forty five minutes until midnight
the year will end and with it begin again, another tally at the end of a signed this date document
it is the cusp between death and fool which have always been me and you,
dying out to start again, skirting around the tower to look for the world we want behind it
maybe in the new year you won't have to do for me again what you tried to in the last
but no resolution is going to change our fundmental states of being
magician or not, the year will die
the tides will change
the date will climb higher and higher toward an infinity we won't get to see but pretend to understand
you will still be you
and i will still be me
twenty five minutes is not enough time to unpack all of that
i hope in 2019 he still coughs when he takes the first drag

there are ghosts in the walls
i hear them meeting in the crawl space
skittering around, slipping and sliding and falling from the ceiling down, down, down
the whisper of voices and ringing of sounds in the hallway

they say it’s not a haunted room, the ghosts, i mean;
they do not exist,
it must be common creatures that loom
in my walls, in my halls, in my room,
mice and mold playing tricky mind games behind the scenes,
it must be

i ask them this,
isn't it all the same -
if i can't see it for what it is?

what respect do i owe to my elders if they cannot afford me any?
who i am is not a choice but to do right by me,
as another human being, is.
i do not pretend to know the horrors of lives that i have not lived
but i have lived my horrors daily, in the face of ignorance and erasure already, at twenty-three.
do not expect me to stay silent when it is my existence on the table.
those days are over.

i woke up bitter at six am
it was a saturday i could’ve spent sleeping in

well i didn’t ask you to wait for me
but you could have waited a little longer than two ******* weeks

we aren’t transcendent but you had me believe
that this wouldn’t end with staying friends -
you know i think we’d have to die to succeed,
that’s my bad, i’ll confess, i should’ve have known better the day you told me you lie about the colour red

i’m just being honest, like i said i would
i mean you said it too but you’re also a poet who said waxing poetic was something you couldn’t do

darling, leave me if you want to
even if together only ever saw us as being two half truths
i don’t hold it against you - but yes i ******* do
i said no promises and you promised this was everything to you

I want to be so full of stories that the ink runs out, that the pages are stained with the frantic, diagonal scrawl of trying to get it all down.

I want to live a life filled to the brim with so many stories that i become the entire nonfiction section of your local library, the one with the chairs in the windows where the sun keeps the carpet warm; the tattered spine of a favourite novel.

I want you to tear the pages out of me and pin them to your wall, ripe with your thoughts scribbled in the margins.

I don’t want to die. Not yet.

I am watching the other lanes of the highway knowing each car holds a person like the hardcover version of a biography; I am grasping at mere glimpses of a single page, too far away to make out any of the words and I don't want us to be that way.

I want to know you like the back of my hand and still sigh with relief at the coolness of your breath on my neck like a summer breeze when the weather is too hot.

Let me make maps of your freckles and connect the dots with my fingertips until the palms of my hands have memorized the atlas of your body like the lyrics to that one song everyone somehow knows how to sing along.

Let me get a few things wrong
and be patient with me for I am still learning how to be human,
but know, that in all my silence and closed covers, I want.

ask a poet what it's like to read verses write a poem
ask a writer what it's like to have an idea verses what it takes to put it down
ask a failure what it's like to fail themselves verses everyone they know
ask what the difference is

between a self proclaimed title and the one stitched on the label by those who think they know a person
between stuttering because you can't find the word and the purpose of your repetition
between regular anxiousness and feeling as if the world might end
between what it means to be heard verses someone who claims to listen

between how hard you fall after a success you don't deserve and
how hard you fall in love with people who don't put in the work
when a blank page is exciting verses exhausted
when sleep comes so easy the inside of your eyelids feel like a relief and when sleep is a slippery beast, refusing to settle down for anything and when sleep is a restful / restless blink, night and then morning so fast you forget that you're not still living in 2003, 2011, 2014 and

when the world has changed
and the word has changed
and 2018 still doesn't seem to make a difference

ask for a stream of consciousness
and then actually listen

like peeling back the skin of your chest to examine the damage
pulling out push pins from underneath nail beds, listen
like running outside in the misty morning unable to draw a breath in, listen
like finally pulling a breath in, pushing it out again, listen
like the taste of the air on a perfect evening, listen
like the way the moonlight kisses the ocean as waves rise to meet it

there are sparrows painted on the walls of a house we don't own yet
less than two of them, more than a few of them
searching.
flames eat their way in from the outside, siding, floor boards
sighing.
someone left the door unlocked to a balcony, all my things are left exposed to the open windows, boxes piled in the middle of
rooms.
they might be ravens, or crows - the birds, i mean. dim lighting lends to an easy disguise and i haven't been paying enough attention
probably.
i don't even think this house has a balcony.