You've probably bought her a rose
and she squealed like it was the
single most important moment
of her life
Had you bought me that rose
it'd better have been black
It would be stupid to say
I wouldn't reciprocate the gesture
So I'd run my fingers in ink
creating something trying to be
as emotionally effective
as a flower

-cj

you've probably laid awake
in your bed late at night,
unrealistic notions
bunching up in your nerve endings
at least that's the
impression you give

-cj

You're something else
Hold my face in your hand, it's the
only way I'll remain whole
Why aren't you leaving, why isn't
your foot in the door
Why must I feel like every disaster before

To cry in your bed was
the last thing I wanted
But you, with your bedroom eyes,
your loud awful incredible eyes
Told me I was something else
Not someone else,
something else

-c.j.

it's
crowded
in here,
the thoughts
said
in the cage

-cj

waiting in the apartment, sitting on the low loveseat
windows of right before the eyes,
a mirror of what encircles this piece of home
entrance, shy and half-innocent
"you look swell," will you stay for long?

-cj

Happier songs
make my arms move
to melodies like
shut up, i'm pretty
and like a balloon
i will let you go

-cj

Until now your science has been mere evidence
Essential maxims blew hard scores
into my ears
Negligent, the stark truth remains

-cj

Clouds descend on the berth that you fled
Both our brains are vexed by the hollowness
Wreck the centre, it's futile
From the flawless rise to the end
If you're inhaling purely yet, you are blessed
Nearly all of us are strangled by ill air
Igniting flames to our souls in leisure
Gathering labels of *******-over paramours
We are the exposed ones, the age of ignorance
Hunting dreams of our fates
Someday we'll unveil what is real
That the lone will vanish before arriving
If your blood is still flowing, you are blessed
Much of our dreams, they are scorched and they have faded
It was the sea that drowned us
You didn't rescue me
Well, I've sent it all into disarray
I'm a breathless visage slipping from your memory
My vision's blurred from the echoes from your lips
Pealing through my mind
When you pierced my heart
If you're drawn close, you are blessed
The rest of us are sleeping alone
Igniting flames to our souls in leisure
To break the knot tied to their name
But I am never without that thread

-cj

eyes witness a sharp beauty
hands bleed from wringing
tumble, wrap, secure thy veins
before your tongue gets tied in knots
speak in spite of the twisted among your teeth
perhaps an innocent part within
slows the birth of desire, the forbidden fruit
young but knowing pain, feeling cherry-stem-tied inside

-cj

most of my cells linger in their near-kisses
with yours
the rest assume figures no one can detect
dancing carefully on new floors
and reciting those younger whims
keep no talents if love corrupts me
open my meanest October chest left
in the niche
whether you think romance allows
frailty, no one can dare determine
cast off neuroticisms, friend
and reach, trip, yearn
watch kindness' next trick

-c.j.

it's monday afternoon, my least favourite time
machine poetry appears borderline insane, and
I get this fear for my identity, this fear that,
when it's over,
I'll realise it was really nothing

-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.

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.

we are in nobody's empire, watching
the dimming light
in the sky we hear the thunder clatter,
and ask the palm reader what the
lightning bolts mean on our hands
the laws of the universe are unbound,
she says
science, merely an old friend
gravity's been lifted, now, so
float and see reason blend

-c.j.

I am not Sylvia but I know sadness
sometimes I can taste it, still on my tongue
that omnipresent lump in my throat
the murderess in love, oscillating to the music
of speechless ignominies
tastes can impale you, slicing knives acting
as tonsils
knowing sadness, I know her
and of course, after all this time,
she must know me, too

-c.j.