I must have begun writing at some point
But by now, I’ve lost track of my own wayward thoughts
And I’m starting to lose the point of my words
As my pencil’s dulls down
Like it knows that we are simply
Speeding up time
And dragging it out
With the lead on the paper
And maybe a period would be good here
So even if I can’t continue,
“Should I end it now?”
“Should I end it now?”
I ask but I
Find myself mesmerized
Or desperate
At the thought that I might find what I’m looking for
Somewhere in these scribbles–
That if I carry on,
These lines will make a picture
And tell me what to do–
That all of this will mean something
And not just augment the confusion
In every passing line,
I play editor in my mind,
And to avoid that final point,
I place some commas in my life

There’s a secret in heaven
In the vines weaved through the overcast
Of a leafy canopy
Someone sleeps in the gathering
Of rain puddles and
Drips like the liquid
In an IV
They say,
Someday
We will be free
From our lost ideals
And speak the last words
We can muster
Someday
We will hear them floating in the
Particles of the wind
And become the stories
That the earth
Tells to the stars

You may have nothing but kind words
But I
Still shudder away at the intrusive suspicion
That I must study your cadence
For any inflection
To find a truth
That caters to
My worst imagination

There is a god at the bottom of the swimming pool. Whirring, he wakes me from my sleep. He scuttles like a crab across vinyl. Some nights, I stay up to listen to the song he scratches into the tile.

It’s a somber sound, settling unearthily on concrete. It wasn’t meant to be enjoyed, I know. But I do.

I close my eyes and imagine it’s the sound of the earth turning on its axis. I imagine it’s the sound of time moving, year after year. It turns and turns and I follow suit, casting shadows behind me.

I imagine the god is lonely and far away from home. I imagine he is just as lost as we are, piecing together maps from soggy, fallen leaves and clumps of hair from the filter.

He cried himself into his containment. He misstepped once and fell into this hole. I hope he curses himself for being created without wings and arms and hands that could climb out of this.

I hope he catches his reflection in bubbles every now and then, and stops to consider how his face grew so hard.

He cries out and causes waves to rise and fall, splashes around, drags the moon close and pushes it away.

I hope he knows he can do anything, believes he can do anything, except help himself.

Each morning, I clean the pool. I dissect his well-laid plans with a skimmer and make his world clear and beautiful again. All for him, of course.

I imagine he is building character, struggling in a world that was not meant for him to live in, a world meant for someone else to enjoy. We built him in our image, to do the job we don’t want to do.

I hope he wonders at the unprompted responsibility and grows frustrated each time I insist that I would not give him a challenge he couldn’t overcome. I hope he’s beginning to learn.

There is a god at the bottom of the swimming pool, learning how to grow old and tired of swimming.

She doesn’t like to hear “I need you”
It’s difficult for her to say “I miss you”
She’s afraid that “I miss you” means that one of us
Can’t be without the other and she’s nothing if not independent

She says, “you should be okay alone.”
She says,  “you shouldn’t be afraid to lose me.”

I want to say “You shouldn’t be afraid to have me”
Love, when I’m holding you close, running my fingers across the soft curve of your arm
I feel the warmth blossom in me and my lips pour a waterfall of details and compliments
I want to make you feel as if you’re like nothing else in this entire universe

I don’t say
We are all the same

I spent my childhood being alone
I know how to count the cracks in my bedroom floor
The way you count up ways to improve and strengthen
Your steadfast mind
Build a wall that you can always go back to jump behind
I admire you

I learned when I was about nine years old that I don’t need to be alive

When I’m sad, I don’t try to fix myself
I was born onto a snow graced mountaintop on the verge of avalanche
I’m not afraid to shed a tear or two

You say, “Challenge yourself. How can you escape the dark parts of your mind?”
I want to say, “these days, it doesn’t feel so dark. Lately, they feel like thoughts. Lately, the only thing that differentiates sticks and stones from words is how other people perceive them.”

The dark that you see is a blanket
I wove it from the tatters of my ripped up sleeves, rubbed thin from nervous habit
I spun the hair that unplanted itself from my head like wilted flowers into rows of golden thread
I presented my heart, still beating, in two of my hands
And I laid it onto the heap, it doesn’t care if it’s scarred and neither do I
My darkness
Is the warmest thing I know

When I tell you I love you and point out every detail of you that makes me swoon
That makes my heart beat faster
That makes me smile
When I tell you I love you, I cry
And you always say that you love that
You say you love that I’m so attached to my emotions
That I’m not afraid to show it

When I tell you I love you,
I tap into the dark recesses of my mind
That you are afraid to look too closely at

And sometimes
The tears flood out like a leaky faucet
And I know that if you knew
You’d likely call it broken
Broken walls that I was supposed to be building like you do
Broken windows I should’ve been boarding up
I don’t tell you
When I tell you I love you,
I think of the fading scars stretched across my arms
Like cross outs and deletions in poems I’ve written
That don’t make sense anymore
I think of angry shouts and toppled chairs
Broken glass and locked slammed doors
I think of the whole world turning
For no one in particular
I think about how nothing matters
Nothing matters
Nothing matters
And it doesn’t matter
Because we matter

Because when your smile hits the sparkle in your crystal blue eyes
I know that over a million places I could’ve been at this point
This was the lucky one
And I’m here
To smile
To laugh
To cry
And sometimes I feel like I was built to be nothing
And then all the sudden, I don’t care
Because even the smallest nothing
Could have always been the world to me

I’m not afraid to want you
I’m not afraid to miss you
I’m not afraid to love you
I’m not afraid to love you

I’m proud
After everything
I have a blanket
And not a wall

To my old love
I know it’s hard
Do you get tired of carrying
The weight of my poetry
On your shoulders
Until I have something better
To worry about?

It’s the weight of the world
And nothing at all
Really matters

To my friends
I really feel like
I’m starting to disappoint you
And then
It starts to feel like
You are too

It’s the weight of the world
And nothing at all
Really matters

To my parents
I know you’re afraid;
I am too
But I’m really
Much more tired
Of running

It’s the weight of the world
And nothing at all
Really matters

To self-help
To patience
To glasses of water
To deep breaths
And better drugs

I promise,

It’s the weight of the world
And nothing at all
Really matters

I told you that I'd always love you
In the last text that I sent
That I was grateful and I hide
All the ways I circumvent

So you would think I've got less poison
Than my memories of you
It's so unfair I held you close
And now you're all I want to lose

Running through my veins
Running through my veins
I'll always love you, darling
I hope you feel this all the same

I'll cause all the breaths you bate
Every time you hear my name
I'll always love you, but...
I hope you suffer all the same

I have this way of waking up
I fill my senses with the scent of spring time
I wonder if, left alone for a while,
I will begin to grow flowers from my skin
And if they will be as beautiful as my memory is
I listen to daybreak’s sweet delusions
Blurred in a rose-colored candor
And cultivated in a cooling soil

I open my eyes

It is not springtime
It never will be, again
I rise from my grave and I walk
Phantom petals falling in my wake

My lover goes traveling with a backpack of things
Her eyes are always on the distance
She is a wanderer at heart and a sentimental hoarder
I wonder how she walks invisible and still takes up the room
But she doesn’t wonder at all
When she leaves she cleans up after herself like it’s the scene of a crime
Sometimes I think I don’t know her
And I am just the things she carries
When she leaves she will clean up after herself
And there will be nothing left of me to see

I stood beside you like an omen
Always one step behind
I thought if you turned, you'd catch it
The glint inside my eye

A silent glance in my direction
My finger to my lips
Beckons every thrumming heartbeat
To cater to the trip

I said, "I know what it looks like
When the world all crumbles down"
I thought maybe you'd seen it
The worry in my brow

Happiness hides the fear
So well that you might miss
I laughed, "I know what it looks like–
It's an awful lot like this."

Let's play little word games
If honesty's so obscene
You can pierce a soul with icy prose
And still claim your hands are clean

Well I've created monsters
More harsh than your deceit
Forget the cold, my pen will bring
Words burning at your feet

So let's play little word games
I know that you know how
I've seen the disasters spilt
From tremors in your mouth

If it's "only words", then fine,
Let's smoke each other out
You say that you want sparks,
I'll be the fire in your house

I wonder how deep I can bury myself
Before my breath begins to thin
I’ve been looking for ways
To shirk my skin
At the bottom of this pit

Then I wonder if I can exist
Just like this
Every time I hear my name
My gut creates a crooked twist

So I wonder who will still be here
When my voice corrodes like tin
In some watery, choked collision
Of the body that I’m in