chest tightens reason to worry through isolation and fury,
i'm ill and attempted, lacking redemption and
owning not even myself today.

i imagine your heart as seen through a fool's eyes,
from afar, so i can't see all your scars.

it's always been tangled, from my head-to-
heart-to-head-again:
it's like, love, or lust,
my heart and heads may bust or break, or fake
the flow that we all long to know, that gorgeous glow
like the first snowfall and a slow fall or my
heart explodes.

cage me in your chest;
i'm an anxious pet, a hungry dog.
let me chew on your bones,
**** on your carpet,
or air purifier.

trade me like a baseball card.
maybe i will be worth more to
someone else. i never wanted
it both ways, you wanted it every-
which-ways. every witch has her
way.

mess with the bull and you'll get
the horns,
look through my dresser, you'll
probably find ****.

i'm not proud of much, and i'm
certain of even less.
no beliefs to die for, no one
to live for, just suburban
survival, shelter from vultures.

don't worry, self.
You paint your own hell.
things in the heart best unfed,
unread,
unsaid.

don't worry,
health.
you will bleed ulcers and
insomnia will own your dreams,
screams,
and heart too.

even in dreams, perfection is
a mutation of your fantasy.
weather between legs, like a flash
flood through cotton,
or like blood and *** on
my sheets,
and liking it,
it's hard to tell dream
from memory.

you diagnose, i drown.
only my shell will be found
as i pollute my head will i recover
revoke
repeat.

lungs fill like gills gasping for
water, choke like humans do.
in my mind, i wrote six stories,
half
true, half fiction. and they sifted
and shifted and silenced themselves
into what is forgotten:
Caroline, you are my childrens song,
the dreams undreamed, the eyes of a
love i can't fake. you are the *****
blonde busts and the sugar-coated won'ts.
the enticing do's and Don'ts.
the icing on the cake and the
lather, rinse, repeat.

"7:45pm"

it means time and time again that everything is new,
that
magazubes conzine poetry, that spelling is relative.
it means the last kiss is the first kiss,
is the first **** worth this?
it means i am numb, i feel [or fall out] harder than you,
i think until i bleed,
i mumble the streets mid-morning, mid-slipping sleep;
the windows aren't lit, the neighbors still sleep.

it means last night was a quickly remedied failure,
fixed by mix of music and a can of aerosol aimed at
canvas, or a bottle turned inside out, or a typewriter
being taken advantage of.
it means the groping and loving before the fight was
genuine but an uphill, losing battle against ourselves.
it means i love you and hate myself for wanting to
release my grip upon your heart because then you would
be even more hurt and i would be even more alone.

the closer i am too you, the more it blurs. the more
i cannot focus, the more i feel like a locust that
is just greedy and hungry and can't give back what
i've taken from you. i want to give back.
but locusts travel in swarms and eat crops alive;
this is not how i learned to survive.
my heart begs for it to make sense, my head begs
for this **** to stop.

i know you. but we've never had a conversation.
not a single one.
i know your tastes in music,
i know you're a lucky man to have her.
i know it must be right.

i know you well enough to know
you can be trusted,
that you like beer,
that you and i would likely get along.

do you know me?
do you know how many times i've loved?
do you know how the illness eats,
how the waves drown, how the song sounds?
do you know this is about you?
you'll never read it,
so no, you don't.
the song drowns, the illness runs free and sick.
i'm so glad she has you, because that illness would eat her,
too.

i suppose i deserve the warped subtlety
and loud silence, in a karma-sense; after all,
i've dished the same for a long time.

you want me to know, want me to guess,
lips zipped-closed mind-read wonder.
that doesn't get to exist without an end to the hope.
the hit ***** the fan, the bag's out of the cat,
the nail hammers the hammer this time.

what goes around goes around
and i never aimed to disappoint. but i will.

so choking down a medicine, sweeter than i deserve,
listening to songs that are sweeter than i deserve,
this comes honest and idiot, and i've been on both sides
of both arguments, and both sides of the cardiac,
and i've bled out and i've inhaled and i've
made an effort to say too much because
for so long, the silence has been too loud.

should i take the bitter medicine, instead.
a period gets to end the questions
we already know the answers to.

it aches and burns
going through me.
every lyrics matching melody,
just as perfect as
december eighteenth;
quoted and whispered and
applied to each other
like journal entries, like
the future, like street
portraits.
naked bodies (a
caricature of the
bliss that turned to
****).