Cigarette smoke and **** colored beer
Family is a suckerpunch epiphany
For people who’ve spent so much time
Saying they no longer had one

I swore forever
Mine was missing parts
This heart carved shells
Let’s swap odd shapes
Re-sew them and **** up our beats forever
Together

If the world is ending and you find me here
Kicking up the earth
Dirt scatter to the wind
Brown blood spatter
That’s just me trying to escape faster

Join me or leave me
But I got this beef with gravity
Like a severed head tetherball
This face senseless

You make me senseless

Numb to all the bad parts
In the same way salt makes everything sweeter
You make everything sweeter
Your salty skin
Sweet mouth
Sweet speak
Sweet laughter

Make me feel a little less stupid
About giving in to the movement
This mouth
This body
Like a knee-buckle kick to the gas pedal
And I peel out by accident

And you can still love me
Like family
I’ve slept in so many beds
And on so many floors
All so much more comfortable than my own

I swear I have bed bugs
Drinking my blood as I sleep
Getting drunk most nights
Them and me
Wake up itchy and fatigued
Like an allergy

But you
You smile like a hammock
Held up by strings hanging from your eye squint
To your dimples

Without speaking
“you can rest here tonight”

This is for the beds
For the people who say ouch when I hug them
For the family I thought I never had

For the appreciation that
Every moment of sadness
Means I’ve known so much joy
To feel that way

I’ve known so much joy
Thank you

I dropped her off on the other side of the city
Lights blur past my window
And I lose focus
A different kind of space travel

I don’t know why I drove here instead
The house on Ellen

I had always imagined it as a sad thing
Keeping the shape of comfort
Waiting lonely for me to come back to it

The shattered window
And the holed walls
The singed edge crop-circle in the living room carpet

I broke in
The place smelled new
Like fresh paint
And good credit

I am not a vandal
But these places don’t feel like home
Unless something has been broken

Tonight
It was just a lock

My tires hugged the road like it didn’t want me to be there
Like hydroplaning without the rain
And every red light turned green
Just after I hit the breaks
Like a bully placing a hand on my chest and then saying
“Nah, I’m just ******* with you. Keep on going.”

There’s this place I sleep most nights
Only
I am still in the parking lot writing this
And I don’t want to go upstairs yet

By my parking place
Frogs ribbit
They sound content
Though they live along the water drainage line that seems like a stream
Only there are more flies and crickets to eat here

Home is a funny place
So I have decided this

Not that I believe in God but
I’ve decided
His hands are as big as the world
So big it is easy to feel like no one is holding you
Even when you're being hurled a million miles an hour

And maybe that is why I feel I have no home
I mean
Hold me like you are small too

You were always tablets and talk
and I was always plaid and not so talk
but June taught that things exist between us and
red strings exist between us and
awkward gestures, slurred words and tired heels
all can heal us
and boy, your name is as common to me as my own
and just alone, an open sore
you dont know
you occupy the spaces between my
flesh
and blood
and bones
naked wounds, uneasy tones

Because we both know the sound of gunfire
Except I, didn’t grow up in a war zone
It was a different kind from yours
Our bullets were words
Sounds of breaking glass
And the shards of which made it into my cheerios the next day
Chewed them anyway to spite
The sound that
Breaking makes

You,
you know the sound of falling bodies too readily
  you can mimic them in your footsteps
The smell of rotting corpses
What kind of scars shrapnel really leaves

What the color of blood really looks like
I see that shade of red every time you speak
  The way you keep it hidden in those paintings
In the drawer that I sneak into when you sleep
Know too well what evil looks like

I can find a place for all the words buried in my chest
inside your bullet wounds easily

If I were not a coward

Staring into the dark irises of men in uniforms dirtier than their conscience,
Find it easier to look into a barrel of a gun
Only one of them holds salvation
  
No, you are not afraid of guns
Nor the sound that breaking makes


But I still remove the safety pin
Just in case

We both existed on the same tuesday,
in the same area of space, I expected you in your striped shirt and smile
you expected me in my whole contrasting aura and existence
but on this day we switched roles
and it was because you weren’t looking well
so I asked why
and it was because your mother was in the hospital
I didn’t want to say I was sorry. Not because I didn’t mean it, but because how could you fall in love with someone who used such cliches.
I considered settling perfume on the nape of my neck and enveloping you in a sympathetic hug.
I meditated on the words “it’s really all okay”.
I wondered what your girlfriend had to say on the matter.
and what I could say that would mean more to you.
I never thought
infatuation
could make me less of a person
than I already was.