graveyards have started to feel a hell of a lot more like home than this god forsaken house ever could. it's easier to sit in front of strange graves in beds of grass and weeds than even consider looking at the empty space where your shoes used to block the doorway, where you turned our welcome mat into an ashtray. the comfort I find in headstones from people I'll never know is nothing compared to how I felt pressed against your chest listening to your own voice boom within your ribcage; shaking the walls with every consonant you let escape your mouth. the overwhelming sound of silence across the grounds is all that I can hear in my hallway now that your laughter isn't lingering between the wallpaper and drywall. I swear to god I hear wilting pedals from forgotten bouquets the second my ear touches my **** pillow every night, I miss your snoring. I've found sick comfort in the way the grass is welcoming and forgiving, the way it happily took every poem I wrote about you and decayed them into the earth beneath it. I've left every trace of you I had at that ******* graveyard but I still can't bear to wash my sheets. I'm as good as dead to you and maybe that's why I've found a home 6 feet under every word I've bled out in your name rather than in this house and body you abandoned.

Someone far off , I can't see ,
lives in a graveyard
in hopes of reviving
dead dreams .

i wanted to write about the wolf in my chest.
how it is hungry with claws extended, tongue running over it's teeth.
i wanted to write about the thunder in my bones.
it's cry shaking the ground and waking you from your sleep.
i wanted to write about what makes me deathless,
my flesh iron and teeth sharp.

i did not want to write about you.

i did not want to write about the fire you started in me,
that you ran from as you called yourself "brave".
i did not want to write about how there are stones in my throat,
or how exposed the space between my ribs had become.
i did not want to write about the phantom limbs i feel when the air is still.
i did not want to write about sitting in your passenger seat while driving in the dead of night,
mercy in the form of twisted hands and my head in your lap,
like it was that easy,
like you had become comfortable with the cold.

no, i did not want to write about you.

because if i do not speak your name,
if i do not romanticize what was,
i can bury you the way i have before, the bodies piling up,
your name on a tombstone.
maybe it is because you are young and i am tired.

i did not want to write about you.
i have written like this before.
names and dated times to remember when i felt this vacant.
i did not want you to become another page in this black book,
or another reason to believe i am being punished,
my trust in god deteriorating effortlessly,
you sleeping soundly in your bed.

i did not want to write about you, so this is where the verse ends.

i'm standing by the marker stone
feeling wind upon my face
listening to the echoes from the grave
i feel the tears freeze on my cheeks
from the wind upon my face
as i listen to the echoes from the grave

I'm in a darkened corner of the graveyard
It's overgrown and not well kept
It's been a long time since a visitor
Has on these markers wept

I feel the spirits all around me here
I hear their voices on the wind
There is not a single angel here
These are souls who all have sinned

The grass has grown halfway up the stone
You see the name but not the years
It's been decades since any marker here
Has been whetted down with tears

I tend the grass and **** growth
Cut it back right to the ground
And except for ghostly echoes
I do not hear a sound

The man here was my father once
Though I don't recall his face
But, here he lies, worm food and dust
In this long forgotten place

The voices of other souls do float
Waiting for someone to show
But, their families died out years back
And those left, they do not know

I hear them as they call out names
Frozen snippets lost in time
And though I am on my father's grave
Nobody calls out mine

i'm standing by the marker stone
feeling wind upon my face
listening to the echoes from the grave
i feel the tears freeze on my cheeks
from the wind upon my face
as i listen to the echoes from the grave

You and I,
We got high
together at the seven eleven at seventeen,
and listened to Fall Out Boy as he sang ironic one liners.
And we'd argue about what it would mean; too high to believe
the other was right, and then laughed at passing cars.

We stumbled to the graveyard and told ghost stories with wine,
and whiled away the hours dreaming of knights and dragons
in crystal towers far away across fable and time. I'd lift my proverbial flagon,
and you'd ****** it away, and whisper
"What am I
to you?" So sudden, and I was too high to answer it right at the time.
I stumbled. I mumbled. My words were all jumbled, and all that came out was:
"Thou art mine friend." Kind of lame, that word at the end. But I ended the sentence
With a laugh. I didn't know you were serious...
But...
I should have cut a word from the statement. Because if I was being serious too,
I'd have whispered back "Thou art mine."

In my mind, I relive the moment over again and again,
before you left and stumbled off into the dark,
I say "You are my princess, I'm your knight."
I say "When it's all ****** up, you make it all right."
I say all the right things and it culminates in a kiss by starlight,
but I mumbled,
words jumbled,
And you took the bottle of wine with you as you stumbled
alone into the dark till it took you away from my sight.

That night I sat alone and soliloquised what I didn't say right.

Moonlit door open slowly
For I fear my words can be heard
By the frog in the pond;
Moonlit night crippled by silence
I hear that to someone
I am a joke to my own conscience;
The sullen woods within
Give me the secret keys
To enter another world
Where the forgotten constant
Rises from the grave
After centuries of buried wisdom
The light shines upon this misplaced soul!

Bats, spiders, and rats form on my tongue
they crawl down my throat and live in my lungs

Cobwebs, moths, and dirt course through my veins
they nestle in my brain and make me insane

The flowers I've spent months watering start to wither away
Why did you lie when you said it would all be okay?

These weeds inside me were born from idiosyncrasies
And they make it way too hard to ******* breathe

My skull is cracked, bones are shattered, it leaves me scarred
This garden looks more like a graveyard