I grabbed her by the waist in the disco-ball light
And said that we didn’t have to stay here and dance if she had any better ideas.

Everyone smelled like liquor,
Vultures circled in masquerade frowns to listen in on our plotting,
To drag our way out of the party
Toward somewhere more secluded.

But the alone time we made for ourselves was just that,
Alone in the most quiet and heartbreaking ways
That could only ever materialize when you’ve communicated perfectly with someone
By a complete accident of circumstance.

And the balancing act of the words you’ve placed rigidly inside of hers begin to unravel
Beneath the weight of all the questions you ignored to ask.

What would either of us scream tonight,
And why am I so worried about it?
The hypothetical situation I imagine
Is always an argument
Because I keep it realistic.

You wouldn’t come back to make things easier,
Change your ways
Or make up for the past,
But to yell at me one more time
To get thrill that you admitted it gave you.

Because you said you knew I wouldn’t leave,
And you left me wishing that I had.

As always, you want to sidestep the pain
And let it take residence, staying there until it rots,

You say you can’t face what was once effortless
But the most effort you ever invested in
Was mindless cruelty
That very easily could have killed me.

When I start to forget it,
I miss you despite the circumstances.

But it’s been ages without you
And it’s not as painful as it was.

I hope you get better about compassion
And less hung up on vendettas.

Maybe the blossoming of the new year
Will change you completely
And no one else ever will want to **** me like you do.

Am I the reason you’re so silent now,
Truth be told and not your version, or mine, of the truth,
Write the same poem again
Or tell me, in truth,
That we’re both worth saving,
That you ran for a good reason.

Will you stay gone forever this time,
And is it any different?

You wouldn’t know how much’ve change I’ve endured,
Or the shape of my beard anymore
Without you to convince me I should shave,

I’m healthier with you here, believe it or not.

I hope you’re safe,
No matter what I wrote.

I wish you’d say hello,
If nothing else.

You say I’m biding my time
Here, five years behind you.
Well, love, my world has changed
In pitch and season
Fifty times without you.

The time has gotten lost
Along with the details we had in common,

The spaces between struggled conversations at midnight,
Just 9 o’clock for you,
But always the time where we’d exist,
And exist,
And exist as one unit
Terrified to think that we’ll wake up tomorrow
Under a pocket of uncertainty.

I almost thought to close my eyes
And rest my head before I’d have to start another day without you.

But you, the Flower Queen who embodied all of the poetry I was struggling with,
You took my mind as you always have.

You wrote about missing me
And the song that is only shared by us.

It still tears me up...
I’m still blessed to ever have found you.

I always wonder how you’re living,
If your life has gotten better without me,
If you’ve prayed that I’d get better,
Or if you’ve hoped that we’d talk again.

I miss you terribly.
I’m sending you all of my good thoughts,
And I hope that you’ll get them
And know that I’m sorry
For not holding our bond more carefully.

We got so familiar...

And now,
I only wish we could again.

And would rip it out if she could.

You can condemn me
And think that there's a void left,

But you have no idea.

You haven't been around to hear
These beautiful girls sing or strum
And all you can see from your new outside perspective
Is sink or swim.

Your pretty face and gentle voice led me to try to win you over,
After you assured me there was something there,

And you only call out to those you love and trust

When you're scared.

I should have ran like hell the night you said you loved me,

But you were my miracle.

I know I was selfish.

I wanted to take the little bit of magic left in you
And lock it up for myself.
///
You saw through my depression
And spoke to my ailing heart
That not every girl who sings
Is an angel at all...

But maybe a siren,

Only graceful enough
To get their fingers behind your eyes
And push until something interesting happened.

There you are,
Still singing.

And I still can't tell.
///
Call it like it is.

Don't leave it shrouded in poems you'll know I'll stumble over.

Scream it at me.

It would hurt less,
And we could stop doing this.

I could **** my obsession once and for all.

I'd stop having to meditate to clear my head of you

And make peace with the fact
That you're not a monster at all.

I'm not lonely anymore,
But I'm lonelier to know you like this.

I don't hate you.
Not at all.

I'm confused.
I hate endings,
Especially without proper goodbyes.

I just want to talk things over,

Because one-sided dialogue
Won't get either of us further.

But if it's an ending you want,
I'll oblige.

In loving you I found a philosophy of the human compassionate heart,
Beautiful in her inter-dimensional quest to sit next to me that day,
Or ask me some theoretical question I already had an answer to,

In loving you
It's you who must deliver my eulogy.

Were you simply a ghost, walking your way from coast to coast,

Spreading beauty like the sunlight and being the apparition of striking perfection…

Unreal how you made me curious,
But it’s pretty face, brains, gentle inflection,

Same equation as always.

God blessed Colorado when he placed you there, and laid out retribution by way of your departure,

But their lack of fortune is my insomnia ridden insecure daydream.

Because you sat next to me,
You sat in all your undeniable conquest of Eastern Kentucky,

And then vanished back into the crowd.

I look good in the background scenery,
It's just as sincere as the rest of this *******,
This styrofoam party that I had to dig my claws into
Just to feel alive for a few hours,
Just to blow off steam.

I'm as lost as I could be in this dark room
Where we touch each other
To make sure we're still real.

Would anyone look at the light in my eyes?

I see great constellations,
While some random guy holds his stomach in pain.

It's only genuine if you believe it is,
And I'm not buying.

But this pretty girl by the fence caught my attention
And was afraid in that moment,
And so was I.

I ran to anywhere that would accept me
And I happened to blend in,
But I entered the dance floor with a full bladder, a migraine and thoughts of no anxiety to worry about.

Through miles of nighttime wind on the highway and secondary remarks that meant nothing,

I barely remember what you look like,
But I'm sure you once left me breathless.

The terribly natural position of making poor choices,
And missing people
Even the ones who don't exist.

Convenience store where I stopped to buy poison gum *****,
Here I am baptized in the light of the new genesis.

For new life sprang up on the oil rigs
In the industrial world,
We live in a future no one dared to comprehend.

We blew up the old world with new ideas,
We couldn't resist the urge to push the button any longer,

I sit under my bed
Duck and cover Cold War safety,

Safe from communist war criminals,
So when is the bomb going to drop?

No, I don't believe the Earth is going to be reborn as a paradise...
A land of altruistic Eden.

The lost garden is doomed to burn up in the sun,
As is the mausoleum for my memory.

Best guesses say we aren't exactly advanced,
But what if there's exceptions in our numbers?

What if we sat awake in our tombs for all of eternity
And your soul keeps locked
Waiting for the oblivion of the unburnt citizens separated from the material world,

How great were our ambitions if they didn't stretch to something after this course of existence...

Then what right do we owe the Catholic church that was not there at the beginning of our symphony.

I'll show you a great story of illuminated migrations and books about the lights of the pillars of creation,

When they tell me that Walt Whitman's work here is not done,

And so walked into the bathroom to lock the door,

Wash his face before yelling on both coasts of the American Empire.

Our Prime Minister has flawless memory and offers us codeine syrups of all flavors to vote for the Environment.

You'll have me yelling about the importance of taxation,
You can't have me acting like this if I've already bought us tickets to the art gallery...

And can you even now believe that toddler's first reaction was to destroy that giant biblical oil on canvas.

Maybe it was the violence,

And the same God who gave us our nuclear training wheels.

The same God who kills men of euphoria under meteors

And the same God whose name was in the air on Inauguration Day.

When I drove down the rode with you and your new ideas about where to go...

You had words I didn't know,
But we had Prince on the radio,
And that's something I know well.

I have a Wilco CD in my backpack,
I have every reason to just set my alarm
And pass out in the passenger's seat.

We talk to fill a silent void,
But never more.

It speaks volumes.

Trading your morals for a supporting role,
Holding hands with upstart actresses while you hold the syringe
And swear this is all genuine.

This emptiness is the feeling of fame,
Waking naked on patios used as makeshift churches
Where the last of your secrets are sold for another half gallon of limelight.

It hit me suddenly that I had seen this room in a dream,
The concerning part being that I can't remember the nature of it or how it ended.

Was the crowd overtaken by pandemonium,
Or was my past spilling out into the future
Realizing that time was in fact not air tight?

Maybe some deity miscalculated my timeline...
Who can know for sure,
Yet I know how to navigate the gray tints of the room with not one moment of needed adjustment.

///

I never wanted to be back in the grind.

Routine wears at the creative mind like a weathered rock,
Rendered beyond repair.

It's ****** up if you think about it:

Wake up,
Slaves to the system sharpening the axe of the upper class,
Go to sleep,
Repeat,
Die.

And somehow, that's the accepted way of things.

We're perfectly okay with our fate
As long as we remain distracted.

Millions of brave women take to the streets
To defy the government's tendencies,
The head of the serpent the main oppressor
Set to be severed by those who bring life into the world
Suffering for the other half of humanity,
As they think freely,
Create art,
Dream in philosophy
And sit lonely in scarlet clouds of disdain for the political system ripping out their hearts.

And in my delirium,
I realized it was probably an old expression from a census,
And that I too have an unborn sibling with consciousness surely floating in the ether of what comes after death.

Maybe I will come to collide with what would have been companionship and instinct,
Or maybe I'll meet with oblivion like the dread on the end of a needle,
Quick and not at all as bad as anticipated.

If sin is what bars me from enchantment,
I challenge the legitimacy of our creation by perfect being...

Have we ever considered that God too has made mistakes
In giving us the capabilities of genocide...

They say we are flawed experiments of an immaculate design, in the shape of a flawless creator,

Ruling every instance of ****** as an act of iconoclasm.

Where do the sins ends?

What voice should I let entertain my thoughts tonight?

I've settled on that of unborn souls never guilty of hatred, preconceived bias, elitism.

Tonight, I lend my ears to the innocent
Who will judge me by my merit alone.

Constant beauty and contract signing,
Steps outside the door to flashing lights,
Cameras,
From center stage:

Her bedroom of anxiety.

Greeted by the sea of paparazzi,
They seem less genuine than a crowd of assassins,

Only reporting on things that will tear down a reputation,

Publicity that weighs on the soul.

Notoriety was never supposed to make it hard to breathe,
But the only soft air comes on the end of ****** needles
That one day will pass too much relief into your veins

And make a pop star that much more famous.

Awaken on Friday morning with green hair,
Looking every bit as mythical, out of the ordinary as your personality.

Do you remember telling me in my clouded memory that I was loved?

I don't blame you if you don't,
You were shapeshifting, you were busy.
You had more to worry about than my ramblings and poetry.

///Preamble.

Into the past where I find myself slipping,
Forgive me if you find that I'm trespassing.

I see hurt and heartbreak...
Want to bring you back through the vortex
Despite the physical barriers.

How many thousands of men could not break your enigma,
And how many sincere girls have shattered your heart beyond repair?

Oh, who could have blamed you for reading Nabokov in bed?
The marijuana haze was too prevalent,
You having gone years without joy but not a handful of minutes without self-deprecation,

I saw in the full frame of this seriousness,
I cut my hand on the picture frame,
And looked to the floor out of shame.

This is your story after all,
Is it fair if I exclude myself?

///Submersion.

Born under a black sun,
And drowning in the omnipresent light,

The Pantheon took note of the atmosphere,
Heightened with sadness.

But you're locked up, Melpomene,
I hardly know your name,
Your tragic songs...

What quiet, old voice has led me to write this?
The same morning my anxiety had reached its peak
And I had little reason to think you'd reached clarity,
I sat in the hallway of struggled composition,

Arrived at the reckoning that nothing should cause worry,
That questions either warrant answers, spite or silence.

All in between is dictated by sadness,
Dictated by you, then.

Please, step back from the ledge.

Wrapped in electric Christmas sweaters,
Apple cider morning holding whiskey
Feeling nervous.

I watch average people out my window,
I see snow, unique and frozen.

But who cares that everything outside is dying?
Here inside it's a rave, we're all alive and close,

Sweating, comfortable.

It's the only thing tethering me to the Earth.

Staying awake is only fun when there's ecstasy involved,

Depressing news on smartphones,
Roofies and ice cubes.

So much excitement, so little time before death,
Might as well live in excess,
And then stop, suddenly.

I'm in the backseat, speeding out of my comprehension,
Down the road in the darkness
With no choice but to trust you.

You had one request of me:
Play ****** pop music,
And I obliged to heighten the mood
But we're all either melancholy or medicated
So it made no difference,
Except that which was on the surface.
///
Muse of Tragedy, enter...

I have no need to scratch out stage directions,
I inserted myself into the situation.
Because it wasn't you that needed to inspect my dramatic ways.

I hungered for all the calamity you could carry, all the companionship and all the trial.

It's been deep and you've been quiet in getting comfortable with me.

Have I grown familiar to you in how I'm a bumbling mess?

Recognize my form as something better.

I'm desperate for you to see me at the base of my spine, not the top where it connects to my poorly formed brain.

I'm a heavy philosopher when I'm drugged up, I sing The General Specific in bed with the Elf Queen.

How many thousands of times did we make awkward eye contact,
And then receded out of our shells
To both ponder our crises with Sufjan Stevens sad verses falling out from the ceiling.

I've fallen directly in love with life in the nighttime.
///
I'm sure that there was some cloud of fog when I slumped out from your room.
There was a physical haze I was trapped under
Trying to feed you harmony, melody and restore your confidence.

Reading your signals, it says your words don't match the hurting in your eyes,
And that scares me.

In reading the Russian legend of the Snow Maiden,
Doesn't she have to melt in the summer?

It's the delicate balance of nature that ruins any hope I conjure,
But with the temperature dropping below freezing
I'd just as well preserve my happiness
Until I can't control its thawing out
And imminent disintegration.

That, of all things, can wait.

Leonard Cohen, gone the night before we recited Flanders Field,
And our memory was still fresh with poetic inspiration,
The artistic suppression of dread.

Famous Blue Raincoat,
The feelings of despair and isolation abound.
I felt the cold New York traffic that I was separate from all the bustle
And all the life.

Chelsea Hotel with its twists in compassion,
It's all too human and vulnerable to admit your schisms,
The plight of life when it slips away from us,
Into the city and falls off the roof.

Hallelujah resonates most,
The sound of pure emotion
The feeling of triumph with your chest bare to the Earth.
Let the raw expression engulf you, spread the ashes.

I write this from a library under the watchful gaze of Voltaire,
Having read that the future of Earth's water is being debated in Morocco.

Isn't there a Utilitarian part of us all that strives to save our home,
And rejects the notion that we must **** where we eat to make progress?

Gambling becomes dangerous when you begin to stake declining resources.

There is no turning back, and there is little optimism from Millennials who shall inherit the rotting infrastructure.

Nothing is dramatic or blown out of proportion when the President can't acknowledge that there's something seriously wrong with a giant hole in the ozone.

Herr Trump, where is the ice going?
Would you sell the penguins for profit?

Tell the Polish Brigade that legal workers will restore this country's ideal greatness.

Tell them sincerely.

Reagan spouted that it was Morning in America, and I imagine the Trumpites feel the same.

What is morning, anyway, when you can't see the sun for the smog?

You have your demagogic president-elect,
Dreaming in shades of Mussolini
And will sit in his downtown skyscraper and laugh that all the populists
Were not in on the joke,
And thus could not be in on the punchline.

The progressives hotboxed the shower the night we handed the country to Trump.
Pennsylvania, the center of the cataclysm.

The vortex has opened and engulfed all the steel,
All of the illegal immigrants have been scooped up and swallowed,
Reproductive rights will be voided in a stacked Supreme Court validating the opinions of white male legislators.

Tensions twisting to contort and ignore the onset realization
That all progress is halted to return the country to the era of segregation,

Deportation Gestapo formed with the lone intent to displace the children of those who dared to dream of a brighter life.

America, look what you've done and face yourself with your objections.
Look dead in your eyes and see all the minorities, tears in the diaries of closeted teenagers,
And the judicial dread of the gentleman who only wants to live comfortably with his husband.

You've made stepping stones of the counterculture, all crying in dorm rooms or next to their gardens,
All together in sorrow.

Underground America has been sold out,
We're a social experiment for what can happen when sulfuric acid is poured upon the voiceless.
The silent majority has shut us up.
We've been yelling to change history and now are tracking back.

Bigotry is back in style and I'm terrified.

You said, as if that is the only aspect necessary for preserving humanity.
There's a sense of decency in all the things you choose negligence:
Sincerity, honesty, acting with someone else's interest in mind, thinking without malice,
Walking outside and onto the patio at your grand pity party.

What would you do with no attention at all?

You'd shrivel up and die.

Just be nice to people, it's as easy as that,
If your portion of sweet words are honest,
Yet yours are meant with such fake intent,
I look through your Saran Wrap smile, synthetic *** appeal,
To know your ex-bestfriend has great understanding and ****** insight,

It ends up that you were seeking my vulnerable brown eyes and not my cheap wine when you told me to come share with you,
But what I shared were a few too many buzzed secrets.

You, on the keyboard struggling to play songs of romantic tryst in no sense of irony.

Our last communication: road to Huntsville, called to yell at me one final time. I didn't need it.

You drove to play with rockets, the kind you'll never be entrusted to operate,
And the high you can only use to escape your pitiful exhibitionist existence.

This is the portion you're getting of my blood.
Simply a leech...
Don't you know I'm full of poison?

You, the ever-brilliant astrophysics girl, you failed to research me and my contents to know that I am coming down, down from vindictive respite...

I told you at the Bell tower that I once thought I was God. And I am.
I'm the Old Testament God who you never should have ****** with.
I will hang you with your manipulation and feel all the remorse you cared to show everyone,
Plotting for the spotlight.

But, "Just be nice to people".

This one time, I'll pass.

Young girl, songs lamenting the American condition,

You are the catalyst of sexuality.
You are the tar on my fingers that keeps me writing.

Clear in your heart, paradox is the word and I am the scar,

You're too afraid to come outside,
Bombs won't break through your kitchen tables and plexiglass.

Far too much shelter, this is a movement I can get behind. Starting to crack. Starting to scream.

The motivation now: breaking out of mediocrity.
///
At least I'm better than those guys, I must continue to assure myself.

I might be the loner,

Underwhelming boy who will never serve his country,

Yet I don't go around breaking things that aren't mine—

Urania may have pulled my strings like a puppet,

But I snapped her sanity.

I will spill every drop of my pagan blood in burning my world to ash.

There will not be mass calamity,
For I am unimportant, typical—

I'm planning to commit a ******.

What will they have to say about me,
Reduced to dust and only partially remembered?
///
I'm fixing to die,
Highest spire of Reims Cathedral.

I'll miss the girls who drink themselves into dehydration (if the dead miss at all),
Stuck like pin cushions with medical stickers and needles...

But don't miss me, it's a lonely endeavor
And one I cannot advise.
///
For the lonely soul who once spit venom at me in a dream,

Pick yourself up from the wreckage of the parking garage.

Keep laughing at the patriarchy's agents of the night,

And find fame, love, honest devotion, anything you could hope for.

All lost upon me.

Not worth the time to worry over.
///
There's nothing inside me worth saving, I've decided.

I am to throw myself at the Leviathan and into the pit,

Rolling in the abyss and into the bottom.

I'm not about to waste one moment's effort on repentance,

There's a great revelation that I'm troubled with: drugs only cloud your judgment.
///
My connection to God in Heaven, all narcotic illusion.

I mean to be eulogized by the poetess of beautiful sorrow,

That her melted caramel eyes would lead me to the grave.

Be my priestess one last time,

Then let me down to rot.
///
Who will care for Gothic Architecture when I stain the edifice and hit the pavement?

For no one cared that I struggled like Sisyphus with my demons,

But will love me when I hit the ground with tremendous velocity behind me...

Vibrant girl in colors vivid and bright,

Teach me how to stay afloat.

People only mesh well with kerosene, each and every human so flammable,

It's a wonder we don't all set ourselves on fire...

But yours truly did it last night

Swallowed two liters of lighter fluid and chased it with jet fuel,

Ate the box of matches you keep in your purse

And burnt away the last good parts of my stomach.
///
I slept like a baby for two hours,

Not enough for lectures on the carbon cycle or dada mathematical deconstruction,

So I drifted off to more sleep, and slept to dream of the Six Gallery.

Wishing one or two poets would gain fame in an age of pineapple vodkas that no one is drinking for the taste,

But for gravity to pull through their very thin blood stream and feel at one with the party.

It's monotony—

I'll die and everyone will love me then, so where are they while I'm alive?

That's the joke of mourning,

It's the reason I resort to self-immolation,
It's the reason I dream everyday for fame and do nothing about it.

It's why Frank O'Hara got out while he could, dying with the true images of New York City

And not living to see it destroyed as I now have.

Emperors and Legionaries alike, take up your arms and help me overthrow anyone who dictates verse and meter.

I aspire to **** a fascist with my bare hands.

In this kingdom of dread, she straightened my hair and advanced my thoughts on my own insufficiency.
Never does it spawn out of the soil that you fit perfectly between her sheets and smell like peppermint,
The way we all sniff herbs in the garden,
How she now sits awake at night and will inevitably kick me out.

How much was I faking drunk to spur conversation

And how much is this...

Destiny, and all the pun that lies between here and idiosyncrasy.

I'm not whole, it's the way I always crack, thinking life has ran in circles and spit spheres into orbit.

Humor, humor, I wish I'd burn.

Where is she, in her impeccable timing and charm?

She's gone to roam the Earth,
And all its great civilizations left to conquer.

She'll sing at the throne to become Empress of African empires

And keep me waiting.

It's shameful to think about the stuff I've cried over recently, and the things I saw of her while intoxicated,
Her beautiful face and the words of a woman who'd grown both petty and sad.

It sounds familiar.
It makes me want you more.
///
Is 1:30 too early to get ****** up?
I have nothing better to do.

Where have you gone,
And have you lost the plot on your journey from Cumberland River to Puget Sound?

I hear you're the Queen of Seattle.

I hear Eastern Kentucky has a long history of intoxication,
Blessed with unbelievable quantities of prodigies and savants.

Shouldn't it be a sign that they all leave?

Two days into being back in Van Lear upon onset emergency,
I feel trapped in my childhood home and engulfed by jingo lobbyists who have posters of Ronald Reagan,
And I read about Pascal's Wager in an essay by William Buckley to realize how anyone, in annoyance, could fall into conservatism.

I come home and all the farmers are talking Communist uprising,
But back in the university the Mormon professors are talking up our structure and that we should roll with the punches.

Noting that everyone disagrees on something,
Everyone back home is too sessile to talk or debate the issues.

I must leave at once and argue with tact about the grander schemes of life and money,
I'm just getting started.

///

This is not a place where you can accumulate *** and alcohol,
And thus not a safe space for creative expression and thought...

In the dormitory halls I would put on my Aztec print sunglasses and parade the hallways declaring myself the most immortal of men from third to fourth floor.

And then you inevitably get trapped in a two story country house,

Cry for the fact that the sky is too calm.

Nothing happens here.
Nothing happens here...
It makes me uncomfortable.

Let me sit in the corner of room 403 and meditate with more excitement than a shouting match here,
Or how everything is so quiet and we're waiting for a phone call of awful news.

They all must think I eat nothing,
I subsist on nighttime ghost stories, or something,
I'm a creature of the night,

Then who are you,
Man of American with your European jaw,
Or King of all men who dare to call themselves free,
Why is it that in a decade of invention and creativity
That it's the appeal of brawn that wins out continually?

We are regressing.

Eastern Kentucky is the center of the wound,
The eye of barbarism and I am not welcome.

I will move west to spite my family and then become successful to spite society.

Under the pine trees, we'd lie in the shade and make up excuses for why we couldn't return home.

It isn't safe there, spend the night with me and confess that I'm aging like wine and not withering and rotting away.

Take me to your childhood home with your hidden retreat where you feed the ducks, gazing contently into the water and not thinking of the stepfather who with his meatlike hands would drown you beneath the lake's serenity.

Just don't leave me here like I know you're destined to –
As social convention says you should,
As I now in reflection know you will, and always must.

Send my soul back to Europe for this night of excitement.
I wasn't thinking in plain terms, I had already read this in Santayana but I was only noticing that you were soft and pale,
My neighbors treat me so much better than you seem to (try noticing that they're people too sometime),
You complain and put up your false barricades to lower at moments notice,
Momentous when I'm out of sight and still carrying the remnants of scent and dreams of morning candles.

Turns out you aren't very unique and you major in manipulation, honing your skill and your art isn't to be displayed in public.
Will you say I broke my own back, or admit you were taking my head and changing your voice, ignoring what was right in your eyes?

I was already agitated.

Our last supper was in the front seat of your toothpaste green Ford, no mint on the floor,
To rub your collarbone and then wish I could take it back because you ended up in my bed...

But you made it clear that we were just friends, absolutely.
You said to stop, didn't you?
You told me it was wrong?
You didn't, I asked.

It was a game of consent and I lost.

The muse of poetry gazed into the eyes of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom,
Walking through the books for inspiration or simply to **** the time.

I found myself happily at ease knowing I had love in my heart,
Love among the words of dead poets and dead Roman Emperors who dared to dream of philosophy,
But it was thoughts of treason stirring beneath the planks which built the staircase,
Winding five stories up and you in your feminine near mythical beauty.

I spent a short time in the library where I thought back only a minute on Allen Ginsberg's infatuation with the human construct of language,
How I would yell my lung's capacity of air out and scream at the stoics for their wasting of their one chance at emotion.

Will it ever be helpful to better learn the placement of the Swiss Alps, mountain line of scars on every globe, when I'd rather trace the placement of your spine, holding you in place, keeping you sound in your structure...

Walk with me through the centuries of words.

Don't just lay above me wasting your day as I'm sitting here wasting mine,
Wasting money that neither of us have to spend.

What time do we have between here and England, to return all this art to London?

Morning Glory has come to nightlife Kentucky.

Calliope, you've matched my curiosity.

Calliope showed up in my window after a night on the town,
A face full of anguish begging for help.

She brought along with her fragments of my past, spewing vulgarities like I had never grown accustomed to,

The night opened up to new possibilities.

New found companions at my side, I went into the intoxicated haze of confusion surrounding the sixth floor,

This is my adulthood, I cannot turn back.

At the end of the hallway is safety, yet in front of me is my oldest and truest friend who I cannot abandon.

Calliope came calling about half past one, August Eleven, No more innocence.

Drove her car into a river just to spite me,

Saw Christmas ornaments among the garbage and proclaimed that signified her life,

Who with no immune system at all contracted every disease around her,

But upon my asking if she was sick announced, "Actually, I'm Alex."

Told me I was less than gallons and was not wrong at all,

But I'm pumping about ten pints of blood in hopes that you'll continue to do the same.

I thought to take you to old Glory Ridge,
A place among the clouds and void of worries.

We could share an evening with the foliage,
Lying on our backs with our self-deprecating jokes.

Soon, the stars will pierce the daylight,

Just lets in more privacy for our shaky conversation.

Turns to cement when the words start flowing...

God knows what I'll say.

I'll take you to Glory Ridge for more than the view,
The scenic trail lined with countless jesters
And I, their king,
Must admit you're right at home among the natural beauties.

You've grown on me very symbiotically.
You've entered my blood stream.
You've raised my heart rate.
You've shown me a crystal lattice of beauty in your eye sockets.
You've convinced me I'm so much more than the average emotional man.
You've shoved the silver spoon into the jugular vein of the patriarchy.
You've never seen your potential in any mirrored distortion.
You've heard my idea of the conceptual us while I was vulnerable and sitting in your car.
You've become my sentimental 3am worries.
You've taken on all my meanings of wonder.
You've absorbed your fair share of sunlight and in your kindness have shared it with me.

You said my art was verse,
But I knew my art was you,
It was simple, it didn't rhyme,

It didn't need to.

I spill out my thoughts every night...
I do it to chronicle everything we say to each other,
The tiny interactions that are thawing my heart that I'd rather not forget.

You see, my brain isn't made like yours,
And there are gaps in my past.

Like Michelangelo did carve his marble or Rodin did shape his mass of bronze, I shape my words so I cannot forget these steps that I take,

One by one with you.

I interpreted Rembrandt as Sadness.
I interpreted van Gogh as Suffering.
I interpreted Titian without Sincerity.
I interpret you simply as Love.

You are art, you do not know.

I don't remember all the paintings I've seen,
And if you are to fade along with them, I'd prefer to fade as well.

Lying on my back and needing a few hours to myself,
Elliott Smith was singing that familiar line in my ear as he did so often when I reached this same threshold of sadness:

"Dreadful sorry, Clementine" ,
And you seemed to know just how dreadful all of it was to me,
Slipping out of my comfort, which is shaky at best in the eyes of the public,

But the tempo did change, Elliott...

And I confess that I don't think I'm killing her,
She won't let me give her life,
She thinks she's glowing right now...
Does it mean she can't comprehend?

Someone should be ashamed, Elliott.

I'd love to sing into her some life she's yet to discover,
Replace her doubt for continued existence with nothing more but yearning for foreign lands, hand in hand with me,

Yet I digress and can only sigh.

I stumbled into you via modern technology,
Shot out of an atom smasher with endless chances
To spark some debate on space and all that lies between the moon and your window.

I like to believe in the odds of random probability,
Taking extraordinary circumstance and crafting it into friendship,

A testament to innovation, modern socialization,
And classically, it's boy meets girl once again, and she's sitting on a fortune of intellect.

Thinking for yourself has unlimited *** appeal behind it, and you're glowing with charisma.

You're my drug, my very own antidepressant.

I thank every God for the atom smasher that made it possible to collide with you.

Sent me to the cabinet for some overpriced wine,

Bottles upon bottles, for if we can't sleep we might as well celebrate.

But it was martinis in the bathtub, your throat burning, you thought it would drown the fire...

Your legs would cramp for hours after, and there's nothing I can do to help,

It's typical and expected.

What can I dare to now term creative expression, with your flower contortions now causing you such pain?

Yet I've been called an artist, but it was Sugar who was dancing with such grace tonight,

Either by design or intoxication.

Should well have known that I was truly asleep,
Sat next to you,
And you next to my hallucinations of false maturity,
With both of us by chance reading Blake,
And me understanding that both of us were then looking for some romanticized outlook on life.

And the fact that I was so taken back by your taste,

More so how beautiful you were,
Clad in white and for once sitting still.

32,000 feet above the lot of you and examining the strands of cloud, looking down and wondering just how safe I could be.

When can you start to discount coincidence as no such act of random encounter,

Instead start to look at fate and decide that this is a risk that needs taking...
///
Cutting through the grounds of sacred legislation and mystic men in Brooks Brothers suits,

So far from Hollywood, but matching 1929 *** appeal and romanticized images of gilded ghosts of America.

How do you keep all these agendas upon the people who claim to be the freest on Earth?

You making your living on collective barriers—

Has never stopped me from taking to the skies and leaving my confusion in the clouds,

All my worries absorbed by the cold cotton ***** I have no option but to soar through.

What better time to admire the rapid bloom of countless species of flowers I cannot match a name to...

And a few that I can,

But the same land which facilitates our growth has sectioned each plot to keep me away from the plants to which I'd harm.

There's no melody behind parasitism and this pollen isn't treating any of us well anyway,

Yet beauty is so timeless,
So radiant—
Too many questions for the roots that hold you steady.

How do you avoid the trap of a cosmic blonde,
Intellect twirling and coated in subtlety?

Has anyone ever existed in more eloquence,
Perfecting all you care for in heightened precision?

It seems you sleep in the studio,
Next to my mind,
Throwing off the perceptions any on-looker might pull out of your air...

Defenseless, no matter, to get caught in your charm.

At the forefront of this new wave of substantial beauty.

Thinking I'd outgrown this sort of nervous musing on my late nights,

How could I have known I'd fall under any spell so suddenly...

Russian Duchess of Glory,
Chilling precision behind every turn,
And here I am cracking a joke because I can't even waltz.

Anna Pavlova,
Can you see yourself in the full scope of your beauty tonight?

Can we both stand to be witty,
Or find it easy to live past thirty?

Why is it always more elegant in the moonlight,
Regardless of the action,
From East Europe to the sad blue East Kentucky...

Have you once looked me in the eyes to judge how honest I've been in reading your history...

Oh, Anna Pavlova,
If you only knew that beauty would hold weight in modern reincarnation.
///
Still I wait for your autograph.

You who I dare to look upon through seldom borrowed books.

And if you pay regard at all,
To any of this, that is,

Then how much will you take hold of,

How long can you maintain your balance...

And are your pirouettes more acts of orbit

Or simply spinning out and away from me?

Seeing you walk on mirrored images I dreamt in moments of pain,

And thinking that I one day would hold your hand in meadows and on top of the Eiffel Tower,

Yet I was so far from you,
And that, you could not bear.

There is comfort in our separation, as you've blossomed within love.

No opportunity for me to disagree if you are happy, secure and warm in the gravest of circumstances.

I feel you here with me, God knows your caring hands could still scrape along my face.

Who wouldn't imagine the infinite (nearly laughable now) possibilities that could have spawned out of our seasonal tryst, but let's give praise to the unexpected joys shot out of reality.

All pieces in place of a puzzle carved out of some improvisation.

Strange that I sit here now,
Bathroom early morning of same hotel where you once did think to please me, First Love.

Now you sit in Orient soup shops thinking about your life plans somewhere I do not belong.

Have these three years healed any wounds for you,
And are you the reason at all that I'm scared to fall in love?

I'm running out of trips to Louisville, forgotten friend.

Do either of us now think of beauty on Wednesday night teardrop prelude?

Slid my hand down the gentle back of memory,
Entering back into the realm of vile yet given consent,
Weighing the risks of tasting the salt on your lips and knowing that it has already bitten me in the ***,
Feeling sick to my stomach for knowing this is the most adrenaline I've had in my life...

And isn't that sad,
But we'll consider that in late night/early morning mid-April, and not now in hotel sensuality.

It's dawning on me early because my hand is cold
En route back and thinking heavy about everything between here and Independence.

Forward three years on and it's all still a mess.