It wasn’t the time
To start dropping lines
About love and forever
So I hung “I love you”
In my closet
Next to the skeleton
Who’s been begging
To see the sunlight
Sometimes we let our hearts
Act as a vault instead of
A home
We lock things away
Trying to protect them and
Keep them safe
But ultimately
Everything dies
Emotions fade because
Even though we say “forever”
Forever has a way
Of changing people
Cursed be the man who isn’t
Changed by time and experience
So locked away in my heart
“I love you” began to decay
soon it’ll be another skeleton
I’m afraid will come tumbling out
So instead of saying anything
I’ll give you the combination to my vault
And hopefully you like what you find
Like maybe it reminds you of treasure
Something you will want to keep
Instead of selling it so you have enough change
To wash your ***** sheets

the soul wells with poetic thoughts
but the mind no longer knows poetic word
and the fingers no longer have poetic purpose
just a small figure in a towering chamber
where every footstep echoes for hours
so there is not a cough, not a whisper
and those who pass through would say
that no one lives there,
at least not any more

We're in a car going twenty too fast on the highway, and I don't know where we're headed.

Maybe the headlights will take us to a home where we've never lived or maybe somewhere where the flames aren't as shallow.

Rain has been beating the windows for at least four hours, and I can almost see lightning through all the cigarette smoke.

He says that he can see clearer than ever.

I swear ever since the radio lost signal, I've basically been able to hear the stardust in every shallow breath he takes. 

I can't believe all it took was a broken radio to see him for the kind of words he was meant to be.

The kind that rip apart a person's heart when they finally read them the way they were always meant to be read.

His name is just a noise, and his face is only skin;but the fault lines etched into his bones make me want to believe there are more earthquakes inside him than he thinks.

He makes me want to believe there's something more to life than his fingers wrapping themselves around mine as the car wraps itself around a tree.

It's hard to write a poem
When there's nothing going on
It's hard to think of what to say
When you've given most of it away

As poets we never scratch the surface
We delve within, disclose our deepest sin
We crave our pain, declare it's for our art
Yet more often than not have no idea where to start

But start we do and start we must
A deep desire in all of us
To spill out on the written page
What little bit we have tried to save

Ink now is the poets blood
Fragments of self pour from within
Silence is our safety net
To stop us from bleeding out

Although it's hard to write a poem
With nothing going on
We still find words to form a verse
From deep within our marrow bone

Work © Mike Hauser & © Sia Jane

It hasn't even been a month yet but
I look at pictures of you sometimes
and wonder what it means to forget.

Then the emptiness comes back.

To fear death;
Then long for it
We must be...