Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.

- Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows o Kilimanjaro," 1936. 

due to a busy life and the inevitability of growing up, or perhaps my lack of desire all together, this blogspot will be rather quiet.

i had that dream again. where we broke each other open like pomegranates on rainy sundays, and shared the minuscule insides of our human construction. i understood your attraction to the hawaiian islands, and you contemplated darkly on my draw towards a specific sound created by a machine gun long obsolete in the modern world, embodied by dead soldiers and wars who's cause has long been forgotten. i murmur the same whispering thoughts to a dozen girls hoping to hear the right answer. and if that answer comes i am unsure of how it would be dealt with. i want you to break me from this nostalgia. to tell me i've made the right choices. i want to watch your mouth wrap around the vowels which argue a life i feel so awkwardly suited for. what difference could we make? you and i? i lose it. i lose my rational, and my convictions when you're close. i can't separate yourself from me. i drink your presence like a soldiers last dose of whiskey before the cannon fire burns the grass. our senses fuse and we take on each others delicate burdens between the consultation of our pressed lips. my ear is drawn to your belly like i will hear some inequitable truth about myself in you, something to solve everything. and the only answer i get is to be 

                                                                                     closer

                                                                                                  closer
                                                                                                                  c l o s e r.
the veins in your pinky toes are the roots i grow from. i wish you wouldn't underestimate how often i think of you.

          

god save the queen.

i'm strange in the sense that on hot summer days i wonder what it was like to be our grandparents seventy something years ago fighting the war in similar weather. and that the idea of the heat and wool uniforms and the struggle they faced warms my heart in such odd ways. a bit of bravery, some heartache, and to be a part of something greater is the sentiment i suppose. it hurts my heart to think of us melting away into that ever greater swell of retrospection; the complexity we created becomes a rotting shipwreck on a foreign coast. your muddled words become fragments of old films, the lead roles played by actors who died while our own parents were in their infancy. the black and white glows burn beneath skin. a pressing of the tips of our noses brings the mad blend of inky coolness and burning warmth that seems to only contradict so splendidly when we find ourselves naked and close. you have a character which can surely be traced back to an ancient ancestral bloodline which is completely estranged to that of my own. my top lip to your left clavicle was only made possible in the passing of time by the murderous expansions of our dusty empires.

fades

an ever growing highway carves its path closer and closer to some field we mucked about in years ago. i wrote it a letter in hopes of some reconciliation: "dear highway, i know you can't help yourself, you simply move in the direction you have been told. but we played there, in that field once or twice, while we were in love. i miss her as i would miss the grass and trees that would surely be buried under you." the highway pondered this letter. considered its options, and replied "i'm sorry, i'm a highway, i don't know love. please don't write again as i am very busy." fuck you, highway. hopelessly heartless that inanimate object is. and i guess all i can do is make new memories to replace the old but that seems like a lot of work. since the day she left i've become an artist in the process of figuring out clever ways to break girls hearts within the month; the idea of new beginnings excites me but this feeling rapidly drains with each passing day. it is not their fault of course, every one of them pretty and nearly all of them rather smart, and sometimes while i stand in the kitchen and smoke my last cigarette of the day i even miss a few of them. but never for long. it's a grey and blustery evening out and i consider calling you. that pair of lakai skate shoes which swing in the branches of my tree twirl and twirl and twirl in the wind but they still hold on (maybe they are not so heartless). a crack of thunder rattles my windows and a memory of her and i having sex at seventeen surges across my room and settles between my gut and just under my lungs but of course it fades rather quickly; i wander into bed glad to be sleeping alone.

certain vagueness

isn't it odd that the stars make no noise, i mean, considering their grandeur? they say in its most basic form our universe tastes of raspberries and smells of rum, wrapped in the rumbling of a low flying plane. it was amid these facts and the tender thoughts they conjured that i realized my wrongness with you. to react to such maladroit intimacy, pretending that i could ignore my inability for our meaninglessness to remain as such; and my commonplace. there was not a hint of romance save for the first few kisses and the rush of  unaccustomed closeness between our hips, or maybe it was there in the ever forward march of the brazen spring sun, as it rolled across our backs the morning before my birthday. it could have crept in as i watched you puff away at a cigarette in the parking lot of niko's restaurant (i thought it funny that you didn't inhale) or maybe i caught a glimpse of it beneath the sheets and between your smiles as we whispered adventures to have in the thaw of spring. but what is nearest our hearts is the foremost on the mind and the first off our tongues, i was certainly not yours, and you were never meant to be mine.

to care so easy

i'm am never clever enough to know what to do with myself between six and seven in the morning. i pause to watch as the airplanes quietly leave the city, and i wonder small hopeless facts like how high could they possibly fly? something which makes their leaving easier to grasp. "thirty thousand feet and counting" the pilot whispers as he sips his cold coffee and levels the wings, and fuck him for encouraging that distance. he watches the aircraft flight control systems and nods between aileron readings and throttle controls, an observing bundle of organs to insure the promise of your safety. "we should love again!" says the heart as it ignores the bleakness of a rainy tarmac. it rallies the blood and rallies the soul, all for another massacre - and what is the brain to say to that? "I'm sorry soul, I'm sorry heart, they've killed all your men, they've killed your troops... you've got nothing left, there is nothing more". the comforting hand of those who can so badly hurt us turns me on and i'll ignore those who care for the confused and apathetic. we're not about what movies we like, the tattoos we wear, an ability to kickflip the school steps, or how well we know the finite details of each others lives. we're residents of a bizarre world that emphasizes understanding while our melancholic curiosity searches out the intangible.  

    

i'll be damned

i remember your sinewy frame as it curled itself around our recently bought cheap marlot, hours before these rib cages overlapped for the first time, and i could feel your heart and count its pace like seconds between the flash of lightening and the irreversible boom of a thunder strike. we become intertwined because we cant help ourselves, and so it goes, that remorseless havoc of our human calamity. an ever more reckless expansion of the futile human heart, which will certainly ruin me someday. i'm not as fucked up as i come across, but i still wish for you to make me want to be something better. i wish i hated, and i wish i fought, because loving leaves so many people emptier the morning after. 

philtrum

today i woke up to the smell of soggy grass soaking up the boulevards of snow outside my bedroom window. it is spring and our night was filled with the fluorescent bleeding chaos of the city lights in a warm breeze. i scrambled over your contour in the covers, strategically star fished as you wage a territorial war for my side of the bed (i have yet to figure out if this is a conscious decision on your part) and onto the balcony to touch the bottoms of my bare feet on the cold spring concrete. my building is old and beautiful and it still holds its ghosts, burning with the smell of home cooked meals, cigarettes, and infrequently used sticks of oddly named incense. i dig through my records for something spring like, and hop to the kitchen to grab a beer (it's past noon and we have the day off) i drink when i'm happy which can be dangerous as the thoughts of the humidity and history and the stardust we share burst with the promise of summer. i open the french doors wide to let the spring air in, and flip on the playstation three. "you're such a boy" you sigh as you squirm beneath the sheets, but with one eye peering out from beneath the covers you look intently at the second controller and quietly ask "what are you playing, can i play too?" and we start our day off with the tip of my nose pressed beneath yours, angled in such a way that i can squarely position your bottom lip between the both of mine.  

it's unlikely these moments mean as much to you as they do to me. waiting in your parents driveway for the engine to warm up i dance the receiver between radio stations (trying to skip the christian rock) while we flirt with stories of unrequited love and indifference. your dad is shoveling the sidewalk and i wonder what he thinks. thirty minutes from now we'll stomp our snowy feet in the doorway of my apartment trying to disregard a fondness for sleepy moments and entanglement, and i'll try to ignore how your bum looks in those jeans; we still have friends to meet in the bar down the street. i drank four beers and a guinness, you had a shot of whiskey and three far-to-sweet mixed drinks. the sugar will give you a hangover tomorrow, but we have no plans anyway. your fingertips are cold from the walk home and we forgot to lock my front door. our safety lies in our thoughtlessness for anything but each other or more candidly it may be the model 1911 handgun which rests in a drawer (my grandfather traded some flight boots for it during the war) it is unloaded but it's the idea of its closeness, like ours, that matters most. earlier on, when i had picked you up in my parents borrowed car, your knees tilted slightly towards mine in the front seat and the thought of us fucking had made me cheerfully nervous for the better part of the day, our evening ends between two a.m. and three as our balmy lips touch pleasantly in a half awake state.   

cereal boxes

our city frames your beauty like a tin can flower pot and i think of you far too often while i search the snow for any signs of spring. there a more red blood cells in your body than there are stars in the milky way and you spilled your universe on a broken beer bottle behind our osborne street bar. the blood stained your cigarette and the accidental scar (just under your left ring finger) will last forever. I should try and concentrate more often and this should not be confused with thinking. do my taxes, check my bank account, buy condoms, read the mail, lock my door, turn off the stove. tell me a worry and i'll concentrate on it frequently so you feel less alone. your  sleepy grin always makes me chatty over bowls of breakfast cereal; spilling my guts like a medical student's first clumsy autopsy. i hope whoever invented mini-wheats felt loved because for fuck's sake they deserved it for making you smile every morning.    

crumbs

i'm a softened agnostic with no firm belief in anything much 'after'. is this why time weighs so heavy in my pockets like a dozen grandfather clocks? but my mind is always ever so lighthearted as it lays with yours and i'm sorry i can be so headstrong. my thoughts will burn your shadow in these bed sheets like the hiroshima blast in a macabre memory of everything lovely. i will go back to them from time to time like those little white shacks built for irishmen lost at sea, stocked with crackers and water, to feed until found again.

rainy days and morrissey

some things i like: the smell of home depot and the free popcorn at the door, the warmth of linoleum tabletops in sunny prairie restaurants, paint samples with curious names like 'tea leaf green' or 'crocodile tear' that brings to mind victorian explorers slipping through far off jungles (for the glory of the commonwealth of course) and when pretty girls lend you books and you turn each page searching for the press of their finger tips. did you know our brain fires neurons that are used specifically to help us find each others lips in the dark? not much to do about anything but it's a pretty thought. i often read my own run-on-sentences trying to hear them in your voice and i hope you wonder if they're all about you.

on a thousand museum shelves.

i think you were forged in an explosion, which melted your chromosomes seamlessly into skin, and you were always ever so clever at saying pretty things at odd times. they tore down that old building we used to play in, can you fucking believe that? your mother would always whisper "such a shame" like someones grandfather just died and it's obvious now she was speaking of the memories rather than the mortar. we sat so close and drank milk and ate blueberries and kicked at broken glass and i never really knew what to do with my hands when i sat with your parents; strangled by a tie much too tight. we looked good dressed up (whenever it was we had to be) but even in heels and high-waisted skirts you would rather be beneath the railroad bridge throwing stones at passing trains. you dipped toes into the muddy creeks near my parents house, carefully choosing words to repeat until they lost their meanings, and i'd sit and wonder who assembled your little frame, who's god decided your tiny measurements? and if heaven was a record i'd drop the needle right there on that very moment and repeat repeat repeat. that night we held each others hands and spilt sugar into cheap gas-station coffees and your cheeks blushed with every sip and it was all so bloody perfect.     

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.