Every story is a sad story.
Everything is sad.
Too many tragedies, not enough time.
They pile up on top of one another,
Clamoring for attention.
Bombing tops earthquake tops ****** tops ****—
Burying us under the weight of too many
Bodies, their cold eyes pleading
See me, hear me, remember me but

Every story is a sad story
So no one stays sad very long.
When sadness is ever-present it becomes normal.
So now we don’t even blink, just
Scroll through our newsfeeds thinking:
The world is horrible and what’s for dinner
Simultaneously. When reality is too sad
Sadness becomes a simulation, acted out
On the stage of nightly news broadcasts and
Candelight vigils, as if:
If we all just felt sad enough for long enough
That would solve anything. As if:
If we could compartmentalize our sadness into
New national holidays and moments of silence
We could stop feeling everything so sharply.
But I am running out of room in my closet for charity t-shirts.

Every story is a sad story.
I am starting to become cynical.
One child dead from a drive-by shooting is no longer newsworthy.
Give me more bodies, more pictures
of distraught mothers crying,
More suffering.
We have fought too many wars in too many places to remember
that the bombs in Boston that shut down the entire city
Are an everyday occurrence everywhere else.
Except sometimes they are our bombs.
But rarely are they our children.

Every story is a sad story.
Everything is sad.
I am not sure which is worse: constant sadness
Or no sadness;
Constant tragedy or constant denial.
I am becoming too sad to write anymore.
The world is too horrible.
What’s for dinner?

uncatchable a fish must be
our dreams
otherwise our hook would not to be empty

not been  ever asked
our fears
otherwise our secrets revealed

unknown never veiled
our wrongs
otherwise our crimes would decrease

no longer are invisible
our old fires
otherwise our room doesn't with candelight lighting

sickly in overtures,
and commitment
to hollow compliments:

gives birth to
a rotten fruit,
at its core,

and an unwelcome
stereotype of
unforgiving critique
lost to what could
be a house on firm root,
toward quicksand
stepped,
   and made of the two Adams...
Bryan before Ryan...

      a consistency of compliments
are a hideous half mask
of womeno of a gorgon,
before his death she blasphemes
his presence...
    and all I can envision of her,
is the year,  a dead-lit room
with barely a candelight to
keep company,
a runaway son before a television,
and a daughter with a Pharaoh complex...

i and Joseph could,
     take to Icarus and Menelaus...
hyenas of the graveyard...
    itchy from shadows,
and halving the sun in a guillotine
drool, over a crimson skid of a river,
into a Barkley Wicker-Bucket:
roulette of pork choppers
    with the pupils sly into
     a dominant coordinate
            to relate to.

My first kiss was not a fairytale...

It was neither soft nor gentle,
no candelight, nor whispered promises-
just burning rage,
and violence in chains, now broken.

It did not come bearing roses,
nor with a heart filled.
My first kiss was not for love,
It was neither warm nor sweet.

Instead...

It tasted like iron,
a taste of broken pride.
Dripping with embering red,
not from lips,
But from a place where scars cannot hide.

It taught me nothing of love-
only the language of cruelty.
And yet,
Some part of me still remembers it
as something intimate.
Something real.

Not every kiss leaves you wanting more.
Some just leave a scar.