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.  

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.