when God created love he didn't help most
when God created dogs He didn't help dogs
when God created plants that was average
when God created hate we had a standard utility
when God created me He created me
when God created the monkey He was asleep
when He created the giraffe He was drunk
when He created narcotics He was high
and when He created suicide He was low

when He created you lying in bed
He knew what He was doing
He was drunk and He was high
and He created the mountians and the sea and fire at the same time

He made some mistakes
but when He created you lying in bed
He came all over His Blessed Universe.

Everyone I’ve ever talked to has said they’ve held hands with ghosts at one point in time. That’s why it’s so easy for me to tell you, I don’t sleep at night because I’m haunted. Neighborhood kids don’t even come around me no more and if you walk to my door you’ll be so thankful that it’s closed because if the outside looks like hell, you might want a ghosts hand to hold if you want to look in.

When this place first started to feel haunted I didn’t believe it till I walked outside and said to myself, “wow it looks like it too”. Every board holding me up feels like a memory and that broken window looks like a miracle. Something isn’t leaving this ghost heart and it’s the reason I’m barely alive with a barely connected ribcage.

She broke that window. She’s gone now but still around. It’s like she vanished into the ceiling only holding on to white balloons, telling her they were clouds, tricking her and taking her; a chunk out of my heart. I can hear her breathe when I turn my back, it doesn’t scare me I kinda like it. When it’s too quiet I hear her say “boo”. She drops glasses and picture frames reminding me of where I am. Rattle your chains and scream. I believe in you and I believe that this ghost heart is haunted too.

She had this tattoo of closed eyes reminding everyone she’s a dreamer. And when I’m dreaming I’m seeing her. Feelin’ her, the pressure on lips, have you any idea what it’s like? Ghost lips folding over mine? Well, it feels like it wasn’t even there. Though it looked real it’s just something some people still believe in. And I believe in a portrait I hung on my ghost heart because people were forgetting to look for it. As if it never really was there.

I don’t close them but my eyes are starting to play tricks on me. In a wispy white apparitional haze I see you. I abandon the idea of a ghost and just call you pure. But baby the truth is all in this manifestation. You’re the traditional ghost of my hollowed out soul. Necromancy I’ll speak to you. Hear me and if you heart me speak me into the callings of those who are no longer with me. Where are you? You haven’t been lurking within the walls of this house but rather in the veins of a ghost heart. Pumping your face into arteries. Haunting my beats. You follow me like a demon. I’ve never been a man of faith but that word means different things to different people. People need to have faith in the pulses of ghost hearts.  I’m beating although you may not see it. I’m alive and you don’t believe it. I am haunted. By a beautiful ghost who lives in my disgusting ghost heart.

While I drive left-handed
you scratch at the white clouds
drifting out on the growth
of my fingernails, and
rub salient fire down tendons
toward fingers of gnarled roots
and less a hand, than work incarnate-
in essence of character. In lines, in
worried skin and flattened bones:
the misshapen unity of labor in lengthened phalanges.
You speak to me about how getting older means:
you can always remember a better time than now and
about the city of angels who never sleep,
staring open eyed, hazy with intangible halos.
How is mans great struggle now with society and no longer himself?
As the sharp angles of the road drive our skin to tight contact,
I find myself in the air between your breath and sweat slickened palms.

Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The color and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

I have yet to learn
How to relay my swollen
Thoughts in such a small

I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it's not pretty.

it was the first time I'd
realized
that.

My phone lights up and goes dark.
An "X" with your name beside
A missed call.

I return.
You pick up.

Flash:

It's the eighth grade again.
It's 4 am.
I muffle my voice so my parents won't hear us talk
I refuse to hang up until I hear a click from your side
To preserve what I can, savor the moment

Return:

Tonight, we talk.
We discuss what went down on your side of the world this week
And remember old jokes
(your cat is only fatter)

Tonight, you're tired.
You and I both should go to sleep.
We sign off, say our good nights

And I am the first to hang up.
As I was that July, three long years ago.

*People change.

Putting up the red heels,
washing off the blush,
Anna sits,
grabs her phone,
calls me,
"I'm hanging up the gloves."

"What?"

Anna hangs up,
her cellular words
whispering on the wind.

She's going all in,
ambition ******,
picket fence planned.

I fester at the side of the shower,
while laugh tracks burst in the room
through my barricade door.

My world shrinks,
the fever girls find wedding bands
and turn to vapor,
while I wrinkle,
gather dust in the far corners,
and dose nostalgia until
I no longer care to breathe.