Today was the first time I put on makeup in six days,
flinching as I anticipated the usual sting of misplaced liner.
I have to look good, though. After all,
how else do I make up for nearly a week of anesthesia?
There's nothing else i can do.

I lie on my back on dulled blue flannel
whispering a Hail Mary, one of many this week
and think of all the pointless, trivial things we shared.
You used to tell me that I was always brushing my teeth, and I smiled each time,
laughing through mouthfuls of blood and self-preservation.
How was your week? What's the weather like there? Are you thrilled for tomorrow? Do you remember what it felt like to fall asleep hearing me on the other side of the line?

I wanted to draw today, but notes on my clipboard were everywhere,
surrounding a graphite picture of Lisbeth Salander like a halo.
Notes to you, of course, all of them.
You used to say you liked my lips,
covering your own mouth
so I couldn't see your beautiful, dripping, two toned words.

My to-do list is filled with broken promises and shards of glass, but I swear,
I'll get around to it all some day.

It was never comforting
Walls in the room, I mean
For the Earth is round
No corners, it is
It doesn't supposed to bound
A bird who wants to fly freely.

If you're heart is always over-explosive,
people will call you a maniac,
I know some folk who fall in love too easy
and they're broke and they live in 2 bedroom apartments,
their rent is like the Romans sticking
nails in their wrists.

I'm not really interested, I.N.R.I.
My younger nephews crying
because I tipped over his new toy,
I laughed way too hard.
I laugh way too hard.

Sleep before work before *******
and **** your day,
constellations on constellations.
Everyone I admire wants to die.
We all commit to suicide more sincerely
than our current relationships.

We're all incompatible,
and no one sleeps enough.
I am a culprit too, I am invaluable,
I'm in denial over a lot of things,
drown it out with aspirin and youtube,
and vitamin D and spicy foods
and water and orange juice...

Enough coffee to drown a child,
they say it only takes three inches though
[everything's a *** joke, everything's innuendo,
or it's a gritty reboot of a silly franchise,
Robocop was ****** up in the eighties
now it's warm milk and
grandma's pull out couch].

I can't figure out why we need
two holidays to celebrate genocide,
my friends probably think I'm insane
and I'd never call them wrong.
I'm not really interested though.

Love's letters clattered in currents
Winds curled to stillness,
in a talus of potpourri,
Season totem, a cluster of hope,
waiting
For one match pulled and struck,
To scare the ghosts from the pyre.
In a choke of smoke
from sweet attar,
Loves heat fans
the embers within
the hearts own fire.

So many words
wrenched from mouth
and wrought from hand
Contortions,
twisted spoken grip,
we strip the evergreen needles
from the bough
and let them fall from the fist,
Sprinkling fir
To the earth as grist.

Had not a sentence stretched from
pulsing ink well
by plume to parchment, or
from warm breath of lip’s beseech
What then of our night would say,
And of our day to listen.

If we do not dare with deeds to fly
Then the falling never ends,
And poem, eternal, ne'er to begin
Loves expression, not its desire,
Is the cachet
to which both life and death aspire.