A thin chain of a broken beaded necklace
separates you from
illumination. The muted metal *****
are smooth under your finger
tips. Clicks, mark ideas
like they mark the presence of
tacks in your soles on
linoleum.
Some things are better
in the dark. The strumming
of guitar strings, a cough.
The slide of skin
over velvet glass. Vinyl
hands wrapped around a globe,
turn it. Left, left, right, right,
metal twists, snug against
rivets, grinding, a dull black
nose. Shake filaments like
fractured electric fence
marked by a flash. The last
moments of daylight dropped
behind a horizon, made of
creamy silk pleats to shade
the glow. ‘Til the chain lights up
the room.
Illumination.
Some things are
better in the dark.

I couldn't love you any less than I do,
I've tried.
I ate my tongue like a sponge breaking
apart after sitting in a bucket of suds
weeks after the car has been washed clean
of the mud we sprayed on it's flanks
fighting and kissing like two magnets
meeting for the first time.  
Separating us is like pressing
the opposite sides together,
they'll only want to face each other again,
once you've stop trying.
How could I love you any less,
when you're the only thing that is keeping me
breathing in my own poison.

She couldn't get the Brillo pad out of her throat
or the pictures of her family off the walls,
they just wouldn't come down;
but the lotion took the make-up off just fine.
He said, You're trouble. The good kind, like whiskey
and riding my bike like a dummy.
Sometimes things are just better left alone,
unless you're choking on the syllables and drinking
is the only thing preventing you from lying.
Soft, sweet memories have a way
of rearranging themselves, into confused little lines
and trying to keep them in order only scrambles them
worse until they are made of gibberish and I love you's.
So shake off the water droplets and watch them spray
into the breeze, they'll be gone in a second
because after love, even breathing you can't be sure of.

He didn't believe I was crazy
But you can't see the insides of peoples
Skulls and mine was plastered with posters
Of him and pictures of us.

I'll cut off my head to get out
Then you can keep it if you think it's so pretty
Just throw the rest of me to the wolves
They've already had it.

The melody said "love is watching someone die"
then sign me up to catch your last breaths
Because I want to see you realize
what you gave up.

As the water ran down the windowpane
It drew silhouettes of your face in blurry streams
Each drop racing the other, till they were just lines
Of precipitation pooling at the bottom.

I can feel the rope pressing against the skin
of my neck, tightening. It hangs like the noose
we once found in my neighbor's yard.
I wonder if they know their yard is my designated
lynching spot, stringing up memories to die.

I like crying so hard I can't breathe,
when the tears and screams catch
in the back of my throat, I don't stop,
hoping I might choke on them and suffocate,
saving my pillow the trouble, and the government
the issue of typing something other than
'Natural Causes' on the death certificate.

Staring blankly, without attachment
into the desolate, waning sky.
The last beams of innocent light
cut through the gray overcast
like a final reach for the edge
that disintegrates under palms and nails
as they pass into the dull atmosphere.

Wilting grass merged with hues of
insipid maroon and bruised orange
glare at you with mud caked eyes
With every fallen autumn leaf another broken heart.
They call to you from their decrepit grave-
Join the millions, take the fall.

The decomposition and rot
welcomes you in.
As cool, brusque air rushes
past your balmy, moist skin.
Chilling marrow, and numbing sensation.
As you jump.

The crunch of every dried vein echoes.
Cracked flesh and spines crumble
beneath the weight and strain.
The crisp hard smell of
Dusk and Winter’s breath
fills in, cementing the emptiness

And you feel their comfort
surround you, suppressing the anguish
amidst the fading ***** green vegetation.
But despite the soothing calm of their
consoling, empathetic murmur.
You pray to forget everything and go under,
lost in their withering foliage.

He pressed his lips and tongue
against soft pink power switches.
Flicking them On and Off.
Until the energy bill was high enough
to pay for a college tuition used
for leaving the rest up to a left hand
not ridden with finger nails filed to perfection.

Sliding a finger down to the ridge in cotton
*******, like testing a mantle for dust,
he ran his fingers repeatedly over the field
fabric causing morning dew to flood the fibers.
Ten tiny dancers, slipped slowly
along the topography of skin.
Like brushing the straw bristles
of an archaic broom over a bare
hardwood floor, his 5 o’clock
shadow itched my flesh
and hair shaved away grew back
in goose bumps and excitement.

Feeling my legs shake, and toes
cringe made him whisper,
I want to *******,
words which have never sounded
more like a plea than a yen.
So when palms slid on sunken
chest and ground pelvis to pelvis,
a mortar and pestle,
tightened muscles like a practiced
fight scene of fencing.

With pursed pressed lips and furrowed
brow, squinted eyes looked down
like a lawyer serving up
divorce papers on a silver
platter, and let him know
This is what you asked for,
So lets not pretend it’s love.