when you've lived so long under the flight paths you cease to hear their sounds. we're two train wrecks on endless tracks with ashtrays at an elbows length and your smile is a cancer which kills my commonsense. so darling, do me some damage, let your blue veins show beneath our winter layers (your bedtime warmth is an extra coat) and speak softly crumbling consonants of adventures we'll run to; eventually. and our winter is a series of complicated rearrangements like an adornment of dates on a dusty textbook timeline.


a murmuration of starlings

you ask the sky but the moon whispers "i do not know, don't ask me" so we decided kissing was the best route to take; i ditched my friends in a warm bar two neighborhoods down. a little riverbank too late at night, in weather much too cold for our skinny limbs, continues its business preparing for winter (nevertheless of us) but autumn is not over yet. you blink and ask questions concerning the phosphene, those dancing shapes of light we see when we close our eyes. i give it a name but you prefer the millisecond memory of the tealights in the grass or perhaps the ghosts of previous lovers from before the great war dancing on your eyelids. are we lovers? is that the word for this? we share first-hand accounts of poetry by Poe and whisper the improbable case of our fragile and imperfect human connection. "oh" you hum quietly (of course) "to rebuild happiness from nothing is such an odd thing." and i suppose it is. "who do you think of when you're with me?" you ask. "well, who do you think of when you're with me?" i reply and we will probably never know where we're at on the subject. i spell words on your palms that could suffocate the heat from a room and writing a thing on your beauty would be a loss as i think i lack the words. your heart beat quickens to the rush of a bloody emergency ward and we should be in love but we won't allow it and that's just fine. we saw the first snow of the year tonight, although i think we were the only ones.




stranger
meet
like
like more
time
friends
like
touch
lust
like
time
touch
kiss
like more
lust
kiss
sex
trust
like more
sex
love
sex
trust
time
fear
like
sex
lust
love
pain
fear
love
kiss
loss
time
love
time
resentment
love
loss
hate
love
time
ambivalence
time
loss
time
stranger.

i have these four paper lanterns which glow in the corners of my room. well, two are lit (two don't technically belong to me) and by saying they are "lit" i'm actually disguising the little glow and buzz of a tiny bulb, which is powered by acid and chemistry of some sort, into something romantic in notion. we feel each other up like a couple of teenagers enjoying a blank slate, and we've ignored our friends for at least two weeks. you kiss my neck and we fuck like we want to be in love but we aren't and that's the beauty. this way no one else can make a mess of this because this something we have have is nothing at all. i have four cigarettes left but its raining out and my windows face east in such a way that the rain still creeps in with a tap tap tap against the open window's screen. so we bite lips and high five between rounds of guitar hero, you explain the origins of blue eyed brunettes, and we share information on the geography of cool spots beneath the sheets; your body burns like a thrift store space heater. i repeat small words while writing to add emphasis, perhaps i repeat mistakes as well.... as if to add emphasis (you are not one of them).




following some glow like a lit lantern

what's the sight or sound of a feeling? does it show itself the way purples and reds rise up through bruised skin. is there a name for that burning pulse you get when you have realized that someone woke up next to you, day after day, and slowly realized they no longer had any desire to love you, maybe even a diagnoses and cure for it perhaps? can we tie a tourniquet around it to stop the bleeding, or will there always be a drip drip drip of those bloody memories ever so small. has no yale graduate written this into medical text books yet? studied the equations and chemicals or at least etched some fucking riddle on a bathroom wall? i've got a needle and thread but there isn't any tear to sew up and i've mapped your skin as we stood in the shower those two or three times (we've only just met in that way) but i can't ever find that gunshot size wound that turned the rhythmic thump and firefly glow of your chest which i remembered from years ago, into a spot solid as an oak; with limbs of an elm. laying on my back you trace pictures between my new scars that dot across my stomach and laying with my head on yours i can hear the crack and moan of your heart strings, like branches in the wind, wrapped tight around your lungs that just need to fucking breathe, but they wont ever let the air in, and they won't let me in either. but that's okay, i think it's okay. we'll hide in bed and drink tea and talk modernist artist shit like it never went out of style, and we'll be our own moody and brooding solutions for each other, for now anyway. i have every intentions of kissing you to sleep tonight because, well, what else is there... what else is there that i would ever possibly want to do?





broke down tries of lesser than

you cry a bucket of grey skies filling my heart like kansas state torrential rains. you downpour tears while we pour down bottles of ninety-nine percent proof, howling at the moon and its fucked how fast eleven at night can turn into regrets at noon. you're a fucking fake, we're all fucking fake because we avoid the mutter of real names, realness reminds us of bullshit we hate. her strawberry hair wraps around the nothings in the wind like fresh bed sheets on the clothes line in this growing storm. beat back by a breeze brought on by darkening clouds the woven cotton dances away its memories of sex and love and all that we hold dear and the cold makes us shudder and we run to close these shutters. but its too late and the staircases and hallways and closets of your rib cage hollow out their insides and you spill your guts like furniture and picture frames on boulevards after hurricanes. you'll pick through your wreckage, stacking timbers next to tear drops, hoping no one saw too much beneath that crumbled facade. and i'd help out but i'm all out of smokes and got tired of hiding behind those bricks and mortar ages ago.  


what if i knew you when we were younger

for the shipwrecked sailor you are a heart that is an anchor. a worthy tie down in a storm that is never ending (but with a hope that you are, perhaps, its ending). you are a house set on fire, a heart ready to burst. something which has no right in happening but an anomaly which has burnt down these insides. you expect more but with so much distance i just knock on the nearest door. some small talk about the weather, or whether or not i would rather you among her, this, that, or something more. and at arms length we try to share a heart beat, and you claim you grew up swallowing handfuls of emptiness, but whats worse is i grab some type of bullshit closeness to fill these gaps. well i have what i remember, and that's more than most.      

ionization glow surrounds

"to fall from a window is terrifying,
                    but to fall to the rocks,
to the sea,
                     is a   poem."

a moment so short it was like a still frame in a three hour film, but this is no movie. your lipstick could have burned it's shape through skin, left behind on my bones for an anthropologist to tinker with, musing about their meanings. i fixed your jacket hood, as it was crooked and out of place, it meant i fucking like you (or maybe like, i wanna fuck you), although both of us were too drunk to notice it at the time. the weather conditions proved foul that night which made dismissing the closeness of our hands as we walked home quite easy, perhaps it was just for the sake of warmth. inside between cigarettes you tucked your toes up under my thigh, but maybe the room was just cold as well, you see it was still spring and i had left the window open. but we stood belly to belly and were able to trap some heat between ourselves, between my chest and your fragrance (i caught a hint of it at a party recently, it was not you). with this warmth we could have grown an elephant from an apple seed. and like a shitty self help book i will always remember that we are the architects of our own something er other or however it goes and no kiss was wasted.  







sleepy hallow

we are the yellow and brown leaves lying near the riverbank, just beyond my windowsill and hiding from sight. we catch the rain drops like little earthy tea cups, but that's just shitty imagery, it's much prettier when you catch the drops on your cheeks. i caught a fever once, it stuck me between reality and nowhere in particular, it destroyed my blood and chest and lips and left me dead for days, yellowing bones and a teetering stone grave. i remembered that night i let out a sigh and watched as it left through your lungs (more shitty imagery, this one of a kiss) and it was the prettiest damn thing i had ever heard, or felt, as your chest rose up just slightly and pressed against my palm. i'll tip toe my fingertips around your hips as the walls creak in the october wind. we jump back into bed, it's too cold to leave (leaf). our autumn will be made up of attics and blankets and tea and probably mittens, and costumes and stories of ghouls and ghosts and Ichabod Crane of course. but like those leaves, we fell to early, and would never last the season.


mountain goats, fault lines

down here where the heat's so fine
i'll drink to your health and you'll drink to mine
as we try to make the money we scored out in vegas hold out for a while
we drink vodka from russia, get our chocolate from belgium
we have our strawberries flown in from england
but none of the money we spend
seems to do us much good in the end
i got a cracked engine block, both of us do.

got a house, the jewels, the italian race car
they don't make us feel better about who we are
i got termites in the framework, and so do you.

down here where the watermelon grows so sweet
where i worship the ground underneath your feet
we are experts in the art of frivolous spending
it's gone on like this for years i guess
and we're drunk all the time, and our lives are a mess
and the deathless love we swore to protect with our bodies
is stumbling across its bleak ending
but none of the rage in our eyes
seems to finish it off where it lies
i got sugar in the fuel lines, both of us do.

and the fights, and the lies that we both love to tell
fail to send our love to its reward down in hell
i got pudding for a backbone, but so do you.


cold and ache

"lemons are forever as blue skies never change" or so is written on the bathroom walls in this wolseley bar, next to floyd's drawings of ten toes and my sharpie of a woman's shape. and, well, i wish i were the one but sure as shit i'm not (again and again) but it was a worthy chance taking. and i'll miss you seeing as i've let the dream go, but a chilled heart never warms up to such an empty bed, no matter the blankets and no matter the afterthoughts. will i be the man i wanna see at an age much older than twenty two, or three? or will i just be stuck in another place i don't wanna be, absent from the you's and me's. i don't think i will ever get it right, i don't wanna be free, i want to be a part of you and if you'd like you can be part of me. but i will always chose the wrongs and will have to start again. i'm more or less alive but neither makes me feel any more than just fine, and i'm made up of things that stop me from believing in anything (religion is shit and politics are useless) but i believe in the everything which is you. i believe in you. probably cause i like you. i definitely like you.


these houses are our tiny mansions, and we're framed behind their wrought iron fences. this mind is full of poetry but with nothing to write. i had an archived message of your voice across some ancient telephone wires "i'll be home soon" you'd say over and over without ever a change, even now when you're far from the same. when i erased it, where did it take your voice i wonder? can something just vanish forever, so quickly with such permanency? could i ever go find it, that small bit of you. find it between books on the library shelf, or maybe it's been buried in the dirt behind the lilacs out back, or embedded in the concrete and brick of our old school perhaps. maybe it's so far away that i would  forget what i was searching for if ever i found it. wait, have i forgotten what i was searching for? what did i ever want to find, i am unsure.





i always slept through church. long before the autumn leaves lay on the street like little copper pennies across our bedroom floor. bar change which clattered in the rush to be naked to the bones. if i don't believe in the afterlife, can i still come with you whenever it is you go? i remember smoking cigarettes in junior high by the river. i used to kiss this girl between drags but i always waited for her to ask (i always wait) and i must admit i'm lost in the open sea as of late. when you stay the night i rarely sleep 'cause i would never waste my arms around you with all that dreamin' of nothingness when there was something so close. i've always been that one percent but i would give you my one hundred, and when these chemicals subside that heart still aches just the same. what the fuck was she drinkin' that first night she was untrue, i guess we were young but fought problems which were much too serious, all i wanted was for us to be ourselves. and as quickly as it ended you stole that heart from underneath my nose. but its okay, i don't mind that you don't know as long as your lungs are close enough to inhale my thoughts which pump the blood that your heart so closely holds.



i suspect this is over, there isn't a thing worth writing, not any longer.
i don't write on here as often as i used to but haven't you heard i'm in a mother fuckin rap crew, we have shows and shit but our shows are shit (except their not) and writing decent raps to spit on the stage is harder for me then writing this silly poetry. i could just write what you're used to hearing, how if i were dead and dust, six feet under and the soles of your shoes walked above me my heart would still beat that dust like the blood never stopped because a real kiss quickens that beat beat beat past one hundred times a minute, but oh well. when a muse is found the writing will quicken just the same.

crippled bastards and broken things

your eyes hold my reflection like a mirror in its frame, and. i was going somewhere with this but i have nothing to say. i just want to rant about the way things used to be and the way things could have been. how i hate coming home to an empty bed and how i love waking up with you in it (you are not her, and that's the blessing). these nights are in between their endings and we're driving past esso's thinking of stars, knowing someone filled our hearts with nothin' but your skin between my scars seems to have brought us something. and i'm swimming in the thoughts of you, between paragraphs of novels when the mind wanders beyond the windowsills, feeling lost like a child in a whale's veins, with the heart the size of a house and blood which bleeds gallons. but it's better to be inside the flesh which holds your tumultuous warmth then in the frigid waters like a drowning sailor clinging to timbers (the timbers are metaphors for whatever). and we're all just pennies tossed away like tiny burdens, and they pick us up for little wishes until the next change of heart.



i fucking hate the way you smile and i fucking hate the way you ride your bike and i think your tattoos are dumb. i hate the way you spread the honey on your still warm toast and it breaks apart and mooshes up every time and how it doesn't seem to bother you. i hate the way you grin after shots of gin like its freshly squeezed orange juice and i hate the way you move your hips from left to right and back again when you slip your t-shirt off over your head. i hate the smell of an unfamiliar airport terminal when you're holding my hand and i hate when you hold mine during your nightmares. i hate how you shoot a pellet gun better than a boy and i hate the way it makes you giggle. i hate how you collect dandelions for wine and i hate the way your bum looks in your favorite pair of jeans. i hate how i'm full of shit because i think you're fucking lovely.



i can see our bicycles chained up outside together, links twisted around bars and keys left in the grass with a forgetful rush that seems reminiscent of high school sex at three in the morning. that old gas lamp post which hides on my street under those wolseley trees warms their frames as we warm ours and i think that we may both pray for closeness but i could never ask and you would never demand it, although i wish you would and perhaps you wish i could, but i simply couldn't. i saw your shoes resting on top of mine just barely but barely was enough to make me sigh, and i wonder what your thoughts are made of between sips of beer that taste like wine when your lips smile at mine from across the table. fog and history and rain in the mornings, french subtitled films in the afternoons and thunder at night and i love the way you dance. and it's odd that i can think of you after missing someone else for so long (well that was a lot of drinking). but i don't know you and wouldn't claim to, and i can't say more than a hello before time stops and i wish we could spend it sleeping close close close. i'll drink heatburnin cups of late night regrets because the day i saw you walking up those stairs, when he said 'oh you'll like her she smiles like the sun and talks with a bit of a whisper' is a day i knew i'd never ever have that courage to say anything more than a hi and goodbye to you.


 
the sun will shine each and every morning for you and you will feel stronger than each and every day before, and this i promise you. my lungs have gradually blackened and have begun to ache but they reflect that missing link, and i don't mind if you don't mind. i remember being younger, sitting at those booth seats in restaurants early in the morning, just outside of town, and the sun warmed the linoleum table tops and the heat would balance on my cheeks and palms and fingertips and the waitress was always very young and pretty. our clothes held the prairie air closer to our skin and the ketchup tasted just a little better and the soda pop seemed more bubbly and sweet. we whispered conversations between sips of lemonaid and you would think that a feeling so perfect can only be so specific but my limbs between your limbs feels oh so very much the same. her bed while we were teenagers holds little truth any longer and i enjoy hating all the things that her and i had loved together, but your bed is a reminder that bitterness is a passing feeling that deserves little nurturing, and your heart which pumps the blood that blushes your cheeks and heats your belly which warms your spin makes all those shit faced lonely nights a worthy battle.


i like the the colour of raspberries on white kitchen counter tops. or the inside of orange peels, left discarded on those green picnic tables in june. i find something curious about women smoking cigarettes on film and this acts inability to transfer its attractiveness over into reality. there are so many more things i'd wish to tell you, like how she wrote that note which i found in our sheets, she said it was for me but i knew it was not and all these kids bitch and moan about being alone, but what's worse is trusting someone else with your happiness. i have not fallin' asleep sober in seven months (it washes away those dreams that used to keep me up) but that is not to say i am unhappy, i just refuse to give up these wonderfully calm nights to those empty meaningless memories. but your heart is a million times safer to hide these thoughts than hers ever was, and a beauty which she had lost long ago holds itself in you tenfold. you remain to remind.



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