It is too easy.
Much, much too easy
This falling and rising we do.

It leaves me hollowed.
Empty, like an autopsied heart, chambers no longer pumping life’s blood;
Or like the distended belly of some pathetic half creature fevered with hunger.

Don’t you ever feel that way?

Or do you glutton yourself on the rolling and rocking,
Feasting on the tides until you are consumed by vomitous pleasure?

This falling and rising.
This rising and falling.

This and this and this.

I am so tired of it all.
No more bile drenched lust or hearts seized by rigor.

It is simply a strange and listless pantomime of a thing now
And much too easy
To hold any worth.

I put you
over my shoulder
like a spooled
rope.

Twisted too many
directions,
a little tug
and you might go
anorexically
thin;

too taut for me
to yank anymore.

And when you come to me
drunk,
a *****
of yelling,
I think of those times
when we sat close together,
barely touching.

In those days,
we were both drunk
and bitter over forever.

Beers chased liquor
over steeples;
we dropped dimes of pain
over smoked ****
and bleeding anger.

Time languored,
and eventually
or anger
stymied.

When you cried
twisted beyond
compare,
I held you close,
sniffed your hair.

People hurt each other because they can,
and we lay
on a mattress of your canned hopes.

I would never be a prince charming,
even when I groped
you;
when we were tossing each other,
fighting like ghosts do:
bad jabs,
quiet knives,
softer moans.

So, I curled you
over me;
beneath my earlobe,
as your whistled tears
drained energy.

Our synergy was syphoning
each other's
pain;
coiling nooses around our hearts
and kicking out the chairs
holding up our underneath souls.

We never spoke words,
we only compiled songs.

We understood every connotation
behind every tune.

The way I look at it,
a mixed tape is a poem.
Each song is a stanza,
every note is a feeling,
and every emotion
is in perfect likeness with the one who sent it.

I feel the caress of my own fingers
on my own neck as I place my collar
and think pityingly
of the kind women I have known.

Do you remember when we
danced beneath street lights
that bowed
in the presence
of our youth,
to that hum
from power lines
that can only be heard
early in the morning
or late at night?

Lately,
much like the power lines,
I hum
but only
when no one
is listening.

I keep these feelings
like water in cupped hands;
desperate to convey them
but they slip,
drop by drop,
through my fingers
and never completely
make it to you.

There must have been at least a couple hundred pounds of it
All trash
All things to let go

I find pens
A glittery black heart shaped paddle from Halloween
Old poetry
Stories
Photos
A set of drums

This how you body-bag your excess
Give your heart fat a proper burial

It is shedding weight

Take what you need
Take what you need
Enough so not sticking around is easy

I have a runaway pipe-dream
That in the telling
I have whiskey lung
And a voice like carnival gravel
Like semi-ground teeth in a bag you hold on your tongue

A comic strip hobo
With a stick and a red rag

Fresh starts imply shaking dead weight
That includes people

So much **** gone
**** I never needed
And was never going to use
But I was living with it

I've got this ****
in my arms,
cuddled tight.

I could have it forever,
cold and beatless,
my heavy love.

Maybe there's no place to go,
but I feel like there's a place,
that only you know
about. That
seems so long ago.

Don't you know you've got a strong tongue,
and a whiplash heart?

This is why
you always have a boyfriend,
and I lay with you
in a bed that's not mine;
I never tell you I'm hurting.