Do your scars ever insist
That you touch them?
Do they hover above your skin,
Just so you'll scratch them?
Like maggots
Crawling over a carcass
Wounds that will never close
The burrowing mouths
Leave permanent trails
Because the flesh is dead.
So contrasting,
The pink of healing
That was once an angry scab.
But you scratched at that, too,
Because it stuck to your body
Like some parasitic tick.
And I wonder now,
If the circles of scars
That trail down my forearm,
Are like a line of dark ants
That will follow me forever.
Or if in their ugly hatching,
I can see metamorphosis.
But in the corner of my mind,
I know
They will always follow.
And in the corner of my room,
I hear the buzzing
Of a fly.

The inadvertent sigh at the sign of affection.
Twisting old reality of confused yet knowingly wrong experiences into memories that I want to live again.

I sometimes like being alone...but I still fall asleep whispering her name.



*Spring2012

Wrapped in you
Light kisses
The tv
Playing rock
In the back
You smile
I laugh
My heart
Swells
And inside
I cry
Because this
Only makes me
Want you more
Not just now
Not just
For a few years
But Forever
Because I love you
Too much to Ever
Let you go.

Please, oh please
can you spare a drop
of the liquid flowing through you,
dripping down your sweet ****?

I am quite parched
I’ve been barren for months
Please can I drink in
your billowy lumps?

Pour into my crevasse
Make me bloom with life
Moisturize the cracks I’ve earned
from loneliness and strife

I’m a desolate island
desperate for nature’s touch
but too far from land
for one shower to be enough

I signed my life away
A week ago today
I took a pledge to be a warrior
To serve my country with pride
I am proud of this
I need not your approval to be the man I wish to be
For I will be my own
Traveling my own path
Finding my own me
I have finished the part of my life to try to impress you
To try and make you proud
I am done expecting you to be there for me
The cracks are too easy to fall through
I hope one day you will wake up from this slumber
We will talk about our lives while we fish for lost time
The bobbers on our lines dancing on the water like ballerinas
The man I am becoming
Ignoring the child inside
Screaming and pounding
For my daddy

I remember the morning Tuesday was invented—
how gleeful we sang across the streets—
forgetting that the day after tomorrow would be Thor’s day
and that one we didn’t own, too.

I remember the bathroom stalls, the sins of Leviticus
we survived
comforting our confusion with the indulgence that God too
love man, kind.

Let the purgatory full of half good men sing about their sins
with pride and laugh at the moons and stars for being without limbs
and tongues to protest their innocence and Idontgiveadamnisms;

For I remember being fed the tenets of heterosexual history in elementary school
yet wondering why queer gods are the ones named after the planets.