I am nothing compared to your past.
You are everything, even with your flaws.
I love all of you.
Every problem and addiction,
makes my love dig deeper another foot.

My favorite is your insomnia.
How we stay up talking—
albeit on the phone.
Hours go well spent as we break the midnight barrier.

I am not your lover.
I am not even your best friend.
But I love you.
I love your random fits of ADHD,
and your strength through your past.
I love your drug addiction and insomnia.
They make you, you.

And you, you are beautifully flawed.

You're not my first or my final
but you can be my favorite.

I hope it hurts again
when you drop your vice.
I know it certainly burned when
you let me go.
There's still a hole
in your heart.

Being half-happy reminds me of you
When we'd talk on the phone and I'd write you poems
Comparing you to the pills I've never done
and the powders you described to me

I'd give up used bookstores, libraries,
old love, and free chai tea lattes
to be alone with you.


All of the things I once believe caused feeling—
Just moments and memories

in a great spectrum of
*"I forgot—just being happy. being happy.

So I prioritize
and keep going,
close my eyes.
close your eyes."

I've never truly believed in love.
Playing Coldplay in the mountains above,
An inch from the edge of the atmosphere,
you told me not to give my tears,
you told me not to cry.
"It's weak," you said, drilled it into my head.
I did something I believed I never could,
You might not know, but you changed me for good.

I've never truly believed in love,
The mountain air, or lack thereof.
I tried not to fall as best as I could,
Did everything a blind girl should,
But I stumbled, and I tripped,
I fumbled, and I flipped,
Not off the mountain that we were part of,
but into the abyss that one calls 'love.'
At the edge of insanity, where we once stood,
You might not know, but you changed me for good.

But does 'for good' mean 'for better,'
or 'for good' as in 'forever?'
I tried to find out as best as I could,
but all we'll ever know is that you changed me for good.

but really i was always too afraid to say
"be my tonight and you'll be my tomorrow"
and i don't know how long forever is but
we can find out,
right?

I sip my drink in waterfalls
looking to fill a hole
whose origin I haven't quite
yet figured out.
I make the same mistake
because maybe I can fill this void
with all the luck of the 3rd time
with all the regrets of the coming 4th.

"You don't think it's bad, do you? That I keep
Finding myself in the people
I find in my bed on Saturday morning?"

never wanna be an addict
but i got no qualms against *******
just don't want similarities to you—
n' you had the nerve to call me vain.

life is cycles and so is death
addiction is the quickest form of slow suicide.
you never quit—
you only take breaks
and i will always come back home

Quickly cunning,
armed with a witted tounge.
Eyes of a murderer,
    with the rope already strung.
Coat of copper,
lying sweetly as it promises,
the appearance of a dog.

The fox feeds once again.

He runs through the brambles,
reminiscent of an open door.
Eats all the farmer's poultry.
His mouth waters no more.

As quickly as he came,
the bushes he now does part.
He has stolen a living.
He has stolen my heart.

"Yeah, why don't I tell him that I ****** you too?"

Chalk, felt, feather-pens.
construction paper ends
glued to gift you a shift in-
to happiness:
You need bliss.
You don't have bliss.



I can give you this.

tired because of the things he does,
always remembering where i was.

these fickle things nostalgia brings,
icicle fingers touching ribs—stings.

this ship merits no singing of sad songs
cleaned my decks, the salt water is gone.

i can't let go of the past if i am surrounded in it—
watching the old and blowing off the new.
From second to seventh, all i can recall has left me
counting months until it means something

Language is painless—
but somehow, we're
afraid of the words
that we painted.

push me down the stairs and pin me to the wall
we ****** on someone else's floor and i woke up with no regrets and a ****** nose
the only thing that clouded my judgement was my old life.
i live in constant fear that i will find myself

**** will never release
the way our eyes touched—
and held between them:
those worries in your fingertips.

here we are again
midnight.

as we count the new day away/
one, two, three
in the morning.


four, five, ***
seven days in a week.

playing on our words.
we're weak.
i'm weak.
so weak.

here we are again.

your apartment is a glass bottle of ***** and we're drowning in the bottom of it
and the only way to save ourselves is tip the world over
and sip.

I am

Watching adventure
Through my glass bedroom window.
What more must I say?

not i, i am not prolific, of late.
i lack no creativity, only desire.
such expansive palate but no taste for creation.
i have words in my cupboards but i
go grocery shopping for a different hunger.
i am hurting for a different world.

Monopoly.

Playing both
red and blue.

If you own all the railroads is there really any point in travelling?
You'll just stay in your own hotel.

I flew through one.

Clouds hang in suspension in the sky.
Special effects may or may not be used.

Love is the death of man and I,
I am coated in a lacquer of immortality.

You mistook rock bottom for a mountain plateau, but you were happy, so we decided not to tell you for awhile.

I wish I could show you all the words I wrote on my body
That you probably wouldn't approve of
(you enjoy the meaning—but not the idea).

But you don't want my skin anymore.
And that's fine.
That's just fine.

Graced to know that
you still lie through your teeth and
and
and

(I hope you get a cavity)

You stand on the edge
of my vision.
     Teasing?

So tantalizing.

Blurry,
but you manage
to radiate
with a perennial odor of:
Cigarettes.
****.
And bleach?

You are too far
for my arms to reach.

"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"

So pleasure twists to grief—
Sweet Eve looks for just relief.
We were looking only for release.
Because Adam died.


Adam died.

I sit on a long wooden balance beam
Asking *"please, just give me a break."

Sadly, an
"I love you"
and a look into your iris
isn't strong enough of a cure
for this virus.
I would rather you
hit me and make
me realize
that the only way to fix the problem
is to revise my mix of overwhelming
string-of-something-mood-swing so
I am sorry,
Kyran King.

I've always hated how
love can sting.

In front of her, lies—

                  —What,
                  are you looking at
                  Mother?

"Nothing, dear. Just
the clouds against a seventh
day's barrier."

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 smell like green and brown and taste like cotton swabs and trees. When I see you I don't see you but I see rhythmicity. Your skin is liquid chocolate and your eyes are hot green tea. Your mind brings mine to philosophy and not radians nor degrees. I find you in the clouds and in the cycles of the sea, seeing that you say that we're just God in hide-and-seek.

she looks like me, but she does not
hate like me. she loves,
and she loves you, but you
have always wanted to be hated. and i
can hate you.

and i can hate you.

you were the greatest catch of my life
but i am no fisherman
i was never meant to reel you in
i was always meant to throw you back

There's a world that sits
in the tip
of
your cigarette.


There's a city in
that spark.

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 wish I found you before your first rolled 5 dollar bill
your vertebrae goes viral into a double helical spiral.
acid dripping from your spinal— tap.
tap. tap. tap.
i am knocking on your door.
"must i never see your youth again?
just live this age still useless."


you're calm but

your mind is ruthless.

I'm standing above you like a mechanical crane
you reach up your iron bars and I rotate away—
working on the next steel work frame of my life.
you are irreparable, and I am not strong
enough to carry
even the pieces of you.

I love you.
I love you like oxygen, like my lungs.
Pulmonary. Coronary.
And although it may make me dizzy,
I love you like my blood.
My veins, venules, arteries, arterioles.
Blood epidemic. Systemic.

when the humble
bend their necks
we show to them
no humility.