsheets and blankets,
delirious, dreaming of
You. if only-
if only You were here, to be
entangled in my
arms, constricted under the
comforter, searching your feelings for
love for me while we
use ectodetectors to
search for the ghost in the
machine.

burnett's in the bloodstream now,
his cheap strawberry liquor
cheapening my strawberry kisses by
increasing supply in the absence of
appreciable increase in demand;
Economics 101, taught by the
professor in the tweed jacket
with the leather elbows.
you say you want to
practice black magic, and I'm
so down; god you're so hot.
I just want you to kiss my back and
cast a spell on me,
but you've already done the
latter, and you will
never do the first.

hit my cellphone in the morning
and tell me you love me;
who else will love my
frozen skin at 6:15 AM,
my eyes glittering, awash in
LED bliss.

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)

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.

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)

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.

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.

the forest beckons, eddies of
wind rustling leaves, whispering
"welcome, welcome."
(a kilometre away,
there's a lumber yard)
the branches are blown about by
the wind, a come-hither
I am loathe to resist,
and I am struck with memory:
you,
naked,
standing shyly at the foot of your bed
one hand upon your
thigh, the other
crooking a solitary
finger, allowing me approach
as you look at the floor, hair
burqaing your face.

I am watching trees
blur by train windows,
and I'm reminded of
the green of your eyes,
and the woodgrain veins just
barely visible on your arms.

do you think
that when the leaves
selfimmolate
in amber and scarlet and sienna
it's their equivalent of blushing?
and when they are
coerced earthward by
the insistence of gravity
it's how they fall
in love?
if these are true
do you think
that the leaves
are as enamored with each other
as I am with you?

Let's run away together
and buy a cramped, one bedroom apartment
in New York or Prague or San Fran or Bristol
wherever you like
(I could never begrudge you anything)
I'd sleep so much better
with you in my arms
(I wouldn't be scared
that you would **** yourself
in the night)
I'd learn to cook
vegitarian
just for you
and
I'd make you tea
when you were sick;
You'd tell me
"You're pretty"
every morning
and mean it
and
You'd read me
Nabokov and Ginsburg and Shakespeare
over breakfast on the weekend.
We'd go to the museum
and discuss
artistic movements
and painting techniques;
We'd go to concerts
and dance (though
neither of us
can)
We'd lie in the grass
under the stars
naming off constellation
basking in each others' proximity.
In short, we would
love each other;
*** each other;
make each other happy.
Let's run away.
let's run away together.

let me first
apologize; it is neither
fair nor right, that I have placed
you, human that you are,
upon a pedestal, made you
object of my affection,
concurrently greater and baser than
all of your peerage.
second,
let me apologize again.
I've been ****** up for
a while now, mentally and
blood alcohol levelly, and it is
not fair
that you have to deal with me at my worst.
third,
let me
apologize
once more,
because even at my best I was not
worth your time, yet I persisted
insinuating myself into your life when I
had no right to and that,
that was my cardinal sin, was it
not?
that I had the audacity to
love you, and then
to demand you
love me back.

S-P-A-R-T-A-N-S
this chant has been
emblazoned on your prefrontal cortex for
years yet, and you'll bear it
upon your chest for years yet and
yet: you aren't certain
what it's all meant, whether it's been
Worth Your Time
and in this way, cheerleading has become
stand-in for
every boy who's let you down
month after month after month.

too bad you can't
unlearn their habits or
unfire the synapses they triggered;
too bad you can't
hop in a delorean to
unwind the time you spent with them.

but if you could:
would you?

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.

strawberry vines are
creeping over my memories of
you, rose stained glass and jasmine
in my hair. I'm trying to
numb my thoughts of you,
but the pain of the needle buried
deep in my gums keeps me
******* crying, and I can still
feel my ******* face. no one
ever tells you,
falling in love is easy. loving
someone else is the hard part.

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)

oh
honey, with your
butter cup smile and your
butter pecan hair, you're
bound to make me fall
in love with you sometime.
too bad, because it's
evident that would be awful
on both sides. for me,
because you would not
reciprocate; for you,
because you could not
reciprocate; c'est
la vie, ma chérie, trop méchant
et n'est pas sympa
mais Dieu t'aide, tu
l'adore.

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.

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.

god you look so good.
it's taking every shard of
Decency I have
(and they are shards; I dropped
Decency a long time ago)
not to shove you up against a wall
and press my mouth oh-so-insistently
against yours,
hands rough, partitioned from your skin
by that ******* dress
(god, how I hate that dress)
(god, how I love that dress)
your nails clawing at my back
in feline fury, gasping for breath
as my thigh nestles between yours.
(we're just getting started)

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.

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.

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.

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

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 remember,
stretching out,
the whole expanse of
the universe naked and bare
for you and me;
still,

still, still
as the night, though all I remember
is nothing, as if there was no you and no me.
turned inside-out,
my sins laid bare
for public consumption. Love of

my life, Helen of
my Troy, still
I adore thee. the little bear
to my Ursa Major, remember,
remember, do not forget! that without
You I am not me.

For me,
you would do anything, you son of
Adam, you would never turn me out,
despite my myriad disappointments, still
you love me, remember?
(please don't let this come to bear)

Bare,
if you would be so kind, your soul for me;
I want to see you bleed and remember
days long past, bygone eras of
stillness, still, oh so still
before Pandora let all but Hope out.

Out! Out!
you let slip the dogs of war, and they mean to lay us bare.
They destroyed the water still:
we die of dehydration, you and me,
in this desert of
our own avarice ----- remember

me, I implore you, out and out,
days of old when our skin was bare
and our sins still clothed. please. remember.

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.

I can see three skies
on the interior of my eyelids,
and I just got a text from
my friends at a party; it's
well past dark and it feels like
Genoa and Home and London
all in one. I keep
waking up and
dozing off again;
******* fits and
trazodone dreams.
I feel like I'm trapped
in a time loop; Groundhog Day,
but every day I love a new
person,
but you
always come around,
always on my mind
and I
do not know how to keep you
out of my brain, how to
keep you near me.

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.

women swilling white white in glasses;
remember when you took me
out to dinner with your parents?
your father peppered the
salmon to excess and the
sommelier to exhaustion:
what year? where were the
grapes grown? what would you pair
with this? what about with that?
your mother gave me a
knowing glance as he prattled on,
and you shook your head in bemusement.

I wonder what
looks she gave
you while I was distracted.

you're
sitting on a ledge,
feet dangling in the fall air
and you won't ******* shut up
because you're with Her
and you feel like a
star:
consuming hydrogen,
creating helium.
no one ever
warned you about how
others would
step into your heart
like they owned the place
(and now she did)
looking around, nodding,
"yes yes, this'll do, but
what's the rent like?"
no one ever warned you
that you'd let them stay for free.