Dearest,

This thing is claiming me again. I write only to express a great need to see you, or call you, or maybe even crank up the engine of this beat up junker I'm sitting in now. I'd very much like to see you again, or once more, even if it were just your eyes. It's been three years. Three years since I last heard your voice, or laugh, or saw you smile. ****, do I miss that smile. It's been three years since you left without a decent goodbye, you ***. You never had a ******* clue - but, anyway. That's not why I'm here.

I was thinking of you today, as I have every single one before and will continue to until my breathing ceases. Did you know it's the anniversary of when I realized I was hopelessly in love with you? Of course you don't. I never told you about that moment, or how I really felt. I swore I might, before you were gone, but it's been three years and I never did. So that's that, I guess. This is such a waste, writing to you. Yet here I am, painstakingly scrawling these thoughts whirling around in my brain on to a sheet of loose leaf paper. The best part is knowing I'll never send this to you. This is going to sit here in my pocket until I wash it, or burn it when I'm searching for the cigarettes I don't smoke, or even lose it on my walk through the city.

I walk every day, and not just to and from places. I walk to think. I walk to clear my head. Instead, I will pass somewhere you've been -- somewhere we've been -- and I will be right where I started again, plagued by the ghost of you on every new corner, in the middle of the crowds, and at the foot of the subway stairs. You are everywhere, darling.

You'd be laughing at this point, probably. You'd be thinking that I ramble like I used to and still don't manage to say enough to ever convince you that I'm true. Or maybe you'd be thinking how wasteful this is to this sheet of paper. How unfair that this piece of paper gets to carry this nonsensical message to you -- or not, actually -- and how unfair that it gets to sit in my pocket, close enough to be lost. Or maybe you wouldn't think that at all, and you'd be just blankly reading all of this and wondering whether I'm just bullshitting around the truth, like I've always done oh-so-well.

Or maybe you'd just be thinking that this is so typical of me, keeping things I'll never do anything with for the sake of keeping them. You always thought I liked the act of keeping things rather than the things themselves. Perhaps you're right, because I've always wished I could both keep you and be rid of you and the toxicity you bring.

But at the end of the day, I'm the one writing you. Maybe my feelings learn towards the former of those two extremes.

Anyway, you would have been right about the bullshitting thing. I'm really writing because the emptiness is back, eating me out and wringing my guts inside out, and it isn't even pleasurable. I wrote because I haven't done so in some time, and it's been a long time since I wrote one of these one-sided letters to you. I used to write more; I used to have dozens, even, though I never wrote those on loose leaf paper in an old junker, heat off in the middle of winter. Really, I'm freezing right now. This is ridiculous. And I've got to stop bullshitting to you, I do.

You know, I can almost hear you responding to this. I can hear your voice somewhere in the back of my mind, answering me. And maybe that makes me more insane than I ever was. Maybe this hollowed out body has finally been done in, and I'm just beginning my descent into the clutches of insanity... or maybe I just can't tell you the truth.  You know me well, you do.

The truth is that I ******* miss you so much, it hurts to breathe. It physically causes my chest to ache, for pain to shoot through my entire body with each pump of my heart. Unfortunately, my heart is beating ceaselessly and my breathing has yet to stop by choice, so it hurts every day, every single second. I am always missing you. There is no other truth but that.

I think that, by allowing myself to write this, I'm hoping this idea of you can save me. I know already that this is the dumbest thing I've let myself hope for, more stupid than letting myself hope for you and for change and for happiness. The point is, letting myself do this at all is stupid, But I can't stop myself. You are worse than any drug I've ever known, and I pity those whose lives you have touched only because I know what it's like to be cut off from you. God forbid you leave them, someday, and they end up like me. Or a few shades less crazy than me.

I haven't even eaten because of this emptiness. I can't eat, actually. If I feed the monster, it erupts and soaks me with self hatred. I'm afraid of it. I'm afraid to do anything to infuriate it, and it's always angry. It's always whispering to me, sexily and sweet, asking me to do things that are so wrong. I'm not listening, and I'm staying clean, but it's hard, dearest. It's so hard when you've got nothing to cling to, nothing to even dream about hoping for.

This emptiness takes and takes, and it does not give back anything but empty caverns and the memory of what it was to feel. It takes everything I've got and it dumps it on the ground, spreads it around and sullies it. And when it's tattered and worn and filthy and unrecognizable, it crumbles it between its fingers like it's nothing but ash. I hate this behemoth more than I hate living through it. It's never-ending, the terrors it brings, and it pounds against me when I trap it away. It is invincible though, and it will always win. It's invincible in the way I believed we once had been, a long time in the past. Like us, I am not as invincible as I dreamed.

I'm sorry if I've worried you. I didn't mean to tell you, not truly. But now that the words are out, I seem to be a bit less empty than I was. Maybe I'll find my way out of this... maybe. I hope you are well, and smiling, and the world treats you kindly. I hope the night sky is beautiful where you are, and the lights glimmer in the distance exactly as you've imagined them. You deserve it a thousand times over me.

-A.C.

I wish for you at 9 pm when the bars begin to swell
My voice is hoarse from the cigarettes and wishing at the well
I find you there at midnight by the metro station and Liberty Bell
My legs are strong from sprinting from Bethlehem to hell

I taste you in the morning when you have not come to keep
My lips so sore from kissing company in my sleep
I leave you in the afternoon when you wander but do not seek
My heart is breathless from chasing you down these empty streets

You touch me in the sunrise as daylight falls across this room
Your lips are weak from biting in the cover of the moon
You betray me in the evening, for the evening begins too soon
Your hands are wrecked from calculating the days until we are doomed

You adore me in the city’s spring your smile open wide
Your arms are stretched out beckoning across the horizon and skyline
You waste your honesty as autumn sullies the joy of the 8th avenue line
Your eyes are heavy with insomnia as surely as this pain is mine

I called for you in the dark hours of the early morning that echoed endlessly
My cheeks were flushed in blush and the anxiousness of eternity
I met you at the boulder behind the stone wall where we once shared insanity
My lungs could breathe little but smoke and uncertainty

You met your Juliet that month somewhere in the chill and dark
Your mind was at ease from pursuit if only life was such a simple arc
You drifted upon the waves of confusion for a time while we made each other art
Your stomach hurt from the flowers you ate in the Eden of the park

I awoke you from your slumber to all that exists in the break of war
My ears were picking up radio waves from the allies at the shore
I took you back to the pillow you craved, though it was a different chore
My veins were amplified by ******* and love is such a bore

I waited for you in August, spread across your linen sheets
Our eyes are locked on the calendar counting the days to our defeat
I betrayed my post in October too offender now to do ought but retreat
Our whispers never ventured past the barricade we built in our release

We vanished as January bathed the world in frost and splendor
Our songs were over played and our words lacked the potency of forever
We wrote letters unsent in scribbled ink that would always remain returned to the sender
Our handwriting had been illegible since September

We spared one another the grace of good-byes and false promises
Our teeth were sharpened for fresh bars and unknown kisses
We would wander sometimes through the haunts where we used to feel delicious
Our memories aching with the scent of a memory that will never miss us

Little dull birdies  .  .  .
Love own songs by mirror pond,
  .  .  .  Graceful swan sails by.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Rube lords with simple vainness,                                                        ­­              
Watch him crown himself.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Day sullies night, bright vanity
  .  .  .  Rube is a poser.


Hello poetry  .  .  .
Even vain rube's bio drains,
Spews self promotion.


Here is Pantheon  .  .  .
Dabblers, self aggrandizers,
  .  .  .  What a hollow hall.

1.
My mother hates me!
My father hates me!
Oedipus screams to the
stealthily silent Sphinx.

He scatters riddles like laurel leaves
waiting to be braided into
a playwright's crown. It is too
grandiose to fit his cracked. cramped cranium.

His unconscious mind flies open
like the Sphinx rocketing to the sky.
Sacred haunches soar. Wings beat
steadily to reach titanic heights.

Blind to his murderous fate, Oedipus
cannot know himself. Before the
Delphic Oracle, his life shrivels,  
unexamined by his bleeding eyes.

2.
Freud exults in triumph.
Maternal love births eternal love:
endless comfort and affection
for the newly bloomed beloved.

Soon, comfort metamorphoses
into feral eros, unspeakable, unthinkable,
beyond the bounds of catastrophic evil.
Submerged desire sullies the chastest kiss.

Jacosta embraces her son
as her new living king, her husband's
royal blood bubbling brazenly
on the bitter road to Thebes.

His hands stained, Oedipus strives
to transmute his trauma as our own.
We become him when Freud deigns
to interpret our darkest, direst dreams.

Blindly, we mimic him: carnal union
with the mother, lethal rage against
the father. Mourning Becomes Electra
beckons to the wary second ***.

3.
The Sphinx belies its own riddle:
How can prophecy spring from
the sculpted, smooth stone
of these perfect *******?

Only blind Teiresias plumbs the depths
of Oedipus' fate: Judgement lies blinded,
action lies blinded by the ventricles of
violence, the twisted telos of the mind.

Humans sin against the world, against
nature, siphoned of joy. They sin without
a sacred perch to rise from. Blood and *****,
mud and blindness fashion their Oedipal souls.

Little dull birdies  .  .  .
Love own songs by mirror pond,
  .  .  .  Graceful swan sails by.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Rube lords with simple vainness,                                                        ­              
Watch him crown himself.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Day sullies night, bright vanity
  .  .  .  Rube is a poser.


Hello poetry  .  .  .
Even vain rube's bio drains,
Spews self promotion.


Here is Pantheon  .  .  .
Dabblers, self aggrandizers,
  .  .  .  What a hollow hall.

Little dull birdies  .  .  .
Love own songs by mirror pond,
  .  .  .  Graceful swan sails by.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Dawn lords with simple vainness,
Watch her crown herself.


Hello Poetry  .  .  .
Day sullies night, bright vanity
  .  .  .  Dawn is a poser.


Hello poetry  .  .  .
Even vain rube's bio drains,
Spews self promotion.


Here is Pantheon  .  .  .
Dabblers, self aggrandizers,
  .  .  .  What a hollow hall.

The only natural poem I have consciously been involved in-
The site, not just the reporting-
was when I happened upon a sheep gazing at me
in a field immediately off a motorway in Norwich.

This was not planned, yet it was
disconcertingly poetic.

Life whispers it's potentialities, it's immovable eros
the way billboards make us aware of our melancholia.

"Your hair is flaxen"
No, your hair is just damp. "Flaxen" reminds
us of a language that according our reading of poetry
existed long before our ancestors could read.
It does, however, sound more complimentary,
therefore more sincere,
therefore more comforting
than "damp."

I wear all my pretentious vocabulary and sentimental heart-stirrings
like a cross dangling from my neck
pretty as the plastic emotions I express
Because of my dearth of enthusiasm as opposed to experience
Because of the transparency of my speaking without first attuning
to the spectre of blood which no longer clots my lungs Dominika
but now sullies my hands.

But I wash and wash, and am clean, cleaner than most.
And my cleanliness infuriates you Dominika,
it breaks your back to see me so elevated among the wrecks.
When you speak there is no air that leaves your lungs to pollute the air
there are all only words whose sounds make the other sounds commonplace.
Whereas I am all white, brilliant, brutal air.

I've calculated the effect this has on your sense of self
Dominika, of your progress, of your place in the narrative
and though you hate me for implying so if I explained
You wouldn't understand
Dominika
I made it that way.

I would kiss your lips as gently as I'd slap you across the face
Smooth
Straight into the action
Purely fueled by passion
I'd set you free as often as I'd lock your cage
shove and hide you away in the remoteness of your mind
I'd make you spend time
Wondering just who I am
Seconds
Mainly
As you can't be bothered nor can I be asked
Too involved in my past to set course for a better future
I found myself repeating history
Now nothing remains a mystery
I can
Tell when the **** will hit the fan
And set it on high so it falls and sullies the floor
Where I can inspect the damage that was not done to me from a distance
Reminiscent of times where I'd imagine myself doing something
Aside from drifting in and out of consciousness.
Finding myself wishing my arms were spread around you
To pull you in
Seek your warmth and figure out just
What warmth is to a sack of flesh
Supported by bones
Running on blood and adrenaline rushes
The mind seeks to lay blame on other important organs
So you can ignore that you are faulty
And then you see your faults in others, and blame them for grievances you encountered yourself
And I'd set you and your hips down
Slide a hand up and hold your lips down
Lift you up because I'm afraid you might drown
In the tensions that arise when you're slipping out of your mind
And into loose tongue mouthing nothing that sounds like obscenities wafting through the air
And I'd make love to you
You'd call it *** too
In the same way one casually waves a hand at an old friend
Long forgetting their name
Who they were
What they meant if anything
Casually smiling back as these voids go unfilled
You'd never mention it again
Like the time that the world almost came to an end as I was choking on my own saliva
Siezing out for a hand or a tree branch
Crawling on the floor, vision fading
Thinking
This is how I'll die, and I'll think nothing more
So that to this day I cannot stand to feel as though I might throw up because my throat my hold down the ***** and I'd erupt only after I die
But it's never mentioned
So it's like it never happened
Till it comes back in flashes, calling to you like a parent, promising some sense of warmth, something safe
Because we craft and recraft our memories till they make what makes the most sense to us
Would be to let me do as I want for a year
Without limitations I might finally face my fears
Self imposed, unreal, and confront myself as I am, a coward too afraid to act
So he acts in defiance to his own whims
Like
Holding onto your hands
Memorizing the smooth contours and shapes
Feeling the tingling sensensation of running my nails gently across your fingertips
Down your neck I'd find nothing but soft skin and exposed vacancies of weaknesses long since abandoned
What gives when the architect of your demise
Is that little voice inside your mind
Saying
It's your hearts fault, that you're so blind
When
All it ever did was give out the signs