We were born side by side
Invasion of the body snatchers
Bluish hair cut and swept from the salon floor
We both got lost in each others curls
If I could return to a certain October
Believe me, I would
Some kind of magic in the way you were lying dead on the highway
Like I breathed that sparkling dragon powder through your lungs
And resurrection took shape as a boy named You

We live on the line between two worlds
Boys and girls and the animal collective
We reside on the scientist's bookshelves
All this attraction or lack thereof
Dancing in the dark when we're pushed to the brink of normalcy
Your wrists remain the sole body part that ever made my veins shake

This hallway was so much smaller,
Back when we owned it.

And it ran rampant with plaid,
Concealing plastic bottles of tequila thrown about the parking lot.

We woke with trembling chests -
Rumored teenage love affair coursing through bed frames and fingertips.

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

If we were just seventeen again
Everything would be magic *** bubbles

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

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

**** happy - klonopin.
We're drug addicts or gay.
Crisis where christ is.
Bullets fly and we laugh -
None of our business.

We sit shiva for strangers ,
And blood splatters the camera lens.
The uprising persists.
We exist in glitter.
Head trauma, and its bad (I think)
Somewhere, a baby is crying.

It's classical for the incomprehensible.

Last one to die, please turn out the light.

I wake up with a fever fueled mainly by your hands
Or lack thereof for that matter

I disrupt the monotony found at the bottom of my coffee cup
Or ***** glass for that matter

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

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

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

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

Scene:
Everyone in a hurry to get to hell
Where he can't say I Love You
Even when he's drunk and you're begging
Baby, please tell me what I dream of hearing
What I carve into my neck at night
After the Om Nashi Me's go to bed
Everyone running through this death march
And eyes hollow out without a doubt
Your yellow undertones from your mothers throne
Boy this is not slow dancing in a burning room
This is arson, setting the house on fire and rolling in the flames
Because your hands won't even reach out to pull me from the oven
I am tired of waiting for perfectly drunken nights to kiss you and drink from your cup
I am tired of running through this death march
Let's slow down and dance under blankets in the shed
We are twenty, we are not dead

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

Green dye fell from little jars in droplets from his apartment and on to the hardwood floors the white linens the bed sheets and me and you and i fell asleep holding your hand and i crashed your bike but i bought you beer and you threw up six times because we drank too much sitting down so when you stood up the ***** rushed through your stupid veins and to your pretty head so fast and i didn't want to leave you i wanted to kiss you behind the keg i wanted to kiss you in the bathroom in the side yard in a puddle and really when you fell in that puddle i thought you would drown but you didn't you just broke your camera some rough and tough sleepover remember my hand on the small of your back with our best friends on the same mattress you know my thumb almost got cut off at that house party we stumbled into steak knife *** of gold and joanna went to bed with a dull skull ache while your hair got caught in some australian briars

We are close to death, and
Earth was carved from chaos.
The aging bags beneath our eyes
Are swollen full of gold dust.
So we'd better pierce our skin with needles
To let the glitter out,
To make the crystals grow magnetic
Before the final bow.

The wrong belongings -
The microphone is meant to reside in our city cove
And everybody loves a Dead Girl

The illusion of completeness -
I still dream of Catholic high school hallways
Of teenage girl's knees, living clean beneath plaid skirts

The humid taste -
God hid all the secrets under particular blades of grass
It's nostalgia in the typing pool

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

I can sit idly by on the bleachers
And let you make me cry
Stand in front of the fireplace
Or lay on the carpet
And let you blow a hole through my head
Because in my dreams we're kissing wrists
And you're running your hands through my curls
As I trace your face with blistered thumbs

You're silence -
It kills me
Cracks my rib cage clean apart
Brush burns the sides of my skull
And rips my skin to shreds
All the particles left screaming your name into the wall

And am I getting too old for this?

And maybe one day
I'll tell you about the night
I tied my wrist to your ribcage

And how I don't have the heart
To cut myself free

You know what he said about drinking Coca-Cola,
How it's better than Jesus and how you're better than the saints.
Yes, and you were born a tin foil baby with an
Aluminium vertebrae and electric fingertips.

And with your elbows on the table, you will love me until morning,
And not a minute more. It's the awake verse the dormant, and
All those things you miss when you fall asleep. How strange it is.

So if I could call you that would be a fix, my ***** veins left crying on
Fresh linens. I'll hold off until our next drunken encounter and you
Will play to social construct, while I whisper sentiments of beauty -

Some things just can't wait.

I am terrified of the flashbacks
So vivid and green
On our foreign ghost's porch
In the park
We were scrawled out on the same page
Holding hands on the track past midnight
We spoke of velvet in the basement office
And I kissed your neck

I am stuck in an infinite loop
Memories of nights spent in the boiler room, beneath the string light tree, on the carpet in the mountain -
Anywhere but here

Somehow in the last moments of this January
We ended up in the same bed

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

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

We haven't spoken in over a week,
But really, we haven't spoken since May.
And how many times can I spell out I love you with a fistful of gold dust
Before you believe someone could love you with a fistful of gold dust?

How was that party with the mountain boys?
Did my name fling itself through the windshield
As you pulled in to the driveway and back in time?
Was it all 2012? Ski slopes and corduroy?
The herd of heads you've only ever heard of?
Were you a wild child in the deep woods?

I see champagne bottles scattered under trees,
And guitar strings echoing, resonating, suffocating.
When she pulls away you fall into blue eyes, all wrapped up in books.
Good for you, perhaps the happy couple will one day
Take up residence in Georgia or wherever the freckled girls gather.

Our shadows, all gyrating in slow motion,
It tasted like gin. That night spent raging at
the penny arcade - juniper and pine and Ago.
Friday night, East Crawford Avenue, warm.
We were Christ-like figures wearing velvet,
and you spent your night in a chicken coup.

It snowed that October,
It was just like Christmas

You dropped the garage door on your knees
At the teen party that summer
And you bled some fantastic blood onto the sidewalk
With a cigarette in hand and a lighter in your mouth

We would roll around, naked, on the trailer bed sheets.
You may recall, it was reckless as ****.
And how you almost stabbed yourself with epi on a whim
While we barreled down the highway, fifths of gin residing beneath the seats.

I wasn't the only one who had words to say about the dagger on your bedside table
Or your self made haircut all untamed and screaming

I was tied to your ribcage with fishing wire
The same day you hid all the knives.
See, I'm still here beneath the string light ribbon tree, and these days, Rachel's washing her face with wine

You're slow dancing at the state park,
With river guides and alibis.
At least now no one cries

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

Until you spent three years away,
The moon was always shouting in my ear.
Through the drapes, past the glass -
In my ear.
I recall our ribcages, reflecting light in May.
Perhaps we were all facing west.
We stood near the river once,
All baby teeth and gold dust,
All glistening flecks and fleeting.
Where have you gone, friend?
Campus coves kept us close
From September till now.
But you return to blonde hair
In fevers, like she is/was
The window to your dizzy spells.

I've realized if you're poison,
I will drink to the bottom of your barrel.
And if I told you summer was two sleeps away,
would you fall in love again?
Or did you swallow all the nice things? The yarn bindings and the leather I collected from beach sand graves?
If I say goodnight to you every morning will you gift me moonbeams like Christmas wrapped knuckles beneath balsam necks in the basement

Recall the theater lights that turned your hair
And ever slightly blonder shade of brown

My sonnet went to hell the same night I threw up mix tapes into cereal boxes

I'm terrified of you and you're as meek as they come

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

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

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

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

When I said
Meet me in Monatauk,
I meant it.

And the only thing
You've ever meant
Was well.

I'm putting all my faith
In a roll of tape
Trusting it's torn pieces
To hold my memories to the wall

Purple-mouthed idiots
We are all glass bottle drunks
And it's so funny how
A string of lights feels exactly like a human hand

Warm and wired

Here is the breath.
And here are the marks left behind by bandages.

Here is where I paint your face on each shoulder blade.
I make them meet each other,
you kiss yourself.

Here are the points of silence
trapped between fingertips,
toes, the chin and chest.

Here are the secrets kept in
the small of my back.

I found cigarettes hidden in the notches of your spine

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

The river water was in and around my mouth
As four silhouettes screamed through shiny phantom limbs.
Like the moon's reflection was the only thing keeping us afloat,
And there was talk of some radical ******* and a doctor's appointment gone wrong.

Then after the movie show, we thought we'd die in that torrential highway downpour,
And you let it slip that your ghost was ready to leave your body.

I lived a life through your pockets
Where you kept your other secrets
And crippling fear of loud voices in quiet classrooms

I was simply a secret
Someone to think of in passing, never to truly know
I hung on to every word you ever whispered to me

I think coffee smells like cigarettes
And I think cigarettes smell like far-off summers

I never told a soul about the rosary playing in your mother's car (until now)
You kissed me on the night when I said "you outstep them all"

But now everyone knows too much
And I'm all out of blood to bleed
My heart is throbbing out of tune
Aching in extraordinary anger

There's a chill in the air
There's a ghost in my bed
There are bugs in my brain
Little infant insects
Driving me mad
Keeping me warm
I boil my fingertips
Over hot stoves
Without that blindfolded faith
Things grow scary
I'm numbing the pain
With ugly poison

Lying in bed in the late parts of May
Fingertips cracking in numb disarray
I never thought your voice would stick
To my throat box or glove box or melodies, thick

You return to the trailer park with warm ****** laughs
And mosquitos they bite you, your head and your calves
But you don't think of me and ******* I wish
That your arms would go shaking to catch my red drift

And you barely remember that night in the car
When the rosary played and we went way too far
Cause you blocked it all out with my notes and my screams
Now your lips exist nowhere but inside my dreams

And how will I ever get past your wild curls
Or your questioning laugh, warding off other girls
For you've hurt quite a list in your short twenty years
Now I can't find a difference between Windows and mirrors

It's late
And I know you're not awake
But there's something you should know
We shouldn't have been left alone
Just when I started to call you home
And I understand
That you've taken back your hand
I taste blood under trees
And think of the trash can keys

Remember that night that you and me listened to a song about rivers and roads
Over and over
On our way home
We couldn't get over
The sounds of their voices
And we didn't want to leave each other, if only for the night

That was two years ago
And now drives home hold tears and headstones

I was hurled from the heavens
When I fell through a cloud,
Right arm first
Reaching for your hand
And what keeps my sides scraped
Is the way my rib cage drags
Just a few feet behind yours

I promised you a wink
We got drunk so we could kiss
Fireworks, smoked out sheds
Tee-*** man fell in love at the Taco Bell
We lived beneath the tree
Twenty years old
It's been three since that night in the basement
Citrus something and secret kissing in the office
My hands rested on your legs, and your sister sat outside
Summer is always showing up again
Oh, I remember the Indie Rokkers (who could forget?)
You've been on my mind since 2013
One day, someday, it's been too long
It all started with that Free Festival Concert

Write me a song
Call it
The Sound of Where We Were

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

There are few things
That can exist outside
Of the Summer

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