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

At 5:00 am
We  take on the identities
Hidden beneath the car seats
All nauseous guilt
And sunrise afterthoughts
Your fingers shake while the
Fire takes its place in the sky
And you've been up all night
Deciding which way he'll break your heart this time
But it's not a certain someone's fault
How we belong to no one
The same way no one belongs to us
And everything built on or around an amen or hallelujah

Delusions set in with the dawn
Like am I sleeping or dead
And I make big plans to string lights
On the porch
Like one glimpse at Christmas and my mouth goes magnetic

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

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

What fun! I am gnashing glass shards in my teeth, my throat so raw and I found your sister outside of a bar, shaking. Some little **** crush said he'd blow up bombs in her head, I hugged her hard, and you were flirting with the doorway.

Suppose I awoke with just enough wind in my throat to say:
I would love to eat a cake with you in June! Alone. Or July for that matter.
Though I may be busy planning other parties, so June it is.

I haven't felt this in a long while
That same old, beautiful teenage rebellion coursing through my twenty year old veins

Remember the grass we'd tread on during days of
Extracurricular activities all hungover and dread locked

Or the Saturday night in late September
When three girls first inched their way toward a mirror
In the thrift store and the coffee shop
Gourds and games and locking ourselves in the car to listen to that rust colored song
Amid the high school hoi Polloi
Three girls, still, getting closer to that mirror

There were books about the body in a Goodwill
About the diseases that afflict our tiny bones
And science hung from a rack while she put on an old mans sweater and fantasized about the death that could have taken place in each stitch

Catholic school boy bonfire
Doing donuts in the field because, well, life is a highway
And can you believe it? She hit her head again
Oh our blonde believer, knocking her brain out of her skull and onto the highway
While our other friends smoked secrets in the woods out past the driveway

When we parted from our dear doe eyed psychopath
And found ourselves a trifecta for the first time in months,
There was only one thing to do -
Admit there were robots among us, chug a beer, and say goodnight

Maybe I'll get published
And you can read your name
In a literary magazine
Yeah, maybe I'll get published
And make a couple bucks
Or better yet, struck by a bus
So you can visit my bedside
And play out that hospice epilogue
That's been reeling through our
Brain cells
Since the first Fall apart

These days I'm writing in red ink
Trying hard to get back to blue

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

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

In my America, we sick dogs on the Natives
No reservations
Safety is:
Same ***
Same color
Pulling an afghan over Harlem
Pulling an afghan over the Afghans
Choking down turbans with turpentine

In my America
We ignore the horrors of history
Psychology is:
A field founded on healing female hysteria
Terrified boys sitting unabashedly petrified of
The galaxy between a set of particular thighs
The ******
Lunging into the vacuum only after they've been properly liquored up
In cowardice camaraderie

In my America
We segregate within our feminism
You can march with us, but stay at the back of the riot
****** spelled backwards is:
A ***** bottle, smashed off of a fraternity stage
And dragged along the spine of a man in pastel
****** spelled backwards is:
A picture of thread in knots, tied around wrists
Of female ******* rebellion
****** spelled backwards is:
I need this
For me
Woman
Alive

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

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

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

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.

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

The car beside me is from Quebec
And I hear children whispering in French
I'm accidentally realizing my own existence
Trapped inside this steel contraption
Like if I were to take off my clothes I would simply be naked
Or if I were to cut my hair I would just be carrying around a few less secrets
Who likes shoulder length secrets anyway
So maybe I'll sharpen this car key on the parking lot pavement
And give myself a good old fashioned trim

How is it that all of the songs reeling through my speakers
Call but one thought to mind
A boy in forest green, and then my own reflection
I watch myself float past in a mirror made of river water

Can you believe how old we're getting?
How parents are dropping like flies! and
we've got to mean every goodbye - with
a heavy heart and a fist full of sky, lullabies.
And wasn't it just so funny? at the grocery
store when they asked us if we were throwing
a party? It was a funeral all along. We laughed.

We can smoke cigarettes on the
overpass till our lungs collapse.
Resurrecting bodies and killing
spiders, foolish, faint-hearted,
at rest, yes! in pieces.

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

So I will cease production
On love poems of yore.
I will color my insides with
Little pills and forget the rest.
I will take note on my own,
Bottles of wine and aluminum shreds,
And I will coat you in vapor rub
Until you've melted into peppermint bits.

Rachel bleached her hair to
Mark the end of something silver -

To counteract the epitaph

An eternal "I was here, and I didn't want to leave"

It all washed up on shore, dead
The same summer most of us
Gave up on God and gave into one another
Or those saints found below the belt

Death is not the color black
It's water growing gradually stagnant, yellow
A slow crawl on all fours to the finish line or a sunset swallow
The faded leather found sourrounding your veracious belt loop

And then there's Elizabeth
Storming down the church aisle to call the whole order off
She'd return to the dive bars in red lipstick
And break hearts through notes written in checkbooks

Cosmic chaos comforts
The living in regard to the dead
We have faith in stardust and song lyrics
A road map, phone number sent through the telescope at a camp sight

But caskets close and
Bodies burn
They scatter on hilltops and
Scream out in stereo

Sleepless slumbers remain
For Rachel and this is her
Peroxide obituary
For a mother gone too soon

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

Weekend Warriors in face paint, remember?
Home caught fire and we danced on the
pavement. Tambourine shakes and tattered
blouses, please don't go away! Christmas
light canopy in the secret woodland electric
tree. We raged and swore we'd never leave.
All running toward homemade, handmade
radio waves. It tasted like some thick fruit
bowl and ***** poison - anything but
Still Life. Those brush strokes were shaking,
and I love you beneath theses branches,
and you and you and you and you and really -
please don't go away.

It snowed that October,
It was just like Christmas

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

We were Christmas velvet Christ-like figures
Licking wounds with liquored tongues, and
You spent your night in a chicken coup.

Snow sky in December, and things were unseasonably warm.
There was a fire on the porch and my teeth drew blood from
Joanna's forehead. In the field then, we screamed so loud.

There was something more than magic in the air those days.
The back room at the State Theater,
Citrus blistered fingertips and plywood smells.

And you chose me.

After I asked you to
call me reckless in the
crushed red stadium seats.

November rains and nothing's new:
Let's go back to writing poetry for two.
I laugh outside the echo chamber, and read O'Hara in blue.

God is gay. His name is Frank.

We've been at this for years, my dear!
So why seep into silent sludge. Ink blots
on the sole of my shoe. If not for you.
The max! The wax! The musical goo!

As you know, it's all true -
However the weather,
Dead Girls last forever.

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

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

My best friend threw up flowers in
someone’s mother’s shoebox,
And Nelson got a ****** nose.
All while we ate chocolate in the shadows.

There were boys on the porch smoking pipes.
We ran through the haze, into the field,
Reeling in those tiny bulbs of hysterical light.
Something was screaming in the trees that night -

Maybe wind, but what is wind other than
Gold dust & baby teeth? All glistening flecks & fleeting.

I was force-feeding you radio wires
When we were frozen in some lost October.

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

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

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

Some barber, who does not love you,
Cut your hair, and gave you bangs.
You brush them back with careful
hands - yet another time you
shouldn't have chosen silence.

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

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

**** 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.

To start, their brains are still sparking.
Neurons still making connections and
breaking promises. And really, I have
trouble with the denotaded dead as
these bodies simply find themselves
at rest, in pieces, on a piece of a cloud.
Cerulean clean - little apple alabaster.
Their flesh turns back to wax, and we light
their wick embodied skulls with little
matchbooks disguised as bible verses.
Embalmed emblems and bodies bodies bodies.
Cremation in street clothes, everything special with
a man in the oven, a woman in the wood stove.
Back to ground, in deep with the worms, and
all the tiny evil machines as ushers. Death, hm!
Is some moon rock sweat and blood blister mix,
sandalwood musk, a turpentine must. You'll trust.
Playing fast and loose with scripture,
magnetic movement, entombed. Dead bodies are
keeping check of clocks, and swallowing wrist watches,
and don't forget it. Dead bodies will be late if
they care to be. With their painted skin and
formaldehyde breakfast, they form riddles in
caskets, and what about the Egyptians?
Dead bodies have rust in their throats and
foot soles made of limestone. They take up
space in rafters, between your bed and the wall,
stained glass stained with afterthoughts, forget-me-nots.

Your arms are just two pieces collected from Saturn's rings
We're all made up as the same stuff as stars

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

Oh, my God.
We had it all wrong -
It was never Weird Honey.
No, it was Wyrd Honey.
It was Fate, honey.

We are beings of narration
Killing all those trees
Then turning into some
Demented Johnny Appleseed
And how do we experience religion?

There are reasons why we are
Moved by the art that moves us
It lies in the state of your own handwriting
The good music playing outside the clinic
The sound of where you are (were)

The idea of the uncanny
That clown was only scary
Because it's almost human
How sonnets singe my fingertips
And it's entirely illusion

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

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

Pine Needle Spine Man
You housed our hollow heads.
Filled the vacancies
With ink and shouts and Magnetic Zeros.
It was the age of kissing wrists
and secret smoke.
Pulsing plastic bottle poison
Wrote Om Nashi Me on my neck,
So we never had to check
If anyone was still breathing,
Because of how hard our blistered hearts were beating,
And our songs raged, wreathing.
Some nights beneath the blades,
we claim we can’t recall
But fossils were burned into our shoulders,
and I know we felt them all.

Pine Needle Spine Man
We strung you up with lights
The fistful of blonde hair
Had those ****** knuckle fights
With the dead letter secrets
In the ribbon spit trunk,
Dipped our hands in *** and balsam
We sunk into the drunk.
Blast beats, we’d
Retreat.
It was a world gyrating in slow motion.
Dancing on the mulch beds,
We hovered high on reckless rebellion.
Our feet rejected the floor,
But ghosts were moving into our cores.
It was all golden rod and the 4-H stone,
Sarah Jones and the radio wars.

When they cut you down,
We washed your hair with wine.
Found our cigarettes hidden
In the notches of your spine,
And drank what was left
Of the Rabid Bits of Time.

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

I believed in the backs of your knees,
The little cove I built beneath your blue dye village veins.
And I remember the back of your neck, with ink to show, but summer came and grew your hair out long.

Deliberate illusion, babe -
I'm sorry for the mess!
The psychedelic bonfire,
The prayer that you'd undress.

Then, night two of the ******:
That evening ran rampant.
With ounces of beer filling each skeleton bone,
Flashes of indigo, and a friendly plate of pasta.
And us Hispanics have to stick together.
We made a home in the sand pits and
On the college buses, we must have been
Going one thousand miles per hour, and
I heard from a good source that the wheels
Weren't even touching the ground.
Bruises, baby. A concussion to match.
Still sprinting through the indigo, you know,
The night sky has never/will never be Black.
Blue consumes me. I am drunk.
My best friends dragging my lethargic limbs
To and fro. Warm ***** at the apartment party -
I am in love with each of them. My friends, that is.
Riding high on all that reckless rebellion,
No matter what happens, this was, this is.
(Forgive me, but - We Are)

Perhaps at some point
She was in love with
Each of us, individually,
Or different parts of us
That she smashed together
To form a glowing deity
In her mother's pottery barn

This being created was
A blistering hybrid -
A lake water guzzling,
Guitar string swallowing,
Paint brush *******,
Hair pulling, ring bearing,
Monster in a pair of old fashioned skis

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?

These are words I threw to pavement
Many Mays ago
Not for you, but about you
Not dead, but dormant

My shoulders quake in your memory
And I keep dreaming that you shaved your head
There were sopranos hidden in the bed frames
And altos renting out the bathroom window

You rest your head on state park driveways
In the backseat of your best friend's car

When you walked across that stage
I thought you'd shudder at my ghost
But you didn't
You staggered behind classmates in robes and
Forgot about the shirts I stole from you

Forgot about the first night by the river
Forgot about my brand new chipped tooth
Forgot about the night in the shed, a shirt pulled over your head
Forgot about the night I sang about fire water in the walk-in closet

I'm still lying numb on the gymnasium floor
You found your way to the big city's door

I'll dip my finger tips in cinnamon
And you can lick them clean
While smashing me to bits
Until I'm nothing more than Goldenrod Spit