he lost his way, he knows not when.
chasing false idols he mistook for men.
he'd lose the child, if he only knew then -
he'd find a way to be a man again.

the past caught up to me
and I

couldn't run away
from it this time.

a fork in the road,

decisions to be made
and I'm waiting, wondering

is life just one big show?

the outcome,
nobody knows,

we're all in it for the ride

trying our best
to keep our heads above water

and not get swept in the undertow.

it's all a game of chance,
and survival

the final destination,
a to-be-determined arrival.

a fork in the road,
decisions to be made,
and I'm waiting, wondering

how long it will take

to break this cycle?

Love is not a circus.
Still, I watched her perform.
I watched her spin around in circles
And pretend to fall.
I watched her paint her face red
And smear her clown mouth.
She laughed at things that weren't
funny, often mixing up the punch line.
Still, I watched her perform.
I watched while she loved another,
A man that didn't know she was there.
The audience could tell.
Any of us could.

None of the balloons that she carried
Seemed to float,
Pretending to trip and fall into our hands. The smeared makeup around her mouth twisted into a smile she didn't recognize.

After the show, she asked, if she really did fall would I catch her?
One of her smiles telling the ultimate truth, Smeared left then off right.
Like she brushed against something.
The start of the next show.
Those ill-fitting clothes weren't so ill
After all.

She fell towards his arms,
Hoping that he'd catch her.
Love is not a circus,
Although their stay is temporary.
Painted faces tell no tales.
Not all injuries heal the same

It could have been different.
Don't you think?

If we never lived.
The lives we did.

If fate didn't have other plans.
If death didn't take a vacation.
If one thing changed our direction.

We could be indescribable.
We could be unrecognizable.

Trapped in another time.
Destined to never meet.

It could have been different.
Somehow we could have changed.

Never be who we were meant to.
Doomed to forever stay the same.

Fate is funny like that.
Still we wonder.

Only in another life.
Things would be better.

Sometimes you're a footnote.
Others can refer to.

Other times you're lucky enough.
To be a whole entire chapter.

Some people go.
So they turn into a page.

As they wonder why.
They're not mentioned,
Again by name.

Other people's stories.
Will stay estranged from you.

While others will weave,
Their way into your world.

We are all just living stories.
Wanting to be heard.
Needing to be seen.

Trying to find a home.
Among the margins.
Of life.

We are all just stories.
With something to say.

That we are here.
Even if it was just,
For a chapter or two.

We all become stories.
At the end of the day.

My love is the shape of canine teeth and claw marks
I leave around your neck,
the way I leave poems decaying in an unforgiving landfill —
the gods have turned away in disgust
as I sit and lick, like a rabid dog,
the maggots chipping away from the inside —
the entrails of my grief, all pulled out without mercy,
without a deathbed confession,
without a god to listen.
I long for something else to unfold;
something sacred and beautiful
when you turn my body inside out, but lo.
This is as deep and far as we go.
Tell me, I beseech, does my filth look better inside out,
uncovered, on display,
penetrating your very skin?
Take what you need, love, they are all yours —
my sins, my wounds, my impiety
in exchange for your darkened heart — I’ll spit it out
and swallow it back
down to my underbelly where no one can ever take it —
not you, not the gods, not their fallen, forsaken angels.

Forgive me — forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
Forgive my unforgiving hands, forgive my unforgiving poems
if our sick, twisted, defilement is all they ever know.

Such a classic mortal blunder to lay
my spine as it erodes, graceless, inelegant
on Galatea’s cold, ivory arms;
such delicate carvings can never be human, look human,
feel human under my lonesome bones.

I long to see you flinch and break
into fine, liquid, rain of dust blinding me,
covering the walls of this room
in a blameless shade of white: a new asylum ward
for my kind of insanity,
you say.
It envelopes like light around my awe
and my forlorn limbs,
tangled with Galatea’s unmoving ones.
I look for comfort within brittle carcasses
scraped of everything they could ever give.

The quiet persists eerily.
But here, Pygmalion’s gifts remain untainted:
the apex of auger shells, the beak of a songbird
the blunted ceriths, the rusty chisels
all impaling my spinal bones.
Yet the sculptor’s kisses, long erased,
the careful carvings, long defaced,
long reduced into a Grecian ruin.
I bury my body on your arms yet they find no rest
against the ghostly pleas of mammalian tusks.

How many for your fingers?
How many for your hair?


Tell me, Galatea, were you carved to bear the weight of
all the sea salt I swallowed as I drowned?
Soften under my meandering thoughts; I long
to see you flinch and break — like all the dead elephants —
any reminder that you yield pliantly to the voice
of the love goddess, that you were once turned human.
Break now, your solid arms, under my own collapse
over the sea foam caught on fire.

I am no longer bending and weeping to pick myself up.
Here it all goes down and ends:
my bones,
and yours,
burning,
snapping.
Nothing —
nothing less glorious will last after us.

— Fray Narte

Alone. In the center
of an intersection.

He leads travelers
to their corresponding
destinations.

Yet he himself
can't seem
to move on.

Her eyes are sinkholes in a quiet, sleeping state
and I was a girl, lost and misplaced at twenty-one,
looking for love in infinitesimal spaces:

on her palm creases and chipped, ruby nails,
and in the blown-out ends of her lotus tattoo
I find myself tracing a secret,
at the spiked tips of her hair tamed by fairy lights
and on the slits of her skin — a rabbit hole of wonders,
I always fall like Alice in sworn careful tiptoes
and crash headfirst; a broken wishbone, a tainted wish
some habits you just can't quit.
like —
October and her obsidian eyes, and the sunless ways we kissed —
being lost and misplaced made sense for a while in the detached comfort
of her cold bed, colder hands,
warmth has become an oppression.

But this dalliance has always been a disaster waiting to happen
and I am a paramour, a memory, a face in the crowd
swallowed in a seismic fall —

and losing October has always been a disaster waiting to happen —
this bed, always a site of a losing battle
and I find myself in a soiled, torn dress,
lying helpless on the other side of her war.

Tonight, I light myself a candle;
maybe one day, I'll finally learn to run away from a girl made of disasters

and not towards her.

You still eat away at my chest
like a mole finding its way out of my body.


God, it’s been ten years now since you last wrote me a letter
sealed with a pressed, dead daisy
and a ghostly kiss mark,
yet they’re still dying under my thumb.


These days slip by and I can no longer write you poems,
my dearest, sweet September —
but still, I hope that you have in your chest
all my papercuts from unbridled letters,
all my quiet midnights,
and all of my unwritten words;
they are yours for missing.


Must you leave a girl then, darling,
whose only fault was being one?