A broken clock is right twice a day, but there is no time
at which a broken windshield is useful. In my peripheral
vision, the cracks could be lightning, but Minneapolis
is not as interested in drama as I am. Somewhere, not here,

it is raining. It would be great if it would rain on me
because then there would be a reason I felt like garbage
right now. There's always of course, a reason, but it would be
nice to say It's raining in my head rather than

I have a chemical inbalance in my brain or I just remembered
that someone I love will die before I do. All of downtown
is underneath the sky. If you spend

long enough in one place you will eventually be hit
by lightning. Because it's not real lightning
we're discussing here, stay longer and you will
be hit twice. Never move, ever. You might go somewhere

there us no lightning. It might not rain there at all.

It's not simple
It's rusted nails breaking skin
Lightning flashes in a hurricane
The crack of a body hitting the pavement

It's the pinch of nails in your palms
The tremble of your legs when you think they're watching
The ache in your chest when your binding is too tight
But not tight enough

It's not a stormcloud, it's a typhoon
It's not a discomfort, it's torment
Its the steel beams in your chest snapping under pressure
Your skeleton crumbling so maybe your chest will be flat then

But all those rusted nails and steel beams
Heated by the fire and fury of passion
Remold into something new

Someone who can stand a bit straighter
Speak louder
Tip their chin up
And show the world who they are
Who he is.

Dysphoria is a skyscraper crumbling to ash
But it's also scraps of wreckage
Reminded into a safe haven
A place of rest
A place of comfort

Transformation.
To be transformed.
Seed to flower.
Child to adult.
Caterpillar to butterfly.

A wave can turn to a hurricane,
a flame to a wildfire,
a stormcloud to a tornado.
It looms,
it darkens the sky,
it frightens.

But does not the shore dry,
the forest fizzle out?
The sun sneaks out behind a seemingly never-ending stream
of darkness and devastation.

So, too, do we transform.

A boy became a man,
but not before
he was absorbed
by darkness.
Only thereafter
could he seek out the sun.

Peace comes after war,
recovery after illness,
healing after injury...

This transformation,
it is greater,
more magnanimous
because, too,
that process,
that search,
journey,
his darkness...
it stretched on for what he presumed was his
                                                                                eternity.

He was scared.
He was alone.
And then,
he triumphed;
he needed no one.

And then,
out flew a newly
transformed
him.
Out to the world,
new world,
brighter world,
out he came...

a butterfly.

From the moment of my exsistence
gravity bound me to low lands. Holding me firmly
under a sun with no mercy
to the thirsty earth.
I prayed to my Beloved for rain

From the miracle of our encounter
Love swept me above the drought Our bodies
collidng, tasting like thunder
ecstasy drenching the parched dirt
I pray to my Beloved to rain

what’s your favorite kind of flower?
mine’s a forget-me-not,
a fear settled deep in my chest
that remembering me might
not be for the best,
a knot in my stomach formed
from your stormcloud eyes
like summer skies.
like forget-me-nots.
loyalty and long-lasting
and pleading to remember me, forgetting.
december makes me forget sunny weather.
i think i’m kind of
in love with the sound of your voice,
and your smile,
which is dangerous because smiles
are always going to be the
worst kind of weakness.
i hope they don’t forget me.
i hope you don’t forget me.
i’ll send you bouquets of words i never said
of texts i never sent:
yellow acacias and yellow tulips and blue forget-me-nots
(secret and hopeless and true loves);
angelica and amethyst and flowering almond
(inspiration and admiration and hope);
red columbine because you
leave me anxious, trembling;
white camellia japonica because
your loveliness
is perfected.
send me red carnations
(yes and yes and yes)
with unwritten handwritten answers
(yes and yes and yes).

thunder is your favorite sound
and thunder is what cracked
in our stormcloud lungs
and our pulses
and the brushing of fingers
like lightning rods,
hoping one too many
would be enough to strike us.

petrichor is my favorite smell
and so we're suited to the dark grey
when it looms o'erhead;
every rippling echo an invitation
to be the next rock thrown into the sky --
rain breaks the seal, and immediately
there's no other option than
to be intoxicated with the scent of renewal.

Timeless rain, come carelessly, come
scour the furrows in the land.
You are most cathartic for the sky
and drop from fumbling hands.

Drumroll, drumroll - smiling, insist
yourself in grass and wood and fences
marked as Private. You are young snow
but with ambition. A stormcloud’s
in my head and you should know that
the world is drenched and wailing.

Tomorrow is a shattered mirror,
blinking at me, showing the sun's teeth,
as though fending off starving stray cats.
There was no sun today,
I worked while it slept below
its sheets made of the empty fields
that lie east of my home.
Dereliction, undiluted, joins ranks with the
birds who have forgotten winter is coming.
Blotches of paint on stormcloud canvas,
like Jackson ******* began painting the October sky
and gave up after three or four flails of his
glorified, dripping brush.
Although there is a reflection here,
it is a dream now. The details have been
misplaced, and we can only recall major
landmarks and plot twists.
The surface, however, looks the same
as it always has,
and will go on doing so,
through the death of tomorrow, and her child.

that one unfinished bird metaphor
     Wear me like a birdskull necklace.
     Grind my hollow bones into sugar for your coffee.
     Pluck my feathers plume by plume to make pens for your washed-out poetry.


math note lines
     1. I SWALLOWED EVERY PIECE OF GLASS THAT REMAINED FROM YOUR SHATTERED REFLECTION. *******.
     2. WEDGE RAZOR BLADES BETWEEN YOUR TEETH AND SINK THEM INTO ME. TAKE EVERY LAST BREATH FROM ME. COLLAPSE MY LUNGS AND RIP OUT MY TONGUE. LEAVE ME WHERE YOU FOUND ME, VOMITING INTO THE KITCHEN SINK LIKE IT’S NOTHING, SHOULDERS HEAVING. I’VE BEEN PUTTING OFF THIS 3RD PARTY SUICIDE BUT IT ALL COMES CRASHING DOWN TONIGHT. KISS MY HEART GOODBYE.
     3. BREAK YOUR JAW BITING BULLETS LIKE YOU’RE TRIGGER HAPPY. I NEVER ASKED FOR ANY OF THIS BUT HERE WE ARE, STANDING ON THE CLIFF WITH NO COMMON GROUND BETWEEN US. IS THAT WHY YOU JUMPED SHIP? YOU COULDN’T HANDLE IT? I WASN’T BULLETPROOF ENOUGH FOR YOU, AND YOU WERE JUST TOO MUCH.

blinker
     my mom uses her turn signal like an afterthought
     it’s pointless at that point but that’s conditioning
     and her train of thought has always been linear


ugh
     when i was 15 i asked my mom to start taking me to therapy
     she said baby why pay a stranger when you can just talk to me about anything
     and i smiled like i wasn’t dying inside and started writing poetry.
     funerals cost less than student loans
     at this rate when i graduate i won’t be able to afford myself a home
     the american dream has been dead for a century
     a degree is worthless and it’s not likely i’ll make much of a salary
     have you even imagined yourself outside of high school yet?
     i’ve never thought about my life past my graduation date

thinking about someone
     sing serenades through silent car radios like static
     through sleepy stormcloud eyes that could swallow you whole
     he’s got a smile with more stars than yours ever did
     wishbone collarbones and long eyelashes
     stringing together dreams in constellations
     piecing together fractured calculus equations

i’ve been reading pete wentz’s old livejournal posts again*
     you’re apocalyptic chemistry, a candycane of all the things i never was and never could be to keep you stable. i’m a broken spine and you’re fading. love is hard to quantify so i’ll just keep counting and catching fireflies.

Numb
As I mumble a quiet,
"Hello."

My eyes drift away
My mind too
That day

The beating figure
My chest holds
No heart here

This ****** mess
Could never be a heart
Not again.

Broken
The Hate
Slides down my cheeks

At the corner of my eye
Like a stormcloud
My tears rain

The swell when I swallow
I cough
I hack

I need a reason
The reason
You're there and I'm here

So far away.

Your morning breath drips as honeysuckle into tea –
I drink it, refreshing. There are days
where I can nearly see the heart in your chest like a Valentine’s Day
card and you are not just flesh and bones when we touch.
You are full the same way my scalp is a street of
gold streaks. Our love was once not more
than a **** planted in a coffee can, now there are roses
whose thorns lead a trail back to the day we first met under umbrellas
and dewdrops slightly sweeter than rain. I catch all humidity
as if I were a cloud – stormcloud, suncloud, so rich
with your every season I could boil it in kettles and make steam.

It weighs heavy on you
Even when you've never spoken before
And when they pass through the distance
Like a radiowave, or a stormcloud
And to see how many rivers snake to their final shake
That drips off like morning dew in the middle of the night

Would I be missed that much?

sugar i
am carried on lofty currents,
days like this. days
evaporating, caught in
tumult. hands, caught between
bricks. banks of
simmering stormcloud.
outside, in the throes of
daisy-speckled fields, i
am found with the taste
of your syllables tucked
just behind the lip. thought
convolving, shifting dot,
position, tangent; no simple
question. just combination:
these speckles i know, the
silhouette of
your face in
each blink. the
warmth of this soft hum, when
i sing, to the world, of your
radiant heart.

lightning, bright as the sun
etched on eye, and mind
shaking with the thunder
rendered, deaf and blind

clouds, passing on
to the beat of striking shards
and ears, listening fond
as the storm's bright music starts

the darkness always passes
it's always been this way
storms and gales revealing
a newer, brighter day

so sitting on my roof
I sigh and blink, in time
I will no longer be aloof
because in a stormcloud, there is rhyme.

old man with stormcloud hair
eyes indistinguishable from
an unseasonable sky
and I wonder
if perhaps he's blind.

I forget where I forgot you...
That place is a ghost land,
it's a dreamscape,
it's a netherworld,
where Styx was our path
and death was our guide
for into life we emerged
absent of one another.

When I remember that I don't remember you,
there is a gentle flutter of the heart
or the buoyancy of a smile uplifting the balloons of my cheeks
even the pull of earthly forces
a magnetism that I'm sure slams us into walls
across time and space
when we can't escape the force.
I'm forced to regret my shame.
My heart splits apart where glue,
like melting-hot pizza cheese,
can't protect the seams and my memory is suddenly
seamless.

There you are.
Cradled in a vignette.
It's snowing, and I've fallen over.
My friend cackles next to our Quasimodo snowman.
You fear that I am a basket of eggs
sliding toward the precipice
time counts down
you fade
I smile,
and tomorrow
your haunting is a stormcloud
the past comes raining down upon me...

"Good morning folks, it's 97.8FML; look's like we've got repressed memories. Visibility is low. There's a sharp depression chill sweeping over. The tears won't let up; about 70litres today. Better have good wipers, it's looking like a long weekend. And now, we have a word from our sponsors. Kleenex."

The memory surfaced the same way you found me.
Out of the blue, like an angel: of death or of life, I don't know.
Sleeping is harder than catching butterflies.
When I count the sheep, they have your face.
When I think about you, it's a circus.
It's a mixture of laughter and staring into a wall; the occasionally thrown chair at an invisible lion and the whiplash of my dreadful anger.

It doesn't make sense. I last knew you in the time it takes to grow a forest. And here I am. In a thicket of bedlam.

I used to forget that I'd forgotten you.
Now, I can't remember you're not worth the memory.