Birthdays stick to your teeth
Your ribs
Your shoulder blades
And shins

My bones are made of candles
And my head's an open flame

Too old now, to live without a fever
I wake up in my childhood bed,
Sweating and screaming
Dreaming at over one hundred degrees

Ready to return to the theater
Or to board the time machine
Anything to escape twenty
If you need me, I'll be searching the woods for seventeen

Things were always happening in the dark
And behind closed doors
Or after everyone fell unconscious to the hand of drink

What I remember most is that first night in the basement
The beginning of Year One
You shotgunned a beer in the boiler room and we almost kissed

My hands on your legs felt like something I believed in
It was always all wrong
I had trouble deciphering between your face and my reflection

There are still so many nights I pushed into the space between my bed and the wall

We are still alive, bleeding that same fantastic blood
God is cracking our ribcages open to collect the ghosts residing there

Robots around the dining room table
On the roof with a string ensemble
We were so drunk in the time machine
We started to swallow the clocks

One for you and one for me
And two for the girl with ghosts in her empty eye sockets

We used to lay punch drunk
Beneath the knuckle blood ribbon tree
Write letters to lovers and bury them like saints
I can smell the ink from two years away

We only ever surrounded ourselves with the reckless
I only ever dream of the wrong boy
We touch arms and compare our skin
We succumb to the warm lights

That day was drunken splendor
With my reckless best friends
Even the careful grew corrupted
And none of us searched for perfection

We are sitting here with screaming hearts,
As you try and tune our yells to your praise

I learned so much in the short trip to your true intentions

*** on the bathroom sink
Back then at the retreat,
Time was spent getting married
Or being carried
Off to a hospital bed

There were
Shattered knee caps on hardwood floors and
Hands dipped in jealousy, coming out as green
(Or a tortured, teenage lesbian)

Aluminum barrels of smooth poison
And glass bowls of hydroponic hand holding
It was a day spent breaking the law, somewhere past coherence
A void in which we fall beneath the affection of strangers

Shooting up skirt in the shower, and keys in the trash
Hey, it's all better than drinking and driving
Or sinking and thriving
In the marsh of your own oblivion

Stupid boys and their razor blades
Stupid girls and their glass shards

No one holds hands anymore, there's just too much blood

I can't believe you died

You drank all of that whiskey
And your head fell off
And you died