You understand, though.
There is something about you
So sensitive and under the surface, right there

Right there so I could put you in the oven
And cook you at 400 degrees and you would yield
All that I’ve been missing.
Or half of it, in any case
And a lot of rainwater

In all the parking lots, amusement parks, torn, grease-soaked wrappings
And the noise of bliss gone to noise whited over, I search for this.

It is so hard to explain what I mean.

Lights cut through the fog.
Here is where the tracks have run
over life, mud,
life (stories
underground biding time),
where the train has fled into
the image of a train,
the image of an image,
the image of nothing,

necessarily something.

Now here I am:
alive—but awake,
awake—but in fear;
life—a shadow,
and nothing more.

And all I can think is how
I long to sleep again.

A mirror faces me now,
reflection;
my eyes gape criticism,
my lips bare a smile
unexpected, genuine. Tragedy, love.
Two more nights.
(oh, yes)

I watch your slow descent,
reminding me we’re all
breakable,
observing the fluid bits of yolk
clinging to the stomach lining
of the perfect porcelain sphere
to which it belonged

(so thin)

After years of retaining
Who would have guessed
that this too, took strength—
And now, so easily
empty—

Your eyes, too
Like souls.

Crouching in the semi-dark
of a sleepless hour turning to light,
I ponder this
Noticing just how close my veins are to breaking my skin
How time is one fucked up sonnovabitch
The roots of my obsession one with the ground
All of this, as the day breaks
purely rational
only expected
even desired.

We start each day with a courage
for which there is no applause.

In strands of mirthless black
there is no going back—
only coming more undone.

So let us lie about our feeling
not only ‘cause we’re selfish
but because we feel too much.

Together shall we
await martyrdom to be
Divided by one.

—-

This was one of the only (maybe 3 or so) poems I ever wrote that sort of rhymes. Btw, if you ever want to see the year I first wrote anything I post, check the tags ; ). It’s my new system, haha

there is another door at the end of another hallway,
deep brown carpeting for sleepless nights and then
the dark kitchen staring back at me through the lit numbers on the microwave:
2:43.

Still somewhere nearby there is a house being built,
an oblong red rock on the construction site that I will pick up, moving from skeletal room
to skeletal room, lying flat on a pile of wood, inhaling pine scent deeply,
surrounded by phantom walls to which I will return every summer

after the cabin, the smell of must, the worn grey couch, the yellow-red glow, checkered
tablecloth, riding the lake contained in a globe of sky, the stars shaken down like snow—the call
of the loon in darkness over black water crying an emptiness that wants more, a fullness with
nowhere left to go.

the crackling of an orange, over-intense mass of heat

throwing passion into a collected sky it cannot touch

the heat in my chest,

me grappling with the cold of stone patio at my fingertips,

                        staring up at stars like dew, caught

in the intricate, secretive mechanisms of a spider’s web,

the star-spider’s web (and I could believe this too,

 up there where no one goes and existentialism dies on its feet,

 just floating up there,

frozen with a million captured birds, a million points of heat so far away

we think them cold.)

Beauty enters my dreams
covered in hunks of nostalgia, a collage of broken things
that vanish upon scrutiny.

Jealousy takes me in the form of wanting to grasp things
Not to be them
and sometimes even leaves me content.

I have never I do not
Know when to go home.

courtyards,

feelings

unremembered,

but never speak

with death.

Speak only with

life, understanding,

even when every

body else goes

cold.

Don’t cry on the world,

cry with it—

so tears turn to laughter.

Nothing, you will tell us again,

and again

and again,

is ever really broken.