i don't care what the people say,
let your blue blood in my veins
wicked foxy devilsh and cool
i say it's in the news, and then it's in the news

Teach me your weapon's class systems
those broad and eccentric Jimi blue's
tell me the stories in the cipher of you
many in this list of marvel's accentuated

while we dive into this voluptuous horizon of youth
stationed in Chicago's sensual blues

this is the recipe to man's progress, classified from standard view

You are the devil in the face of my broken watch- your eyes reveal a shear glint of the moon's light. Your tear ducts make mine heavy. It's been 7 years since I felt you. You feel wonderful. I kept my promise. To you I keep all my promises. I fought the demons you protected me from, but I had to fight them on my own terms. Talk about rotten boyfriend material. I wish I could have been able to move to you, into you, closer to you, maybe even do some of that weird parkour jumping dancing Magic Mike Jordan twisting dancing type things. You after all are our Pieta.

You are the brilliant amulets of mirth and unbroken pathways. I feel the fur of your carpet between my toes. And I still haven't reapplied your nose. Please don't drown without me.

[on the verge of a cry]

Darling penguin,

you've brought me here yet again. whether we writers are on the page of paper, Moleskin, notebook, website, or smartphone, here again you have brought me. Having just lit another cigarette, drinks and drugs and smoke and music are in this place you've brought me with these ***** fingers pounding away into a bluetooth keyboard as the long lonely nights I've taken to find you melted away the keys of my computer ash and burnt plastic have taken to so many letters: H, command, I, R, and D too. I have a fixe and it won't be cured alone. I've been on so many lines and numbers, and I keep trying, and I'll tell you some people might consider these women absolutely marvelous, but to me, they too often prove to be nothing more than the hollow engravings of tales told too often, and where am I with you?

I'm cracking my knuckles again, and it's so ******* hot in here. Morphs, subs, percs, and oxys, pain and agonizing pain. And I'm growing a beard and mustache, very soft hair for you to nestle into when we move into the house in Evanston. I've been touching my lips with these ash stained fingertips drafting your lips upon mine, while the piceous nexus of this cold untouched skin shifts restlessly in the drear and yellow light of another sad and melancholy hour away from my arms around you, abreast and grinning with excitement, contentment, contagious glee. i bring my clean soft fingerds through the strands of aurulent glistening gold hair of yours and press my mouth into the crown of your head, the temples of your face, and your face presses into mine, and it's 1:41am and these eyes wander endlessly around this room ******* down carcinogens and poison, holes in these jeans, black denim tapered cut, your black leather studded cuff around my right wrist and the peace beads a wandering monk granted to me with a gold card and a bow while amassing friends in the herds of people gathered in line to go into Lollapalooza. I am brimming over with excitement, even for the taste of dog feces in the cigarettes(I will brush of course), you are my event horizon, my vessel of light beams, lasers, and the most immense love for which of course more than a dozen different writings attempt to share with others and imbue the world to even come close to the extraordinary magnanimous love and adoration unto the both of us, but between ourselves especially.

Earlier this evening I was speaking to Elizabeth on the propensity of how valuable having a soulmate really is, not to say the words but to know the person, to know you in the full grace and integrity of what that means. I was saying how with you, there is no one or many or anything about you that disturbs me or that I could find gross or that could keep me from wanting to be close to you. That no matter how sick you could get or **** it- what I was saying is that I love you so much I want you to spit in my mouth, smear every part of your body against every inch of my body. I want to smell, taste, touch, and see all of you that there is, to sit again and stand again and stand up and sit down just ******* staring forever in the most beautiful enchanting, ethereal, and beloved face I have ever seen. And if I must I would carry you over molten lava, burning steel, broken glass, but instead I think we ought to go to Half Moon Bay, and while the chill is in the air, and it's just you and me my love, we can dance in the surf and kick the water at each other. Because the continental plates will always be moving, the water will move to grow and surge and swell and turn to clouds and back to raindrops and precipitate life and govern this planet, but I will always be governed by our amatory interconnectedness and how perfervidly passionate and over the top I am and always will be about you. I will give the world to you, so long as I can love you for as long as I live.

You may not have meant to
and you probably didn't  
but your smile
and your voice
have left soft footprints on my heart.
Because of that, as soon as you left
I had to get up and dance,
alone here on the gallery floor,
amongst the paintings I am meant to be selling.

I miss Chicago.

I miss walking everywhere with my best friend.

I wish I had been brave enough to take his hand on those walks.

I miss walking with my puppy to go meet him after class.

I miss the adventures we had, and planning more adventures with him.

I miss splitting pastries and snacks and meals with him.

I miss joking with him, laughing with him, playing videogames with him.

I miss the silly little nudging game we used to play on the couch, on the train, on the bus.

I miss when our stop was near and he would turn back and offer his hand so I wouldn't fall...and he would lead me to the door before letting go.

I remember the first time he held me...I thought I would lose my mind, I thought I would cry, I thought I would die.

When I close my eyes, I can still feel how his hands felt, intertwined with mine.

I miss laying in bed with him, listening to his heartbeat and just breathing him in, his arms around me.

I remember the time he fell asleep, his arms around me, his hands in my hair, his face so close to mine.

I should have kissed him then. Instead, I confessed when he woke...and he listened to me and let me cry for what couldn't be.

I miss when he would take my face in his hands and tell me everything would be alright.

He doesn't love me. Not like that. But dear god I felt loved, oh so loved, those two weeks.

My personal déjà-vu-time memory-prompts that frame
The blurring patterns of today’s hubcap-wheels, spinning
Kaleidoscope flashbacks of bathtub playtime.

A gaggle of giggling girls babbling about
What used to matter : umbrella-popping chewing gum
With gallivanting jargon laced in crushes-hushed : boy-talk.  

Pillows : Comforters morphing, swarming like
Womb-entranced, half-cupped palms calmed
Palpitating mouths motoring off self-pitying rumble-grumbles.

How the clopping ball of opted-birr was a bent-mouth birdcall
Over-relished, over-zealous imploration : a round robin
Jumblemix of a jejune bombast for slap-sticked power.

By-and-by polysyllabic buds bloomed, baked, and wrinkled
Past-Gas’s long-gone jokes : those balmy snug-hugs guarding
Doltish vulgarity among the begrimed-glitch and old-grown-boring Jive.

All my friends are tortoise-shelled Merlins stalking statues
with their walking canes at dusk while
I pad behind them on all fours
as the day breaks the clouds like wet tissue.
And, Garrett, you broke the picket line –
Once the spotlight’s beam with that grin wider than yours and mine’s minds’ intangible illusions – Now the rustle of an intermission between stage and applause.
Our afternoons were spent *******
nicotine out of burning daily afflictions
between raspy exasperations and half-laughing
declarations about how we couldn’t catch a break.

I would ask you why, but it’s not my place.
It’s not yours, either.

I’ll tell you The Why about me, Garrett. I’ll tell you the right
and proper Why I had to pause and stifle
my cigarette break before my wrists broke
                before my wet-eyed babbling witnessed your last wave’s exhalation on all our friends

The Why I was 40 when I saw the shady What If [the same
                that stalked you] linger round my mother. And
                I heard your exhalation of “Mama Kara” and
                I remembered how to act.
The Why I was 13 when I begged the ambiguous How Do I out of you
                when I felt lifeless and pale within UIC's Courtyard -- all of our eyes spread white and feverish.

We can never pay for it -- too much of one thing is
Our buckled knees dragging the question to the fountain to make it drink.
Garrett – although so distant, the brush you had on me is the echo of a “Yup” and an “I know, right?”  and "Yo, lemme get a square,"
that drowns out the reverberating sound
of grief-clapping palms,
and cries, of everyone’s “Why?”

There's a private, invisible flock of comedians chanting soapbox knock-knocks in my parking lot
            Noisy, clang, boom thingy aloft and clipping the air around the slimy snow
And why does ajax keep butting its nose into everything I’ve got?
They’re all just boom-lost facades in a canonical, sly-faced rant.
So slanted, frankly, and poised toward a milder pace that the clang clipped the frosty branches beneath a drunken frat-house party.

Ah, the dandy-clang : native to the sandy graves and morose olive branches.
            But only on the night of the dandy-clang, candy dances
for the branches are not partial to missed solid caches
            of want and woe
            of tongue and toe
and seldom shaken beneath the overbearing heat of a white-faced predator
for times it was that here and now, because
the wind had bitten harder
What am I saying?
That if the dandy-clang came. And if it produced the branches of the dancing eve fame...
with but not together. The clouds up in the ether
that lake and earth should wither

Friend Rockstar,
            Listen, yield to a robust think-tank,
            earlobes skidding against wheat and grain.
Terrible story, yes, what happened to that little girl.
Sterile teddy nightgowns weeping in the squad car windows.
Teacher – Teacher, do you harken my yodels for grace?
            I’ve never been maternal.
            Put the game on. Abortion.
            That’s what I’m about.
            Grab a bra. Sling some weight.
            That’s what I’m about.
Some housefly wings on a weathered corn cob.
Some downhome, homegrown twang for those fancy, fussy britches.
            Muddy workboots. Sweat-soaked collars.
            That’s what I’m about.
Him done made me read, sir.
What sacraments did we write today?
            I can still remember my first broken bone.
            I can still remember my first broken *****.
                        That could be what this is all about.
Mary, Mary, you can be contrite,
            so knife – so critter – so laze – so stalked.
    Who fertilized your seeds? Who reared your sprouts?
            Cockle shells and silver bells, honey,
            can’t grow up
            to be pretty little maids all in a row.
Sterile teddy nightgowns – green bells in gaseous gardens.
Friend Rockstar, you may have to sleep.
This restless harbor is a shivering anecdote spilled from a belly,
            a vast, deep cavern with love notes written in milk.
Your fried, stern smile was a flaking fingernail adjacent to the crack in the flowerpot.
Some garden, I say.