You kept sending me mixed signals
A week ago, you were telling me you miss me
Now you're saying you wanna call it quits
Remember when you joked about being obsessed with me lately?
I so badly wanted to know what changed
between you being sober and after a bottle of gin

Do you ever just pine for someone?
The way they smile while talking to a loved one
That bright and easy laugh, the gleam in their eye, the knowing...the realization that you're watching them enjoy themselves from across the room

Or maybe you're just a spectral spectator
Flipping through photo albums, looking through photos that are a permanent snapshot
A moment in time
A second
A few minutes
Of them smiling among a gathering of friends

They're so happy, they're so brightened and unassuming in their youthful zeal
You can hear the bursts of laughter
The peals of it
Disjointed conversations among friends
Maybe one or two have passed on
Maybe they just lost touch with them

But you look at them now
All the same
You really look at them
You realize that they've changed so much from the person they were in those pictures

No more bright laughter
No more infectious smiles
No more disjointed conversations with gatherings of friends
No more college bar hopping
No more wandering the backstreets of Venice at night
Or Rome
Or Britain
Or Germany
No more spontaneous traveling

The light is dim now in their eyes
It's like the bulb inside of them has burned out

So...
You pine for them, for the person that they were yesterday, & days before, & years before you
entered their life

After your arrival, came a burial

Somewhere along the way
With the unspoken hurt
& unprocessed trauma
They died

And so ...
You grieve

Joanne,
you have an immaculately horrible taste in men
that’s why you plotted me
to report one to you
I watched every one of his moves
Living in the groove
Joanne, I came to conclusion you deserve better

You can tell a man by the way he tells his jokes
Yours is confident, drawing every eye to him,
A focal point,
A perfect delivery, whether the joke is funny or not

Observing him closely,
I fail to understand why you fell in love with him
Did he make you drink magical milk from a golden goblet
Covered with thin white veil
And lavished with crystal opals,
Running across the circumference
Did he pour some mystic love potion
He perhaps borrowed from Aphrodite
Were you blindfolded when you drank it?

Joanne,
He is a simple man
But it is not fair
five times prayer
yet still a player
sometimes he is infuriating
him not understanding the complexity
of politics, lives, rights and feelings
his mundane taste in music and movies
his obsession with numbers
his unbridled bigotry
you want to tie him down and make him understand
but in the end, deep down you envy his simplicity
he is what you are not; happy

Joanne,
You can tell a man by how he mourns
And I never saw him cry let alone grieve
His heart is made of stones
Though he is pretty good at comforting
When you’re down
He festoons around your shoulder, his arms
It almost catches you off-guard

Joanne,
He is intimate, but you will have to beg for it
Not everyone looks pretty when they cry
And you will fail terribly, I know you are timid and shy
His words are sweet, you can taste them
But they leave an aftertaste in your mouth
A tang of diplomacy and sycophancy, no doubt

Joanne,
When I began to see why you love him
I can’t blame you
He exudes an aroma of fortitude
Once the fondness becomes love,
And doesn’t get subdued
It will turn into worship
And thus I conclude
You deserve better
But he is the best

Joanne,
you haven’t replied to my letter
I became an encyclopedia of a man
All for you
And now I don’t even know where you ran
Where did you go? I don’t understand
You left me all alone here
Sometimes I think you can’t even feel
And wonder
Joanne,
Are you even real?
Joanne
Are you real?

I

I was told that faces persist, could wear away pebble, wind, and sand. Rivers, long and winding, and the rain, always so strange, mingle with rippling ashes of our ancestors, their fingers dipping through charcoal powder, tracing animals over stone’s face, carving bodies out of empty space, faded faces on walls. We are not a dream, they were saying. Not flashes of an aged old dream. Sand-like memory, look for us.

Filters litter the ground around me,
Slowly they fall to the abyss.
Waiting for time around me,
To go amiss.
We wait for the filters to fall,
so we may see reality once.
And all the while,
it leaves us behind

"Pillar, pillar, pillar".
Gosh
who am I kidding?

"Support".
Maybe
you're my stability?

Falling,
however,
through your aid.

Upwards and downwards,
With and without you.
The latter seems fair,
though
the former too
                            don't.
So,                 or
       help me

Autumn,with the force of rapid thunder
Dawns the sky, clawing the lake asunder
  Beneath our steps
As we leapt
  To,fro,and to again;

Here we burn, trapped to our limboid sojourn
Gasping for air as the Daemon sits without a care
Tracing and chasing the ends of his thinning thread
Connecting to our voodoo dolls, laments of our death
In silent whispers only existant at all by the dents
Where our mouths should be.

This dreaded haunting, this memory looped
With crimson nails the Daemon draws hoops
Pliable as a smoke ring from laughing lips,
The Daemon strings us by his fingertips—
Reminds us we alone created hell on earth—
You can taste it in the kicked up dust,
The unlexical powder that remarks our birth
In this stale heat, our skin starts to crust.

I called you my best yet, you said I was a settlement in a lost bet,
I called you a ***** and wished I drownt you in the wishing well
Where you'd only have other mute spirits left to tell; I set

Out on a ****** scheme that night--
To slit your throat as you awoke and watch you fight
Without a chance.
I watched you in your contorted dance and felt you lift,
Shiver and go stiff
Dying in my arms. But as I sighed I felt invisible red eyes
Settle on us from the willows
Behind the blindness window.

I heard a needle scrape, a scornful moan and a bat's descry.
I knew then I truly was the pawn in a wicked game
Who's evil was signatured in our name.

The devil netted your soul dear, and already had mine.
And as I sat straddled over your limpid frame, frozen in time
And feeling his nails, like worn toolbox screws, along my spine
I oddly thought pleasantly of better times:

Of our first meeting on that autumnal day, when caught in the breeze
And kissing discreetly
Amongst the trees
and along the lake we simontaniously compared to the mythical  Lethe.

I loved you then, oh how I did,
And in return, we'll love forever—
Us, the looping dead.

The cigarette was trailing down my throat like a ten-inch tapeworm
It was grounded, the bright look she gave.
I projected my disgust onto the rain.
This was my one shot to make a garden.