Do you confide in your window glare
or is it your enemy?
You're breathing in numbers
and little decimals ***** the lungs

I want to say, as we drip we blossom
That the smoke will lift, and when it does, the sky will pale and remember all the terrible apparitions it enveloped

Do you believe in a beginning or is the middle enough for you?
I am clutching the thought of you
in a dozen mirrors at once

-c.j.

Completely awake, without qualms
Yet halfway to lovelessness
Pure unlike the trying music
And clear as an inkless bell
While they are striped with accidental brambles, thickets, and other cruel beauties
As I once was

Then, petrified by black and white film,
Tasting not salt nor sugar but ambivalence
Now, I remember how the foreign world rippled
The mountains shifted- they stood still
There were questions in the seafoam until
Thunder shook its pattern

However much I long to say,
Embrace me; forget the day
My mother reminds me that I am
Blossoming, young, omnipresent
With shields of sun and pieces of moon
Visible in my eyes
Which tell the mirror,
She is of age, but she is not of age

-c.j.

A question mark is our eternal punctuation
Under our initials added up to an undeterminable sum
Green lights were once desirable
But that red was much too fast
Fiction, we're surrounded by fiction
And books are so loud
But we are quiet
And we are real

-c.j.

You haven't stolen my heart
You've stuck a sewing needle in it
And run away

-c.j.

Do you know what I wish, she asks
He waits, she turns to him with the
speed of her irregular heart
I wish I was innocent, she says
After a minute he breathes and tells her,
You still are, in your desire to be

-c.j.

He didn't know what sylvania meant
But I knew it had something to do with forests
Something we learned in class last year
Despite your forgetting a definition made of wood,
Your mind is growing keener than one's should
I act all dry and logical as a cover to avoid the limelight, you confess
You're failing, then, I say
You're luminous

-c.j.

But, yes, you will endure,
and one day if your heart is heavier than
it is today,
you will endure that

-c.j.