I was dying within the skin that would not love me back
The husk of a man
Broken before his eighth birthday
They took even the shoes from his feet even as they gave them
The same they did with their love
Told him it could not be for him
It was not supposed to be this way
Let time change all things
A baptism of a saint
You martyr with the name sinner

When you get to heaven
Ask Icarus of the sun
When I get to heaven
I will tell him
Of the brightest light
I ever knew
I will spin him stories
Of golden thread
And he will wonder
Why he did not instead
Chose to fly
Close to you

You are
The muchness and the madness
I look for the morning
The love I long for in the night
You are the softest star
In the evening sky
You are my guiding light

When you speak
And I listen
Know your words
Are not more beautiful than my thoughts
How desperately I wish to cherish them

Those of us who are human
Will never be free from our thoughts

The creative mind can be strange place
You can create the most captivating beauty
And the darkest monsters imaginable

Who are you
To know my life
Your lips quiver
When you testify
I am a ghost
In my own home now
Yet you are the one
Haunting me
How can we speak
When your language of love
Is syllables
Made of material things
And my only speech touch
Love's evergreen promise
No longer whispers in my ear
Bury peace in me
That the seeds of our forgot me knots
Will one day find fertile soil
Apart from these sands of time
We called love

Would you still
Love the sun the same
If you saw her
Barren of her rays

You are the heat of a fever
Charting course in my veins
Even Icarus in this flight
Never felt the pulse of Apollo like this

Do you hear the wind blowing in the willows
Her moan calling through the trees
She knows no names
Still I know her voice
Oh how bitter her cry
She knows no peace for a hundred years
Like the rings of a stump
I have felt these things too
Oh that we would find comfort
Oh that we could make peace

How sweet to be
The last thing I taste at night
The worm moon will not steal
My dreams of you
I will kiss you again in the morning

I feel fear in my feet
And that is why
I am not grounded

I once begged
God
And the universe
To cling to my mortality
Now I know
To even begin
To know peace
You must give up yourself
Only from nothing
Is something built
After so much time
Do we ever truly disentangle
Do we ever really split
Like the trunks of two oaks
We are wrapped together
Who could tell
Our branches apart
And if one dies
The embrace of love lost
Is held
Until the latter passes too
It would be
My greatest aching
For you to pass
Before we are through

Sadness, like hunger
Always returns

The wolf of yesterday
Coming to feast
On today's warm carcass

I wanted to tell you
Of how I almost died
At the hand of another

But I guess that doesn't hold weight now

Will the roses
I lay on your grave
Wilt
Before they become
Petals in the wind
With my broken promises
Will these stones be skipping
On the shallow waters
When you are gone
And I begin to break

Are you weary of this body yet
My falsehood
Was believing we were even
In belonging to one another
Or to even belong at all
Know if you can love me
I want you to
If such a thing
Is beyond your capabilities
Hold no doubt
That you should be rid of it
Hold not to the grafting of a heart
Over your chest
When your own beats
So steadily in your chest

Take me to the darkness
In the middle of the sea
Drowning is nothing
When you live your whole life free

These words
Are my testament
My everlasting ode
To attempt sanity
Clinging to the edge
Of my mind chasms
I have fallen before
I will do it again
Sending my thoughts out
Only words return
Only words

Sometimes
When you give another
A piece of your mind
Know that you may sacrifice
Your peace of mind

I have loved you
Even in the time we are apart
I know it means nothing

I remember a rainy day
You told me you were hungry
I broke my heart in half
Like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
Cut of the crusts
We sat on the couch in silence
Nibbling away at all the love I had to give

The moon has never said a word
All this time
I wonder if she knows
I dream of her thoughts
How utterly entranced
I am by her beauty

I don't ever want to talk about my poetry
I have already said my words
I put them out there to defend themselves
Stop being so attacking

Figure it out, make up your own mind
I don't care what you think
They left my heart through my fingers
And not a word is meant to be opened

You use them like daggers
And turn them against me
Like a suicide I was killed with them
And it makes me want to hide

I hate admit it
But the balance of wisdom
Is off without your gentle touch

The sky
Is soft pink tonight
As the sun slowly sets
*
It reminds me of you

Tell me if you love me
And I'll tell you if I care

Sick of wearing my heart on my sleeve
For those who are never truly there

How beautiful it was to know you
And now it is what I cannot forget

We cannot truly break
If we were never whole
Nothing the innocence of angels
Or resolution of devils ever stole
As much as I try
I cannot measure out the days
We began our splitting
I thought if we ever broke
It would be an axe chopping
Straight through the trunk
Yet I did not notice when
Our roots
That had dug themselves
So deep in the soil
Began wilting
We are knowing strangers
Empty shadow
Bitter ghosts
Wandering around
The house bones of our past
Do you feel the winds here
Does it send shivers down
What you remember
To be a spine
I shouldn't of waited
Until the twelfth hour to pray
If I wrote all the words I could find
I would still be rendered speechless
And that is why
Your name is the only thing in my mouth

We know
We are only loved
If we are known
And that is why
We cannot bear
To be forgotten

You asked for forgiveness. Forgiveness...
...and I said I withhold nothing from you, not even this.
Yet still, I do not hold my grudges or my feelings against you for those are mine and mine alone; I hold only you accountable for your actions for they are yours as foolish as they be.

I hate anger
It was once so familiar to me
A crackling flame under my skin
Close to the surface
Now I am soft
Against harsh hardened hearts
Vain hopes
And the pitiful work of my hands
I pray for gentle souls
To work their light across acres
Where only concrete highways
Have paved their way
Built on a foundation of self preservation
I will not live forever
Maybe not even many years
You knew me
Came closer
Than I ever let anyone get
That’s the scary part
Pieces of myself I showed you
The aching hurting rejected pieces
Parts I put in the rooms of my mind
And shut the door on
Even to let myself in
Every time my thoughts
Try to wander in there
I remind them
That isn’t allowed
Those aren’t safe places
We aren’t ready
To face those demons again
Who knows if we ever will be
I hate these parts of myself
The red tape thoughts
I would burn them if I could
If they would light
But I can’t put my own body in flames
Whisper soft prayers
Against smoke meandering towards heaven
These thoughts will not remember me
I never knew them
Yet here I am match in hand
You my tinder
If only my mind would bend itself
Against the plight of the wind
She more sturdy than I
Maybe her voice a bit louder
A bit faster to the retort
I mumble over my words
The thickness of my tongue
Inconsistent in my mouth
I am no liar
But these words are white
I turn them over charcoal
Spit them out red
They mean nothing either way
Why waste my time
On the taste of passing sins
Will I look myself in the mirror in the morning
The eloquence of a bottle of wine
Passing from my speech
Sober eyes stare back at me
I have nothing to do with them
They are my own
I am my own fool
Screaming of my qualms
In the cobblestone square
And no one will understand me
I do not even listen to myself
I need help
But have no humility to ask
You would be to close to me
If you knew me
To far from sanity
Soft to you
Hard and harsh against myself
I can forgive the world of her wrongs
Hold myself accountable
As a martyr on the hill
For even one solitary sin of my head
My hands have not yet been burdened of
I ache for loneliness
If you can’t hear me
You can’t hurt me
I won’t let myself see you again
Because the hardness of my solitude
Is a feather in the grass
Against the stone fortress of your face
I am a fool among my own wisdom
A clown painting myself
With the oils of your hands
Nothing was real
Only the hairs on your head
Collecting in my shower drain
Soft skin in my sheets
Your lies weaving themselves
Through the splitting skin of my hands
I ache
You know nothing of guilt
All to much of me
I can’t believe I let you touch me
The soft parts I don’t like
Let you see the dark clouds
Behind the blue sky of my eyes
Nothing is real anymore
Except this small ache
In the left atrium of my heart
The ventricles talk back
Promising everything will be okay
There’s no way we could have know
I can’t sleep
I am tired
My eyes almost as heavy as my heart
Let me go
No, it’s the other way around
I’m letting you go
The bird in a cage
Migrating south
On the direction of it’s hollow bones
Should I start building my walls again
They served me well before
But then the light doesn’t get in
And I am afraid of the dark
Terrified you may fill it again
I already let you occupy enough of my head
If you could drown in your thoughts
I would be out in deeper waters
Than I know how to swim in
My shores are sunk
And my white flag
I may raise it
I may burn it
I may pray
If God remembers my voice
Ask him to come down
Take me home
Water washes away nothing
I am empty again
A small droplet of hope
That I will begin to fill
Tell me why
I am not yet broken
Against all the storms I weather
There is more to come
You are no good for me
No good
I knew this would come
I didn’t expect it to be so hard
I have been wrong before
Never so blind
My eyes will open again
May the sun on the horizon
Guide me to greener pastures
Where the dust of the stars
Falls untainted
On the ground
Of the Garden of Eden

What an unbelievably heavy burden
To be human
A dead man's bones
Made music today
When the wind blew through them
How soft the song
Of a relinquished soul
You crucified the god of ego death
On a paper cross
Heavily ink stained
With the tome of your plight
So harshly blatant your motives
Time is falling
We too slip
Knowing nothing of humanity's ache
My soul has abandoned me today
I am weightless
Unanchored
To a realm that holds no bonds
To the flightless bliss of my bones
When you see God
Then you will know
You have gone to far

Drifting apart
Makes it harder to hold you
Here we are
Where are the stars
I see you
As you are
One with the dark
Does the world
Ever change
Or are weeds
Growing between
Cracks in the concrete
Beg for mercy or martyr
The devil has more than two horns
One for each of thorns
On my crown
Here we wait
For the sky to fall
Paying out of pocket
To dye slowly
Waiting for dead fields
To make music
Where is your heartbeat
Here in my veins
Pulsing melody
A secret song
My remedy

My throat narrows
Vision tunnels
At the sight of you

I am flightless
Beneath the sky
At the mercy
Of a breaking dawn

Have I always been
Shallow waters
Against your ocean trenches
We will go out
With the tide

The smooth rocks
Upon the shore
Will murmur
Of our devotion

Until they too are sand

The troubles you said
Were below sea level
Are eye level for me

I do not hold
The healing of time
As an absolute truth
It is the echoes of trauma
That still ring
So steadily in my ears
The beginning of my undoing
Is awakening again
It is not in my nature
To give up
Yet I am nearly gone

Somehow
It feel wrong
To even write about you

I'm sorry for that too
For everything

For judging you
For not listening
For breaking you
Over and over

I have been
So unbelievably blind

I guess this is what happens
When the blind lead the broken

I remember once
I told you
I would not have known
Love or healing
If it was not for you
And now it seems
I will give up both
For an eternal ache
I can't say I don't deserve it

You were always better than me
Kinder
More honest
It seems this will continue
You're better without me
Wether or not I like it
You're better without me

If I asked you nicely,
Would you break my heart

Even now
After you are no longer found
In the physical of my life
I still feel your hands
Around my throat
And covering my lips
I will bite your palm again and again
Favoring the taste of blood
Over that of silence

Tremble against the strings
Row against the rage
Sleep against the grain
Know when time ends
We are not even stars
Not even sand
Only human, only sin
Bear me not your faults
As I am relinquished
Of soul and stamina

I suppose one day when I walk into a room and the lights don't turn on
I'll know I'm a ghost then
Now my only proof I have is my cold hands and faded presence