I’m up before the sun most days

Drinking instant coffee and debating with myself

I write out all my thoughts and no conclusions come to mind

The phone rings off the hook but no one calls

I leave the house but never go outside

And every wall remembers what I’ve done behind fresh paint

No grounds for or from

I sleep before the dawn, between the lines

You say my personality revolves around exhaustion.
I say yours revolves around passivity and foolishness.

I saw my toes the other day.
I hadn't looked at them for months.
Indeed, they might have passed away.
And yet they were my best friends once.
When I was small, I knew them well.
I counted on them up to ten
And put them in my mouth to tell
The larger from the lesser. Then
I loved them better than my ears,
My elbows, adenoids, and heart.
But with the swelling of the years
We drifted, toes and I, apart.
Now, gnarled and pale, each said, j'accuse!--
I hid them quickly in my shoes.

I've been drinking about you baby
trying to drown you out of my head
but the poison makes you stronger instead

I've been smoking about you baby
inhaling you into my lungs
i miss the feeling of touching each others tongues

I've been pill popping about you lately
to make me feel more numb
the fact that i still need you is really pretty dumb

I have a kindness in me
That blooms and blooms
And it has eyes so wide
That when they gaze upon you
Kindness blossoms and waits
Salivating for opportunities
To be plucked
But those are rare
And more often than not
The petals are left searching for light
In an entirely dark room
And they fall one by one
Until they are kicked underfoot
Trampled, and lost

it's so easy to talk about loneliness and pain
to romanticize all of these things that i've been feeling
and throw in rhymes here and there

but how do i get myself out of this mess?
how do you fall in love when you're so uncomfortable
with yourself?

it's 5 am again and all i can think of is
how quickly my fingers hover over the keys
and there are people rising but
i still cannot sleep

i am engulfed in sad songs and books and the quotes
in those books that tell me more about myself
than i ever can

(sometimes i wish some dead poets were my friends
and then sometimes i wish i could put on a mask
and masquerade around as another person,
as a stranger even to myself
i feel like i'd be more comfortable then)

tell me, what does it feel like to fall in love?
does it feel like electricity crawling up and down your spine,
like warm fuzzy feelings swirling in your stomach like wine?
and does it last? or do people just pretend?
will i ever find love? or will i be all alone in the end?

I was with the ocean last night and your body
Was its vessel, overflowing.  Words were frail,
Drops indwelling about the shapeless sky,
Water reaching for its own height and breath,
Like touch, were as desperate letters exchanged,
Endlessly read, until like loamy vellums, they
Disappeared in our hands.  Inklings of tide-
Pool and driftwood.

                               My blood was a river that ran
Its course.  Members feeding your deltas and birds
Breeding where the water-russet sheds on pampas
And inverness.  Eyes like wing through ever—
Green, empties the fossil shell.  Fire, brimming
Mountaintops that were, for countless millennia,
Sleeping.  Did I mention that the earth moved?
No?  Her displacement was involuntary.

Then came the waterfalls, lifting throughout
Time.  The scent, searching for its identity,
The wave, calling to its own name— Ocean,
O— cean.  And flowers, opening like galaxies
In the after-light.  A universe of face and hand
With hunger for salt-rain and then the cloud
Burst-blue and spilt and spun more redolent,
Deities, in joyous creation.

I breathe, in your ocean, like a child unborn.