The underside of a tongue and the bruised
Protruding veins from around the beaten eye.
The hissing, sissing, kissing radiator releasing
Steam heat like screaming tea kettle ready
For release and cream or sugar.
The trickle of water in a bowl and claws
landing right into the small of the back.

I live in these places between light and flowers, dust and staples,
flight and hours, rust and maple. I am amber, but not solid,
Flaming, but not hot,  Sunrise never Sundays.
Feet always cold. Ex-smoker over sleeper, always wishing for the reimbursements.
Now weaper, but never weaker, just a weeker trying
To see deeper, but never the keeper, just the reaper.
it's okay to get used to it. like

Starting the bath cold and pouring boiling
water from stove top kettles and pots until
You notice the warmth, but the heat never
Hurts. or

Maybe jumping in all at once, and skipping
The ladder all together is the best approach.

What's an amygdala and its relationship to the olfactory?
Probably the part of myself that makes my heart flutter
and the air move differently through my lungs when I smell
the warmth of chlorine in the air from the indoor swimming pool.

Or the truth of the man made time machine when I smell
gold dial soap and I'm suddenly in Michigan.
The combination of fear and cleanliness, with a dusting
of hymnal music and the fragility of its pages.

A psychologist at the University of Oxford labeled an
ambiguous Brie-like scent as either "cheddar cheese"
or "body odor". Even better, walking through the apartment
complex in the dead of winter, following the trails of drier sheets
being spit from vent burrowed within the bricks.

The winter evening settles down
with smell of steaks in passageways
that seeps into the wallpaper and stinks
up the breakfast room until Easter.

What an amazing thing, the fragility of time
as it averts itself in the face of smell.

A drop of water hits the corner of
My face, shockingly
A reminder of all things good
and how to breath.

I'm in love with the feeling of
Sharing

A light through the trees
It shines
Of the constant reminder
Of who you are
And what
You want

I knew you were in love with her from
the sounds of your feet, chasing her

down the stairs at 11:15pm on a Tuesday
night. No one who has hate in their heart

chases anyone down the stairs anymore.
Not since they were kids, at least. When

the risk of falling face first, chin hitting each
step on the way down, wasn't enough to keep

you from sliding down them, your vessel,
an old plastic laundry basket packed with

couch cushions. Diving for loose change to
shell out like lint from the laundromat

to buy another pack of cigarettes from the
circle K that never asked for your ID.

Play it again: the circle shall not be broken
or will remain unbroken, or how many times

have you listened to it by now. it is 7am.
Your favorite record, you found in your late

fathers storage unit, in a place where you
were hoping to find a friend.

the spider web, broken to solitary strings,
clings fast to the antennae of my suv
withstanding winds, and tunnels, and turns,
and dives all the way home.

4 dead bats, huddled in the corner built into
the trap between the new and old roof. not
meticulously placed. proof that even the
smallest of creature understands death, and
the fear of leaving earth alone.

you tell me i need to be alone to grow,
to be independent. but how do I accumulate
all the years ive spent alone in the company
of others to prove that i already have?

i will never stop loving you,
but your caution has petrified me into
a state of uncertainty: too fearful to make
my own mistakes because you say you've
made them before.

i want to be fragmented light.
trailing downward on a wooden stair case,
separating each step with absence and shadow. always to return technicolor atop
the next.

you fear the darkness more than i.
i will step into it, arms stretched forward,
probing the air for familiarity,
if you'd only let me try.

I am screaming
I haven't stopped screaming
I don't know how to express the fact
That I can't stop screaming.

Screaming in ways like sweating armpits
Chafing thighs, itchy under-****.
In ways like waiting in lines and for
Conversations to end.
For feelings you can't source, that
You just can't shake.

Screaming in ways like an ache in the
Lung or chest or heart and dry eyes for
How much I love you. In ways like the strain
Of muscles for words just beyond the tip
of the tongue. The strain of laughs when
Nothing runs through your mind.

This will never be a love poem because I am
Not in love. And never have been.

This is a proclamation of the indescribable
Feeling of feeling. Like trying to look at your entire life from one point.
Impossible to do.
Just like the universe, absent of a birds eye, focal point.
The only way to see its entirety.
It's complexity, is through the patch work
Picture stitch of the infinity of stars.

Would it be to cheesy to say that you are the infinity of stars?
No, You are the finity of stars in the infinity of light.

A wind mill sliced through the air in complete silence.
Energy travels near, but won't travel far, land locking itself to what it already knows.
Screaming. Bright. Rigid. Slime. With a hint of basil.
Just reach out and taste it, as the warmth of it's rotations engulfs you.
Maxwell Edison is stuck in the Pentagon and no one is going to save him.
I can't hear you over the sound of the wind mills.
But I don't need to hear your voice to listen to you anymore.
"It's been a minute." You said, to me with the breeze messing up your tawny hair.
You dip but I never would dive, because I'm afraid of breaking my neck.
My questions remain unanswered. Must we know our names today?

The reigning king of time and space
showed me that I can make the clock tick faster and the days move slower.
So I'd spend my nights flying through the mesosphere looking for lost breaths.
Oh, joy joy, he would say when watching trails of smoke and cloud accumulate in the sky.
I will never stop this ride. It will never end and I will never come back down to earth.

My ever spinning song for you is stuck on repeat. I will end the night and the day to create the space of nothing where we have been all along.
"Laissez les bons temps roulez"
exclaimed the taxi cab meter, hiking up prices that made our wallets weep.

No one is going to save you.

I'm in the current review of
everything right now.
When my lungs have told me enough
already and I taste of foul
consequences that seep into taste buds.

The walls were gushing water,
as they often seemed to do, and
I always lay on my side,
left leg crossed over right.
Nothing irregular.

The tinge, spark, of pain from a
resting avocado, I can feel it in the
tip of my thumb. The right one.
You were supposed to be soft,
and full of the good fats.

I can't look at a cupola without
seeing "SEWN". But I guess that's
just what happens when someone
intercepts your point of view.

I don't believe in reality right now.
The walls littered with literature of
one night's sobbing onto the carbon
copy- Machine out of order
due to ******* and coffee spills.

That wasn't supposed to rhyme and
I'm glad it didn't but the meter of this poem
is to irregular breathing and jostling
doors on hinges influenced by the
pressures of windows opening and closing.

You were a goddess up there. In the
chair that you loved and learned to hate
3 months later. It pulls you down deeper
into your own personal- Help me understand your
A.M. radio beauty.

Was it recorded then, or is he
making it now?

a poem for Ben*

I remember sitting with you in a small
field when the air was sweet and comfortable.
An air that draped itself upon your
skin to shield it from a breeze.
The field, wasn't really a field.
But an inevitably guilty attempt to cover
up the shame of the town's aging lines.
It was adjacent to a bank, and I played
with the crumbling dried up dirt under the
bench that you sat on
I read you a poem here.

You called me confessional.
I don't remember what we were doing there.

It is easiest to lose the time when you can
feel it moving forward, but looking back
has different laws in physics.
Back, then, in the relation to now drags
slowly behind the future. Progression.
For now it is cold and I tread carefully,
through ice glazed parking lots,
but I can remember you in the warmth.
And you can still find me in the snow.

To those who rise at 4 in the morning.
Sin cannot win and faith cannot fail.
For those rising not for the occassion
But for the necessity of being.
This one's for you.

For all the coffee spilled on leather car seats,
And the evidence that the caffeine runs
Differently through your veins.
Because let's face it. You need it.
You were told the youth of Germany
shared your taste in coffee and cigarettes
For breakfast.

Here is to those who have never seen the sun set,
but greet its rise with a forsaken smirk,
as it has lost its luster by now.
You can take a shower later, for that
final fifteen minutes could equate a
winters hibernation at this point.

They say for every step forward, you take
two steps back, but that's hard to believe
When the world is standing still.

a cough staying lodged between
your tongue and your throat.
screaming outside startles you.
you are used to being alone
with only the faint tapping,
or illusion of tapping,
in your ear, flooded,
by the ceiling fan set to low.

I wish we named every rainstorm.
Hurricanes get everything, but
It's easy to have everything when
All you do is take.

I used to think that falling
Asleep was the same feeling as
Earthquakes shaking the grounds.
Don't get stuck in the chasm.

Washed up memories, shoe box
Chachkis, left untouched through the
Eye of the storm. Who knew these
Relics would follow you here.

Crying as the pouring rain stops
Is impossible.
All of the tears have been taken.

But rippling water is overrated.
Have you ever seen sand slide through
The Sahara Desert.
I've been there. I've seen it.
I watched as each minuscule grain slid
Down the valley ridges built from years
Of wind storms making piles.
Piles idiosyncratically stretched across its reddened face,
Maybe modeled by the smoldering surface of mars.

Lay down and let it wash across your leathered skin.
Sensations spreading, each nerve on every centimeter of you
Lighting up, marquee, competing with the hot desert suns.
A million dandelion spores dancing ballet.
Tip top, tip toes to a tarantella timing.
Buried under dunes, only too soon to
Uncover you once again.

You wouldn't believe how something
Solid can so namelessly float across the land.

I'm trying to meet new people and everything in between.
I like to get drunk on patios, porches, tailgates, and float trips, and any outdoor scenario.
I have a definite weakness for all things sweet.
Pipeline rig welder in the making.
Ask me, voted most likely to succeed in highschool.
I watch too much netflix and enjoy crying over Frank Ocean.
I am going to sue the **** out of you.
I'm a guy that sometimes carries a pocket thesaurus.
Socially conscious dude who probably drinks too much.
Amateur chef. Banjo Jedi.
New to this Midwest life.

2 fitted sheets, stretched and tucked atop each
other. A nesting home for soft bugs with thousands
of legs, in which you cannot see.
Why does it smell like Michigan basement
bathrooms, and size 4 feet in turtle sandboxes.

Painted, chipped, salvageable wood only shows
it's gritty teeth in the day light.
leaking through shower curtain rings on
the makeshift curtains like pool water
through the cracks in your smiling eyes,
blue goggles, the ones that cover the nose.

the longer you listen to the silence,
the louder it gets.
or is that the sounds of fan blades
ripping through the indescribable texture of
the stale air you swim through each night.

You'd swear you experienced a sonic boom here,
the bull whip cracking from over pressure. or is it
under pressure? I always thought that pressure
weighed like pounds and tons. I still don't
know if that is wrong.

I won't remember the sound of your laugh,
or the way you smell, or the clothes you wore
when we met. Like a good poet should.
But I'll remember all the things we forgot
to do together. All the times we spoke but
got too high to listen.

High, like the time I told you I thought
the trees and the sun were making
strobe lights for our long drive into
October. Flashing light in the car windows,
as we drove down the open freeway.

It's easy to remember the world
was made for us, when we are
alone, here, in this room, together,
like we were before, and will be soon
once again.

There were actually three sheets. I put two on top of the third because the bugs are real and were on the original unstated third sheet. Sometimes things smell like my grandma, but the scent has no name. My mom is over protective of her 107 year old wood floors. We've talked a lot about silence, but how often do we listen to what it is trying to say? I don't understand the physics of sound,  but there is nothing you can't understand without google. This poem isn't about you and we weren't wrong about the strobe lights or the fact that we had never been so ******. I wish you were here again.

The same effects that bring
You to me, in the words we say,
The way we say it, and how
It hovers, still and structured
Through the atmosphere.

Words, effortlessly placed,
Cold tweezers and shaking
Fingertips, as if God himself
Placed each cloud simply to cover
The blemishes sought for on
Sunny days in the sky.

This force, lifts me. To you.
Aeroplane, cabin norms, box dinners
Above the blanketing words.
You tell me hello.
My body regains its grounds
As we reach our highest altitudes.

I've left a part of my heart in Denver, Colorado.
Four twenty somethings jumping into the the freezing
lake head first from the mountain tops just to see
what it's about. We counted flannels and puffy vests
and tried to calculate the net worth of this place.
Rooster cat opened a up a blank wall to me where
I blew out my brains and left my phone number.
Remember, your neighbor might be lonely.
Lavender lime muffins and clouds intricately laced in
patterns meant to hold the sun hostage for but an hour more
as it gently strokes the broad shoulders of the 14ers backside.
Without them, how do you know which way is west?

I've always thought it a bit cruel that
my mother named me Trista Joy.
Doomed to a fate of being pulled,
polarizing at two ends of the spectrum of emotion.
Smacked into the middle of a war
that has been waged for thousands of years.
Millions of lives lost to both happiness and sadness.

A walking contradiction can only move about in one way.
Circling what I thought I knew, and what really is.
Am I meant to be extreme in expression,
ferociously flippant from side to side?
Was I born without the ability to reach the medium?

A children's movie once taught me that
happiness cannot exist without sadness,
and in that I often find solace.
But I live in a world where people run, fight, and hide
from half of what I am, and obsessively strive for the other.
It gets exhausting, suppressing  the spring loaded spirit that is being sad.
Happiness can only hold its ground for so long.

It's great to meet you, I'm Sad Joy Sullivan.

Debauchery was in the air for all of us last night.
Neo hip hop stoner jive.

I once watched my friend break down into tears after
hearing a Phil Collins song while shopping for dinner
in a Louisville gas station.

Angela will get up and leave the room if The Reason by Hoobastank
comes on the radio and you still listen to Closing Time when you get ready for bed.
Weird phrases are hovering through the air.

I turned on the bathroom fan to avoid sitting in silence with myself and you ripped up all my potted plants and sold my favorite arm chair on craiglist.
I wake up sobbing.

You were chewing on a red pen, but i thought it was a twizzler. I worked up the courage to ask you for one.

The chainsaw love song of the jumping spider
makes the snare drums in your ears roll.
Its gold in the right light.
Even better in the under light.

I told you i think its weird that everyone buys shoes
and maybe some people feel about their shoes
the way i feel about my shoes,
Which is a good feeling.

I am writing this poem while other people
read poems that the have written also.

I am too anxious to ask people when podcasts become a thing
and what does it mean to be a podcast?

A friend once said it would be cool if your poetry professor
told you to ******* but its also cool when they get you a
glass of water at the poetry reading where you are writing poems.

I think the girl in front of me is writing a poem too.
I wonder if she writes about spiders.
I wonder if she is giving her mom a poem for her birthday.
I wonder if she drafts poems about how you make her feel but
deletes them before they burn into her laptop screen.

I wonder how you feel when you make me feel good and happy.
I hope that you feel like the way i feel when you make me feel good and happy.
I am glad we are friends. I want you to play piano with me on sunday evenings
so we can prelude into the perpetual strain of sunday to saturday.
It may, if we play loud enough, dampen the bodies of the
****** and doomed that we inhibit on weekdays.

I wish I could write poems that inspire your poems.

Hints of maple kiss each of
your highlander grog fingertips.
The smell of her shampoo
pierces & permeates throughout
your living room, lingering still
to this day, on your pillow.

You told her you'd make a perfume
that smells like the car heater on
long drives home for Christmas.

Aromas of her laundry detergent
still live in your spine
like LSD.
When you turn your neck a
certain way you fall back
into trances of her & 1997.

Vick's Vaper Rub, NyQuil
Cough Syrup breath, with
a 104 degree fever. She
sobbed when her last
sea monkey died

You called her cartographer.
Intricate trails of herself connecting
each board of your apartment floor.
Charted long ago when her
candle still burned scents of warmth.
The art of burning,
a front the fire place of
maple logs where you told her
to "Let go."

I call you
          Cartographer.

Farm lines graph and chart
     Geometry class.
          11th grade.

Walls are made from
   Far more than
          Brick and mortar.

You planted rows.
      Of oak and willow.
          Growing.

                   Growing.
  
                                Growing.

Up and apart, your land
     And mine.

In time.
          Foreign boarders.

i take a step back into myself  as the last golden brown

leaf crumbles into dust upon the delicate caress

of your callused, cracked fingertips.


you will find me once again, breathing down

your neck and into your ear, creating ripples

of chills that freeze down each vertebrae of your spine.


adaption is a process that you can never seem to catch

when the cool spring breezes that once warmed your smile

have given way to the morning dew frozen now into

frost.

We all sat and pondered over the strange
phenomena of the world we live in,
like the fact that the moon sleeps upon
the surface of the earth each night,
but never returns to the same dwelling twice.

We asked the stars why they continue
to shine, even years after they've died,
and we wait in silence for their coveted
response, only to be let down once again.

What is a conversation without listening,
but waiting in line for your time to talk,
only to an audience involved in their next
comment. Leaving messages.

You only call me when it's raining out.
And I only answer when it's 2am.
And it's all good and fine in day dreams,
because we know the right things to say
and the right ways to respond, when
it's all in our heads.

But that's not how the world works,
so we stub on tongues on thoughtless
comments, as we fill the voids around us
with butchered "I love yous" and cold nights
back to back.

a heart that doesn't hurt over the loneliness
or the absence of others.
there was never anyone to begin with,
now was there?
so you use the brain, not yours,
that you've brutally stitched
across the once shining face of the heart,
so that it can remind itself that loneliness
isn't rational anymore.

there is nobody here but me.
there is nobody here but me.

I will, someday, be the first in line to the opening of your estate sale.
I will buy all of your furniture to keep this part of you alive.
We keep remnants and pieces, as we scatter  memories like your charred remains across a place you once knew.

I want to love the carousel figurine
you forgot you once owned and sing the sweet melodies of the music box you once fell asleep too each night.
For the depth of something once loved and now lost, is impenetrable to pain.

As all things are made, and all things are to be loved and lost or forgotten.
I want to love all the things once loved by others.