You've got this fire
blazing away in my mind;
burning through my time,
making me breathless,
shreiking anxiety,
a chaotic unrest.
Heat in my veins
and my douse just
no more the same.

You once said,
sleep is for the weak
and I feel like Achilles
limping across the battleground of your
subconscious; eyes half shut
are eyes half open.
How long will it be
before I too drift into
the limbo of your nights
and forgotten
when you awake?

Sleeplessness is a lonely kingdom.

I could promise myself discipline with the daylight,
but what if I told you that I lied under the moonlight?
Sinners never sleep,
sinners never sleep.

They lie awake and talk
with the wings of Gabriel.
They don't shut their eyes;
there are stories in the picture houses of their own.
Of lie and deciet.
And guilt and anguish.

They'll never sleep.

They'll howl with the night
and forget why they were meant
to darken their hearts to match the sky.

They'll never glow. They'll never beat.
I'll never sleep. I'll never sleep again.

Somewhere over your rainbows,
lies still
my beating heart,
which you've thrown away.

Somewhere under your shadows,
is a shard
of my life,
still trying to piece with yours.

Somewhere in your mind,
I'm there
wondering if you'd ever,
say yes.

Somewhere in this empty house,
I lay still
waiting for your voice,
to break our silence.

Today I wrote a song about your teeth.
They are crooked and imperfect.
Just like this. Our hands. And these
songbirds are all liars. We haven’t learned.
Flesh memory is overrated. Last night
I felt the linen, and it whispered to me
nothing. Not even the shape of you
reminds me of happiness. What is the use
of these metaphors if they can’t
beautify you anymore. No longer as fierce
as the inferno I allowed you to become.
Drowning in bedclothes, trying to understand how streams of consciousness
are becoming bodies of water. Today
I wrote a song about your teeth. And I
read it aloud to the voiceless, and now
they know what love tastes like.

There are stories in your eyes.

I never told you how
sometimes I fell asleep
with the thought that you
were perhaps the moon-

always disappearing
with the dawn.

Stupidity tastes surprisingly like guilt.

You fell in love with me.

I just hope you jumped.
Not slipped.

A tight hug, tearful farewell.
I hope fate conspires for us to meet again.

Six years isn't a short time
six hours a day was never long enough.

I will miss you
like the cold skin misses your touch.

I will smoke rings of memories around you
till Saturn pines for you.

A tight hug.
I will never let you go.

I heard we
ran out of papers
so you ran up
around the walls
of this house-
thoughts scribbling
on them like the paint
we could not decide upon;
like a troubled mentalist
looking for solace
the sound of your pen
against the walls-
how they went from
flowing to screeching-
hands now bleeding
blue
heart; you reached the
porch where you underlined
your first steps and her last;
the bedroom a serenade
between the sheets some-
times a lie tucked away
underneath;
there are fractured stories
in the woodwork finally
seeping out.
You are making the
ceiling cry in the eulogic living room; the kitchen
is a mess of lonely dinners.
You left the library for the last.
This was where you began a
passion never ending
fantasy; open up
the curtains.
The world will one day
listen to the way
a little scribble went
to a house
and came back
a masterpiece.

I took a paper and a pen and sat down to write
a plan on how I was going to make a time machine--
because I had to, I had to go back in time and change your mind--
but I flew past papers and entire diaries and I know there is
no more ink
left in this world to continue writing.
Yet, I still have no more than a mite of sense
in a huge mathematical mess
of fractions, functions and graphs, and sad handwriting.

I put together my math with metal and I scoured the earth looking for the exact things to perfect my monster creation
and satisfy the algorithms.
Time was not going anywhere and you are awaiting my perfect words that I actually tell you,
and stop you from taking the step outside the door.
I spent, seven years to just put together the courage
to finally plug the machine
into the socket-- a humble four-point in the wall and all it took was the turn of a switch.

I spent years and all my time and all my youth,
all my mind and all my life creating a time machine,
so that I fly by the light, going back into the time to that very day
when I first saw you and take a the seat in the back of the train
instead of the one next to you.
I would take the one opposite to where you sat and refuse to even look at you.
Because then, we will not begin something we would never be able to end.

I am here now and all it takes is the turn of a switch,
a time machine to end all of the worries.
A turn of a switch and I would be able to fix all my life;
I created this thing with all my life, so that I can forget you.

And glory! I am successful.
I forget you, but not by the power of a time machine
but I forget you nonetheless.

I set my room on fire and jump out of the window.

Wise men can tell you
of stories in the stars,
how life began on this earth
and that love is an imbalance of the heart.

These wise men drank wisdom
from the pages of age-old books.
They spent their lives learning of
what others know not.

I
see you in stars.
My life began to get me to you
and I don't care what love is
as long as it makes sense to you.

I spent my life knowing that of you
what others will never know.

I read your scars
like a lover's braille.

And I am not wise at all.

This is where the heart lies:
softly in the hands of rhyme
and meter; we've made a shrine
out of syntax and code.
We tell stories and we sing songs
about life and love, and this
is where some of us grow up,
this is where some of us die a little
each day.

This is our home, not your playground,
so keep your fights
out of here.

Like some sort of sordid fantasy in the tangles
of my subconscious belief, I
think that maybe some things must be waited upon to make come true.
That I must wait for the dream to unfurl, like the petals holding
tightly onto you and my talks to the mirror.

You have no idea of how terribly, insanely, amazingly
I can put my feelings
to words and not in my voice, that you are awaiting to read my mind and
my hopeless efforts to convey the feelings I hide so poorly
behind incredulous yarns of vocabulary.

I must wait, I tell myself for I, wait so intensely for my illusions
to come to life.
That you put to words the thoughts in my head without me
telling you so--
that you have read it all, the words, the thoughts and all else
and you love it without obligations.

But alas, have you found me, in the depths of oblivion
and I see a smile beginning to mark your face, for yes
you have found me and my words, dancing to the endless sonata
of feeling shy and courageous, all at the same time.

Fifteen years since I was safe.
Six years since I had a peace of mind.
One year, six months since our first kiss.
One year since our last.
Ten months since I last felt your touch.
Eight months since we had a conversation.
Seven months, five days since were were together.
Two months since it rained.
Two weeks since I last cried.

Three seconds since I last thought of you.

*My memory is my greatest enemy.

My mind is a tinderbox.

Only awaiting a reminder of
the taste of your breath and your many loves
to spark up and light a deadly fire.

It is vulnerable to hate, jealousy and other
fiery emotions,
and more than once have you deliberately
caressed the ends of this box
with an emery touch.

It feeds on past sensations of the skin,
forgotten beatings of the heart,
and promises only skin deep--
they are still just the sensations
from crosses you made on your chest.

It is a bubble, waiting to burst.

But make no mistake,
it is very powerful.
Do not, and I repeat, do not
let yourself be swept away with fuzzy emptiness
and homely tempts.

It is awaiting only a weak moment.
Like a swish of warm breath
on a stack of old dry grass,
to start a fire so bright
you have to squint.

Trust is like
handing someone
a candle
in a storm
and expect them to
keep it burning.

Hide me from these false hopes of life cycles
for they are tempting quietude.

I don't care who I was in my previous life,
as long as I can make this one work.

Take away these choirs of chaos,
for they become mad kings.
And I refuse to be their hymn.

I want to write you something,
but the words don't spill
out of my mouth
the way they used to.

You can't lock yourself in
and then complain that nobody visits you.

When his hands dance in the night,
the moon quiets down to sleep.
Maybe he's awake at this hour again,
who knows what the day will bring.
I'm in love with the absence of hurting;
like this; my shins splitting with dancing
so much with my own insecurities.

There's really something in the way
you breaking my heart ends up
sounding like a love song.

Today if you had asked me
what love still meant to me
I would look at you,
diving in the abyss
of your brown eyes
and look at you look at me.

I'll tell you that I loved you
before the first spark
ever hit your armoured heart
to light an everlasting fire.

That the words which escaped you
cascaded down on me
like a million rivers unfolding
to reveal their anger they kept
hidden long enough
to allow the heat to die down on their own.

That the truth in things
didn't exist in the ways,
in people like we wanted to.

If love was an inferno
to walk through
you know I would.
That with every burning touch of the coal
beneath my feet
would be another step closer to victory,
closer to you.
That this was the painful esctasy of love,
and every ember was like the ones
that burnt in me for you.

And I would tell you
that you were worth it.
You were worth it all.

Under the clouds of hope
I married your kind eyes with the faith
of a million flowers bringing
back the spring
to the wild gardens
of my left atrium. I swear
I did not know that you were born
of rain and alcohol, because every one
of your touch could douse the flames
your kisses light on my skin.
I tried to write more about how every
time you said the word “halo”, your mouth
would curl like a serpent waiting to attack;
how your hands always were a warm
reminder of thoughtless touching;
how your feet are tired from all the walking
down flights of a paradox of stairs
and still wanting to run
away with me.

Your eyes.
Your voice,
and most of all,
you in your green blazer
with your hair swept to a side
and a shy smile.

No,
not your smile.

No, not now.

Your smile not now.
Because you are smiling now
with your peaceful eyes
in your sharp green blazer
to the girl sitting across the hall
while I
am walking out the **** door.

The night unravelling,
caught in the moment of the earth's
dance on its tilt

when it's just as day
as it is the night; like light
appearing behind shut eyelids

who am I to trust
when the earth turns and dreams
turn into daytime reveries

will I wake up and forget
or will your elbow slide off the table
and break the spell?

This time is a perfidious lover,
so tell me,
whose side is it on

tonight?

When I die, dear Mother
don't give my body away
to science.

I'd rather have it given away to poetry.

I want people to cut me open
and observe
how my bones were riddled with
melancholic verses of joyful pasts.

They have to see
the scarlet of my blood was the hue
I stole from the sunsets of
wishful thoughts.

Dear Mother,
give my body away
to the art of writing:
for they have to look past
everything they have ever learned.

They must know
of how much I loved and I lost,
and how that made the twine of my ribs
a story to tell.

A shout from across the dark,
you are impossible.

People are trying to sleep;
you are trying to keep me awake.

Please stay awake
You must stay awake.

If you fall asleep, I will be forced
to awake you from your deepest dreams.

Please stay awake.

You are shaking me and speaking not
in whispers into my ear.

Your sweet voice is humming into my mind,
singing to keep me awake-- cheap I tell you.

Please stay awake.

*I'm afraid of the dark.

You're burning a seething red beneath
your skin; how long before this garden
burns to ash and the ferns grow?

When you no longer know how your
story goes, how many demons can you
create out of those who you've surrounded

yourself with? These tresses will strangle
the last of you in some ceremonial ground
where all you'll ever hear is the sound

of their voices laughing like a pack of
wildebeests, waiting for when your flesh
is no longer owned by your bones.

They'll pick you apart like a child
in a corridor full of strangers much
stronger than you; go to bed

sleep on it, and just let the light of your
ember veins light awake the madness you
cannot cast away. These miseries

will find their way into their beds
and make your dissolutions their nightmares
and then sleep, sleep you will.

I am leaving scratches on the ground; dragging
my feet: they no longer take me home
if there is one.

The tree in the backyard fell during the storm
and with it went the young years of my life
torn in half by the lightning

and took from me the shade I sought
in your hair and the thoughts they often led me in
and some belief in fantasies.

Even my dreams won't cross the threshold of the room
I confine you in; you haunt me
like homesickness and runaways.

You gave your life to the birdhouse
and waited for the wings to reveal themselves; flutter
and fly away.

Maybe it is numbing cold,
the weather there,
as you taste the snowflakes on your tongue
and picture us making angels on your porch
while still stealing the warmth from the breath
of one another.

Maybe it is not so white until December's wake
and when it rains, it pours.
Your car is probably stuck in the snow
when I was busy making a snowman
that I couldn't wait
to destroy with you:
we don't need anyone else.

I cannot wait to see
what winter is like in Utah.

Till then, I will just reminisce
of salt mountains
beside the oceans.

It's like sitting in a boat
and trying to set myself on fire: half-
hearted apologies made me a full
ocean to drown in.
A foot out the door only
lets the light in; some-
how I let you creep
in and now I don't know how
to let myself out
of a maze I didn't mean to design around me
more like a drawer full of clothes
that could maybe hide the shame I
tend to carry;
I am used to the guilt
of having had someone
fall in love with you like
it was an act of charity.
I was within you,
without you
ever knowing the way a heart works.
It is not muscle that'll atrophy of disuse,
it could only maybe
break like Schrodinger's vial
and **** you.
I sit here listening to the clocks of our house
out of sync:
sometimes I was always
a second too late.
I feel lost in these ticks
and these tocks
of all the time we lost; I
was within you,
without
you.

Fine, I will confess.
You have me.

You have me smiling at
the perfect shape of your perfect words.
Though half the world
create the distances between us
you map them with
the mere presence of you.
And I feel lonely no more.

You have me awake at night,
combing the depths of my half-awake mind,
searching for pieces of you
to go to dreamland with.

I sometimes blink twice
on a perfect moment,
as if to take a mental picture for you.
I sometimes rub my hands together
to feel how warm your face might feel like.

You have me.

You just do.

Found myself staring
into the cold ceiling
thinking
if this could be right.

Weary soul and broken body,
you found me
when there were none
to see.

Right before this
we condoned with friendship,
but now
you've got me thinking of ties
more than them.

With my flesh and bone
by the telephone
waiting,
your overdue phone call.

Stealing glances and hushing breaths
you barely look at me now,
only feign an ignorance
and refuse to
pick up where we left off.

Call me a friend
Call me a cheater
Call me a liar
Call me a lost enchanter

But call me.
Just once.
Tonight.