My greatest struggle of humanity is this;
That we must wage our minds against what they are unwilling to relinquish. Where we go, the mind leads and all the unredeemed will follow.

in the matters of what I have done
no other holds higher guilt

in the matters of love and trust
forgive me until I am barren of innocence

Do you change shape to
Slipping through these days
Liquid dreamer
Faulty against lines in the sand
You have eight faces on a round head
Only irony would permit
Octagon facets of your expression
To reflect one another
If the earth could talk
Oh the stories she would spew
Perhaps she is the only true triumphant
Yet we press against her
Resisting the way she would show us
All the love she has given
Yet, race to the moon
Love to the blue stars in the black skies
Will we tarnish them too
When we reach where their light touches
Paying no respects, giving no courtesy
To light beyond our own
We are never satisfied, never happy
With where we are
We hate the journey, fear the end
Desire to burn so bright
Pushing the super in supernova past our thermosphere
When no one in this solar system cares
And as if any creature, animal, or vegetable
In the next solar system can see your flares
When nothing matters
What do you do
How will you burn
When the exosphere will one day pull to earth
Every atom we are composed of splits
Phosphate and nitrogen sin against each other
As if it was their first day in the garden
Knowing, time is our only true forbidden fruit

you are green now
changing color, healing
I am not the same
won't say I've changed
we named each other once
I think I am finding my light again
I pray you are not heavy hearted

My constant
    Is filling the space
              Over the edge

Right before it clicks that I should be afraid I am falling

Where do the gentle go
When they are weary
I have been here far too long

Because nature was divided in two
Each piece seeks the other half

All along the completeness was within me
My pieces are wolves, and
so the restlessness is my equilibrium

Who am I to say that I'm alive
I felt close to death before
Pulled nearer and nearer
I have slipped away since then
Fear for the end, and
Reality of life
May charge their forces
With no avail against me
What will sway me
When I have seen the end
And made a new beginning

Who do memories belong to?

Besides, they are never the same.
From day to day or eye to eye.

The spoon-colored light of the stars bright
Against the lacking of moon
Your cotton ball words soaking
Every lazy river thought in my head

This is the love they spoke of
In the books of the bible
On the walls in the bathroom
In hushed ancient whispers
Carried on the sands of time

Why do you choose to know me now
Turn my leather-bound pages

I have always felt love
Was a delicate thing
How can I abandon my strength
For man or weakness

Will you write my memories
In a bold font
Curate my remembrance of you
Sweet as the honey it is

When I opened my eyes
I saw fire in you
You were made of glass

Have I been sleeping this eternity away
Looking for good in glass people
To know it burns within me

We were nothing before this
Your soul lost in something other than space
Did you know you would have to make purpose here
Find meaning

I do not know of your age
I have been practicing immortality
As long as I have been alive

It's all questions and lies
Pain and goodbye
Bittersweet flavor always stays
In the pockets of my mouth

Do you ever take a break from aging
Letting the child within fill the space
This is their home too
Before you
And whatever you call advanced consciousness

Can you in honesty call it advanced
If joy has not lingered
With the accumulation of wisdom
Perhaps we have learned nothing at all

I feed neither of my wolves
Let them hunt if they hunger

July 28, 2021
For so long I have felt like I am falling asleep.

October 5, 2021, 10:54
Have I been such a stranger to peace my whole life that when she comes to settle, I do not know her face?

Feast on my emptiness
Then neither of us will be satiated

Endings are as neutral as change in the weather

Winter always comes around eventually

You can see bruises
Ripening on my apple skin

I don't want you to recognize them
If you placed your palms against them
Would they fit like key-in-lock

We all have our own unique fingerprints
Mine are frost bitten

Do not betray the love of a broken heart
Where will it go when you break it

I want to stab a ball point pen into the soft part of my wrist
Pull it upwards through my arm until it hits the shoulder
I feel the urge
The need to let something out
I want to feel open

When you are on the shore
The water seems to go on forever

Knowledge is the great plunderer of youth
Intuition was a better friend
She knew before she was told
Have you never felt fire of life in your belly
Glass stars in your fingertips

Immaturity lacks discretion
Here we are silent, void of words
This truly is enough
If you let it be

These men are ghosts
Repossessing my body

You fit religion into my mouth like a metal fillings
Before my tongue even learned the curvature of my own name
My thoughts hold no inkling apart from that which you bound to me
Such as I am empty
Fill me up, with no doubt for my cracks and chips
I am a humble vessel

If my body is a temple
As those who worship
The god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob profess
Then there is blood on the walls
If it is a temple
Who is it devoted to
Who will be the sacrificial lamb

I cannot be both temple and offering

You grow inside out
Out growing your skin
Like a snake sheds its corn husk past life

I outgrew myself
My passions, honesty and hope
Like a bomb in a building counts down to ten fastest
And is in an instant expired

When we are older
We will age like weeds in flower boxes on the third story
We will taste the rain before the surface of the earth
And we will dry out from the touch of the sun
Remembering how gently we craved for shade

The weight of time gets heavier if you let it
Said I love you, don't know if I meant it
I wait in the soil, like fresh turned grass
Holding my breath, hoping this will pass
Each passing moment is worse
But nothing truly hurts
I've heard your body does not remember pain
That it forgets it as quickly as it passed
If it is not pain then how do I know you
How do I remember
More than that, how do I let go

You say sleep when we're dead
I'm tired now

i. you to explain your anger

ii. you to slip slivers of ice
between the stacking of my spine
so that when I shiver it feels like an icicle shattering

iii. my tongue to remember your name so well, but unable to speak it for fear that it would be a potent spell and conjure out of the air

iv. you to tell me I'm pretty as if I didn't not already know

v. you to hold the gold of my heart as the highest currency, a debt paid against myself with every act of true self or kindness

vi. you to linger here like the taste of licorice and tobacco

What secrets does the carcass of summer divulge
None greater than the barren skeleton of trees can disguise

The magic in the trees is aging
Though differently than I

I find no comfort
In the muteness of my thoughts
Silence goes before me
Bringing nothing back
Are my words
No longer my own
Soft at a fresh day
With not a single light shone

here we are again
face to sky
with a full wolf moon

i don't know this road
the journey all to familiar
as the grains of sand under your nails
after a day clawing at the ocean

do you hear the depths roar
or does she whisper to you
i faintly remember her voice

when i am high in the mountains
call out to me
like i wish you would

i have only now
learned of my brokenness
i have only now learned
of things beyond my knowledge

how many times
must i admit my fault
how many times
must i pull my foot
out of my mouth
i do not relish the taste of soil
you know i am a foolish fool
i cannot speak for you bitterness

my truth is different now
though unlived, uncovered, unbound
all but unrelinquished

i am swept under the rug of your past life
the splinters of the floor flaking away from the boards
we too will turn to dust

I thought
When my body went out to the forest
It would become one with the soil
Rotting and rotting
Decomposing every ache and blunder it has ever held
Intricately blended into Earth's webbing
Finally, I am soft

You told me once
Of when you prayed for bread
Acid rain came down that day
I then learned of reality

If I go into the woods tonight
Will I smell another mans smoke
Or am I so greatly delusioned
To truly believe I am alone

These monsters come and go
My chest a revolving door
A heart hotel
A coffin of nightmares

Angels speak, I do not listen
Prayers quiver in the morning air
I am not there
Not patient enough to wait

Scars on my back spread
Along my limbs
Vines growing on a brick wall
Neither of us will ever find heaven

I never shut up about the moon
She's always there
How I do love her company
When I'm making myself out to be lonely

Is it wrong to assume
Stars are another worlds
Parking lot lights
I don't have all the answers

I find no humor
In the irony of doing what's right
As we go along
I find I was betraying my future

When will I learn
Trying to love this way
Is like trying to dance
With a broken leg

Even after I pass
I will not of told
All the stories in me
They are in bones

I call you foolish mortals
Take it as praise
I will not even name my self
There is great folly in wisdom

If only happiness
Was as aggressive
As the pain
I hold space for

Bury me shallow
In the autumn floor
I hold myself no greater
That the earth

I cry out under the heavens
The veil is thinning
How do you deny
The pulse of the spirit world

Know me now
But not my name
She is the secret whisper
In the thickest of your veins

Maybe once we would have lived
Thriving on the chaos
Hand fed to us by the universe
We were foolish then

Someday wisdom will come to us
We will not know her face
Fair chance she is already among us
Thinly veiled

Do you remember
The first time you smoked
The way it stopped in your throat
How it brought your stomach up

Know when I think of you
It is the same for me
You are a bitter tar taste
I light you up again

Only to spit you out
You coat my tongue
The inside of my cheeks
With your black smoke veil

I asked for depth
You delivered
I cannot back out now
There is no where but up

Those in the dark
Beg for light
Those in the shadow
Wish to stay hidden

I am the ***** sinner
In the bathroom
Trying to scrub myself clean
Of smoke and saints

I was warned
The path of the traveler
For those with thick soles and thicker skin
Thick souls and thinner whims

I set out like a dead man on a quest
Like a fool
With my best foot forward
Not knowing which was is South

You prayed me greener pastures
I just prayed for you
Here we are
Hollow promises, hearty prayers

We ache for what we had
Knowing fruit in the sun
To quickly turns bad
Sour sugar in the soil

Deep calls to deep
Do you truly not hear me
I have been silent for so long
Drifting apart
We ran parallel once
Thin white lines on the horizon
We burned out like space junk
Not shooting stars
Or candle flames or time
It seems we hold nothing forever
Whatever passes through
Our empty hands try to grasp
Seems so permanent
Are we this disillusioned
Perhaps it was just water
Perhaps we never held love for each other
Perhaps it was currents pulling us along
Perhaps we knew it would end
Because there was no true substance
Perhaps we called out to the depths
They answered us with the sound of our own name
And we were much too afraid to hear it
Let me go, we are above this, it has gone out with the height of the tide

You were not meant to carry my burdens
Though if you knew of them you so scarcely gave it second thought before stacking them on your shoulders
You were not meant for this weight
Were you not told
Even Angel's long to look into these things
They have wings
Bird's have hollow bones
You and I are heavy and full and soft
Or we were before
Now we are separate
And not the same

You called it grief
I will not name it differently

we are both lost
so comfortable with losing
now as the world spins
in the same direction as before
our paper ambitions
turn themselves inside out
passing like aging stars
burning across the sky
I know a brighter fire
burns in you
I placed it there
before we even thought
of the beginning of time
before amens whispered
on the backs of prayers
when heavens womb
was full of hope
before we gave up
all the glimmering shadows
that slipped through our souls
like water through a child's cupped hands
the ways of the world
brought me to this ledge
you will push me
to remind me of my myself
of my loving for flying
the promise of gravity
and the certainty of an end

Look at me when you say goodbye
Not the red-fire approaching end
This was just a dream
Now you are my memory of love

Here I am doing both
Living and writing
Healing and grieving
The multidimensional complexity that life holds
All wrapped up in the swirls if my palms
My body holds so much time
Lived out
Not every scar is sad
My white lines like the layers of a tree
You can see the growth

Do you remember the bygone seasons
When I was winter
When you were spring

Are you budding again
Like awakened trees
Are you opening your eyes
To sunlight melting the freeze

My words have gone asleep and away
We each buried our dead
Stacked the rocks
Mourned, grieved
I felt for you, maybe not the right things
I hope you are gentle on yourself again
We both know I could forgive anyone's harshness but my own

You paint me as the wild one
So you can be the calmest man in the room
Calling yourself natural sunshine
So I can be portrayed as gloom

We are quite dark in the middle
That is where I go

There are words I hold in
Drafts rooted in the stumps of my fingertips
That may never branch into trees

Separate your things from mine
We'll leave the rest behind
Only you and I understand
It is strange to live in this world
Imagine if we were truly free
Floating through galaxies
As little dandelion fuzz
How small we seem
To ancient skies
I fear when new horizons dawn
We will not remember
Much of anything we forgot
Our hands cupping memory like water
When we pass on, maybe through, perhaps up
Your memory will abandon you
But know you had my love

When I am in deeper waters
You can swim my body back to shore
Know my spirit is still treading
In the depths

Try as you might
You will not bleed me dry
Not of my love

There is only what we know as forward

Endings are as nuetral as change in the weather

Take my breaths
Like the last arrow in the quiver
Look to the moon
All she is, a sliver
These tears you cry
Swelling up like a river
Cold anger in your face
Like a hollow shiver
The chasm is wide
I dare you to bridge her
Walk another man's shoes
Life isn't lived here