Scuzzy film on a scalding riptide,
Bare sinew woven like scaffolding,
Catcalling as warm-and-fuzzies
Mince by like so many exposed marble legs
Passing construction sites.
Crimped by a polaroid viewfinder,
I sit alone and click-click-click
With folded memories in my pocket.

Let me just set the record straight:
I’m still in love with our contrails,
But you can go **** yourself.
We were helter-skeltering kids
Rivulets of caustic devotion
Sweltering down our skeletons,
Fly away with me again, please
I’m seeing synonyms for you
In every ally-cat hymnal
This gutter throat can sputter out
Seeing scarecrows bound by wicker muscles
Shivering in a windfarm
Powered by all those doors you slammed
Snapping together like worn
Rubber bands warm summer hands --
Dance with me, you were
The most perfectly human
I've ever felt.

Is that Listerine rolling out of your mouth
In waves of empty bottles once meant for me?
Off of your shoulders like a cape,
A swindler, eyeing you
Like you’re trying to sell me cutlery.
Exchange glances that are
Trailmix crumbling between couch cushions,
Rubbing shoulders with waspy relief,
Tendrils of comfort had me gripped by the biceps
Spread eagle like a petrified starfish
Till I lashed out at you with bullwhip arms
Because my own back had been too hard to reach lately,  

Mirrored
Ad Infinitum.
Your tongue looks like a mirror,
Stick it out at me,
We always did look more than alright together
People stared on the subway,
Called us starry-eyed without a trace of irony.
Back in the day when you made me happier
Than something I don’t even have a metaphor for,
Just happy. Happy needs no metaphors.

I still check my reflection every once in a while
Never know if we’ll collide again anyway,
Best to be prepared but instead I
Drift aimfully towards a catacomb of eyelash wishes
And equally corny ******* I never believed in,
Still don’t,

It was getting at us, though,

Rubbing sandy fists down to the core
Instead of holding hands
Crunchy apple shell
Skin friction,
Bite the seed,
1,000 angry pomegranate teeth,
Chapped lips like crustacean shells,
Aligned like eye-freckles
Me looking like an unused punching bag,
You somewhere off in the distance,
A fading marble of plasticine light
On my wavering horizon.

Because yeah, you broke my ******* heart
You were novacane cruel and selfish
And so immature it stunned me
But you also taped it back into my chest
On the day we met so I guess we’re even.

It’s funny, already I can’t quite remember your voice,
the shape of my name in your mouth,
how you laughed,
but every word  you ever said
is still carved onto the back of my hand
like a roadmap towards all the ways
you showed me how to love myself.

Still rubbing them away with your scalding riptide,
All those words you said about forever,
Now just shackles,
So gladly did I submit to yours,
I still hate those ornery devices
Even now when,
They’re curled at my feet
Like broken wings.

Smoking American Spirits
Like that name is not sickly ironic
As I watch the moon
And blow your name
Out through my teeth.

After all of it
I still can’t decide
If I’m happy that you’re happy
Or hate you for leaving me
In the cold to gape
At a barren rock.

The moon is a visceral spirit,
Pundit of creation myths,
Vaudevillian purveyor
Of heavy handed profundity,
Reflects the sun
When nothing else can,
Means so much to so many;

The moon is an entropic
Collusion of earth-chunk
That happens to orbit us,
Objectively meaningless,

Communicating with the ocean
As ants ***** chemicals
Into each others mouths to converse.  

Staring together up into
The gaping gnash of space,
Humans give the moon its meaning
Just as two people falling in love
Forever inhabit midsummer nights
'Till one leaves in a haze
Of evaporating brain chemistry.

I really am happy you’re happy,
Because I really do love you
Even after everything,
And I really do hate you
Because it hurts so much
And you were so selfish,
Go **** yourself,
Why can't I feel both?

Just this silly girl,
Just two broken people,
Look at what we made Chlo,
It's hanging in the sky
Strung up with used filaments.

I love you and hate you still
Because knowing the moon
Is a barren rock
Makes what it has become
Incandescently, infinitely beautiful.

I was aware that we were seventeen
and how on earth
could it all be so hazily perfect,
but also how couldn’t it?

I wanted to raise chickens
with you. I wanted to drive
a poemmobile cross-country just because.
In these early moments:

We’re Shakespeare’s lovers
standing up on Bambi’s legs,
and always will be.

I knew we'd met too early, sometimes.
If we were twenty-something and living in Bohemia
when we collided at a jazz-bar
drinking dusky whiskey.
Then life would follow.
I was scared that because we both needed something
to latch onto so badly, there was delusion
and we were too caught up in ourselves to see it;
that my first love would flit away
like everyone else’s.

We were sitting cross-legged
on the precipice of youth,
you whispering in my ear
that you hate haikus,
when I decided that my first love

was realer than any image
of white washed sheets
and yellow sunlit apartments
that this fresh faced
heart could concoct.  

Eight months later
when you broke it
I realized I was right
about everything

because the thing about
Shakespeare’s lovers
is that they die young
and Bambi’s legs
collapse with knobby knees
but the things they held up
while they could
were so ******* beautiful
that nobody really cared.

And we were so ******* beautiful,
how could I
possibly
have expected
that to
last.

Calcified age lines,
driftwood was once a shiny ship:
hallowed bow, curved spine, dead.

Jaundiced and gaunt didn’t appear
until after the fact,
break a bottle on its back
because I'm facedown,
dead drunk, waves of saliva breaking
desperately against the asphalt.
Tree branches grappling together in the wind
are handsome
like a handshake
in a bad poem
but they're just trees, just wood.
I am slowburning like an all natural cigarette.

Jaunt through the woods. Drinking spot.
Acrid friends.
Warm bonfire, I want it to be more like a movie.  
Davy Jones my sorrows. Sitting on a log.
Rock bottom and I’m sitting on a log.
Weird girl comes over, she’s artsy and dyslexic.
I hate that word. Artsy. *******.
She asks if I’m okay and I say yeah.

At home,
exhume pillowcase from *****,
futon forget-me-nots
some thick haired little boy
had curled up to die inside;

Post embrace.
Crashed; a solemnly sinking ship captain
with skin peeling like lottery tickets
too leather-faced to shout anything but
TEN THOUSAND THUNDERING TYPHOONS
as he goes down
with his cracked nymphal exoskeleton
wipes the fire off his brow
he is burning like an all natural cigarette
but phoenixes are not legends
they are metaphors,
and that is enough difference for me.

The sea is salty and stinging
and they say
a smooth one
never made a skillful sailor
but you cannot build a ship
out of driftwood,
just watch one deteriorate into it.

Maybe that’s the point.

For three years,
I found myself in an oozing freefall
base jumping as I carved through the air
like an anchor
parachute made of somber bottle twist
carved cork and microscope slide,
salt stained shoes,
brackish eyes
distort flashes of organic sunlight
thick necked forays into begging for fare
at deserted train stations
lashed out at friends with bullwhip arms
I couldn’t reach my own back
freefalling, base camp
welling up to greet me
from the depths of a tar pit
but the thing about rock bottoms is:
if they don’t destroy you
they give you something solid to stand on.

And if you leap back up, spread eagle
Like a petrified starfish, swim through that tar pit
that is ocean, the warm hovel of under the covers,
Bonfire, whiskey in the back of an old sailors throat,
All natural cigarette,
You can be born again. I promise.

Depression is not sadness, it is the absence of hope
And it is numb. Reduces us to ashes and drowns us all at once.
But it waxes and it wanes, burns itself out if you let it.

And from that flame, scattered splinters in the ocean,
The shedding of my cracked, nymphal exoskeleton,
I understood the impermanence and necessity of flailing tendrils
White hot curling up a mainmast like a handshake
Wet flesh in the womb of moment between sleep and wake,
Breath slipping away like low tide
Gasping for air until it’s easier to ****
Oxygen out of the saltwater in your lungs
Pain killed a boy and made a man

Watch a phoenix **** a baptism
Violently conjure steam into existence
Just for it to disappear, watch them smile.
You’ll understand.

The clumsy metaphor of a graveyard
will go largely unnoticed by me for some time,
by then I will still love you
and you will love someone else.

We don’t know this. We’re stumbling through
snowcapped, oddly pristine tombstones
at midnight while a thirty-something
Brooklynite rambles about
upkeep of monuments to dead things,
the finessing of memories into smooth
marble and granite boxes but I do not listen,
the swooping nape of your neck distracts me.
I will later regret this.

How did I miss something dying
right next to me, as we held hands,
where did the love go when I gave back
the scrapbook you made called
"70 Reasons Why I Love You,"
because memories weren't good enough,
memories remind me that every corpse
once loved and we all die and we all love
but I'd rather die
than feel like this.

How couldn't I tell
from the way we kissed
that everything was wrong?
I know nothing of
the upkeep of monuments to dead things,
the bodies in my head have all been exhumed
or burned and given back,
and I should have listened
to that ******* hipster because

after all this time,
I cannot remember anything
but your exposed alabaster skin,
flushed by cold,
on that lonely winter night.

Disssssimilar homeward boundaries
Rip the static out of my zipperskars
Ripple =-s=-=- in every word you pray
With the stupid eyes I can read so perfectly
Despite never knowing what they mean.

There is a Big Jet Plane
Parked in the wrinkles b/t
My knuckle and nail
Waiting to fly us away.

I have now called you
The word ****
Twice.

Yes, it made me feel better.

I love you
In the way that
Sometimes children’s books
Make me cry. And they never used to do that. Hey hey.
Hey. Hey. Heyheyhey.

that numb? it will waver.
that skulk? turn into droop
step. bent neck sunblasted
central park rowboat; gone.
i lost both oars
in one oafless rift
arcing through the purple air
sat stunned and helpless
as we drifted and you
laughed.

that’s kind of
what this
is like.