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?

And on that first night,
In the movie theater
I cried because I knew
You'd break my bones
Crack my chest and tattoo
My little heart with a drawing
Of your neck.
And when we got stuck in the mud
Driving home from the show,
It was all wonderstruck dirt
Gravel hands and
I stood in front of your
Headlights - deliberate illusion,
Creating a vision that went without notice
It was my own fault, getting involved with anyone but a mortal.

Bite my fingertips till they callous
Or better yet, bleed.

And why don't we go walking on airplane wings?

Life is a death march, and we pass
The time making cave drawings.

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

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

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

There was a time you threw a party
And forgot Joanna's birthday
And went raging down the river
With your next best boyfriends
Left our baby bird stranded in the nest
Dropped acid and showed some chest

There was a time the boy you claimed to love
Had to beg for your attention
And you wouldn't pick up the phone
Even when you were carving things all alone
And a time when we went to a concert
And we rushed you home to rage with
All those new and improved mountain kids

There was a time you called me crying
Screaming songs about leaves and
For a night You Missed that Band
And through heaves you recalled
A night spent on a razor's edge
Thrift stores and throats raw
The old September
And you promised to call Joanna
And no surprise, you never did

Deities die, babe,
But I didn't dare to
Predict your demise.

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

A barback slid you out
A generation early, in
The shape of your father.
He who befriended the
Blondest girl in town -
Elf-sheen baby, eternally mortal,
Entangled in bedsheets, or,
Everyone's Fantasy ****.
So she gifted you lawn rakes
And snack cakes, and you
We're raised in the bar on
Highway 51. Far from the
Vinyl static emitted from your
Mother's breast. She warned you
About The Suburbs. Always
Whispering tiny prayers -
Grab the keys, we're leaving.

And they keep dying on you -
Your matriarchal mirrors.
Leaving you in the hands
Of workmen scientists,
All waiting for the explosion,
The bomb to drop,
The neighborhood burn.

Grab the keys, we're leaving.

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

There you go again,
Sprinting through 300 and some days,
On your way to find the time machine.
Twenty years spent trapped inside a
Toy chest featuring constricted breaths.

I'm sorry that any of us ever got older than eighteen.

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

Eulogy singer
Blood bullets explode in my throat
Blood, ink, rusted piano keys
Church pews and surgical scars
Christmas feels like crying
I hope I don't die in Italy
Drinking ink on the bathroom floor
Everything was, but wasn't
It was white shoes, but off white, really
In love, but not
Warm water in the garage
A champagne bottle and a butcher knife
We drank in the streets, and no one got caught
Blood bullets on Main Street, everyone was drops of old beer
That time of year
Bullet holes in the headboard
Used, abused, we don't get to choose
Christmas felt like joy or melancholy or pine or something

Glances in passing and nothingness,
I'll drop out and take up gardening.
And you are so cool, all German bred,
and sometimes braided. I see you, so
well-read and rather regal. ***** blonde
nuclear, alabaster, aluminum rods -
electricity dripping from the soles of
your shoes. This classroom, my own
ink blotted incubator, the radiator sits,
flatlining. Your jaw as two razor blades,
your shoulder blades, broad, gentle.

I wonder how you look in the morning,
How you look at yourself in the mirror.
Do you practice smiling, and
how often do you wash your hair? Oh,
you exist in glass, and I will not try to
know you. Leaving this poem limited,
and yet. Your jam drop mouth houses all
well-spoken soliloquies, radical requiems.

So, what would happen if we brushed
shoulders in passing? Your little accent.
Accident, we appeared in the same
huddled mass. Literary plugs in the
drain, and your new American. So,
why don't we just go walking on
airplane wings? Some transcontinental
affair. Frequent flyer *******, stranger.

It's when we're all apart
That I begin to lose control of my body
Swallowing lemon juice by the jersey shore -
Things have been worse

Mostly, I long for that physical closeness
To hold a jaw in my hands, careful not to shatter it

And don't get me wrong -
I've seen photographs of myself
The way I live with my shoulders pinned to my ears
As to block out the irreparable chatter of finites and hydrangeas
Like the world has never seen your hair peak through closet dirt

*** 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

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

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

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.

Dear Joanna,
I am drunk.

And halogen lights threaten suffocation.
I think I'm going blind. Really, this time.
Do you recall a day spent craving defective
Melodies in our high school hallway?
And really, do you remember what you
were wearing the night spent too close
to the teepee? Green. Your arms, organic,
and your fingertips clean. You know what
I mean? We once raced up the mountain and
watched the world spin slow beneath trees.  
When I think of snow flakes forging down to
Mother Earth, I taste cheap whisky sugar water
--- (the kind we stole from your father).
Tell me you remember that night. The first
evening spent alone, side by side. Falling hard
for each other's coats. Screaming out to oblivion -
I swear to you, we'll write a book.

I swear to you, we'll write a book.

Dear Joanna,
I am drunk.

My head feels hollow and my bed feels heavy.
I keep dreaming of asphyxiation, and I am
terrified. I wish we all crashed our cars in
the high school parking lot all those years ago.
Nothing can reignite my soggy, stagnant vertebrae.
Your breath was in my lungs when you were born
far from city lights. I listen to the music radiating
from your Shins. And I wish we just crashed our cars
into each other or something. Can you gift me a few
sleeping lessons? Or has the nocturn taken your
tiny hands, placed you in the haze of a night's blue
middle? Kissing lipless kids on street corners, we were
both murdered by the ghost boys in the dark parts of
our collective, electric skulls. Jesus Christ, Joanna.
We were kazoo babies in sweaters, and **** it,
We Were Kind. You suggested we murdered time.
And you know what? You were right.

Dear Joanna,
I swear to God,
If I made you cry,
I'm sorry. You are made
of Sunday evening forget-
me-knots, and shadows in the
fields of our hometown. You are
six guitar strings reverberating in
constant cosmic collision. Cataclysmic
babies in your brain and with my elbows
on the table, I Love You. And with my hands
shaking hard in the concert hall, I Love You. And
with all the new slang spitting through radio waves,
I Love You. And from the backseat of your parents' car,
I Love You. And a tough **** friend, please stay with me till

The End.

You know, we felt the dark together.

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

I will wear my
mother's purple coat.
I will not cry for my
sister's best friend's father,
and wouldn't you agree?
Spring is the best time to die.

Funerals are poetry
and
caskets are cigarettes
for
sober girls.

Where did you go?
With flaxen hair, all whirling and twirling
You escaped through meteor showers
And we got tangled in afterlife moon rocks

We lie in familiar basements and discuss
An ink on skin memorial for the best friend you gifted us
An eternal mother's day playing to the sound of
Loose change in my pockets

Still, no one cares to ask if Rachel can breathe
We continue through the motions
Sailing over your hometown on glass shard boats
The ice is getting thinner

And I must wonder if we will all erupt into
An overflow of you
Or sink into the sludge
Not quite knowing what to do

We keep faith in sure hands
The secrets lying at the bottom of the bottle
Cigarettes on the overpass
The promise of August and Everything After -

A freelance writer with knotted blonde hair, coming through in stereo

There was a mistake made in
the Bible, and you weren't there.
The beautiful and the sublime.

There's a song in my bones and
you're singing it! We step into the
blender, and switch clothes at noon.
When the sun set, we were in
bed together. Four newborn babies:
I hallucinate the destruction of a calendar.

Bottles of wine in the grass, and
this has been the very best day!
I kiss my friends with an infected
throat, and no one minds, and we
just go on eating grapefruits.

Sticky fingers, your car was almost
stolen, and here, I swear -
you'll never have to cut your hair.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 thought you'd see her around
Not everyday, but fairly often
And no one quite knew how to take it,
When a new boy took your place up on the mountain

Remember those endless days you spent
Frolicking through fields and licking cement
Spelling out each others names in twigs
And stitching your bones together with gold thread

Now she's got everything she needs
A blonde boy from the state park
Who lives in a barrel of beer beneath the southwestern rapids
And a home made from the backseat of her secondhand car

You have sternum pains and you know far too much
You used to wear your hair long to keep those mountain secrets  
These days it grows to hide the footprint left below your bottom lip

Some bonds lie strictly in memory
And
She knows she's been on your mind

Chlorine smells on the first floor,
And kids getting drunk on the second.
Saturday's daughters rolled up and strung out on echoing laughter in
shadowy classrooms. Then those ankle bruises in the forest green hallway -
We were drinking gin in school when   I first forgot those days would end.
In catholic plaid we kissed the kindest boys, I swear to God!
We were sparkplug babies wearing sweaters, and dammnit,
We Were Kind.
Kazoo choruses, and days spent standing side by side in a mirror.
We were all tin foil newborns with
Aluminum vertebrae and electric fingertips.

Now this is my dormant reconciliation,
And you're my living ghost.

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

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

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

I'll invade your recreational days
In D.C., Canada, or Maine
I'll push my wrists through your favorite drinks
At the basement show, local bar, and skating rink

You are not dead, but your actions are post-mortem

I write you letters of apology
A certain kind of eulogy
A never ending repetition of hand references
You gather evidence from my numb inferences

I don't recommend your behavior
Leaving me on the bathroom floor
Loving someone and throwing them to the flame
We drown ourselves without ending this game

You are not dead, but your actions are post-mortem

nicotine and led paint
lilac cigarettes

always mistaking ghosts for gods
you can't shake the innocence

getting high on hair dye
copper strands won't heal the blows

you gave it up on halloween
dancing naked, he'll never know

blonde boys don't love you like I do

thought it was time you said we're through

playing pretty in your living room
cut your bangs just to feel alive

learning lyrics to his favorite songs
your veins tick out of time

your mountain days are out of reach
throw your body off the *****

you dance but not in tangles
try to hold on to hope

blonde boys don't love you like i do

you kiss and tell and then you're through

She will choke you with goldenrod
And I will watch you get so close to death
That your body's going cold

Oh, flawed leader you were so confused
Not absolutely monstrous, just downstream
With shattered paddles. At the height of your power

You must have known - it would all burn to dust.

Blood and gold and memories made inside of a certain time and place

I remember us -
Sticky in July.
The humid taste.

Now you're flat-lining in a corner,
Keeping perfect time with the music.

Conscious, then not - again & again.

You'll keep me in the waiting room,
And later, we'll drop acid in your
Parents' attic, and of course, I will
Never be the same.

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

My head hurts, and
It's unseasonably warm.
I read that a concussion
Can cause mild depression.

But what if I was mildly depressed to begin with?

What is a guitar, but something to smash off the bedroom walls or throw from the roof?

And so you'll sit,
Suspended on wires.
Strung across our
Darling country.
Resting on boyish charm
And
School day soliloquies.
Celtic claddagh knots -
Upside down and
Everything.

You can bleach your hair
Or cut it off with a butcher knife
All of this done by candle light,
In the middle of the night

Get him just drunk enough
On perfume liquors in the backyard
And whisper little things about
The parts of you made of glass

Trace his name across
Your open veins in vibrant reds
Mailing him dim lit photos
Of  scar tissue evidence

Crash your car into the drive-in movie screen
Think about how things could have been
If you never let it slip
That you dreamt of his top lip

And, for all intensive purposes,
I love you.

I still have the scars on my ankle
From the day we got drunk in school

I have a few nights burned in my brain
I have some type of mind
That returns to a mountain girl
I make peace with bodies thought otherwise to be dead
I make no apologies for laughter in churches
And my throat was raw on the first day of spring

I miss flying high in that aeroplane
Where guitar strings did anything but strangle our hearts
I left the state
Just to play our soundtrack to a room full of strangers

I will kiss you on trailer kitchen floors,
And make you trace my corduroy with
Your grown out fingernails.

But your brain resides in elsewhere -
The place between two auburn freckles
In the cork skin milk.

Tomorrow never does arrive as
We exist in strictly today -
Holiday ties and river guides.

There are only so many times that I
Can haunt the roof of my mouth with
Cave drawings of made-up memories.

Only so many times that I can turn
Up the volume and smash my skull
Off of those reverberating guitar strings -

Hammer those bar chords / Say Goodnight.

Say goldenrod.
Say Time Machine.
Say velvet dress & radio wars.
Say Eileen on a dance floor.