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

Remember when we danced on main street
And buried our skulls in dirt behind the shed

When we ate those light bulbs
Trying to illuminate the black holes that were always showing up in your bed or lingering around us in the driveway

Our knuckles took to cracking in a fever
We soaked them in the party punch last May
Our mixed blood infected everyone that night

Teenagers and their wasted anthologies
Wasted, as in, drunk & drowning
In the city apartment's corners
Or a green backyard that eventually turned lilac grey

Something is screaming in the trees tonight
It might be the wind, but what is wind
Other than gold dust and baby teeth

Remember the night we bought an aluminum can of rage
And planned to mark our town in tragedy
Or the night we shattered vases and elbows
I bled out in your kitchen sink, and you opted for the piano keys

Last night I dreamt of all the friends we've lost
I screamed myself awake

Elizabeth is a name that sounds good in a poem
An epitaph that reads infinitely:
"You were electricity coursing through this town"
Or
"You were always the most fun at the bar"

Everyone had their story to tell
About the night they first met
In a haze of cigarettes and her brother's guitar
About the last time they saw her
With glazed eyes and wires in her arm

No one ever thought to ask - Can Rachel even breathe?

Secrets held in a college town
Old lawns doused in cheap wine and set aflame by talk of God's existence
Abandoned floors rest high above the likes of academia
Ghosts float past rusted oblivion cased safely on library shelves
In books of history or mystery or something
Most desks know too many bodies
Rooms fill with strangers breaking bread or smashing skulls
Grey foreign spaces call to mind no recollection of summer
But rather holds beds in which we dream of early July nights
Spent punch drunk beneath the knuckle blood letter tree
Alcohol numbs more than our fingertips
And we all drink ***** for sport
Collecting letter grades for ink-fueled suffocation
And some ungodly cosmic conformity

Thinking of your arm around another girls green velvet
Makes my ribs shake, makes my neck break
You can smash skulls from across the state
And I can cry into Joannas guitar

Thinking of you will only ever trigger reckless visions of my fist through dry wall or blood dripping from my lip
Everything is absinthe's hallucination
Reeling through my speakers
Everything was then it wasn't

You can brush ****** hair in your hometown
And I will never get over you
Kissing me every six months will leave my hands shaking - return to the bathroom floor
Waiting for you to come back

All our thoughts of kissing girls have been written off as weird honey

A picture of her on his back
Laughing as they fall into unforgiving brick
Surrounded by anyone who ever mattered
On the back porch
We were all drinking the cheap beer that recalls at least twenty memories from dusty, rusted oblivion
And the expensive craft kind that I stole from someone's sister or dad or uncle or something

A night spent in overalls
Where everyone's head exploded
In mini vans, swingsets, and white wicker chairs
Anyone who could cry did
The others had already gone numb

A picture of her on his back
Falling gracefully into certain demise
In and out of love as fast as she drank all the whisky

When mothers and brothers and lovers die
We place flowers in their lips and wash their hair with wine
We press our faces up to theirs to make sure we're not looking in a mirror
Or worse, a window

Girls like us can't be saved
Just numbed for long enough to realize what isn't love
Time changes change time
Again and again
Your ghost invades foreign lands
David stands before me
And I can only smell your collared neck from a faraway spring
I'm starting to think I imagined the whole thing
The artist screams
And your face replaces David's
Men in marble urge me to stop
To drink wine without wanting to touch your hands
To kiss continental strangers while I still have the chance

On nights like these I have to write my own poetry to fall asleep to
I dreamt of us walking through a street laced in ***** snow
Just me and Joanna

Years pass
And I am as lost
As I was then

January was dark. All **** day. A cold tequila car. A book with writing down the spine. Thick salt tears, a heaving chest and a shaking rib cage.

February was nothing like the movies. Sliding to the cheap seat theater on ice roads with friends you don't care to know. Numbness and red cartoon hearts.

March was my birthday. ***** and three sad ghosts in the basement. A banquet hall concert and a pack of gum. A boy turned stranger and a tragic lo-fi guitar.

April was bad. A hotel room filled with cousins and no blood to show for my innocence. Two-headed boys in painted sweaters. Tiny bottles of rage in the back of her parents' car.

May was my best friends, but not him. A return to the ribbon tree with plastic bottle poison. A handful of dirt to escape the way *** makes you think of me. Two girls with not much else to lose.

June was the night in overalls. Screams and tears and mouth fulls of craft beer and whisky. More ghosts - so many ghosts. First time ***** and my personal demise.

July was the night we went swimming on her birthday. Beer on the back porch. Forgetting why we ever hated one another. We slept together on my living room floor.

August was candle wax. A picnic on her mother's surgical scars. Tragedy and almost nothing else.

September was the great departure. Another year apart. The music festival in that field. Boxed wine and Pope Francis in the living room. the trifecta raged and kissed and called it a night.

October was leaves in pavement rivers. Sneaking into that concert just to  watch them fall out of love. A pack of Marlboro Reds and unrequited fireworks. Animal masks and German beer. Four girls on ghostly slopes and celtic knot rings.

November was fevers and mirrors. The night we traveled back in time. PBR on your sister's porch and a long drive to the high school. A girl faced with the ghost residing in her hometown. Bob Dylan and a second bucket of gin.

December was mostly a blur. Christmas parties and holiday breaks. Basement promises and winter lagers. Old home movies and my best friends. Secrets in the college town and history's tragic repetition.

This side of Saturday night
Used to make all the waves
I don't recognize any of our old friends
The boys grew their hair long and the girls chopped theirs off

This side of Saturday night
Used to be lighting strikes in your car
We'd drink *** in the bedroom loft
But we've been excommunicated from the mountain
(Perhaps its for the best)

You should know
She's not sad because she misses us
She's sad because her whole doll collection ran away

Now she's alone in the toy room
With nothing but a tiny plastic soldier wearing mascara

It's true, it was the age of kissing wrists and secret smoke
It's true, that was a long time ago
I'm holding on to memories that barely exist

This side of Saturday night
Used to make so much more
But not even close anymore
Now we're all brokenhearted and sore

Christmas holds too many ghosts
String lights have seen too much tragedy
Pine trees were once adorned in our empty bottles
Now the old pine has fallen dead

Forget You is just ******* spelled backwards
Or looking deep into a mirror

I stood by and watched
As your birthday bled out in the kitchen sink

I've only ever cauterized my own wounds -
Pavement burns and those of the like

I think that maybe I know almost everything
I know that trees are apology letters from the Holy Ghost, mangled in the travel from afterlife to certain death
And I know that January is two boys sleeping in the dark
But I don't know what the sidewalks are and my mind keeps getting stuck in their cracked cement

Cleveland was a corpse
After the river had burned

If I can find a way
To claw deep enough into my mind
I swear I can reverse time
Go back to a picture
Of a curly haired boy in forest green
Before we knew what growing up would be
We could hate our parents' choices under string light ribbon trees
Share secrets in smokey backyard plywood sheds
Drive home and feel the sky pierce through our chests and
Maybe I could even draw your neck on my arm
With all the shadows that used to hit it in the concert hall
Maybe if we time things perfectly -
Go back to the high school parking lot, football field, basement
Things would be exactly as they were
I don't want to forget what you looked like when maybe you loved me
Everything is your memory -
Plaid shirts and yarn wrapped wrists
Christmas lights and ****** knuckles
***** and frosted windshields
Everything goes from yesterday to a year ago then two

I could say I'm still
Drinking ink on the kitchen floor
But that would be a lie
I've moved now
To the rafters of the theater (you know the one)

Perhaps the smell of hot pavement will always call to mind that one night after the concert
(you know, the one with the tambourine)
Perhaps the mildew scent of a basement boiler room will always be their first kiss
And perhaps the stale smell of fire lingering in long hair will always be the night they went on a bear hunt

We all have sacred ground -
The tree where they strung lights and spent one Fourth of July
(And three nights in May)
(And maybe even one in early October)
The theater lobby where the lights turn his hair a slightly blonder shade of brown
Maybe even the coral basement where four girls choked down their first bitter buckets of her father's old beer

I know about the night you drank all of that beer under the moon
And that people were singing or bleeding or something,
But you had a fist full of blonde hair and a bear cub in your lap
So you didn't notice anyway

I know how nothing can come between you and the animal secrets,
But everything is and will always be blood, ***, and a very high fever
Freeze dried and cracking, your hands run empty in the drunken court room
It's happening again, but this time - numb

What if Death is not a reunion, a homecoming of prodigal children
But rather -
Terrifying
****-all
Death

Blackness and hollow silence
Flesh and the lack thereof
Not quite kitchen tables

And really, how softly can you kiss someone without killing them
Or watching their eyes roll out of their heads

We all imagine Sylvia in a different way
Burning her captor's notes and coats and handwritten books in the backyard
Or
Beneath the house where she was revived by dirt and coal and a lesser god's spite
Or
Nine years old at a funeral band jam for the not so **** father man

Not love, but pitchers of honey
Not ***, but The Death of the Clock
Not marriage, but midnight's blood
Not children, but oven obsessions - adulterous predecessors

This is the funeral dress that was stapled into my shoulders
And crucified
On the huge hill cross, where clowns once emerged from cotton smog -
Where bricks smashed foreheads, and we fingerpainted the sidewalk with each other's unruly blood
Where the Summer sleeps off a failed suicide attempt
Two years ago you put a hole in my head
But this is not the hole in my head (present and aching)
This is the black funeral dress I stapled into my own shoulders
The one that was worn too many days too soon
We are all infinitely bound between her death and a single desire for a boy with destructive ghosts living beneath his fingernails

I keep telling strangers about the way your jaw shakes after midnight
I keep telling strangers about the night I scattered glass shards in between my box spring mattress and the trundle bed
I keep telling strangers about your porcelain knuckles - the way you kiss each one individually before punching me in the throat
There's a rage inside my head
Disease spreads like forrest fire and floral secrets
Dead girls dance in October, rest in November
Goodnight

And now I await cosmic punishment
For kissing a boy on All Hallow's Eve

Ghost Ann created her own religion
Where she is free to haunt in the early parts of November
Whiskey fills church corridors and drowns the congregation
Phantoms throw screams through her mind at night
Awaiting abolition

Ghost Ann carries apparitions of past lives
In her translucent, skeletal hands
She's keeping me awake
As I try to move past a woodland infatuation
By way of liquor, herbs, and parking lot graves

Ghost Ann floats above us as we curse ourselves for nothing more than a warm body to spend the night with
The rafters fill with spirit friends and tragic cases of déjà vu
It's been a year today, rings of flowers round his eyes
The All-Knowing knows
And the haunting keeps us young

Last Friday night was one for the books
All of the misplaced soul mates
Found their way home from college confines
We cried in the face of Iron
And drank victory Wine as a welcome to an amber Autumn morning
He filled his front pocket
With our smoked out cigarettes  

Caramel hops in the spilled beer
Glued our voices together
Remembering
Past deaths and all those other kids who left
Are we the survivors?
Finally free to laugh among our best friends
Ink is stabbed into our aging skin
To place a memory on this night
To place a memory in the shape of our swaying bodies
To place a memory in our minds of orange bottle caps and a love stretched too far across the map

There are few things
That can exist outside
Of the Summer

We used up the other seasons too quickly
We smoked the whole pack

I hear people ice skating on the roof
I met you at the water fountain two years ago today

Two Falls ago
We went on a bear hunt
And I held your hand
Over a broken girl
We spoke of God in the woods
And the trees stole our dead letter secrets

Two Falls ago
We were all sixteen
Maybe less, maybe a little more
Leaves floated in pavement rivers
On homecoming and Halloween
Smoke filled a laundry room, we burned the rug with homemade cigarettes

Two Falls ago
I wore wool socks in your driveway
And stayed up with you all night
We slow danced under blankets in your plywood shed
I saw my best friends everyday
And drank stolen liquor with them most nights

Everything was Golden rod & the 4H Stone
Everything was red and pulsing
Everything was mattresses and staircases
Everything was Sarah Jones and Radio Wars
Everything was bonfires and lasting

Everything was all of us,
screaming and
laughing and
singing and
crying and
Together - under dizzy skies and dying leaves in Fall

That night my head revisited the act of combustion
Fueled by cinnamon syrup and ten dollar wine
I caught fire under a false summer sky
We stole the Holy Father from the threshold of the devil's den
Lo-fi guitars sent us spinning back in time
The three of us became the opposite of a memory
We bent the solar system with glass bottle visits to our old favorite songs
There's a place I'd like to be
Half drunk in the fluorescent lights of a college town bus
There's a place I'd be happy
Carpet dancing with a trinity of alcoholic poets
That night was beautiful and Fall and fleeting
That night is my next favorite memory

This is a poem for the landlocked memories we buried in the sand of my best friends' fake lake beach, and all the drinking & sinking that took place there

One day it happens
We wake up with more than one required regret
The ink washes off of our arms
The dye fades out of our hair
We stop wearing torn up blue shoes that match the bags under our eyes because sleep is for the adults
Who gave up on becoming writers
And gave in to corporate minded mills

I'm afraid of the day
When there is beer in the fridge, but no one drinks it
When lighting fireworks and cigarettes off of the kitchen stove is **just too reckless
When we'd rather sit around the fire than run through the field
When the sound of our drunken song means far more than nothing

One day it happens
We forget the way she looked at that older boy
All sophomore minded madness and navy blue t shirts
Secret dates with her brother's best friend
One green bottle beer and the phones start ringing
Green corduroy housed my legs that night I tried to kiss your mouth and missed, leaving boyhood bite marks on your neck

I'm afraid of the day
When we stop believing we're invincible
When we sleep in separate house beds rather than carpet floors - entwined
When everything has to rhyme
When we stop running away from time
When ***** makes us paranoid and strictly resides on bar shelves in glass

Time does not exist
Age is a name the old men gave us
Time does not exist
Clocks break and hands shake
Time does not exist
I remember the start of every blacked out night in the mountains
I miss us beneath the string light tree
Drinking secrets, holding hands, strumming wire
How do I move past the most beautiful memories this whole **** world has seen

Today the museum held clay books
Pages flying from bindings
To represent
That feeling when you reunite with your siblings after a parent dies
I stole a beer from a boy named after the West
and of course, I think of my friends
As i always do
The pages that flew from our chests
When she died
The siren screamed
And we sat in silence
Photo books mostly just break my heart
I will be angry for the rest of my life
Because she doesn't deserve her pain
Because our year together ended
Because high school is over
And no one in this campus cove
Will ever believe our stories
I need your faces back in my line of vision
Glowing orange over flames

But his eyes, his mouth - they look like a stranger's

Copper shines, reflecting images of refugees floating through mud waters on glass shards
Fire feels dull blood aches of healing ivory gun shot wounds
Professor locked himself inside his head after the fourth born had been buried

Headlines make my knees shake
There was a UFO sighting at the Dome of the Rock, but you were slap drunk in a tin foil book case
There was a UFO sighting at the Dome of the Rock, but you were crying salt for departed birds and card stock fingernails

Seduction is philosophical
Blonde boys play games
Like backwoods checkers
Blonde boys love brunette haired girls
Because pigment stains their wrists like tattoo ink
Distance is a screaming match
Between past lives and past loves
Blonde boys wear bracelets
To cover tattooed wrists
Across boarders, coasts, and continents
Voices cruise through noses and throat boxes
To bear the bad news

I think coffee smells like cigarettes
And I think cigarettes smell like far off Summers

Brush burns and bottle caps
Speak new words to the old pools
Carry on, carrion
Decay or flee the scene
Gasoline drinkers unite
And **** ourselves with
Cotton blend bed sheets
New born stitches
On the blood bridge of my nose
Glass breaks in the oven
Literary Societies keep the secrets
Of children grown
Of ice cube foreheads
Of drywall dinner parties
Coffee grounds on branches
God dammnit God dammnit

Marching band drums on the sidewalk
Sound like an indian summer  funeral procession

In school you gazed through Spanish milk glass, turned your head to the back of the room, and (for just a moment) stared into fleeting afternoon eyes

In school you floated over hardwood gymnasium floors, pointed at your wrist, and twitched a sunburnt nose in laughter and secrecy

One September we all went crazy

We drove to your house at 2 a.m., the sky was ink
We shared a beer in your shed and I was drunk after three sips
I jumped out of a moving car to hold your hand for a few more seconds

One September we all went crazy

When we got home she played church hymns on the grand piano
We fell asleep on book bindings and grape tobacco
We wrote nonsense through the phone lines, and fell in love with eachothers shadows

Red plaid shirt
You wore it on the night of our second sober kiss
The end of last November was good to me
We planned out our winter breaks -
We said we lay on the kitchen floor and listen
To a song about sisters
(We know about sisters)
We stood with nervous hands gripping onto the counter
Your parents were home
Holiday breaks hold nostalgia in paper cups
Holiday breaks hold sad Summer magic under frozen high school football fields

Red plaid shirt
You wore it on the night that you forgot her mother was gone
August has always broken my heart
Wether I'm begging for forgiveness from the pine trees in my backyard, or smoking things to gather your attention -
I have never been at peace with the end of an era

We walked home in silence, party hat strings cut from our throats, and tears streaming from the birthday moon

You and your new friends gawked behind us -
forgetting every lap we ever took around your neighborhood
forgetting every song that ever made you cry
forgetting that the worst part about death is that we are expected to go on living

I remember you and me
Lying in her bed
In her bedroom in spring
She was playing that one track on that one record
That reminded us of that previous fall

When we were sitting in my car
The October air was frosted over
From the rear view mirror
We watched our two best friends fall in love on the sidewalk

You were in the seat beside me
You were in my dreams most nights

I remember you and me
Lying in her bed that spring
She was playing  records and proclaiming her love to you
We held hands under the covers and no one knew

The chorus was playing softly
you held my hand tighter with every note
Her tears were raging
We were all just kids

I remember you and me
Lying in her bed
The audience hung in the rafters
Drunk on your *****
Drunk on his beer

That night went on for as long as we needed it to

I know that the summer holds some type of magic
That it somehow becomes a physical reincarnation of nostalgia
Where time stands still when we are given a chance to have the perfect night
Where past loves can meet again, on brick or carpet
For one more night of infatuation and hand holding

Where hate drowns in amaretto or burns out in the sun
And we return to one cohesive group, singing old songs that hold more meaning than any of us realize
We jump to the beat of that one perfect year, entwined in our scents and lisps and favorite beers

I know that when fall returns, we won't be drinking Miller Lite with our best friends on the back porch
You won't be close to saying something real
I will return to bad habits in dark basements
We will all have to go on in real time speed

Leaving the Band of Bad Kids
Breaks my heart every year

Paint in the hills
Blood in her veins
She's playing dead
I have never sobered up
I'm not sure how to
Explain how I love
Just that I do
I cut through glass
With stares across
Tin tables on the deck
He wants to grow
His hair out until
Her heart is healed
Evil Machines on the
Table of Plenty
She belts songs
In the aisle on the
Day in August
When we had no
Idea what we were
Doing, just that we
Were doing something
Inhaling smoke or
Downing coffee from
***** mugs in a strange
Place where people
Laughed while their
Hearts broke at the
Sight of old cameras
And a one time love
Tanned with age and
Forget-me-nots
The sun set but the
Clouds remained
The day ended but
She still can't sleep

I am drinking beer in my best friends garage
Her hair is turning blonde
And I am getting drunker with every bitter sip

I love us

But in this moment
With pop music blaring
And flood lights glowing
I can only think of you

You and your curled hair
On prom night
You and your drunken hands
Last month on her birthday
You and your mouth
You and your mouth
You and your mouth

That October stole my heart
When we drank pumpkin beer and smoked apple tobacco around the kitchen table of a now foreign Ghost

It's funny
No -
It's tragic
That a single whistle pulls me back into that basement
On a musty couch, hidden under men's clothing

I am wearing pink shorts
And you left an empty house to see me

I am offering you a beer and of course, you don't accept it
And we listened to the greatest songs I've ever heard

Something about the acoustics found in a room with burn marks and my best friend lying on the carpet

I am not sure if I am in love with you

I am in love with the memory of that night

The best and worst thing about life

Is that nothing has to make sense

Some things just happen

Some nights just make your head explode

Some nights you dance on brick to your old favorite songs with your best friends

When you were born, you didn't cry.
2. Your mother did not understand how you held your composure, but your father knew of silence in times of miracles and hospital gowns.
3. Your hair is whatever color fits the facets on the ceramic sink in your Current Hometown.
4. You were gifted with Delilah's able fingers - not to cut the hair of your blind bearded boy, but to meet with piano keys on early September mornings.
5. Your lips are the border of liberation. They are red from the blood ridden boots of soldiers traveling from your chin into your throat, seeking serenity.
6. Your voice is a memory of a strangers first love - unrequited, tragically beautiful, and played on repeat.
7. When you were four you broke your own heart.
8. Your insides are painted in stripes of green and white - green for grasses and a shy boy's house shutters, white for the absence of feeling - comfortably numb.
9. You made a green and white striped basement home for two years, and realized that we do not have to call our insides home.
10. You drink brown bottle whisky to forget forbidden phone calls on far away spring nights.
11. You drink green bottle beer to remember dancing on her carpet , talking about poetry, and hugging the ones that have turned into ghosts on far away spring nights.
12. When you were eight you tried to pull the sun from his jealous sky and badly burned your palms - the blisters looked like four women's silhouettes and after that, words started storing themselves in the callouses.
13. There are boys living under your fingernails, escaping heartbreak.
14. When you were born the doctor cried at the sight of your porcelain skin, something so beautiful can't go without breaking.
15. Your mind is more beautiful than any skin I've seen, and **** the doctor for pitying something he would never know.
16. Everything breaks.
17. The doctor who delivered you went to school for ten years to discover something that the moon taught you in one night.
18. Forever.
19. You are the melody of a summer - naked in the pool, running through the fields, golden browned by fire in sky, screaming songs into every abyss, every void, every absence, every white stripe, filling the space, reversing, slowing, and replaying time.
Your record plays forever in my mind.
There is a white light shining from every part of you - an immortal deity in this world of unbelievers.

I didn't understand how bad it would hurt
How hard my ribs would shake
Or how tightly I could clench my jaw without breaking it

Wet grass broke my heart
Plastic tarps taught me how to hate myself
Metal cans frizzed my hair and sliced my throat
Fireworks burned my thumbs and left the kitchen lights on
We're all pushing twenty and things are going stale
Chlorine burns my brain even if I hold my nose
I slept inside with the mountain boy and my best friend
While they were naked in the dirt
I didn't want to leave The Survivors, but she saw my seams begin to fray, stitched me up, and put me to bed
The broken hearted girls stayed apart that night
I couldn't hear your American Screams and I'm sorry

I had a mental breakdown in a grocery store yesterday
Linoleum floors caked with dirt and a mother scolding her child

Brick barely coated in chipping white paint
Across from a theater with red crushed velvet seats
Green backyards & girls gripping beers
A beamed basement, home of the mountain boy
Not far from the teepee
Brown wood as dark as his ***
Ashy black woods where you gave me your sweatshirt
And my blue hair turned gold
Pale sun in bottles on his back porch
In the orange glow of early summer
Red blood drunkenly thrown away from a broken heart
And the saddest color I've ever seen
The color of something that could never be
The color of you and me

We promised one another
We would be eighteen forever
That no matter where studies took me
Or where the music took you
We would be eighteen forever
That through dents in your car
And cuts on my legs
We would be eighteen forever

It was okay that no one understood what we were
Because we didn't know either
It was okay that we both drank for sport
And held hands on the couch in the Fall
When you were sixteen -
Maybe Less
Maybe A Little More

You said you'd stay eighteen forever

I miss my friends
So ******* much
That I feel sick

When will we fix ourselves
Patch our rips together with craft beers and pink wines

Tell me it's not too late

It seems like girls are always either
On their toes
Or on their knees
Bedside tables
Ready to monthly bleed
And to forget their counterparts
Swings and all other ugly things
Like their need for rings
Or whatever boys think we crave
Cause men with beards are here to save
Us from ourselves
And our woodland self destruction
A head put under construction
Wicker breaks beneath them
Paint chips
Cracked hips
Blue lips

It seems as though
Girls are always found
On their toes
Or on their knees

Something old:
Our talks around tables, hidden behind paper bags
Laughter and the lack of lacking it
Something new:
This strange place, lacking every particle of us
The cold campus covered in facts
A realization that poetry is just a constant occurrence of hand references
Something borrowed:
The way you pronounce my name, just slightly off
I've been introducing myself that way lately
Something blue:**
My suffocating hands
And crippled heart

Maybe the night is blue
Because there is a layer of skin
Covering the honest red sky
And we all ask why

Why do we see veins as
Camera shy and blue
In my finger pointing over cheap wine
At you

And why is everything we do
So complicated and blue
When there should be red between our words
The only upside is the sound of morning birds

Blue is the color of suffocation
And that is how you live your life
No bright paints in your closet
But a muted blue and a broken promise

You will. You? Will. You? Will.

I would have
But you turned me blue
And finally, though dead on the floor
I am bleeding red blood
No blue for me anymore