She affects me and
Sticks with me and
Grows with me
In various ways
Throughout my life
Diligently collecting
Along the way
All those memories
Unforgettable experiences
Reflecting
With no apologies
Exactly the person
I've become and
Forcing me
To love her
All the more
Despite the past
She refuses to
Let me forget

I am a simply stated
Lullaby of quiet prosody
Slipping through the air
In steady, predictable verse
Down halls running tangent to
Desires vastly more complicated than my own

And while I may sometimes linger and lunge
And parry with time
(All in an effort to prove my depth)
In the end I know
If you wanted to
You could deconstruct these rhythms with ease
And you could transcribe this tune in your sleep
And when you awoke
You'd deliver your own variations
With a brilliant, effortless intricacy
That I could only dream of emulating

It's a thinly-veiled secret
A laundered affair
You and that walk and
Always
Making a scene and
Me and my lack of
Tongue
Arms
Legs

And dear god
I love it
The way you stop me
In my tracks
Not that it's the first time

You've caught me
On the flat of my back
So embarrassingly often

And I think I love that too

Are you even here?
I can rarely tell
And so often
It really is just me
Left to my own devices
Left to wonder
If it's all some cruel joke

But I'm clear now and you should go
There's nothing left to say and
I really just need a day or two
To rest and think and wait

Or ******* move...

I don't even like mango
But I feel compelled to consume this one

To savor its every liquid thought and
Collect its every persistent ray of color

And allow them all to dissolve on my tongue
As a solitary solution of sweet perspicacity

Not like raindrops falling into my mouth
But like tiny citrusy snowflakes

Colliding with my tastebuds at the speed of sound
And exploding on impact into an existential array

Of earthbound fire

I see
Your potential

And in it
The infinite stretch
Of ageless matter
Rising and falling
Through time
Like the deepening breaths
Of a priming supernova---

Is your bubbling canvas

The impending chaos, your molecular medium

Meanwhile...

Doppelgängers reside
In the wrinkles of your free will
Just outside the horizon

Inconceivable

They flourish there and
Attempt to overshadow
Your creation with their failure

They dip into your insecurities
And fling them out beyond their worlds

Desperate

To drench yours
To bridge the gap
To drown your will

They stand above you
Waiting
For you to believe
In them
To make them
Real

But I've seen
Your potential

And in it
You are beautiful
Or nonexistent

Either way
It's your move

At the precise moment
Beneath inevitability

From within this nucleic bubble
Of disjointed stillness

I can just make out the whispers

The gray-green haze of aged betrayal and
Cyan-tinted halo of every guilty sibilance
Seep through hollow crimson airwaves
And flood each sensory input like
Color-coded chloroform

Diluted just enough
To leave my consciousness intact

To allow me to witness the foundational disassembly

Not to experience the event
(That's what aftershocks are for)
But to document it for future reference

To study the lasting effects
Of impact

And act
Accordingly

You introduced me
We played them over and over
Always in order
You said it was the only way
To really appreciate them

So we played them
Over and over
So many times
I could anticipate the starting pitch
Of every track
Until
I wanted to save you
And when I traced away the fog-
Well, you know

So,

Inside jokes
Mirrored empathy
Passion
Jealousy
Corrected lines
The wrong ones I continued to sing
Just so you'd crack a smile

Those seven years of summer
Saw an evolution
An eternal return
And predictable though it was
What resulted was
Profoundly, undeniably unique
And I'll never forget that

But I can't do it
I can't let them go
I won't let you have them
I'm taking back every single one
And I'm breathing into them new life
With oxygen from my own blood
From my own sweat and tears
And what emerges now
Is a revolution
So pure
And entirely untouched
That I know now
Without a shadow of a doubt

I earned this

I've always liked green
Always liked the look of it
It used to be my favorite color
That seems so childish to say aloud
Blue is my favorite color now
I like its depth
Its nuance
And now that seems rather childish too

So back to green

Summer always liked green
--Likes it
Summer is still summer, I suppose
Even when it moves on to Australia
Or South Africa
Or Peru

Whatever, not important

Back to green

Splashes of green would play in her eyes
Her tears were always green
And in her skin
Vines of green
Scouring, searching
Always for something green
Green in her paintings
And in her love for all things green
Hypnotic, sporadic, drunk on green
Her progeny, the purest green
Green laughter
Green anger
Green intent
Every word, a brilliant green

Funny thing, that color
How it shifts and fades
Like the human condition
The Northern Lights
My humility
And wit
All in all, a dynamic mess
Shifting and fading
From green
To red
Then red to black
But always
Eventually
Back to green

Her castle was her home
Until it burned to the ground

Could be arson, they said
But there were no leads

An unbearable loss, she said
But there were no tears

What choice did she have but to move on?

No point in crying
No point in stalling
No point in mourning
Over what remained of her former home

Nothing but ashes

No dusty shelves
No worn out furniture
No cracked panes over forced smiles

No tattered clothes or
Shattered plates or
Dented plaster on every wall

No scattered matches atop the nightstand

No blood-soaked body on the bathroom floor

Nothing left
But ashes

When you speak
I don't listen
I absorb your words
I allow them to sink into my bones
I beg them to destroy me from within
Atom by atom
A chain reaction
A cellular Doctor Device
That begins in my marrow
And ends with the incineration
Of the outermost layer of every
Obsessively parched pore

When you speak
I'm not enlightened
The entire universe falls into darkness
Except for your words
Every syllable you utter shines
With a brilliance that doesn't spread
But drains
Every star of its glory
A brilliance that calls it all into question
A brilliance that leaves me wondering
Why I'd ever been born

And when you speak
I'm not alive
The universe dies
There is no movement
No gravity
No inertia
No friction
The breeze stops blowing
The trees stop growing
The electricity
That once flowed through my veins
Can no longer elicit a single heartbeat
And I discover
Just how pointless my efforts ever were

And when you finish
When you've said what you wanted to say
And every perfect syllable is in its perfect place
When the stars start shining and
The planets start moving and
The breeze and the trees are blowing and growing once more

When the oxygen claws its way back into my lungs

I exhale with a smile

And anxiously await the next verse

When your only friend is the burn you begged for
And the world slams still from seventy
And silence crashes through your endless bedlam routine

When the brightest star is the one that burns your cheek
And the warmth it brings is overshadowed by the red

When you fall asleep to the patterns in the rain
And only one thought remains
As all others trickle
Off your body and
Through the sheets

Will tomorrow be the same?

And so it goes
These dreams you fear
They waste your time

Your life
Full swing
Back and forth
Dark to light

You're clinging so desperately for your life
That you've nearly forgotten how to see
The greenest forest from the blackest tree
And that your feet never left the ground

And so you could never fall
Even if you wanted to

So just focus on that
And breathe

In this familiar place, these dreams, we quarrel over petty things. You've never been here, not physically, but you seem at home, familiar, and I guess that makes sense. What doesn't is the fall, the falling; I've adapted to it, adopted it, really, somehow, though it is yours, though you shouldn't be here; you belong out there, away from it, beyond my reach, in the natural world. But here it is, and here we are, disjointed and juxtaposed, my poetry and your prose, fluttering about these neon lights, and he is the punctuation and she is the space between each empathetic syllable.

In this ghost town galaxy
We are an overlapping stellar system
Oddly paired and blissfully unaware
Of imminent full collapse

My skin is electric
I can no longer feel my arms or legs
But I know now what it's like to swim
Through a blackened space

You move with ninety proof courage
And it permeates the stale air in
Rainforest waves that linger
And settle in your wake

Our discordant dance
Quells this hyperbolic world
In which existence persists
With such spectacular earnest

The hydrogen fog will consume us, and
We'll reluctantly accept our mortality
But right now? In this moment?
I've never felt more alive