We'll naturally kiss
and caress when that scent
or that one song is there

Your love is sweet, our life is good

We hang streamers
where we know each other
and keep exploring

Your love endures, our life is sweet

We don't need French kisses
we just caress each other's backs
if possible under the shirts

Your kisses are sweet, our life is good

Our fingertips find
their way, skin to skin
They hang streamers

If paper and pen
understand me to my core,
then it is my voice that betrays me evermore.
I know better, yet opening up
stays my biggest fear.
I am surface-leveled,
neither there, nor here.
And so comfortably, with no fuss,
I stay a projection,
nothing more than dust.
I am your imagination,
no depth,
no width.
I am only but a shell.
An empty figure,
stripped of will and vigor.

Your demons don’t play well with mine,
They bite and they bruise and entwine.
Yours weaponize tears,
Mine whisper, come near.
The chaos is purely divine.

We drift toward escape, dark and slow,
They bloom with our secrets and grow.
Yours pull at my seams;
Mine knot in your dreams.
A dance only demons could know.

In the soft glow of

the sun just above the hills --


we warm each other.

You staggered through the double doors,
a trail of red on bleached-out floors.
The night was humming, wet and mean,
your busted life in Trauma Green.

I clamped your vein, soft as thread,
and dared the gods to count their dead.
You lay there broken, no ID,
just blood and ache and urgency.

Your heart fell quiet
inside my hand,
as if it paused to understand.
Then breath returned in stuttered moans.
your chest arched up to meet my own.

The wound was sealed.
Your sigh came slow.
You could have left.
You didn’t, though.
The sweat still clung.
Your gaze went slack.
You pulled the gown and turned your back.

I saw you later, checkout nine:
frozen dinners, boxed red wine.
You seemed like someone death forgot,
barely awake, missing the plot.

You looked right through. You didn’t know
the hands that pulled you from below.
You don’t remember. I can’t forget
how thin the stitch, how deep the debt.

You aren’t the first to come and sit beside me
On this couch.
Others have come before you
And have left their imprint.

I do hope that you’re the last to walk in
And stay.
The way you smile
and lean back against the cushion,
You stare at me and smile as if asking, what?

The past imprints are meaningful.
Some are deeper than the last that sat
Where you’re sitting now.
I’ve learned a lot from them.
Sometimes their ghosts still
Walk in and smile.
Before stepping back out.

It’s funny how well I thought I knew myself,
Until I realized I didn’t.
But without them,
I wouldn’t have learned more about myself.
About what I needed to change,
What I needed to let go,
How to hold you
without readying myself to say goodbye afterwards.

When you first walked in,
You reminded me of them.
The ghosts that walked in
and kept me company for a minute.
To be honest, I counted the minutes until you said goodbye.
I don’t count anymore.
I’ve gotten used to sitting here
on the couch with you.

Hold me at the tip of your tongue
And speak not, intimately
In suspension of that trembling scaffold
Lest it crush our unsaid space

Touch me the right way
And say the wrong nothings
That in ambivalence I may stray
To some mistaken grace

**** me over in your dream,
Lay me out, exposed,
And carry out your shrouded theatre
Recompense for your absence in mine

And gently, in your tangled strings of pathos
Tie me at the cusp of your love

a clay coloured mug
with the dregs
of now-cold coffee
swirling with bits
accumulated dust
and a fallen fly
left on the side
it needs to be washed
but will be ignored
time and again
each time i pass by
because of how
it is stained;
not by the rings
lining it's inner surface
from top to bottom
with striations of brown
but because of
the lipstick smudge
on its outer edge
a sign of her presence
of all the memories
that a smear of red
can conjure
and a reminder
that she will
be home soon