A tingling wetness in eyeball sockets
Coo into the 8th floor high rise
Outlooking a city that ebbed and flowed
With its foggy productive matter
My love gingerly cooked nutrients into our bodies
As I got to work, so quick
So quickly.

Its been a whirlwind
I'll return to Philadelphia
For what will be
The fourth time since I left town
Left town gave all my things away
Lady Liberty arrived so early
I had to say goodbye in such a hurry
How I cried and cried
On the shuttle that day.

I'll never forget the way the weather smelled
Or my fathers bright but tired face
Blue eyes saying
You brought yourself here little girl
Now lets hope for the best
A new roommate
Her hair an echoing brown red
She hovered in my doorway
As I unpacked and unloaded
The little and a lot
That I had.

Weeks and months whizzed by
I made friends at the blink of an eye
It took no effort
No it took no effort
And now when I think back
It reminds me of when I transferred in middle school
There was the popular girl group
And the ****** theatre arty girls
And the popular girl group wanted
Me to be one of them so badly
And I tried
For a time
But soon enough kept finding myself
Quietly withdrawing
Too strange and creative
I tried with one or two of them
To bring them into a new circle
And it didn't quite work
No it didn't quite work
So we remained respectful
But I built my own tribe.

And much like that time
It bled into adulthood
Made friends so fast
We drank too much
Lip synced in basements
Cards upon cards
I had my eye on one in particular
I thought we might have fun
You wanted so badly to be everything you're not
Little one
And for that
I can secretly forgive you.

And everything now
Is just about as it should be
I struggle and I lift
Myself off the ground
With joyful bounds of exuberance
And low points of self hatred
And I interweave and find the leaves
Connections and streams
Between it all.

A wedding
This time last year
A past ex lover took me to a wedding
I know someday I might pass you by
Remember how I told you
Trying to make you spend time with me
Outside of your posse
Was like pulling teeth
That you would see my name everywhere?

But I'm back in my computer chair
My love, he's so confident and stable
We have the best time
And it can just be
Me
And
He.

I need a night
A night to lean into the moonlight
Bear my soul and forget my name
Leave it on the packed sidewalk
Highkick in heels
Forget patrons and sickly sided grins
Watch my scripts fall from my hands
Like shredded glass inside of paper thin lipstick
Tumbling backwards and forwards
Repeatedly echoing and crooning
Away and neither here
Or within the windows outlooking
The top of the heads
The skulls that make up the city.

Phases of running and walking
Calculating and mistaking
Ears opening and closing
Had I been a singular unit
I would have kissed and ******
My fears away
But like the icy clouds outside
Hot and wavering in their glaze
Suits of armor zipping and sliding up one by one
Allowing them to ooze onto the ground
Wish I had perhaps
Said less.

Maybe its because of this or that
I don't ******* know
But I'm sick of feeling

I don't know how to articulate it.

An existentialist sat quietly outlooking the garden,
offset by the noise of a steady heartbeat
and the warmth of his skin.
He was dismayed by the smell of dirt
writhing with worms and pumpkin seeds below his porch,
so he kept distance from the steps for fear of collapsing;
letting them rot back into the soil.
He began resting his eyes against the midmorning breeze,
for his nights were spent awake, listening to lonely calls,
feeling their whispers reverberate in his fingertips,
unable to satisfy them with reason
so never sleeping out of fear of submission.
Only now under the prying sunlight
does he understands the need for light at both ends of the tunnel.
Letting the rock of the chair run lose momentum,
his thoughts run through a stream of finite silence.