She kisses me as if I am her prized scotch stained leatherback book
There isn’t enough writing in the lines of my pages
no footnotes in this decree of insanity
repetition throbbing as if asphyxiation is
tattooed across my esophagus
only to resuscitate every apology I’ve choked on
too stuck on the goodbye in between my teeth
she tells me that my spine reminds her
of the ripples in a pond during a year long drought
there isn’t enough water in the shallow puddle of my soul
to pour anything into her cup
she breaks her knees crawling away to another solution for her thirst
she is driving on the highway passing every carcass
of previous versions of herself i fell in love with
i’ve been too busy chewing on her back tires
attempting to slow down the roaring engine
my ears are bleeding from every time
she laughs at another boy’s sense of humor
I am too caught up bringing down the skeletons in my closet
that have decided to hang themselves
their nooses are wrapped in every metaphor I have ever written
she is busy grinding my ego into a line for inhalation
getting high on my fault lines has always been a pastime for her
no baseball archive of happiness in her smile
only the hesitation before every time her lips crease like
a subpoena to an AA meeting that you can never leave
I attempted to soak every “I love you” I have ever dared whisper
into the nape of her neck
a spiraling contusion that is a novelist’s ****** desire
she is choking on every slammed doorway
she never had the courage to walk out of
she dreams of diving off of parking garages
to swim in the lucid concrete
she is convinced she is nothing short of a sore jaw
the bruxism caused from chewing on every
roadside cross written in memory of her
my fingers haven’t stopped bleeding as I continue to try
to fill every ******* scotched stained leatherback book
in the library that is my love for her
so while there may be short infinites
I will  write too many of them for the both of us to count.

Dear foreign lover of mine
it appears to be that you boarded
the first flight out of this ******* town
and left your bags under my eyes
I can’t seem to keep my head up anymore
with the weight of your burnt bridges
bruising my bones
I’ve been dreaming of you so often
it’s as if you’ve made a contract deal
with my conscience to torment me
in the darkest parts of my mind
For you see, my cheeks have begun to hollow out
without the weight of your name on my tongue no longer
and my tongue, a paint brush
in the monotonous catalog of blank canvases
refuses to add any color to this dreary
schematic on the obstruction of my smile
the velcro has been stitched tight
industrial grade and auctioned off
like a cemetery plot
I’ve been visiting them quite often recently
searching for some sort of comfort
my knees have begun to ache
arthritis on the bearing of the ship
headed straight for the water full of capsized memories
and drug induced hysteria
I am lost in the echo of the clamoring mermaids
chanting your name
and I am simply traveling with forlorn fingertips
and an apology for a shadow.

Every morning,
I would sip the wine cupped in your collarbones
drunk on your laughter
stuttering and stammering every time you’d smile
I sit in AA meetings like a child in timeout
waiting for you to tell me it’s time to pick up another glass
I am stuck suffocating on the aroma of all of the skeletons
in my floorboards
they murmur of you with every step I take
it makes me spill the vulgarity sloshing in my cup
and with the whirring of regret in my lungs
choking down the bitterness of your departure
I am reminded that you
are the warning sign on a cup of coffee
scolding hot and irrevocably ****
here to drown out the drought of liability
stuck within my pores.

She tells me I taste like too many apologies
I remind her I am a notebook full
of archaeological love letters
There is not footnote to this story tale
there is the script and no sequel to follow
I am falling into the well of woe
searching for my fingers
in an effort to assemble them
contorting in such fashion
formatting this jest of speculation
into the peering ideology of self appreciation
She reminds me of the day
she smiled and felt it rattle my bones
I have not ceased to read dictionaries in a n effort
to find the right words to ***** on your shoes
to get you to smile my way once more
she is filling my glass with the words spewing from her lips
and I am drunk on her laughter
ringing in my ears like a telephone calls
from a gravesite
telling me
it’s time to come back

she is the apology letter stapled
to the bulletin board of
regrets
that I haven't visited
in months
I have been apologizing
to the sidewalk
with fractured palms
too closely resembling the cracks themselves
i am reminded i won’t be able to hold her
she is the hot potato
i refuse to let go off
and my fingertips haven't
stopped burning
they aren’t enough read receipts
to return this jaw clenching
antagonist of
“what did i get myself into”
and I’m still confused as why I still don’t want to get out
I am doing jumping jacks in a gas chamber
i haven’t slept in days
the bags under my eyes
look just like the ones in your hands
the day you left
and I am reminded you forgot
to take me with you.

The wind reeks of broken words
and shattered promises
my mouth is full of every mirror
I have stared into
I cannot breathe with all of the glass stuck within my lungs
I am drying out the summertime memories
where the breeze didn’t remind me of
burnt photographs
and I am stuck in the subsequential
stutter of a back alley robbery that ends up with me ****** and empty
I am a poem that nobody wishes to read
because my words remind them of obituaries
I am an empty dictionary in which
there aren’t enough side notes in
i am the blank definition
to a smile that tastes like
bad memories
I refuse to add myself to the masses of one night stands
with previous versions of myself
I am tired of sleeping in coffins
or is it just a bed without you
I can’t differentiate between the two
All I am certain of is that
if you were a broken word
I would cut my tongue on your syllables any day of the week.

She tastes like cigarettes
someone else has been smoking