Sometimes the temptation to succumb to you is far too strong for me to bare.

I long to feel some sense of numbing and I know that caving into you will accomplish just that.

Then I face the harsh reality that at some point I will have to suffer.

Rather it now or later, I will have to open myself to that hurt and heal.

I don't want to be your hero, nor your ******
Because they provide instantaneous relief but neither are free
The cost, your life, surrendered to addiction
And hero's are a work of fiction
And I want you to love me with no dependency
With out missed calls leading to withdrawals
9.2million are addicted to ******
And I want only you to be free from addiction and love me
Do me a favor and don't make me just be your savior
You're disillusioned into thinking I'm Jesus
When I just satisfy your companionship lust
You say I make you feel better
But when I'm not around
It seems I make things worse
You say I don't of course
To trick me to stay
But you love me in a completely different way
You need to fix yourself from the source
Because I'm worn so thin
And all your healing
has to come
from within

This day needs tomorrow
As much as
Tomorrow needs today.
Throw a stone,
Watch ripples lick the shore,
Then turn around
And ripple more;
Like magician's rings,
Smoke rings,
Wedding rings,
Entangling,
Enriching,
Intertwining,
Becoming Olympian.
At the epicentre
It's calm.

We were infants
Trying to stand
Trying to talk
Seeing the world for the first time.
Six months and we grew
Learning, discovering
Looking for purpose
But still stuck in our minds.
One year and we were children
Believing we knew
All there was to know
But still filled with wonder.
Finding the first sadness
Peace in companionship
Hope for the future
And somehow life inbetween.
Two years and we were adults
Each others' first
"Happy," used so often
"Love," thrown back and forth.
In the cracks, underneath
Darkness spilling
Pain and confusion
Joining but tearing.
Three years and we were dead
Hope gone, innocence lost
Liquid life had taken ours
And pain was all it left.

But I am not
I live. And I realize that
Love was something you never gave,
There was no we, only me
And we did not live, or love.
Rather, I did.
I do.

I know you want to be independent
and make yourself happy, but
I want this to be a partnership;
we both make each other happy
but we don't need each other to be happy.

his life lies at the bottom of the bottle
a glass body entrapping his soul
one by one, his giggling, gaudy girls
grow up into graceful adults
clinking glasses full of candid celebration
toasting their tranquility into theater walls
as he stands up to take a shaky step
toward the door, toward his girls,
the glass bottle drags him back under

Yes, I salvaged you like a sunken treasure,
But you didn't realise, I too, was beneath the circling waves when I found you.
Without you to save,
I may have stopped swimming long ago.

If I was a work of art I'd be a poem
but just a blank white sheet of generic notebook paper
and you would be a symphony
which sounds pretty beautiful
but I never really liked Bach and
I never really liked Beethoven and
I never really liked Mozart and
I never really liked
myself

but
ohmygoddidIlikeyou
like Da Vinci liked Mona and
Dali liked

l
o
  n
   g

d r i p    i n g
          p
brush strokes depicting surrealist scenes and
Picasso liked Cubism and
Van Gogh liked his own ******* sadness and a tub of sunflower-yellow paint and that girl
he sent his neatly packaged and not-so-neatly severed off ear to

though
I suppose
artists are supposed to hate their art
with a burning self-depreciation sort of self-determination or
at least that's what I got from
Plant and Lydon and Cobain and
every other shooting star rock-and-roll phenomenon with their name engraved on a plaque somewhere
and a drug problem that procured a thousand cigarettes now just as burnt out as they are

but here's the thing
you aren't my art
you
are a breathing
walking
talking
self-portrait that sputters to life every morning
with an accent on each note

like I said
if we were art
you would be a symphony
but the orchestra
is crescondo-ing to no end now and
quite frankly I am tired of all these high-pitched violin marcatos and
I am losing myself in the repeats and
I am just wondering when the fine will come

like I said
if we were art
I would be a poem
that was just an empty piece of drab old paper
much too conventional and clean and
empty
to be appreciated
but
I guess a beginning in the form of an empty sheet of paper is all
Poe and Frost and Plath and
Auden and Silverstein and Dickinson and
Shakespeare and Bukowski and Cummings
had in common
anyway.