The stale taste in your mouth grating
only remedied by more mints that melt away
into only more staleness.
some of your body is too warm and some of it cool
some of it itches from this shuttle bus seat which has crumbs from the last person who sat here.
The livid clouds outside are shifting across the sky, shirking nightfall, the street lamps fulgurating, giving the bus interior a ghastly glow.
there is not enough to look at, to listen to, to do, just the temporary sensations
of ******* on peppermint altoids, tapping on your phone, pressing your shoe heel into the soft skin of your thigh, feeling ugly but more tired than ugly under that harsh aisle seat light. Home soon, and not home soon enough.

Almost sad beneath their fantastic disguises, they crawl under the moonshine above. In a minor key, the lute strums— the marvelous night hums with the fervor of churning water; fountains of shining marble contain the ephemeral source, funneled towards heaven. Day breaks and moonlight slips away, the dancers abandon their masquerade and dissipate into the atmosphere. On the horizon, a castle across the yellow sea blushes pink, its shadow cast across the waves.

I buried your box of notes and some cicadas
in a hole in the earth outside my front door.
Then I was small and I went inside the box
there were beds there, damp walls, a toilet  
a crochety man and a girl
who wrapped me in orange flowers  
and cradled me on a bug ridden bed.

The 50% floating out in the G column somewhere
it’s waiting for me to put it down and place it
I’m not 50% but I’m gagging at the numbers, so many
This clanging piano is making me feel like I’m in the midwest, definitely
indefinitely, do you think I could spend the rest of my life away from the sea, next to Canada
in the cold-slowly-warming?  
I could move to Duluth.
in 2010,
I was five
I didn’t know about Alex G,
I didn’t know about anything but the way the swing in the cherry tree made me feel,
trapped and small
(I’m hopping around lines
but not reading them once I write them)
yeah I could go across the country
yeah I could walk for awhile
yeah I probably couldn’t tell if I liked a boy
or tell him I like him
yeah I think acoustic guitarists and emo vocalists and edgy, chainsmoking guys
get It.
whatever It is (and doesn’t everyone! feel that way too)
and my teapot smells like plastic when it boils
and it doesn’t whistle
and I chewed all the gum I bought yesterday and
my mom’s name is Alex, too and
my face is puffy, round, just soft skin folding in on itself for eternity,
soft hanging skin stuck to me, and recently, I've been thinking 'everything’s fused it couldn’t rip apart
without dragging the rest of it with itself--
My family’s in new hampshire and they miss me. 
my family drove to new hampshire with my sister and they are a family
four years apart (without me).
I don’t know if I miss them right now and
this coding project makes me feel like
V-sauce or a conspiracy theorist
or something awfully STEM-y and it scares me
and it makes me awfully happy too.
i hope everyone majors in what they want to and that they love it
and they feel glad when they have that degree
and we’re gonna be twenty-two in May
some people will be twenty-three
and last night, Vik said she’s glad I’m awesome and I told her
awesome is a strong word, I don't know about that,
awesome is a big word
and we laughed about it.

Sweet, cold, pinprick, windy sky
streaked with color
Rolled up my sleeves

And I stepped out in it all
I walked rainy  
streets and smiled

I go to the woods,
The woods go and I see them going, I’ve gone
to the forests of my home since autumnal glow is high in season,
these are holy, golden days and the leaves are blushing in the brook,
but the pond’s gone dry from no rain, it’s all muck. There are no fish and there never were any, but
snapping turtles, bullfrogs with eyes that peek above the surface, water boatmen that skit the glassy surface of the pond avert my eyes. When I was younger, I caught tadpoles in a mesh net and I let them go. Now we have forgotten each other.

Tough green shoots erupt from the soft earth, choking the softer crab grasses, there is blood and lambs in the high days of their short lives, rambling in the pastures of youth.

The pond is blanketed in duckweed, in the sunlit clearing of eleven cottonwoods.

Like red hot coals, the jewels glow in the night,
they’re tucked into the tarmac in the rugged mountains spotted with evergreens.

the City in the valley has materialized, turnt to silver under the stars. Riverbeds dry up, caustic machinery acidifies the soil.

There is a dizzying flash of lucrative indigo, beneath the flashing crimson that signals take-off. 
An orange streak hangs in the distant horizon, above it an oppressive navy sky turning to night.  
The window across from me reflects something I’d imagine in a spaghetti Western,
in the final moment of triumph when the hero declares himself victorious and all forces bow to him. He is the indomitable, conquerer of man and nature.
Day is done, it retreats into faded pink and night falls, the mountains gray. It’s almost beautiful, but it’s burning. It's smoldering. A quiet fire, is it even burning if none care to witness it?