Asleep in a train car,
Picturing a mansion and enough space to scream your thoughts till they're all around you,
It was that expansion that at once,
Excited, then frightened me.
They all want things to be different.
When you were younger,
Challenges appeared limitless,
And as you grew,
The challenges became impossible because it would have meant defeating yourself.
And I believed those who gave me a borderline dead silent goodbye as they shipped me off to get lost at sea,
What seasons changed when we played the same games as new people,
Revolutionaries, enlighteners,
Life tells the ground to crack at what points growth can occur,
And the earth responds in kind.
Infinity matters not when your heart stops beating.
Set your mind free and make the world understand that you protected all you had because the worth of what pain you kept inside was enough to bear a burden,
You wore it well as it tore down your walls.
A casual suit at a water park.
Bathed in insecurity,
Insecurity and promise.
Promises are preludes to tragedy.

We've never had a real conversation
just strings of words clipped from some other communication
and strong together
like a ransom note.

"oh hey, how are you, how've you been?"
the same quick-shot question reserved for friends that you
pointedly stayed out of contact with after
"accidentally" losing contact with them,
and that guy you met one time
who thought you would see each other a second time.

"I'm good, good. Yeah word is going well"
It doesn't matter whose lips those words leave, they're meant for ears of family members who you don't connect with
and that acquaintance who tries just a little too hard to to be a friend.

"I really liked your show, you were amazing!"
Said every person in attendance of a show whose performer they got to meet.

"Hey thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it, say, would you like a drink?"
This whole scene is a beer commercial, not a conversation.

---

"When you look at me i get butterflies in my stomach..."
If you had never heard that expression you would never describe it that way.

"...To the moon and back"
That's an arbitrary distance, and against a backdrop of star pocked infinity it's just insulting.

"I do"
Why, is someone asking?

"Love you"
You're just stilling yourself at this point, and that tells me a lot more about you.

"Unconditionally"
Whoever first expressed in words the notion of love
****** up a lot of couples where someone
thoughts those words meant anything.

Your mouth is a trust, a treasury,
and without actions to back it,
your words just get inflated.

---

These ready made blocks of pre-written prose
first fell from the lips of some lover or another
not now - but a long time ago.

You'd never know someone was able to be angry over getting the wrong anniversary gift if you hadn't seen it happen before.

You would never ask for half off when the waiter brought you fish instead of chicken even though you couldn't stop complimenting it the whole meal
- unless you knew someone had gotten away with it before.

---

"...What's your favorite colour?"
My favorite colour is the sound of preschool children listening to each other and not talking over one another in some kind of verbal dog-pile
- because if you asked the first person who asked that question, that's what the teacher would say.

"what's your sign?"
Something I don't have control of cross referenced with broad strokes of someone else's brush?
How protected do you feel
behind a wall of other people's bricks?

If you're not going to stop being safe,
if you're not going to get over being scared of the dark
and go where you haven't heard of people coming back from
then stop telling me things everyone has already heard...

Then just shut
          the
                              ****
                  up,
and let me listen to your heartbeat.
It's the only honest thing about you.

I thought about two ideas
to write about and I
didn't write about either.

One had to do with
sidewalks and people--
the plundering
of personality
that happens
even when you walk
where it should be safe to be.

The other
was about technology--
that inside our veins
instead of polysaccharides
was the wires
to our electronics;
that stitch themselves inside
to keep us plugged in.

Maybe it was the in-toxicity
of having to try and fail
a persona that perpetuates
underachievement

or a rebel
that displays rebellion
by not rebelling at all.

My mind is the lackluster
of copper compared to silver--
its dull ensemble
may be its greatest achievement
a replication of someone else's words
because mine
lack the quality to be appreciated.

And my information for poetry
is irrelevant to the real world--
because these are analogies
they are the rhetoric of argument

the imagination of 'youth'
and from my age
deemed to lack understanding
so I cannot be president,
hardly can I speak,
nor should I be listened to.

He was terrible at dancing
It was part of his lackluster charm
He tried so hard to do what he could
I can only hope and pray
That the day does not
Come where I begin to
Feel guilt.

We drank three bottles of champagne
He's a beautiful person
A terribly old soul.

But I cannot wait for him.
His mind is much older
Than mine
For I do not want to speed my own aging.
To grow old this young would be a tragedy
And soon many would write songs and plays and poems about us.
But maybe I would want that.

I am not a simple sentence.
I am not detailed and defined.
I am words you thought you knew
But mean the otherwise
I am poetry, I am prose
I am words shuffled along
I am riddles, I am songs
I am complexity alone.

You can't put all of your happiness
into one person. They are
temporary. They do not last
forever.

Things break.

The dependence is a thin line that stitches
your heart to the object,
struggling to not slack,
and one day,
like she broke you,
you will crash backward.

He is
No longer
A person
To me

As I sit here
And watch him
*****
Onto the floor

And it looks like
Alphabet soup...
But
Maybe it's just soup, or
Just Alphabet...
As he begins speaking
1, 2, 3s.  

And I have cried before,
For him. but
Now that I sit,
Eyes on his back,
Unspeaking
And still
.
.
.

I frankly hope he
Chokes.

I made a loop with a running knot around my neck
A snare, a lasso
A hangman's hassle
I tightened it up
I pushed the chair
Only to blame the only person who actually cared