Coins with one side
live forever
on the side
of the street
and are stuck
in the corners
of cedar-topped tables
you never clean
anymore.

Give me two faces and
place your bets on me.

Give me two faces and
spin me in the air.

War,
War changes.
From rifle ranges
to a poison gas blast,
Not last, an atomic bomb.

Calm is not our future.


War,
War never changes.
A hate between two—
Through working men fought
Caught up in the past
Outlasting hate.

i welcome lows like highs
you bit my ear and then laughed—
*"if your entire life is peaking
you're nothing but a plateau"

I was sent to Heaven when I realized
I am not Jesus
and I cannot walk across the ocean for you
—but I can sure as Hell drown

I've tried to die seven times and succeeded in all but this one.

they are ashamed when i am finally happy
"but it is the only thing i look forward to"
they are happy for me when i am at my saddest
"you're better than that.
have some self respect"

"how can you take away my happiness
because it differs from yours"

"why do you do this to the ones you love"

He took me to the river,
Said that careful phrase.

"We were never lovers"

Laid me on blue haze.
Like a floating flower petal,
I skim atop his grip.

"We were never lovers,"
Said the water on his lip.

"If only in the next life,
My words will become true."

As my lover closed my eyes
And plunged me into blue.

Time's a number, same with age
but I'd break those restrictions and do it all again
for one more night with you.
for one more night with you.

i am still waiting for the day you wake up from your three-year sleep

pretty white ******* a date
with a lonely man
whose father's funeral
only had three guests:
him, his brother, his uncle.

i can't even pretend
to know how to feel.

Will you create with me?
Silence says what silence speaks,
Not what your worries tell you.

I could live a lifetime's worth of lifetimes and still never meet anyone
Just
Quite
Like
You.

A millennium from now when
I am buried and you are alive
through the pages of the poetry and letting your voice live through songs or speeches.
You will still cross my mind like our local mountain paths.

I am setting your soul on fire
Like that pack of Player's Light
I will burn on in your mind.

Because the fire on the horizon
Was brighter
Than any light
You could have given me.

carved you out of me
and the cancer is gone.
i'll deny every word of it but
(i know we both look at the holes)

i still have trouble
trying to teach myself
to touch something that
i never even thought existed
in the first place


my fingers go right through you

Oh Ruth, you left me in a scattering—
I hit the gold foil
and I was gone.

in the middle of the road,
you said you wanted to be a canary—
"because God doesn't have eyes
in the coalmines"

We head to visual court to give our testimony.
Blood rush to the podium of my neck
where another lover once bit.
I keep these bruises for you and I
to remember why we can't be together.

You   feel   it
coming. You
can    always
feel   it  com-
ing.  It's  here
again. Maybe I would rather be low. Here it is, again, the plateau.

love is patient,
love is kind.

thom yorke keeps telling me that true love waits
so why do i feel that waiting has made me weak.
(like i'm letting you get away with something)

i am not patient,
nor kind.
i am envious, and boastful.
i keep a record of how wrong i feel.

My best friend, you
At three in the morning,
You asked me to sing you to sleep.
All I could do was sit; think. Silence.
What to sing,
What to sing.
My best friend, no longer.
A year later, and
I am still thinking,
Of what to sing you.

In past I have met a man,
Who sold his youth to sea
Now withered, before old age began
Tells tales of only memory.

I've also found a girl in ache,
Wronged by a single soul.
The past, tainted by a single break—
A future taking toll.

However many memories do invite—
I see no calling in yesterday's light.

"How do you prefer to fall?"*


Test me.
Test my patience
And my soul
Test my heart within my whole.

I like a challenge, a puzzle.
I am too accustomed to easy.


Make me wonder why I am even here,

Let me delve the answers from my inner core.

When you get off work
—remember to brush
the quiet ghosts off your shoulder

Did we teach ourselves to see?
Do we imagine touch?
What do we strive to be,
Ask for so much?
Were we built with this instinct?
    To breathe?
    To sleep?
    Survive?

Or were we given it?
From our creators?
    Creator?

Are we their creation,
    That has created their own?
The forgotten plant planet,
    That has lived; grown?

Is it miracle or mistake,
That we cannot judge,
    Our creations,
With an unbiased eye?
No, we can only judge other's.

Did we make this up?

True, false.
Born by blood, live by pulse.

This is all we know.

Did we make this up?

Hate, Love.
A molten core, celestial above.

Directions are simply words.
Is time as well?
Is emotion?

Did we make this all up?

A beginning, an end.
Just to feel, just to understand,
    comprehend.

I could decipher your writing,
Every loop, curve, and line.
I know all of your secrets,
and you know all of mine.

I picture your past
as if I have lived it instead.
Your voice is my conscience,
Guiding my head.

I know how you died,
On that night, all alone.
But your favorite color,
I never have known.

it's been a year and twenty two days and twenty three hours and fifty minutes and nineteen seconds and
i still can't tell if it was lust or loneliness
mean or meaning
all i ever really know is that
all i every really wanted was to sleep with you
in every sense of the saying

Time heals all wounds, but
scar tissue is always visible in light
and feels smooth to fingertips in the dark.

Time heals all wounds. Time heals all wounds.

Time has never healed me—
And I was never wounded.
Yet my entire body is smooth in the dark.

I tried to push you away;
to deny your voice.
    You make my mind sway.

New phases came,
and I got hooked.
    I forgot your fame.

But then I heard you, from her.
And I remembered us.
    You make my thoughts blur.

The last time I heard you, I don't know when.
But now I've tasted your song;
    and I'm in-love again.

I listen to you, as I go to bed.
Your rightful place,
    is in my head.

Your third eye, your two eyes, you're I, you are I, I,

I rust like an iron oxide coating
(like you showed me how to do).

Supernova, how I wish,
I still were in love with you.

Two years ago could never
come back
so fast.

My present is paining me.
I retreat into my past.

735 days since my skin touched yours

In one second—a universe existed: each
with 735 Earths, each
with 735 cities, each
with 735 hundred sets of lovers, like us.

In one second—each planet had
735 extra suns. 735 cities burnt to
the end of their matchstick in 1/735th of a second,
the same second that we had last touched.

You asked me, then, if I ever thought I had loved anyone in high school. I didn't answer you, because all I could think of was if a world could feel the difference between the burn of 735 and 736 suns.


They can.

taking time captive,
my future tightens
his hand on his own
throat. he acts like a
mother after birth.
i learn to follow steps
once pressed into me,
now fading out.

so we pour salt on slugs and watch them shrivel away
'cause you used say, "let's be human here."

disappearing was never our forté
but we could make it his.

slowly breathing,
slowly fading—
into something that
never even really
existed
in the first place

people die when we forget that they're alive in our minds

Tears—from, or in front of, or in the arms of
My mother, oh God, do I love her,
Breaking down faster than gravity can act on salt water.
The words dissolving under my tongue—
quicker than I can spit them out.

It hurts.
It ******* hurts.

i want to write essays about your body
to preach you to ears who
have never heard
your laugh.

i want to create
constellations in your skin
and give each one a history
that i will read to myself
when it is the middle of the night
and you have turned away in your sleep.

because we don't need a background
in physics to know
that i will never
truly, fully, wholly,
understand you—
but you will always be here
covered in that cloud, oh
that cloud of unknowing.

We were wrestling in your bed
And I grabbed your leg—
Seven others wrapped around me.

Ah, the standard of life,
which comes in threes:
Education, career, wealth.
The likes of which we have welded together into a closed circuit.

I could not be with you so I became you.

The skylines, the cruise ships, the water in every window.
From the sixteenth floor of my permanence—
I do not write to you.

I do not know why the caged bird sings,
nor why I chose to stay inside on
the sunniest day of the year.

There were no birds, no songs, and no cages.
Only shadows of your house on the backyard.

"but you're so beautiful"
we kissed in the alley off burrard
"shut the **** up"
by the bush where i hid my *****
"touch me"
it was raining when you told me
"i love you"

When temptation follows us all,
From the farthest pew,
He calls the poem,
"Untitled."

This new friend, who showed me
New ways of thinking.

She came much too often.
And then her eyes started bleeding.

I thought she only came when I was bored.
So I went out and bought a book.
But then I heard her over my shoulder.

I thought she was chained to my house
So I went out Friday night.
I saw her in the theater.

I thought she hated school
Where all those social butterflies gather
But then she sat with me in English.

I thought she only came out in darkness
But when I flick the lights on,
She is still here with
Bleeding eyes. Smiling.