The first settlers to the area called the Lumber River Drowning Creek. The river got its name for its dark, swift-moving waters. In 1809, the North Carolina state legislature changed the name of Drowning Creek to the Lumber River. The headwaters are still referred to as Drowning Creek.

Three p.m. on a Sunday.
Anxiously hungry, I stay dry, out of the pool’s cold water,
taking the light, dripping into my pages.
A city with a white face blank as a bust
peers over my shoulder.
Wildflowers on the roads. Planes circle from west,
come down steeply and out of sight.
A pinkness rises in my breast and arms:
wet as the drowned, my eyes sting with sweat.
Over the useless chimneys a bank of cloud piles up.
There is something terrible in the sky, but it keeps breaking.
Another is dead. Fentanyl. Sister of a friend, rarely seen.
A hand reaches everywhere to pass over eyes and mouths.
A glowing wound opens in heaven.
A mirror out of doors draws a gyre of oak seeds no one watches,
in the clear pool now sunless and black.

Bitter water freezes the muscles and I am far from shore.
I paddle in the shallows, near the wooden jail.
The water reflects a taut rope,
feet hanging in the breeze singing mercy
at the site of the last public hanging in the state.
A part-white fugitive with an extorted confession,
loved by the poor, dumb enough to get himself captured,
lonely on this side of authority: a world he has never lived in
foisting itself on the world he has -
only now, to steal his drunken life, then gone again.

1871 - Henderson Oxendine, one of the notorious gang of outlaws who for some time have infested Robeson County, N. C., committing ****** and robbery, and otherwise setting defiance to the laws, was hung at Lumberton, on Friday last in the presence of a large assemblage. His execution took place a very few days after his conviction, and his death occurred almost without a struggle.

Today, the town square collapses as if scorched
by the whiskey he drank that morning to still himself,
folds itself up like Amazing Grace is finished.
A plinth is laid
in the shadow of his feet, sticky with pine,
here where the water sickens with roots.
Where the canoe overturned. Where the broken oar floated and fell.
Where the snake lives, and teethes on bark,
waiting for another uncle.

Where the tobacco waves near drying barns rusted like horseshoes
and cotton studs the ground like the cropped hair of the buried.
Where schoolchildren take the afternoon
to trim the kudzu growing between the bodies of slaves.
Where appetite is met with flood and fat
and a clinic for the heart.
Where barges took chips of tar to port,
for money that no one ever saw.

Tar sticks the heel but isn’t courage.
Tar seals the hulls -
binds the planks -
builds the road.
Tar, fiery on the tongue, heavy as bad blood in the family -
dead to glue the dead together to secure the living.
Tar on the roofs, pouring heat.
Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon,
obtained from a wide variety of organic materials
through destructive distillation.
Tar in the lungs will one day go as hard as a five-cent candy.

Liberty Food Mart
Cheapest Prices on Cigarettes
Parliament $22.50/carton
Marlboro $27.50/carton

The white-bibbed slaughterhouse Hmong hunch down the steps
of an old school bus with no air conditioner,
rush into the cool of the supermarket.
They pick clean the vegetables, flee with woven bags bulging.
What were they promised?
Air conditioning.
And what did they receive?
Chickenshit on the wind; a dead river they can't understand
with a name it gained from killing.

Truth:
A man was flung onto a fencepost and died in a front yard down the street.
A girl with a grudge in her eyes slipped a razorblade from her teeth and ended recess.
I once saw an Indian murdered for stealing a twelve-foot ladder.
The red line indicating heart disease grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating cardiovascular mortality grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating motor vehicle deaths grows higher and higher.
I burn with the desire to leave.

The stories make us full baskets of dark. No death troubles me.
Not the girl's blood, inert, tickled by opiates,
not the masked arson of the law;
not the smell of drywall as it rots,
or the door of the safe falling from its hinges,
or the chassis of cars, airborne over the rise by the planetarium,
three classmates plunging wide-eyed in the river’s icy arc –
absent from prom, still struggling to free themselves from their seatbelts -
the gunsmoke at the home invasion,
the tenement bisected by flood,
the cattle lowing, gelded
by agriculture students on a field trip.

The air contains skin and mud.
The galvanized barns, long empty, cough up
their dust of rotten feed, dry tobacco.
Men kneel in the tilled rows,
to pick up nails off the ground
still splashed with the blood of their makers.

You Never Sausage a Place
(You’re Always a ****** at Pedro’s!)
South of the Border – Fireworks, Motel & Rides
Exit 9: 10mi.

Drunkards in Dickies will tell you the roads are straight enough
that the drive home will not bend away from them.
Look in the woods to see by lamplight
two girls filling each other's mouths with smoke.
Hear a friendly command:
boys loosening a tire, stuck in the gut of a dog.
Turn on the radio between towns of two thousand
and hear the tiny voice of an AM preacher,
sharing the airwaves of country dark
with some chords plucked from a guitar.
Taste this water thick with tannin
and tell me that trees do not feel pain.
I would be a mausoleum for these thousands
if I only had the room.

I sealed myself against the flood.
Bodies knock against my eaves:
a clutch of cats drowned in a crawlspace,
an old woman bereft with a vase of pennies,
her dead son in her living room costumed as the black Jesus,
the ***** oil of a Chinese restaurant
dancing on top of black water.
A flow gauge spins its tin wheel
endlessly above the bloated dead,
and I will pretend not to be sick at dinner.

Misery now, a struggle ahead for Robeson County after flooding from Hurricane Matthew
LUMBERTON
After years of things leaving Robeson County – manufacturing plants, jobs, payrolls, people – something finally came in, and what was it but more misery?

I said a prayer to the city:
make me a figure in a figure,
solvent, owed and owing.
Take my jute sacks of wristbones,
my sheaves and sheaves of fealty,
the smell of the forest from my feet.
Weigh me only by my purse.
A slim woman with a college degree,
a rented room without the black wings
of palmetto roaches fleeing the damp:
I saw the calm white towers and subscribed.
No ingrate, I saved a space for the lost.
They filled it once, twice, and kept on,
eating greasy flesh straight from the bone,
craning their heads to ask a prayer for them instead.

Downtown later in the easy dark,
three college boys in foam cowboy hats shout in poor Spanish.
They press into the night and the night presses into them.
They will go home when they have to.
Under the bridge lit in violet,
a folding chair is draped in a ***** blanket.
A grubby pair of tennis shoes lay beneath, no feet inside.
Iced tea seeps from a chewed cup.
I pass a bar lit like Christmas.
A mute and pretty face full of indoor light
makes a promise I see through a window.
I pay obscene rents to find out if it is true,
in this nation tied together with gallows-rope,
thumbing its codex of virtues.

Well I’m living in a crawlspace listening to conversations
When I can’t take reality I change the station
The music heals me

I’m living in fear with a ringing in my ear
The train is on the tracks and it’s getting kind of near
I’m thinking sideways I’ll do it my way
I should care more but why start today

I don’t keep up with the same old sound
I’m busy in my head and it’s written down
I want you to see what happens to me
When I lose existence to think is to be

Under the ceiling above the floor
Between the walls and behind the door
I’m living in a crawlspace listening to conversations
When I can’t take reality I change the station
The music heals me

Your mind is a heart-trembling sight,
And often as you flaunt it I know
I should never tell you it destrings me,
(Sets me wrong and then puts me in tune.)
I mustn't ever never
Say I wish to do the same to you.

(I would caress the insides of your bones,
Kiss your esophagus, clean your arteries;
I would eagerly sew myself inside you.)
I mustn't ever never
Anglerfish my way into saying
"I would be a limb on your body."
And yet "I love you" cannot possibly -

I would live in your synapses quietly
Never intruding, you wouldn't notice me,
Perhaps even forget me by and by;
But I would electric-think my way through
Your toomuchmind sofastly:

I would repair the gaps with
Scraps of myself torn off, I would
Maintain you invisibly with
My unvisible tools unsensed
And silentdense as an atom's center
Whose disvisible weight is universelifting.

I would lift worlds onto you
As though nothing ever sang sadness
And every(right)thing strongly whispering
Through your veins would know
"I want to pulse your blood and beat your heart."

So much more "love" cannot possibly
Desire, I desire (to make you) the
Overloved lover my domain over:
The king and the grass and the sky.

I like slandering your makeshift forceps.
I hammer you down with watery *** and then spill

the remainder on the couch. Yarg! A diamond’s
worth at least a small intestine, and you

are worth whatever’s left over after night
has upended itself, poured sideways out of its

shellacked crawlspace, and turned the basement sour.
There are remnants of you in the park,

some red stain by the baseball field where,
if you’ll remember, you watched little leaguers

build teamwork, and faint splotches on tree bark
from your lactations which, if you’ll remember, happened

every morning. I whisper your godforsaken name
and am slapped in the head. The children cry

when I smile. I cry when the children smile. Good
heavens. I forbid you from not entering my corridor,

even as I set up a barricade. I like my water scalding,
my passion chilled, and I like you in easy-to-

swallow doses. I like you in my eggs.
Ditto the faucet, keyboard, the occasional lily,

but do not mess with my pearls. I mumble of apodictic
meadows while I sleep. What can I say?

I do not mumble of unclogging your bathtub,
which has a certain foul repute, and has grown

heavy and ugly with your hair, which is everywhere,
just as you are everywhere, and wherever, and so

******* hidden it’s not funny anymore, we stopped
looking some millennia ago, after scouring the drainpipes,

kicking down your doors, dissecting your mattress,
speculating about your burial site, etcetera, and even so

we have not been really looking all this time, have we,
just blaring your name through the speakers,

putting wrong numbers on our calling cards, leaving
uncooked meat out on the back porch as if you were

a raccoon, oh, or a lion, which you are not, or not
quite, though, as the books say, you have honey

in your stomach, and if you could but be
ripped open we would taste and see.

My mind could not conjure up the notion that the word, the name, meant something. A-n-n-a. I looked. I looked: she stared back the same. Unknowing, unfamiliar. I wanted to remember, I wanted to.



7 a.m, in the crawlspace underneath the house, flashlight grasped in my hand, sweat from my forehead plastering my hair against it. It smelled like dust. I inched forward on my stomach, writhing as a worm. My body seizing against dirt and webs. I yelled out her name. Just to see. Just to test if my mouth still knew how to speak.



Anna.



Anna.



There. In the corner. I flicked my light against a box with tape on the side and her name written on over it in marker. I whispered it to make sure. Anna. One more time. Anna. I sunk my face into the ground. My breath, soft from my lips but coarse in form, disrupt the filth, made me cough. I crawled over to her with ease, as if the bones in my body were pushing me, the muscles guiding me; these pulsing veins, telling me.



When I opened the box, the first thing I saw was her, smiling back at me in the form of a memory. July 1996, our wedding framed around sanded wood, with splinters etching at the sides, aching for a hold on them. And I cradled her, despite this. Despite my skin giving in.



Anna.



I almost forgot.



My head was hurting again. I blamed it on the suffocating of the casket underground enveloping me, not the staples buried into the skin of my skull, not the remembrance that underneath piles of dirt, her body was just a stack of old bones with only a stone to tag her as proof she was once living.



Anna. My Anna. I cradled the picture against my chest. I clung to her.



My light began to flicker, a spider crawled across my finger. Anna was diminishing, like a ghost, like a gentle sweep of navigating headlights turning a corner, creeping away, and suddenly gone.



Anna. A-n-n-a. I shut my eyes. I could finally remember.

The pine floorboards, cover my work.

The pine floorboards, creak at the spot I ripped them up.

I didn't want to **** her,
But she made me insane,
In a fit of rage,
I put a hatchet Right through her ******* brain.

The pine floorboards, cover my work.

The pine floorboards, stained red at the spot I took her life.

Underneath the earth,
In a dark crawlspace,
That's where you'll find my love,
Sleeping oh so peacefully,
Underneath the pine floorboards.

Tantamount to the crawlspace where your emotions
are dissembled,
is the animalistic focus in your pointed gaze,
Sketchy eyed with jerky limbed motions,
As elusive as you are always around,
Or so it would seem,
Their eyes fall upon you,
no doubt,
You are a vision,
That I do not and have never questioned,
There is a fundamental lack of
hesitancy in your days,
lately you have looked let down,
Thinking of you,
occurs outside the restraints of time,
I would like to be everything with you.

Under the spread hazel's winter
umbrella hung with pale catkins
pulling at a black bin liner rubble
spilled, a little toad tumbles free
from under in turmoil of warty limbs.

A toad in this garden where is no pond
found a moist pocket of plastic pleats
and a larder of wood lice in the rotted
pile sits on my palm calm as a buddha
thoughtless, yellow-eyed, unidentified.

Later, returning for forgotten secateurs
he drifts down in the water *** I let in
to the ground, trailing a bubble stream,
an olive green indifferent nature god.
The lordly stars sustain his crawlspace.

Before the universe
Exploded onto this canvas
There was a crawlspace
A cave
In a church basement

A pinprick of strange matter
Floating unfettered
In space
And after years of careful planning
Years of careful manipulation

A balloon pop
A BIG BANG
Of people places things
Life and solar systems to fill the church basement
Fill the void

God had blueprints and maps
The universe conspires
And the stars align
God mad picket fence plans
Painted this infinite canvas
Just so I could meet you
And we could become us

The sort of home you want to be in,
When all you can focus on are the buttons of his suit,
Tightly woven into the fabric, brand new

Is not the same house you were in when he was alive

Its 3 AM staring at the floor, begging for the sleep to take you,
Anywhere
Even nightmares are better than this, nothing.

The solemn stares churn my stomach,
Somersaults with acid, my body lurches
Doubling over in the pain that is grief.

When the eyes in a room all fixate on you,
It's difficult to hide in a box inside your own head,
Because they tear the walls from your fragile shelter,

And their rain is a burning flame,
You are the match that refuses to be put out,
But wants desperately to feel nothing.

The sort of home I want to be in is
Roses, the thorns cut clean from the stem,
Green tea, just the right temperature
And an old console with his favorite game loaded up

But that house is abandoned,
Left like last week's sawdust,
Swept under the rug in a pile of books,
And i am the can of kerosene in the corner of the room,

Waiting to be used in the most vile of ways.

I am an unlit candle in the midst of a hurricane,
The shadow of the night sky blotted out by the moon
I am the fading smile of remorse,
The pang of guilt,
The sorrow of loss

I am the broken inside of you,
The one that eats away at you until the shell is broken apart
And you are all that's left
In the dictionary, i look up sad and expect a picture of me,
Depressed is myself in my room, alone
Suicidal is the knife i once picked up,

Daring to question if my own beating heart was worth the blood

My House is boarded windows and jail cells,
The crawlspace of cobwebs and creaking stairs,
The leaky roof and patchy ceilings

I am all but a finished mess,
And my foundation is cracked and split.

There is always vacancy,
Because who wants to stay in a house like that?

I’d rent out the rooms, but i'm paying for their rent
if they choose to live inside these decrepit walls

I only wish someone would see the shambles
As a start, and not the leftover parts from a failure,

If these 4 walls housed opportunity,
Instead of destruction.

My house, is a home that i long since enjoyed.

So if poetry is a riddle, is love the key?

Do we subtract sadness?

Take away fear?

What about pain?

In this equation who gains?

Life's a never ending circle of questioning what comes next,

And I'm not sure

Because I've felt a feeling I can't quite keep a hold of,

And it slips from my fingers just as it slips from my mind

And in this crawlspace inside my head I've decided, that we're better off alive.

Despite the pain that grows,

The anger that flows through our veins I still believe that we are at the very least,

Human.

And that is a thing in and of itself, to be able to say that today, I am and therefor will be and therefore always will be because I believe it to be such,

And tomorrow, I think I'll love.

And maybe I'll find a reason to cry,

Or a reason to yell or a reason to scream or day dream.

And maybe, I'll write poetry,

A symphony of constructed thought like I was born into a world where nothing else matters,

And maybe you can too,

Maybe you can believe in things that break you,

Like the things that don't **** me make me strong

The things that I do wrong today I won't do wrong tomorrow,

I hope

And nobody is perfect, and nobody should try to be

But with a language as fluid, and universal as feeling?

Why restrict it to the grandest of all?

Let's get down to brass tacks,

The nitty gritty, let's find the dark spots so that the bright ones seem brighter

Let's fill the room with ***** things so that you don't worry so much about what's under your fingernails.

Let's find out how beautiful beauty can be but first, a little perspective

Let's live through these hard times so we know how much better things can get

Let's find out how many feelings you can feel in just a few short years,

Let's become the people we always dreamt of being, and true change seems to stem only from tragedy,

But let's embrace them,

Because all of these things?

Are what makes you, you.

I toss and turn at night nervous the inferno might
swallow me whole if I leave a light burning bright
so I keep to a crawlspace that I call my room.
Home alone, roll the stone, seal me in this tomb.
The Lord will heal me soon. Has the Spirit always loomed
over me since youth? Where's the proof to back the truth?
I opened up about my life of doom-and-gloom to a sleuth
who replied with nothing from across the booth.

© Matthew Harlovic

When I was a child, I was the riverbed's bend. The silhouette of a person from far away smoking a cigarette. I was the blushing sunset and the barred teeth of nightfall, moon's jutted chin and all.
But as I grew up, people became less tree-house, more crawlspace.
In his drunken days, my father once went out with a crowbar shouting at god for giving me clinical depression instead of a man or a hobby.

When I was a child, I would hold hands the way you hold a loaded gun. No one told me that some people are bullet teeth, trigger wounds, and pistol shot screams. That I would become one of these statistics. Those analogies. My grandfather once told me that the bravest people of all sometimes go a little mad. But you have to find the darkest recess of your mind and tell it that you know what it looks like with the lights on. I no longer need a flashlight.

When you're a child, you're the billow of a skirt. The hum of a refrigerator door in July. You could be the sun's glare or the sky's mouthpiece. But as you grow up, you start blowing out candles for other people's birthdays. You begin looking at the cracks of pavement rather than moths clinging to streetlamps. your house slumps its shoulders whenever you open the door. and why?

if none of this makes sense, regard it as a poem.

Swore I felt your flesh
Push through my dreams
Your gums soft against my tongue
Metal braces tearing through me

A phantom residue
From the crawlspace of my mind
An unconsciously yearning
For love
No longer mine

How the **** can I move on?
With the scent of your breath
Lingering in morning mist

How the **** can I move on?
With the sweat of your skin
Soaking my fingertips

This ache is unbearable

It's not enough to merely speak w/ enthusiasm
Even most "actions" go unnoticed, unheeded
Hate to say it, a succession of blunt force
Possibly perceived as violent
Is necessary
Repeatedly
Or you could stop trying to impress on me
What you wish others would see as your
Personality
If you could do that, just that
I might try and help you.

Crawlspace of the Cranium
$2.00 / 11 poems
Copyright © 1996-Present

He hides you from the world
and guides you by the hand
He speaks to you in softness
as you forget everything
outside his house near the river

We have our special crawlspace,
where the world forgets where we are
He smiles gently as you speak
without even thinking.

With your soul in the palm of his hand
he shows you to the water
the evening sun highlights your faces,
his skin glows in the light like honey
As the faded winter sun smiles upon
the young rosebuds waiting to bloom
In the springtime.

When the old man of the night
Dwindles into newborn dawn,
The conjoined soul feels a sigh
When the river must be crossed.
As he, still guiding your hand,
Navigating your soul
kisses you goodnight.
With a reluctant wave,
You watch him disappear;
Engulfed by the mists
On the other side of the river

Soft curves on smooth skin showed little but a turquoise soul without sin. A sunny heart with no flaws, it was strong. The burning started soon after, a light tingle tingle, nervous laughter. Push away, close your eyelids tight, button. It will go away with the light button. So they say.

My core began to melt through my swollen fingers, down the drain. Then the scorch marks came! Craters, meters deep where it would be easy for sadness to seep and blackness to creep. I'm ******* sick of counting sheep so let me sleep let me sleep.

All that was left for the turquoise soul was crawlspace. Turquoise turns to green and quickly there is no more balance only mean. And it eats at me and I can't see so the worms and rats burrow inside and impatiently I wait for the pain to subside. Twirl my hair, feed me lies, take my hand and smother my cries.

A tear falls softly on your cheek and the guilt in my bones makes my heart weep. The fluid inside begins to boil and suddenly I'm smothered by the blood and the soil. The worms are there too, they're everywhere. I scream and beg...but worms don't care.

Chilled to the bone, I scratch and pull but then I can't move my coffin is full. Little dove, rosy cheeks, no more tears for weeks and weeks. Stop your turquoise **** it dead. Go to bed with GREEN in your head!

there in the crawlspace
they found me
drugged and *****
they pulled and tugged
spoke their plans
to help deliver sobriety
change my outlook
toward the better
I resisted
any idea seemed as hopeless
as no plan at all
that was my comfort
my morning joe
how many times
must this be said
my days can be lived
by one way only
aimed at the end

Saturday, October 26, 2013

I'll stop dreaming before they bludgeon me maudlin
Then run. Run off the mill, playing on a paramount race
The light fumes at the tail of a muffled crawlspace
My calloused heels wait, flaring the barest crimson

The wheel makes the world go round, oh quiet defeat
Fed quite fat with golden grease in gun blood
No sullen faced ant ever bites back to chew the cud
On this highway to hell, ****** in an infinity eight

They'll can me like a fish, consumed to be eaten at last
Those who roar with an industry on their mechanical spines
Smoke the steam from black lungs dying as the lifelines
Don't ask anymore, their hands are wide, lips pressed

It's been a long time
since I had a good cry,
even longer since I let my heart sing.

When was the last time that I found something
that was "to die for", just for it to die.
When was the last time I had a righteous cry.

I  ought to,  I've got to drive on out of here.
Use the charge card, rent a car. Take a day trip,
perhaps a week. Maybe go for broke and drive on out
to the other coast.

If only I could give as much as I get, wouldn't love flow free, make it practically, a good bet.      This wearing my heart on the cuff of my sleeve,
it's got to the point where I can barely breathe.. Something was taken,
when I was young. And repeatedly stolen, and repeatedly I got stung.
I could never give it away, and I can't, to this day.
No I can't any more, yes,  it was taken so long before.

So I kiss those goals and I send them along,
I set them free, I don't hold on too long, it leaves me feeling
that I'm good and strong. As strong as I can be.



Listen close I tell myself, If you don't want to ride the roller coaster
put your hands in your pockets and don't pay the price.
remember *you can't pull strings when your hands are tied,
and you can't feel too good when you're poisoned inside.

The stars are but specks in bits of space, my lids are heavy
from this weary living. I feel the devil has put his bid in place,
On his part, there are no misgivings.

I came to this place of my own volition, to get loose of this crawlspace
is my only mission. Then you'll hear a chorus of me, a churning of mercury burning, I let a moment of time, a bit of space, leave me old and well worn down

you'll try to talk again.
so i can forgive,
and forget, every word you said.

so we can die,
comfortably,
in the crawlspace in my head.

Could you paint me better off?
Clean my minds slate?
Pull my strings
Control my emotions
Will you seize my day into your own and furrow my brow?

You’re me
You should be able to
So why can’t I?

Would you nail in my loose screws?
Dig up my skeleton from the closet?
Pour my heart down the sink
Or break it over the counter
Will you count the suffocations tonight and pull the pillow from my face?

You’re me
You should be able to
So why can’t I?

Can you pull me from the crawlspace in my head?
Ground my thoughts into dust?
Pillage my safety
Leave me defenseless
Will you throw my disarray into the trash and dump me in the backyard?

You’re me
You should be able to
So why can’t I?

Dare you play with my conscience?
Sleep lonely on my spine?
Uncover my sarcophagus
Placate my pain
Will you befriend the dominions and wash away the stain?

You’re me
I’m you
So why can’t I do
What you can, too?

I still find myself summoning you

even after I have been numbed and dulled and
painted greyscale,
the crawlspace between my bones and skin filled with spent ashes...

my stomach has learned to fold origami butterflies when she
feels like reminiscing,
missing when her floors weren't littered in corpses...

I still find myself summoning you

when I think that I have found a potent lighter fluid,
just to check that he still isn't enough,
and remember that I am still underwater...

I still find myself summoning you

playing your music, singing your songs in the voice that used to sing with you, and I am envious of it as it follows the melody from a memory I exhumed tonight because
it sounds like it remembers you better than I do,

but in the end I am glad I am forgetting you
even though it will never be my choice to let go
because perhaps one day I won't remember
what it was like to sing with you,
and I won't even notice I'm
underwater

Under the house
In the crawlspace
The moist Earth littered with the bones of small mammals,
And infested with a multitude of invertebrates,
I low crawled through soiled Earth to replace the water line as an unwillful apprentice under an impatient master.

Wrote it down a while back
in the crawlspace
of memory
Woke in a strange place
with blankets of
strange cotton
Winter sheets and tired eyes
the broken space
between a footstep
Play it again in my head
for a while

Spoke for the white sand at midnight
Where I parted ways with all of it
Still remember nothing

Empty places between the graceless days
of blinked pupils
Empty spaces between the gaps in bad
conversation
I looked for you over every shoulder

A tired stare over glasses
into a glass of nothing
raise, sip, repeat
until life
hurts
less