battered with red kisses
a boy called ocean with
mid-summer ribs
rust unfolding itself
across his chest
and salt and raw and frozen
fractals,
sweet bodies
endless sands
waves
cracked holy monuments
glossy jostlers
sorry means
stars swallow the right
notes, every daylight
plucked with loose fingers,
a boy called ocean
with freshwater shoulders
remembers drinking opposite
a ghost, bones rippling,
veins winter,
yellow
goodbyes washed in
exposed bonfires he
appears raptured
bound in dirt
and barren nails
he asks to ride
tomorrows tides,
a golden crash on horizon  
his only answer
the pink of morning
brimming starless,
over his burning
home.

You know
your **** is ******
when all you can write
are love poems.

You know
there’s nowhere to go
but up when your
mouth is
hate and glass,

adjectives are
for those without
a rapture.

[]
                  ballerina on the subway

     sublimate that cigarette sunset

if you don’t know, now you know

      pop art
for the modern world

            (she’s not that kind of girl)

          normality is a paved road,

where is all the time
we were promised
it asks
give up the **** that
weighs you down
it writes

on a yellow
                                       post-it
.

Playing a harp
with no strings
I swear I hear beautiful music
it seems derivative
unconscious tussle-trap
you sit
reclined at 75 degrees
in a chair made from
the most bleached bones
they were promised earnestly
you seem to love me
you do.

I always tell too much,
I am very good at poker, but
I cannot lie about things
when they tend to matter,
the cards are pretty with
rounded corners and  
red shapes (not like the actual
Heart I keep muffled under
my shirt, overwrought metaphor
that it is)
I've learned to
hold them flat
against my chest breathe
slowly
not like the ocean
I have swallowed my eagerness
tasted chalky salve
hoped it was medicine
weathered electricstorms
conjoined love and self
(which was the point, once,
and i think will be the takeaway
when this is all over)
lost poetry lost you
become stoic but warm
a man
instead of
wounded still I fear
I always smile a beat
too short
lately,
you always know,
It's not fair,

and we could talk later
I could see you around
but neutered love
still is Love.
Unforgivably so.

press the butter
into my hand
watch it slink away
dissolving oval opal
full moon winter
cold preserves,
or so they tell me.

galvanizing current of blazing unknowns
hung in the sky on tenterhooks
salve and siphon
strung together, web of calloused fingers
don’t need to laminate the little gestures —
just the feelings behind them
poster board picture placement
cull the very thing you’ve ignored
the shore shakes and shimmers
and i can endure this ocean no more.

"Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords,
resigned to **** and to die." – Jorge Louis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

stoic labyrinthine sparrow-bone;
there is a slalom down your gullet,
bayonet curled around your neck,
you have a beak, you are *****-smooth,
have rubble for skin, an emaciated infinity:
everything is fractal so eat your words
they are you are your rusty toenails
every footstep is a holocaust there’s
genocide under your neurons,
watch them flex and shiver.

you have soft plastic lips,
there is a vacuum in your gullet,
a box cutter carving
through your adam’s apple:
epileptics are just indecisive,
when they seize hold their tongues
they are their words you are a god
are oppenheimer and shiva,
pick favorites it doesn’t matter
it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter
flex and shimmer we are just neurons
flatlines are not ghoulish nooses,
paraplegics are just cowards,
move with conviction each step
is a genocide, you have wooden
teeth and woolen wings,
thrashes are a velveteen sunset
an edible fog, your stomach
is a stomach do not eat the fog
just know that someday it will **** you
softly and swiftly.

it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter:
infinity is not recursive
alive is not our default state
once is the only route
blood makes the blade holy
if you cut me i will bleed,
i won't blame you just know
you were only ever
that very moment.

Mildew clutched tight,
hollow-*****, manic thrusting,
marionette-faced, barrow-lunged,
nails bit to the bone-gristle,
lips raw with spit-polish,
redacted eyes, redacted eyes --
two palpable creatures,
transient drifters of soulspeck,
one unraveling the other constructing
one unraveling the other constructing
forever,
sallow truth would dissolve skin.

Lips read: founder a self.
Rusty copper
with adamantine eyes.
Steel core, unbroken by absence.

Drown in opposite directions,
oceanwater salve, yes
calloused tongues jostle,
ribbed in salt and rust.

Unlaced corset,
striped sweater,
grunged trainline veins
run on endless.
A clock,
abandoned in the middle,
I think once

it very much mattered.

i don't know
                                                      glea­ming­ like an apology
what i want
                                                      ­your scraped pomegranate summerteeth
these winter days, i used to
                                                      a pointillist sunset,
wish i could inhale                    
                                      ­                d­on't tell me that muscle
the wide wide world
                                                      is made whole by breaking,
just to breath it out
                                                      back bent toward abstention
into your mouth, once,
                                                      none so present as yours
i never really knew
                                                      (­and­ cracked holy monuments,
strength
                                                       vines their unlaced exoskeletons)
just that i wanted to be strong
                                                     ­ at­las was no gardener
for a nebulous reason i cannot
                                                      to hold up is not to tend.
remember
                                            ­    ­      wher­e could it be written
i'm leaving for
                                                     why would anyone say, why would
a very long time,
                                                     a poet teach the heart survives by breaking?
but you have to go
                                                    that in black ink my love may still shine bright
away
   to come back
                                                     ­

liver damage
spritzers and pirouettes
of smoke curl
through canals
in cracked plastic
lip skin,

can
a void thrum?

bob dylan’s
time out of mind
sheathed in my ears
cigarettes burn
all of me,
can
entropy
explain

kaleidoscopes?

if yes, if
only
that I see
you in
everything
is
a trick
of cones
and rods
and nothing more.

Pinned my stomach to the sky
Strung it up with tinsel and filament
Carved kisses into my sternum
With elastic lips.

I can feel you fading from me,
Morsels creep away,
Nothing holding them there
Any longer. I feel less sad.
It is somehow worse.

You had long since left.
Where did the memories
Of me go when they unstitched
From your head?

My heart beats
Like a stillborn child
Against its mother’s womb.

I am an uninflated punching bag
You have hair like chocolate fire
And a sun inside your face.

I stared as hard as I could,
Burned your chapped lips and brow
Into my retinas, you left
The ghosts of your arms
Around the back of my neck.

I, petrified,
Pretend you are a still-life
And paint you onto my eyelids,
With faded ink from
childhood picture books.  

My stomach is a canopy
Of starless sky pouring half
Digested everything
Onto the robins in my chest.

I see you and smile,
But maybe you missed it?

I am going to a movie
With a girl who wants to kiss me.

I am gathered up inside
All of her arms.
She cries to her friend
In the backstage bathroom.

I do not know how
To make the words happen.
She finds me beside her
And her mouth is on fire.
I wish my hands were holding
The soft of her cheeks.

She says:
I thought we were going to be together.

I know I have a heart,
Because it is trying to leave me.

(I. Summer ‘ 13)

Freckles clung
like manic-pixie stardust,
spackled whispers
an unfolding fractal
of brimming dresser drawers
old pictures and mix cds,
we could only ever do
what teenagers were supposed to.

Smushed crabapple handholds,
moxy and sadism hard-won,
no crash course in platonicness,
our stained glass eroded
into a beach
frozen in unsummer,
opiates dull senses,
a synesthetic void
exchanging echoes of echoes,
a cacophony of empty
distilling as it leaves
in whisks of 2 a.m.s,
honey-laced whiskey—

if the sky murmurs one
last love poem, it isn't
to us but our
moment of infinity,
of blind faith
irredeemably lost,

that forever of apex
where the line between
falling and flying
blurs.

(II. Fall ’13)

Spines and ribs
don’t do it justice
you raptured me
both ways to Sunday,
built me up to shatter jaws,
car windows—me
bar stool battered,
you my perfect carpenter,
smile with wooden teeth
(you made them yourself)
so stain me the color of
cherry trees
and unbliss my empty spine.

(III. Winter ’13)

Mildew clutched tight,
hollow-*****, manic thrusting,
marionette-faced, barrow-lunged,
nails to the bone-gristle,
lips raw with spit-polish,
redacted eyes, redacted eyes--
we are palpable creatures,
transient drifters of soulspeck,
one unraveling the other constructing,
sallow truth would dissolve skin.
founder a self, rusty copper
with adamantine eyes,
steel core unbroken by absence,
drown in opposite directions,
oceanwater salve, yes
calloused tongues jostle,
ribbed in salt and rust.

Unlaced corset,
striped sweater,
grunged trainline veins
run on endlessly,
a clock,
abandoned in the middle,
I think once
it very much mattered.

there is a broken thing
reformed in amber
disarranging the spectrum
of sensical causal motion
nail biting following
migration patterns of neural
activity and we bless the few
who cut clean and learn early
those bespectacled masses
cannot intuit the limited scope
of aversion to blurry pink clouds
gussied up in peripheral vision the
pineal gland controls circadian
rhythms gushes dmt when
we die i wonder i
wonder what that (vestigial)
little pinecone knows
that we don’t
cased in spongy
grey matter and i don’t think
much of time as metaphor but
my watch strap broke
yesterday i hope
that is
important i do

nothing so simple or complex
as love but(i carry it in my heart)

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.

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.

freckles clung
like manic-pixie stardust,
spackled whispers
an unfolding fractal
of brimming dresser drawers
old pictures and mix cds,
we could only ever do
what teenagers were supposed to.

smushed crabapple handholds,
moxy and sadism hard-won,
no crash course in platonicness,
our stained glass eroded
into a beach
frozen in unsummer,
opiates dull senses,
a synesthetic void
exchanging echoes of echoes,
a cacophony of empty
distilling as it leaves
in whisks of 2 a.m.s,
honey-laced whiskey,

if the sky murmurs one
last love poem, it isn't
to us but our
moment of infinity,
of blind faith
irredeemably lost,

that forever of apex
where the line between
falling and flying
blurs.

phrases taken in order from my word collage*

perfect
loved
yes
pulse
cigarette
she's --

inside light

//

girl hate
sun carved
******* whiskey moment

//

hope
dead
head
hurt
smoke cold numb

//

broken
hey
hearts standing
legs knew infinity

//

chest tongues fading
stained rock dull beating

//

strangers spine
sunset curled

//

frozen
summer
raw

//

sweet bodies
endless sand

//

pictures whispers grey hanging

//

holy monuments
eternal knife ripple

//

stunned
damage
tragic

//

copper
adamantine
cacophony

//

distilling jostle

//

untitled cds

//

create sharp swords
fell

//

grabbed
buried
shape
friend

//

says thistles
road tomorrows tides

//

beginning

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.

capsized beating purple algorithm
for a heart,
cross-nit aspirations
still taste dirt on my teeth,
the mission creep of eager eyed poets,
carry a briefcase with my levi's --
close cut cigarette encounters,
all brick shantytown of a friendship
them lovelies run on endless,
it's starting to get cold outside.

restless sprites circle our *****
exhaling greek mythopoeics
every sure footed step.
alcoholism echoes in my skin
a depth charge i cannot cut out,
we all have broken thoughts here,
all have blind spots in our stomachs,
they read like a preacher's insecurities:
burly things we warm ourselves with,
the winters sting bitter.

something is wrong with me,
sinkhole of ambition and honey kisses,
all the great thinkers **** themselves,
it's the staunch lack of spotlight,
way the earth drips lackadaisical-like
we just call it a perfect orbit.
shake my hand and feel a goldilocks pulse
anemic shards of a cornered animal,
we cut right
to the bone
here, or so we tell ourselves.

and love is always the answer?
that sure footed toothy angel
so beautiful, it couldn't just be our
churlish blood,
frothing and calming,
frothing and calming,
electrons rise and fall to create light,
they still circle an untapped atrocity
perfectly,
like this, like it must be
god
or something close. something
stopping them from running, free
from bonds ionic or otherwise,
bare feet
beating the pavement until there are
no more stones to throw.

firstborns of the universe,
each star is a setting sun,
blinks staggered,
still grew us up quicker than most,
there is no aphrodisiac like heliocentrism.

them bones cut good
doped up on oxytocin,
those empty thoughts still rattling,
dig sharp -- then nice and numb.

and we cutthroat and glossy,
sharper than ever.

walk outside
smoke a cigarette
know how much you love her,
look at the stars --

it's ******* beautiful isn't it

The way you said my name,
like it was heavy in your mouth
yet worth its weight in vibrancy,
worth the strain a single syllable
caused an undulating tongue
such as yours, that rippling
pink squid beating a solid
leather drum to carve me
into existence, explode the
air into a sweltering thrum,
like you had licked the naked
off my skin and melded  
negative space and clammy
saliva onto scaffolding
lining the roof of your mouth,
carved an arc of sound
only I could fit through,
you said my name  
like you meant it,
like you loved me,
you knew what it meant
and cherished it no less
and because of that,
so did I.

The best way to fall in love, they say, is by moonlight:
it illuminates the beautiful, masks scars and pockmarks.
As I quickly discovered, dimly lit four-hour bus rides
have a similar effect.
We didn’t fall in love, of course,
but I couldn’t swallow the chalky pill
of recent heartbreak
and you coaxed it down my throat
with your tongue, which to me is close enough.
You were 23, and whether you thought
I was 18 as is true or 20 as I claimed didn’t seem to matter.

You were beautiful, an inescapable mountain
to climb, the other passengers vibrating,
shadow-coated foothills.
We had the ethereal intimacy of two strangers who know
they will never see each other again. I kissed you.

It was to forget the taste of empty mouth,
frothing memory foam,
the way smoke whistles through toothgaps:
a caustic taste, one that I’d had no luck scraping away
like so much tongue plaque.  


What does a year of love smell like?
Sweat, mostly.

Frozen central park ramble, attic and basement musk,
my sweaters turned her perfumed pajamas
turned peace pipe turned dusty relic. Whiskey,
and shattered glass windshield,
the St. Marks hotel because it was cheap
and took cash. All colored by one perfect summer
that I can no longer remember anything
but the specifics of. All this you did not smell like,
but it was dim and you felt cozy
nuzzled into my shoulder.

I held you the way I held her,
so maybe we did fall in love
for two hours on that bus ride to Boston;
call it love by proxy. We burrowed
into one another because we had found
some eternal twilight, a midsummer night
on a Peter Pan bus in the dead of winter.
I gripping your thigh as if I only held tightly enough,
I wouldn’t be ripped back into reality
when the bus stopped. In the bright
fluorescent lights of South Station
we brushed lips awkwardly, exchanged
numbers, I grabbed my bags,
and you were gone forever.

You’d invited me to a bar,
and then your friend’s couch,
but ******* you would have made it much too real.
You and her would be differentiated,
writhing bodies are undeniably unique.
The ripped gut-wrench feeling I felt
the next day would have been unbearable.
Because intimacy informs loss, and
love by proxy only ever serves as a distraction
from the fading marble of plasticine light hovering,
indifferently, just out of frame. But it was love.
You were beautiful, and we’d found a moment
of viscous life. You numbed my pain for a while,
reminded me why I hadn’t swallowed those pills.
In that eternal twilight, it was all I needed.

You bound my wrists
With tithe and tides and barbed wire
Draped your braided halo around my throat
Told me you’d never leave
Till you did and fogged my glasses
With recursive memories.

We are strangers now
Or always were
Because I could never
Love a person who’d do that
To someone. Maybe it
Was just the way you
Made me feel like home,
Like the ******* sun,
Like I understood why
I wanted to exist,
Why every other pop song
Is about this corny *******
That really is the only reason
To keep trudging in circles
Trying to replicate
A beginning point
We will never again find.

Because love is something
I only really understood
After you left, when I
Felt my blood harden
And my senses regurgitate
Memoryaftermemoryaftermemory
Until every pulse was a trigger,
When I saw how wretched
You were, felt the sidewalk
Shear my skull clean off,
Even then, and even now,
When you well up inside my head
I feel the skin on my back
Disappear and I am warm
Because you never stop loving a home,
Even when it is no longer yours.  

I don’t intend to ever see you again,
I don’t want to know who you’ve become,
All I know is the girl I loved is gone,
But I hope she’s happy,
I hope she’s happy and I hope she’s loved,
Because I will never forget
What it’s like not to be.

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.

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.

an anchor child born eager
underneath the universe
watches tides blow
tomorrow’s winds
through vacant months
sunlit mountains
stop to explain heartbreak
breaking rolling
young with burnt brow
you look so handsome
telling stories
mouths decide boundaries
twist gutter spill
skyline twitch
shout
swim
fester
depths swooping down
on oars of gravity
asking pitched boats
to knuckle homeward
slipping endless into thunder.

gritty electric pulse,
trench-veins, headaches
grime and polished wood,
scuffed shoes jostling,
sweet honey whiskey, **** that
i want pain. give me burns
under my pulse and i smile
and sit
by the window,

take a cab home
in lucid stupefaction
her legs draped
on my lap,

and we laugh
and laugh and laugh

if big brother
is watching,
he should write
a think-piece
about human
sexuality for
buzzfeed.

//

big brother
has seen
a rip-roaring
raucous circus
of butts and the
unruly objects
we place
inside.

yoll so n so
whiskey is romanticized
cigarettes are
romanticized
death is terrifying

i like whiskey & cigarettes
i **** cold marrow
from blustery bones
corkscrew, touch tone phone,

deceptively white kitchen
i like to think i’ve seen too much,
wow that hurts
crackle of jet black entropy
emotions fading a gradient

i wish i knew
your name
like a fist
in my head.

like
moss to a stone
moths to a light
sand through the hourglass
it is right
to think these days
of our lives are not
so operatic as
all that. but

can we still
appreciate those little
words lined up
so neat like beer
glossy on countertops
in an advertisement,

fuzzy phrases so
utterly known
by the rhythm
of their words
the warmth conjured
by sounds needless of
cognition it
is comfortable to
enjoy these things
yes because
they prove the world isn't
neat and syntactical (it is not)
as if it were
they would
not be sayings but laws
like  grey
immutable gravity
and nothing but the
neutered cry of a
flat response could
know anything so strange
as poetry.

When you sit
Amongst loose-knit rubble
Like a halfhearted apocalypse
With your hands out,
Fingers splayed
As if to say, here,
Here are my pieces,
Weave me back together,

I will just stare through
The hole shaped from inky dusk
On my horizon
Etched when you escaped
Into a pinpoint of skyline,
Trying to remember
The sensation of liking
The person you love.

I don't want to hurt you,
But conniving with empty palms
Will not wrinkle your spine
Enough to make you see
That standing up straight
Was never the point.

makeup messily blurs the outline
of your face, the one the sun is
beating sandpaper ciphers across--
translated they reflect the cesspit
of the first smile I have meant
in months--please just caress
the entropy of this water-winged sunset,
you cannot swallow your shyness
by intimidating everyone into not
speaking to you and by god
I don’t want to hurt you but
I can feel a hot one.

if those who’ve known hell
never talk about it
and nothing much bothers them
after that
why do we talk circles
around each moonrise, exhale
leaden stories like smoke
and charred vapor
everyone tastes like brimstone
so why are you so afraid of
being beautiful, why am I
so afraid of my ligaments eroding,
and we are so *******
tragic ****-it
we’re ******* tragic
time blurs you
whipped the insomnia into
a frenzy
the way you kiss me
when the sun lurks backstage
waiting for her que makes it
okay for now not numb
so much because ******* was I
knife-fight numb. I can talk
about the hell with you the
other girl, not so much, the
tricky-***** was that she
made it go away but it
never really does does it?
just blurs the time so
it can fast-pitch the happy
out of your lungs, like
my me is still here, so maybe
we can rub selves
while the sun bears down
from behind her curtain
of starless sky.

she rambled through midnight,
shoes more white-tar *****
than black leather,

avoiding destinations,
washed palms
not unfamiliar with
stakes being grounded
near the wrong type of hearth.

standing half-drunk,
on scorched oxygen epilogues,
her cheeks deserted,
feet knuckling homeward,

wrists unveiled by calamities,
she’d pour shrapnel
into her scrapes,
wrongs cast in iron,

and
he would trace
her scars like
a roadmap,
but always left
by morning—

twilight strangers
in a cold, perfect sunset.
freckles holy,
lights heady,
moon painfully
indifferent.

The poet has collected the thirty-seven words which appear the most in his previous written poetry. They are depicted here in descending order. There is no man behind the curtain.*

Like love,  
just know
I feel way happy,  
really.  

Away time:  
mouth, skin,  
beautiful eyes carved,  
******* **** want  
lips, hands.  

Hate,
left warm girl,  
words meant matter,
memories, sun,  
loved felt --   
throat, 
moment,
face;  

maybe home?

you were
saltwater
through pores
in my lips
stinging bliss
hanging like lack jawed
freewheeling masterpieces
anonymous thick gummed
arteries pressing
life into one another
one gulp at a time.

the beautiful irony,
of course,
is that
I would have fallen for you

if I hadn't
still loved her.

driftwood skin
sea glass eyes
****** guile
raw and toothless
husks of promises
trawling for exoskeletons
you were mine
i was yours
but i am not one
to let wounds fester
even first cuts
are licked clean
with time

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.

It felt different this time.
Final. Punted into oblivion
For our own safety,
You are static freckles
On my neck radio silence
Thicker than apple moonshine
That warm moment of forgetfulness
Between wake and sleep
Where you are still mine,
That’s gone too.

Just. Dull. Dull. Pain.
Creases in my mouth
Cut and blistered,
Smiling, as it turns out,
Does not go gently.

empty your cherry red stars
into my velcro chest
you have gods mercy
in your eyes fingers
like rays of daylight
churchbells ringing
sound like a growling stomach
cut me loose babe
i'm too late to salvage

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.

Lecherous headdress snakeskin
**** whistle of a leer, tape thistles
To my beard, your breath is sweet
And heady but you never did
Like wine, twitch as if
You gave a **** about
That ambulance ride I took for you,
The scars taste of lilacs
And are still mine.

When they love you and they will,
Tell em all they’ll love in my shadow
Lest the kids not be alright
But they never are,
And you, you,
The most cowardly
Woman I’ve ever felled
Myself for, a mistle-toe
Oak ****** house
That you call home.

Her eyebrows are switchblades
My unknown fate her whisper-silver-steel
Dagger breathing intricately carved nows,
Tomorrows lose meaning when her hair
Tastes like smoke fists like ashes
She looks and the signs
Are a fractal explosion
Holding all that I have been.

Won’t you laugh, won’t you frown?
Won’t your whisper-silver-steel?
This is my hand, each ridge
Means I have weathered a storm
Each valley a piece of me gouged
This is my hand, take it,
Take my tomorrow.
Divine, improvise
and whisper, just beware
not to speak out loud.

A rippling glance
comes before a smirk,

my face had carved
well worn grooves
for all the knowing ones

I flashed your way, pregnant
with bright-eyed
amusement.

They meant,
I love you.

With her
my eyes do not ripple
yet my face
slides comfortably
into that same smirk

the roil of my waters
no calmer, just different.

I have learned not
to love so easy,
something brews
nonetheless.

I know when to quit.
late summer unclenched
for us, thrusts
of pixie-stick upshot,
your perfume
expands my chest,
thunderstick love,

spines and ribs
don’t do it justice
you raptured me
both ways to sunday
built me up to shatter jaws
car windows me
bar stool battered
you my perfect carpenter
smile with wooden teeth
you made them yourself
so stain me the color of
cherry trees
and unbliss my empty spine.

i’m not on drugs
baby
i just love
you

frosty the snowman
had two eyes
made of coal
if that is not
poetic
than I
do not know
what
is.

pinpoint in the galaxy
i feel stuck together
tongues glommed
nestling lightening rods
craters with the hearts of comets
a flash of self
heads bobbing
is that all we are
egos bigger than the question but
we make it that way
we do we tussle with
unctuous joy
knowing
knowing
knowing

all it took was one loose stitch.
things we can preen,
neurosis as collateral damage,
pretty boy with grey eyes.

******* candle fuses
have cutthroat moxy
mildewed reaction times
strangers in sovereign daylight

flesh cheeks
i cannot corrode my pulse
your white skin
stained lips,

yes.

we all have messy
hair and thirsty
hearts here
at the red-light
arcade, can’t
we be alone
together
like
in the
books?

only hurt a little then,
that fractioning of interlocked ribs,
no all-consuming rapture,
i climb through windows,
whiskey and cigarettes buried
in my breastplate,
us weekend warriors
really are fighting something.
happy sometimes. and underneath
mossy water treaded,
tents pitched, long car rides
napped through,
my cheeks slowly melted.

laminate eyes
glossy and mewling
she's a fairweather grappling hook
dug into my collarbone

hearts don't break
they bruise and get better,
yet are never  
quite
the same

Fresh air hitting newborn lungs
lodged in a memory
made of mealworms.

Chalking dirt between
serrated incisors.

The day I asked a new girl to be my girlfriend
you left a note at my house signed "love,"
telling me you were infinitely sorry.

Some things just don't have an explanation.

There is a knife in my throat
chalking chords between scratched teeth,
words ground down to chunks of flesh,
they never last,
taste like the last
of something we had.

When I kissed your face
in my bedroom
there was no golden crust of light
you gave me head
and I didn't ***,
over the next year I fell in love
it tasted
like blood in my mouth
there is a knife
in my throat,
you placed it delicately
as if you'd be back
to pull it out
with hands still warm
from
spreading another's pulse
and stroking down the center
with one finger.

I said all the words I knew
hoping you'd hear some you liked,
I made a collage of spittle
and stringy voice box
from my insides you didn't come back
so your note
is noted but there is no "us" curled up
in grand central station,
no eyes glowing,
and there is nothing left to say, but

it hurt in a way I was not ready to know
and came
from a direction
I had never believed in.

Thanks for the golden days,
most of them were,
i'm sorry I crumpled so easily
I don't think i'll ever be the same,
that's a good thing
but you had to know you had to know
what I didn't
and someday you'll grow up,
it'll hurt,
it's worth it.

But goodbye meant goodbye.