the clouds looked like waves,
we lay, accumulated underneath them,
like lost souls, scattered like dust,
like wingless leaves, like our drifting fingers,
tracing stars, writing our names into them.

it wasn’t raining, but it festered on the brink of,
like a lover holding back, like an abuser, keeping his fist clenched shut,
like us, trying not to roll over the other,
trying not to steal each other's innocence.
maybe we just wanted to be corrupt,
maybe we taught sin with these lips we held agape,
trembling over fragile words, trembling over hollow bones,
like these knobby knees, dancing over damp earth,
dancing under a bleeding moon, and these arms we called our feathers,
unfolded into frostbit air, but stitched around mountains of spine.

we’ve forgotten what it means to fall,
because we just creep now, afraid to find the edge,
afraid our bodies will dissolve into the soil,
we once before tried to bury ourselves in,

the clouds swayed, forming around each other to fit,
gripping one another, like our own hands did.
we smiled, bodies sinking into embers.

I prayed we’d find the waves and get lost in them,
you said we already were.

It started out with gravel and bruising spines,
with my hands wound round your throat and your fingers,
scraping skin from my wrists.
It started out with a dark sun, hiding itself behind the hairs of trees,
unmoving like asleep, or dead.
the streets were empty, and quiet like how I wanted you to be,
but you were screaming and begging for rescue,
and I just wanted to bury your head underwater,
or between my thighs, anchoring you there, immobile.

It was noon but it felt like dusk,
the wind was nothing but a fragile, empty gasp from your lungs,
and the shaking ground enveloping us, was not an earthquake,
nor a crashing plane, just your begging-for-breath, body
and our own fears settling tightly around our clayed bones.
And the wet on my face wasn’t from rain, or hailing skies,
it was from the flood of words you tried to drown me in,
us in.

“I want you to disappear”
you yelled
and I replied,
“I would disappear, as long as I had you, beside me”

It felt like it was snowing but the sun was burning roses into our naked chests,
it felt like winter, maybe because your fingers felt that of a dead man's,
or perhaps it was because we were both slowly fading away under a fiery sky,
thawing out, and then being left to dry.

we had these eyes of ours, woven shut, and these screams we worshiped, webbed into pleading sobs and pitiful amends.
I felt like a sinner, and you felt like a priest, blessing this unholy vessel I remained in.

a bruise was blossoming around your neck, holding on as if my hand was still kept there.
I turned my body into a cave and you turned yourself into it, as though you were a beggar, seeking shelter, seeking warmth, seeking something.

It was dusk, but it felt like we were already dead.

to the tune of "My Favorite Things"*

Poems in all caps and no punctuation,
Mixed metaphors and clichéd observation,
Roses and rainbows and angels with wings--
These are a few of my least favorite things.

Morbid obsessions and self flagellations,
Self involved rantings and dull ruminations,
Exhibitionists’ ****** preoccupations--
I’m just not dying to read these creations.

Statements of true love to those I don’t know,
Plodding prose poems that go way too slow,
Syllable stresses that aren’t found in English--
If only I’d see them no more is my true wish.

When the urge strikes,
When the words flow,
When you grab that pen--
Just take a moment and think…again.

A good Dictionary, and a Thesaurus,
Some time to read poets who wrote long before us,
Revising, rewriting and time to review--
It’s only these small things that I ask of you..

We're weathering this unbecoming world of words. In the womby vortex of disgusting speech. We're not the movement in which your mouth commoves in disgusting misuse and hellacious abuse. Shame on you! We're already sickened by your pageantry and similar symbolism, simile, and pedantic matters of the hand. Someone should have stopped you. Your shoes don't fit and are rather unflattering. We're well rested Reader's of the greater digest and your context is unsuitably off. We've noted this recipe of disasterous dactyls and abhorrent lines that masquerade limerick like a proverb when it ought not be an idiom. We're weary to walk in your idiot-dom, your startlingly stark choice of anti-matter, and material of unsettling misuse so indigestibally obtuse. She says you've manufactured passages with verbose tapestries of word laxatives. We're unimpressed by how many fuxks you've given. Lessons like these are earned not given, not learned but lived. We're not meant to cure your ails, only forward your adjectives, and collect your mail.