The sky is aflame.

To the west, it burns crimson.
A warm gradient that seems like a massive forest fire,
turning to a bright copper in the middle
and ending as a quiet mahogany.

To the east, a near-blinding white.
With no gradient or change as it rises,
simply dying down eventually,
propped up by unholy spotlights that pierce the atmosphere.

The north is charred a mute maroon,
a short glass of auburn carelessly splashed to the horizon.
To the south, pale bone paints away the stars,
spattered with shades of pewter and smoke.

I cannot see the stars through all the light,
and I do not know which way to follow.
The sky is aflame, lit by so many sources,
rendering it empty and dull, burning away.

Enter scene:

A girl sits on a bed in a room.
The room smells like cat **** and Fabuloso
(whatever the name of the yellow scent is).
The black-out curtains are open,
letting the moon shine onto the bottom of the bed.
The lavender fitted sheet has come undone.

The girl hasn't slept in a day.
She hasn't eaten in two days.
There is an empty handle of Jack
that she bought three days ago.
The scabs on her leg were four days old,
But she reopened them three hours ago.

The girl had chestnut hair that flowed,
cascading to the small of her back,
but she cut it herself, drunk in the bathroom.
The girl has chestnut hair that spills
in a mass of tangles to her shaking shoulders,
uneven, moving with her as she readjusts.

If you could see yourself the way I see you
For just a week,
For just a day,
For just an hour,
Or even for a fleeting glimpse in a crowd.

If you could see yourself through my eyes
Then hopefully you would see
That glow around your eyes when you smile
Especially when the smile is sincere
Even when your heart isn't in it, I see it still.

If you could see yourself through my eyes
Maybe you would hear the chimes
That accompany your voice when you laugh.
Maybe you would feel that warmth in your heart
Even when you're fake laughing at my jokes.

If you could see yourself the way I see you,
Standing ready even when you've been tested,
Holding your ground against wave after wave after wave,
Prepared to withstand your thousandth trial,
Even when you know you're on the edge of collapse.

If you could see yourself the way I see you,
You would be stunned into silence.
You would be amazed at the creature you saw.
You would let go of that last nagging thought.
You would love yourself as deeply as I love you.

You would stand in front of the window, naked and raw,
Black tears still stained down your face.
The moon's light doesn't quite frame you the same as it used to.

You think of the days of being illuminated and bright.
Of sunlight dripping off of you as your hands touched
Someone new, someone deserving, someone else.

Nothing since has ever felt as real, as true.
This light has traveled from a quarter-million miles away
To accuse you, cold and pale, cloying to your skin.

The day that I lost you
I didn’t think I’d survive
But I’m all buds and blooms now
Watch me thrive

I'm as drunk as you were
The night you drove your Corolla into that street light
So excuse any spelling errors that might occur.

I should wait until I'm sober
But when I'm sober I won't have the courage to write this anymore.
I can't quite feel my hands across the keyboard.

So maybe this won't end up a poem.
And maybe you won't end up alive at the end.
But I leave azaleas on your grave on Wednesdays.

It's just like back in time, in 2009
Sometime in January, stoking the coals of a fireplace,
Playing Gears of War 2 and exploding a lambent Brumak.

I didn't know you were drunk then.
I had an alcoholic for a brother and didn't know.
And a father, and an uncle, and two grandparents.

It was in my blood
And growing up, I was scared,
Because you were proof of how bad I could've gotten.

You could've called me.

December 19th, 2018, you could've called me.
But you were cut off at one bar and drove to another,
And when they cut you off they drove you home.

I won't have the courage to finish this.

I'll save it when I'm as drunk as you were
When your Corolla took a lightpost out.
Seven thousand in property damage, at least.

I won't have the courage to finish this.

Like you didn't have the courage to finish the night.
Like you didn't have the courage to finish a life.
You couldn't even last a lifetime.

But I'm as drunk as you were.
December 19th, 2018.
Maybe you passed the torch onto me.

I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing anymore
Without you, things seem just a little bit dimmer.
And I pretend things are okay,
And I pretend things are okay.

I can't define pentameter.
You used to know what it meant.
You told me when my poems were ****** up.

I can't define pentameter
Your name was Trevor
I think I might be falling apart.

I wonder what was the last thing that went through your head
Other than the shattered glass of a windshield
I wonder what was the last thing that went through your head when you left.

I wonder what was the last thing the bartender thought
When he watched you get into your car.
I wonder what the last thing the paramedics thought when they declared you gone.

I remember back to 2009 and I wonder if you knew we beat Gears.
The next day, you asked me if I was ready to continue.
I don't think you knew.

So now here I am, five months later, drunk in the mirror,
Praying Mom doesn't wake up to find me,
Practicing slam poetry with my own reflection,

And I wonder what the last thing that went through your head was,
And I remember sirens, and cop cars, and ambulances, and you were almost home,
And I try to make up characters to take your place in stories.

I name the characters Austin, and Brian, and Joshua, and Mike.
I name them anything to help distance what I write about them to what you were.
But your name was Trevor. I remember your name.

I remember everything about you.
I remember you stumbling home at 2 AM
I remember you lighting cigarettes outside the house hoping I wouldn't see.

Your name was Trevor.
And no matter what I write into my stupid ******* stories at six in the morning
You're gone.

Your name was Trevor
And no matter how hard I try, squinting through drunken tears at six in the morning
You're gone.

Your name was Trevor
And no matter what happens
I'll miss you until I'm dead next to you.

And I know you're watching me from Heaven,
But I don't actually think you made it too Heaven.
I don't think you were quite the Saint I like to pretend.

Because your name was Trevor
And you died at 4:32 AM, December 19th, 2018,
Drunk as ****, headfirst into a street lamp.

And you were almost, almost, almost,
As drunk as I am tonight,
Playing back memories of you and I in 2009.

Your name was Trevor
I hope you made it to Heaven.
Your name was Trevor.

I’m sorry I didn’t know you better.

I’ll do my best to listen to every story they tell of you now.

But for what it’s worth, I admired you.

I’m sorry I never managed to tell you that.

I can’t feel the concrete through my shoes
As the chain-link cage around the sidewalk loops around me.
I climb steadily up the incline to your bridge.
The cars pass quietly and sparsely, hopping islands
In this suppressed midnight hour, streetlights reflected
Beneath us in the water. I carry you with me, as I do every day.
It’s been three months, nine days.
I think of our days together.
Of our youth, of your lilac perfume and chestnut eyes.
I think of how we never got tired,
Or how you never got old,
And I reach the apex of the bridge with these thoughts swimming about.
I lean and look to the water as the reflections shimmer in a boat’s wake.
And I wonder how it felt when you landed.
I want to ask you, was it instant? Did you feel yourself pass?
And I want to find out, to dive in after you and chase you down.
Did I tell you, I can’t see my therapist anymore?
I can’t afford her.
And as soon as I couldn’t pay, she cared little of my problems.
How ****** is that?
I raise our daughter alone now, but I can’t do her hair how you could.
She’s sixteen months, and four days.
I think often of if she’ll remember you as something more
Than one of her father’s stories
But the other day, she saw your picture on the mantle.
And she called for you, and began to cry as she pointed.
And I followed suit as I struggled with her hair.
I wonder, if you would have let me, could I have helped?
This that I feel now in your wake, shimmering like those lights,
Is this how you felt for those last months?
Could I have done anything to stop this?
And I think of your parents, of mine, of the therapist that I can’t see anymore,
With their piercing, bloodshot eyes.
Their needling questions.
I wonder if that’s how you perceived me, and I realize,
There’s nothing I could’ve done to help either of us.

If you could hear that voice the way I do
For just a week,
For just a day,
For just an hour,
Or even just a passing whisper in the night.

If you could hear the things I do,
You would understand my shattered-glass smile,
Why I see no light in my own reflection,
How focused I am on how insincere I smile.
Even when I smile so genuine, I'm unconvinced.

If you could hear the things I do,
Maybe you would hear that screech,
That accompanies my laugh in moments of joy.
Maybe you would hear my own mind
Shouting me back down into that grey dull.

If you could hear that voice the way I do,
Never silent for a moment,
Forcing me into a docile silence,
If you could just hear the screaming in my head,
You would understand why I'm always on the edge of collapse.

If you could hear that voice the way I do,
You would be stunned into silence.
You would be repulsed by your own reflection.
You could never let go of that last nagging thought.
You would hate yourself as deeply as I hate me.

It's 2 in the morning.
You're lying in bed, on FaceTime with a man named John.
He was released from prison two weeks ago.
In a month, he'll be in rehab again.
But you don't know that yet.

The screen freezes as you get a call from me.
You ask him to wait as you let my call ring, ignored.
He knows I exist.
I have no clue he exists.
As far as I know, you're asleep.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting at the edge of my bed, 3,000 miles away.
I've just received the news that my cousin is dead.
I'm sobbing, trying to get a hold of you somehow.
Desperate to have someone I can talk to about this,
But you're the only one.

The call stops ringing, and you go back to FaceTiming him.
You prop your phone up on a pillow and let him watch you take your shirt off.
No bra underneath.
You show him how well you can ******* the toy I bought you.
You twist around and show him your naked ***, the *******.

The two of you ******* together.
I interrupt unknowingly every fifteen minutes, needing you.
You swipe my calls away and do what he asks you to do.
You both ***, then talk for hours.
I sob at the edge of my bed, begging you to answer in another voicemail.

I saw God in the forest
Hazed by morning fog and fire smoke.

She sat on a fallen nurse log,
Layers of life and shelf mushrooms,
Cradling the gray corpse of an owl,
Choked to death on a plastic bag.

"
Do you ever just lay down
And look at the wall in the dark
And listen to your fan spin
And feel an overwhelming sense of existential helplessness?

So you draw your sheet closer around you,
but moving it puts colder parts of the sheets on you,
plus now your feet are uncovered, so you move,
but that makes the fitted sheet come undone.

So you kind of just fidget
and it feels like there's a vice around your chest
and you try to think
But your thought won't fully solidify

So it just feels like you're floating
in this broken word soup
and the only thing that forms is
'How did it get to this?'
"

Enter Scene:

A boy rests his head on his left fist,
His elbow propped up on the black IKEA desk.
The desk is worn, several quarter-sized holes and dents
Pocking the boy’s writing surface.
The worst holes are covered by the yellow legal pad he writes in.
He taps a disposable pen against his chin as he thinks.

“To whom it may concern,” he starts, pausing.
The pen hovers above the comma as he considers,
Should it be capitalized? Too formal? Change it to “Dear”?
He tears away the page, tossing it into the trash can to his left.
It joins the other crumpled pages, his last attempts.
First, second, third, fourth, fifth draft suicide notes.

He brings his head away from his fist and cracks his knuckles.
The note has to be perfect. It’s his final words.
His last hurrah. His confessional script to everyone he’s ever known.
Overthinking the words, desperate to make them perfect.
The same desperation that has him writing the note to begin with,
But so long as he’s dissatisfied with the note, he’s safe.

I live my life in constant moments
of condensing and bursting,
of falling and rising,
of growth and decay,
          growth and decay,
               growth and decay.

Moments of joy that last
until the punctuating moment of sorrow.
Alternative swings in an unending dance
of growth and decay,
          growth and decay,
               growth and decay.

Where even the happy moments are haunted,
awaiting the eventual sudden halt
and the continuing of the perpetual cycle
of growth and decay,
          growth and decay,
               growth and decay.

In your last months here, Florida was being ravaged by wildfires. They stretched across from coast to coast, dry shrubs and dead underbrush sparking forest fires that raged for weeks on end.

I told you then that I thought of them as an omen. You would be flying off to Oregon for school soon. To me, the state was burning itself to the ground in protest of your departure. Maybe it wanted to trap you here with us. Maybe it thought the smoke would suffocate us together. I didn’t ask.

The smoke hazed over the highway that I would take when I left your apartment and returned home. I would roll my windows down and welcome the smoke into my car. My hoodie zipped up to combat what counts as cold nights in Florida’s eternal summer with the rich, acrid smoke filling my windshield and lungs. I welcomed it. I loved the scent. It reminded me of you.

The fires slowly burned out after you left Florida. I know this was because they had run out of brush to burn, but I assigned it meaning to you regardless. The state was safe and you were gone.

For two years after you left we tried to make things work. With 2,500 miles between us, you chasing a doctorate and I chasing a master’s. Me making time for you and you cheating on me for the last ten months.

In the wake of these last ten months, I left you. You’ve asked for me back, begged me to stay your best friend, but I can’t afford to give you a third chance.

And I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but the fires are back. Driving home from class I smelt that rich acrid smoke, the haze over the highway more than humidity and mist. I rolled down my windows and let my hand hang out as the smoke poured in. It filled my windshield and lungs. It reminded me of you.

I wrote a poem,
Back when they diagnosed me.

About my fear of succumbing to my depression.
Begging it to let me go down swinging,
Terrified to eventually lapse into indifference.

I named it “Icarus”
And I take it back.

Burn my wings.
Send me hurtling down to Earth.
I’m tired of fighting.

My arms are broken from the fall,
And I can swim no more.

Burn my wings and end it.

I’m planning my suicide again.

First, I would leave her.
Second, I would leave here.

I would mask it as me needing to go somewhere else.
Somewhere new. Vibrant. Beautiful. Cold.

I would write a letter for everyone important to me.
About a dozen or so.
I’d give them to the brothers, and ask them to get them to their owners.

I don’t have everyone’s mailing address.

And I would leave. For somewhere vibrant and beautiful and cold.
I would bury myself there.

I’m planning my suicide again.
I don’t know if I’ll ever do it,
But it’s nice to have a back up.

Hello again, Death
It’s quite nice to see you.
I hope you’re here
For me this time

5:32 AM

The cars come and go
Stars blink in and out
As the horizon grows a cleaner, hazier bright.

No color,
Just bright,
Just the addition of light.
Nothing you could find on the color wheel.

You left half an hour ago.
And I think you'd be impressed
By how drunk I've gotten in that timespan.

I can't see the forest through the trees anymore
It's all just thicket to me now

No ocean to see behind the waves
No sea behind swells and squalls

I’ve become lost in the details
Of a life I find tolerable at best

One day I decided I knew
I couldn’t be happy with the overall

So I sifted the sands of details
To find some silver lining, a reprieve

And now I find myself lost in the failure
Of details that make up the failure of all

Now there’s no forest for me to see
It’s all just blurred to thicket for me

If I died today,
I would not die happy.

I would die unfulfilled.
I would die with more regrets than I wish to have.
I would die with so many things left undone,
And people left confused in the aftermath.

I would die wishing for more time,
Or wanting another chance,
Ruminating on all the things I never finished.

But I have lived my life in the same vein.
I have lived unfulfilled,
With more regrets than I wish to have,
With things left undone and people confused in the aftermath.

I have lived my life wishing for more time,
Wishing for another chance,
Ruminating on things I didn't finish,

If I died today,
I would die the way I lived,
And I've been told that's the way to go.

The years have done little to change your features.
A spattering more lines around your hazel eyes, deftly covered.
Those eyes won’t even look at me now.
Locked to the flashing digital board as flights roll in.
You clutch the plastic handle to your pink duffel bag,
Your pale lips a grim line, your hazel eyes spiderwebbed
with bloodshot veins, surrounded by exhausted bags.
We haven’t spoken for minutes, watching the hordes of people
As they board, embark, fly away into the morning sun, hopefully to return.
It lay unspoken between us, writhing and twisting in the space.
Crawling between our hands, prying our fingers away from each other.
Black and cruel, ticking forward methodically.
How badly we both need you to stay here with me,
But dreams called you away to the Redwood coast.
The woman’s voice calls over the speakers.
Your plane has arrived. Others pause to hear, and continue walking.
I feel my stomach freeze, plummet, and watch a sob you try to hide.
We turn, smile, hug, kiss, numb. You fix your raven’s nest of a hair style.
A half ponytail, leaving most of your locks away from the hold.
It falls across your face as you pick up your duffel bag.
I watch every step of your walk,
And you never once turn around to face me.
But my gaze doesn’t leave you
Until you merge with the crowd and disappear.

I faced mortality at too young of an age. One of my first memories is playing hide-and-seek with my cousins at my grandmother’s funeral. Death had no meaning to me at the time.

I have no memories of that grandmother, other than that funeral. Dingy photographs of her holding my head up at a month or so old.

Eventually my dog passed when I was still a child. I played no games then as I helped my brothers dig her grave, saw my parents wrap her in a tarp. We lowered her into the ground and replaced the soil while it rained gently in the early morning. My father told me it was angels crying.

Death was commonplace. I knew that we all died but didn’t understand it. That understanding came with age, not through any traumatic event of my own. Around me as I grew, others died.

I don’t remember the orders anymore. My uncle went from terminal cancer on New Year’s Eve, 2009, a few hours from a new year. My brothers lost friends to drunk driving accidents. I lost classmates to suicide.

Death was commonplace. I knew that we all died, and I began to understand. With that understanding came a crippling fear of my own death. Inevitable, marching forward. I was fifteen or so - only sixty or seventy years left.

For a while, I refused to leave my house. I dreamed every night or car crashes and murders. I would stun myself into inaction simply by thinking that someday, I would be gone, and that was it.

Maybe it would’ve been better if I was raised religious. I believed in no afterlife, only in nature and rotting away.

But fears are meant to be faced, so I attempted suicide. A pedestrian effort, an attempt at drowning that my body overruled regardless. I hadn’t done it to face the fears - I had my reasons - but it worked for the same purpose.

It didn’t clear away the fears, but it showed me I could face them. So I adopted it all. I let death define my humor, my writing, my music. I thought of it before bed and as I awoke. I let myself face it all.

Over the years, it worked. I can say I no longer fear death. And Lord, what a side effect it’s created.

My bloodstream insisted that I grow with depression, a nasty little devil that sits on my shoulder and holds me down. He helped convince me that death wasn’t to be feared, to accept it, to seek it.

The fear went away. I adopted it all and became disinterested. Death would be here in a scant handful of decades, so why bother with it all?

So I rot now, dying before death comes to take me. I fear no death and fail to see the light that this beautiful life attempts to show me daily. I see the thorns without seeing the rose.

I wonder if this was the way it was supposed to be. I think that I could’ve been happier if I’d stayed how I was. I lie down at night idly wondering if I’ll die before I awake. It was better when I was afraid.

I've been drinking more since you left.
It hasn't gotten dangerous yet,
But it's hard for me to know that limit.

You've been drinking more, too,
But in the company of others,
In the company of friends.

I've been drinking alone, mostly.
Two shots or so just before bed.
From the bottle, so I don't ***** a glass.

I wonder if I'm forming a habit.
I wonder when that habit becomes dependency.
I wonder when dependency becomes addiction.

I promised I'd still be here when you got back,
But we haven't spoken in weeks.
I'm not so sure I can keep my word.

Like Icarus before me, I plummet,
And crash into the broiling ocean.
But I will not drown as he.

If this is to be my Invictus, let it be so.
I will captain this broken vessel,
This raft of shattered bone and splintered soul.
Let me traverse this churning sea.
Allow me to battle, even if futility rears it's head.

Allow me to rage against the dying light,
Until not but darkness remains.
I beg you, let me claw at the walls of ailing
Until my hands are reduced to the barest of bones.

Let me struggle and thrash, even if futility rears it's head.
Let me suffer, and let me ache in my cruel fate.
But please, I beg you, let me claw.
Do not deny me my fight. You've taken enough.

You've taken enough. Let me struggle, if in vain.
I will paddle through this ocean,
On crushed limbs and torn muscle.
But please, I beg you, allow me that much.
Let me fall as if I did all I could to stop it.

My days have become twisted.

I spend most moments stuck between a panic attack and a nervous breakdown
And I’m not sure how to leave that cycle.

On the best of days,
I lie down and try to distract my mind
From the cold, creeping, frantic terror
Welling in my stomach.

I’ve come to realize
That there’s no aspect of my life I like anymore.
I’m pushing away the people that I love again.
I’m using poetry as a coping mechanism again.
I’m using again.

I used to write with rhyme schemes
Pentameter
Rhythm and thought
Countless drafts
And keep them each close to my chest.

But now I scrawl frantically and afraid,
Genuinely, truly scared of it all,
Desperate to get something,
Anything,
Out into the world.

Heaven is a myth
Spread by the rich to convince the poor
To follow their rules

Or maybe it isn’t
I’m just some dumb **** with a pen
Not some cosmic authority

But whether it’s real or not,
I still think of you there,
Cracking jokes to Saints

You stand in front of the window,
A shaft of sunlight illuminating every stray, unkempt strand of hair.
Golden threads made more by one of God's rays.

From 92 million miles away, this light traveled
Just to shine through the window and frame you
Deific in the early morning.

I miss these mornings often. Reluctant in bed to move,
But my eyes wide open to see you there.
Louder and brighter than any church bell or stained glass.

It seems like no matter how hard I wash my hands,
They still smell like the hospital hand sanitizer.

Just a bit off.
Too sterile. Like a tile cleaning product. Unscented.

I tried handling garlic, even,
But the smell won't go away.

Growing up, my teachers always told me

"Write what you know"

But I don't know much anymore.
I'm pushing twenty-five.

They tell me to write what I know
But most of what I know is heart break and alcoholism
Even that feels fake nowadays.

So what do I know?

Death and depression.
Alcoholism and failing family genetics.
Receding hairlines and divorce proceedings.

Write what I know,

But I don't know ****.

Looking at pictures of us doesn’t hurt like I thought it would
(Sometimes).
I expected a sharp pain,
A dull ache.
And sometimes my heart twitches with pain at the sight of us together.

But for the most part,
I’m alarmingly okay without you.
I think it might be because
We grew sick of each other without noticing.

Those first moments leaving the airport
A forty-two minute drive at five AM

A jet liner coming in low above my road
Maybe that’s how I go out?

The moon shines a vicious orange
Magnified and distorted by the atmosphere
Half veiled by black and gray clouds.

The lower it goes, the brighter it glows,
The larger it becomes through distortion,
The more the clouds obscure her.

Worst of all, it comes closer to the skyline
Of urban sprawl and tourist traps.
They taint the sky white with light pollution
Devoid of color, sapping away the hues of night.

It smothers the beauty of the moon.
Drowns her in the loudness of light,
Silencing her vicious oranges and night,
Shattering the sky with the brightening of things.

I can't wait until I die.

I'm not eager for death.
I've confronted it recently and found myself scared shitless.

My cousin died.
May 15th, 2019.

My Uncle climbed through her car to find her phone.
He waded through puddles of her congealed blood.
She was his daughter.

I can't get the image out of my head recently.
My uncle, sitting in the cab of a destroyed truck,
Searching for an iPhone.

It's solidified now.
At times, I'm rather certain I feel nothing at all.
But some days, maybe a few times a month, it's there.
That touch on my shoulder.

The phantom pain
of a severed hand
of a guiding God
that was never there to begin with.

At moments when I consider it
Standing on that edge

I hear that warm tune of your laughter
I feel myself smile

and step back

I've found myself nostalgic for days where I was unraveling.
I want to fall apart again.
I miss the feeling of my back against the wall in the dark as I sobbed,
with no goal other than surviving through the night.

That's how every week started.
Just one more night.
     Just one more night.
          Just one more night.
               Just one more night.
                    Just one more night.
                         Just one more night.
                              Just one more night.
That's how every week started.

The fires are back, and I can smell the smoke
lingering over the 408 in the earliest AM hours.
Not quite late enough to be morning yet,
that mess of fog beneath the streetlamps blurring past.

Things have gone well enough that I'm terrified
of the fall of the next shoe,
of the rug being pulled out from under me again.
Things have gone well enough that I don't even miss you anymore.

There was a level of comfort in the despair of it all.
There was a simplicity in misery.
In all my days chasing the light at the end of the tunnel,
I never expected to find it so blinding.

The numbness remains,
Fraying away at the edges,
A pool of water drying.

You've fallen asleep in a different bed.
You had asked to stay, but I refused.
I couldn't stand the thought.

So now I'm watching the night fade
Out of the slats of my blinds
Through a fogged bedroom window.

No sunlight yet.
Just the brightening of a horizon
Over houses of happy people with foggy windows.

When we die
There is nothing

No silence nor darkness
No void nor emptiness

Simply nothing
And this is a mercy

I’ve been doing better recently.
(I promised you I’d try)
But I have to confess it isn’t all forward progress.

I collapsed in the kitchen again tonight.
Sobbing openly in the silent solitude
On the tiles with my back against the cupboards

It’s only when I see your Christmas card
Magnetized to the fridge
Between unpaid bills and children’s drawings

I was numb then,
Sitting blankly, staring away,
Devoid within save for
A filling emptiness

It was all so fresh.
The shock wouldn’t fade for a few hours.
But I knew
Numb, I knew

Numbness faded and filled
As hours passed on
But that first hour alone
There was nothing but the knowing of what you’d done

The fires are back.

I woke up to sirens again

In the way the lightning spidered across the sky,
In the way the clouds were light from the inside.
I asked the sky what it meant,
What it wanted.

Leaning against the wall on the patio,
With deafening cicadas
Broom in hand
Watching

I saw a sign in the storm,
I couldn't quite make it out.
So I assigned it my own meaning,
And heard Kord.

He told me it was time for change.

It’s cold today.
The birds are silent.
The bugs are gone.
Everyone is indoors.

It’s quiet.

The memory of you is radiant,
Bright and beautiful, like your fur.
But if I focus on it,
I can feel a slight burn,
Like the blisters on my palms
From the wood of the shovel
I dug your grave with.

After everything you’ve done
I don’t hate you

I wish you a long and beautiful life
Where every dream comes true

I hope you start a family
And find love again

I hope you find a career
That makes you smile again

I hope you have a wonderful life
Just don’t let it intersect with mine

It's no wonder I fell for you.
I watch you light up another cigarette,
A pack drained by the late afternoon.
Your delicate lips wrapped around the filter;
Your rough kiss, your tongue in my mouth,

The taste of that twentieth cigarette
Hung close in your mouth.
Like tongue-******* the dirtiest ashtray
At the seediest dive bar
In the worst part of town.

There was nothing that brought me more joy
Than the sound of your voice
The sight of your face

And now the mere thought of you is sickening
Your name in my mouth tastes of bile
Thoughts of you have rotted

I won’t say I don’t miss you
Although, I don’t miss you now
I only miss who you were

Whatever the cause, the ring that I wore for years
Feels heavier now, nearly clumsy
It fits me poorly these days

But I put on the bracelet you gave me
I wore it for four years before
But now it fits as a rusted shackle would

I hope you're doing well
I'm drunk and thinking of you
At four in the morning

But if I were to be honest
I was thinking of you sober
Back around noon, too.

I think I'm finally doing better.

I had to step away from it all
so that I could fill my lungs once more.

I found myself spinning, plummeting,
desperate to catch my breath.

heaving,
     gasping,
          choking,

It's been more than a year...

Has it? Will I wake up in March?
Some days I feel like I might wake up in March.
Or October, even.
Sitting on my bed as the floor fell out from beneath me,
Confident that I was at the lowest I could be.

But this world chose to prove me wrong.
A year spent heaving, gasping, choking,
and my lungs are full again.

I can stand again.
I can sleep without fearing I'll wake up in March.
Or October, even.

I'm still breathless, but I've made it.