The beach was crowded. Pausing now and then,
He groped and fiddled doggedly along,
His worn face glaring on the thoughtless throng
The stony peevishness of sightless men.
He seemed scarce older than his clothes. Again,
Grotesquing thinly many an old sweet song,
So cracked his fiddle, his hand so frail and wrong,
You hardly could distinguish one in ten.
He stopped. at last, and sat him on the sand,
And, grasping wearily his bread-winner,
Staring dim towards the blue immensity,
Then leaned his head upon his poor old hand.
He may have slept: he did not speak nor stir:
His gesture spoke a vast despondency.

When I was seventeen
I did a dangerous thing:

Rung by rung, I rose
into forbidden space,
climbing as an insect
would along a slender
blade of wiregrass.

At the top of the tower
I settled into thin stratus.

I took in my home town,
insignificant and benign:
car headlights sliding
on roads to park below
neon drugstore signs,
yellow house windows
and amber streetlights—
whole neighborhoods
stretched out like fields
lit by electric flowers.

I’m sure I saw the glowing
orange tip of the cigarette
my girlfriend was smoking,
rocking herself away from me
on her metal front porch swing.

While I cowered
there in that aerie,
the air reeked of rain,
smoke, and despair.
I remember my heart,
syncopated and suffering;
how it pulsed beneath
a scaffolding of bones—
a buried, burning flare.

Never, will I ever say "I love you"
Never, will I ever say "I want you"
Never, will you know how I feel for you
Never, will you know that you've let me go

Never, will you know that you made me cry
Never, will you know the pain that you've caused me
Never, will you know that you're my only happiness
Never, will you know that you changed my life

Never, will you know how insecure I was
Never, will you feel the beat of my heart
Never, will you try to take me back
Never, will you imagine our life together

i wish you'd cut it out, causing me all this misery
you found cutting my heart out pretty easy
it's like bending over backwards with a paralysed spine
i'm in agony every second we talk and you're doing fine

you were nothing to me for so long but now it's like i need you
and i hate you for making me feel so dependent on somebody but god i love you
and it's killing me, it's killing me to think about how easily you could leave me
interspersed between moments of numbness, i'm overwhelmingly angry

while you're curling your tongue around double ended swords sheathed in honey
my chest is throbbing with all the wounds i'm hiding under fake smiles and hoodies;
you make your silver tongue's stab wounds seem sweet
it's only after you've inflicted them upon me that i realise i'm no longer standing on two feet

down on my knees and you're bringing out the worst parts of me,
parts i never knew existed, parts i hate, parts that are so unbearably ugly
it's no wonder i can't sleep at night when i'm standing in the mirror, looking at what you've done to me
if internal suffering had visuals i'm sure my torso would be littered with scars, bloodied

but i'm still here, drinking in all your affection and willing myself to believe there's no such thing as alcohol poisoning
and for every laceration, there's a flutter in my heartbeat as your lips chase away the churning feeling
you're so seductive, i'm starting to understand my father's love affair with red wine
i never realised how intoxicating love could be until i wanted you to be mine

my mother always said
"don't fall in love with a poet"
they pretend to love you
but what they really love
is writing about loving you
you are mere words to them
feelings cheapened by a page,
dusty grey typewriters,
and many unfinished drafts
of lovers both old and new,
you are the question mark,
but not the answer,
they are searching for ?
person unidentified: mystery
the page wanderer,
each poem a missing
person poster to cover their
bedroom walls.
they cannot love something
that is in their head
poets are the loneliest of
all people, my mother said.
they write to immortalize
what has long passed.
to live within their words,
but not reality,
lost souls writing suicide notes
and proclaiming it art.

In some way,

behind closed doors,

We are beautiful

And We bloom like flowers

In the dark of night,

but the sun rises

as it always does 
and we wilt and 
drop

like leaves in Autumn

desperately awaiting

our pitch black Spring.

my broken soul
wanders to your house.
uninvited and unwelcome.
my body has become a ghost
haunting only your memory.