INK. and a happier tomorrow

There's a bruise on my bottom lip
and I'm standing in the kitchen
wondering if I would make you coffee

but I'm barefoot.

Touching all the glass window panes,
I make believe
that you would stay with me

but it's Sunday morning.

The sky is crying over your smile and my smile
and your eyes
and my hands

but it's forecasted sunshine.

I've carved a hole in the Berlin Wall
that marks off the edge of the Earth.

You go first.

Bruise

Devoid of parameter

                                   I'm crossing my i's and dotting my t's 

                                   when and how I please.

Thoroughly indicative of another day time terror

I watch her like she's                   fragile                      and

losing hope in my half-way house dream.

I'll never be quite right. 

She breathes in another language

and my heartbeat can't keep up.

Lightning is striking

                                        the sand                                   in my hand                                 and

its burning like someone forgot me. 

She turns the oceans into possibility, wrapped up in the snow. 

She knows where to go.

I'm trying to keep up, but I'll run out of gasoline on the highway when she kisses like a beauty queen and laughs like the  fourth of December. 

Feather dusters keep the pace and scar her face

                                       she's found disgrace

 in me.

In leaning over wrecking balls, and manipulating the moonshine glow, she's made her mark out of the dark.

I'll never know beauty in Arabia

but tomorrow, we'll run away. 

upside down calendars

Like a dance along a fantasy island, your little tongued discrepancy is a beautiful shame.
You are so much better than I could have dreamt when I counted your breaths all those mornings, before we were woken by the laughter of the oceanic views.
Too phenomenal to compare, all the boisterous similarities you find with the whole human race make your visions of grandeur and your cinematic taste seem rather obvious.
You are everything everyone expected you to surprise us with.
Even the way you lie is breathtaking.

She had EXIT ONLY tattooed on the back of her neck so that when she left, everyone suddenly understood what they had been dealing with all along. There wasn't anything closer than infinity to her outer edges, which she had learned to fray a thousand leagues under the sea during the Summer of her infancy. Then, like a childhood year-long tragedy, she was forgotten.
It hit the rest of them like a black hole in the middle of the day; the sun was absolved of its sins until the moon outgrew the millions of millenniums that had passed.
Little talks and garbage trucks had the same volume and the text of the bible began to burn. It was coming to an end and she hadn't loved hard enough to know what she missed out on that coming of the dawn. Luke warm, boiling, and icy cold, all at once, they were sitting in the bed, closing tight their eyes against the rays of Armageddon.
It's the reality of fantasies that historical and social cognitions always ruin the dream. Youth is fading just as quickly as adulthood is devouring the color in your cheeks.
You smile like there's something you haven't said.

Serendipity

She could've been a cupcake in another life; her candy coated lips made the words she didn't speak taste like little apple wood fireplaces to warm the snow that fell onto the black slate roof. They were collecting sun for the night, they were collecting moon for her dreams, and they almost stopped washing the tiles in order to hold on to the sonatas that they wrote in the dust during summer. But internationalities wept for the lost regard of the immediate future and blood colored fingernails made for a fantasy ride. True, the left-overs still smell sweet, but she wanted to bake something every day to show that the essence of their sin would always carry with them the warmth of another time. Moving along horizon lines and dancing on longitude, she would have morphed her physicality and made her name something more Abrahamic and less pop-music. In her philosophy class, though, she meandered without hope, remaining flawless in her recognition of the possibilities that were mounting themselves to the staccato wall without bereft regard. Coolant and radiation aside, there were many more moments left before she could give up on never giving up. Until the ocean hit the mountains, however, she would wait. Eternity was whimsical when one lived a lifetime of serendipity.

Esoteric

You're painting with watercolors in the sky every time you blink through this rainstorm that the gods have created to make everything more difficult to see.
Driving alone, listening to the music of the street lights bounce back at you from the dashboard, there are empty boats filled with empty bottles that have emptied people because nobody really appreciates the sensation of being alive. It's hard to breathe, yes, but you're breathing.
I'm at the junction that will take me to the place that people told me that I need to be. But, I'm merging through traffic and it seems like maybe there's another choice.
I'd like to learn to speak silently so that standing next to you, I can still hear your voice in libraries and cemeteries and museums.
It's getting greener. There's something about the way the rain clears the vision so that suddenly everything that is beautiful can be seen by everyone.
Someone once said that seeing is believing, but frankly I've got a much more esoteric view on things.
I'm the stranger. You're the sun. You're driving me mad, but I feel everything. I appreciate being alive.

It hurts to breathe, but I'm too busy breathing in you to notice. 

Red Wine

It tasted like red wine and a superfluous mixture of extraordinary love and indescribable sorrow inside of her mouth the night before she forgot how to spell her own name. There's a cocoon wrapped up inside of wrought iron cages to keep all the sensations inside her bed. They are just a centimeter too far apart for their cells to begin to replicating into one another, but their breathing makes it seem like a mile stands between their comfort and the rest of the world.
They make much more sense together than they ever did before. They walk while trading hands and minds and secrets made up of chai tea and reminiscence. Beautifying the ramifications of a lifetime of inadequate nightmares, they both have suddenly located the X on the treasure map.
They stand back to back, hiding the way that they hold hands in the shadows. They are living a hundred years in the past and seven months in the future, wishing in a different language and reading about the way that other people have loved before. It's nothing that can quite compare.

Light houses were calling her home off the exit past oblivion and before the universal sign of unexpected contentment. She was a summer day in December, with fireworks in her eyes and a smooth serendipity on her lips. Little market places would open when she passed them on the street, with eyes that begged for her to beg back, but she kept her nose pointed toward the yellow house on the left, and she made up stories about the world inside her nightmares in an attempt to create someone more beautiful than she let herself forget she had become. The blue door and the blue shades and the blue awnings were all closed in the afternoon because she broke her promise never to hope again. Fate was swinging underneath the willow tree and blowing bubbles out of dishwasher soap and red wine. She watched as Fate licked her lips and pointed to the cliffs far behind. The girl with the striped sweater, who cut her hair to forget what people wanted, who laughed with her mouth open and her eyes shut, who kissed with reverence and wondered what tomorrow could do to top today, turned. Destiny was standing behind her, with skin like the moon and eyes like safety. Destiny, on the other hand, laughed with her eyes open and her mouth closed. Destiny looked at her the way that a daydream would look at a night dream, the way that contemplation looks at a wayward thought, the way that a lover would look at the unloved. They saw each other once upon a time.

It was almost too much.

Madness

Lifting up the fingerprints you left on my forearms, I’m trying to prove to myself that any of this is real.
You’re a daydream and a nightmare.
You’re everything I want and so much I can’t have.
It feels like fingers are running up and down a piano on my spine so that I’ll learn to walk in time and not look at you the way that I know I shouldn't look at you.
It’s hard sometimes.
Silk depositories have grown up in my eyelashes and on your rosebuds, and it’s a walk into a wonderland where the clouds never look down so we’re left perpetually looking up.
Madness is catching.
Attempting to color in my dreams, it seems, to the untrained and uncouth eye, that you could be just right.

Truth is, we’re all wrong here.

Sheets

The atmosphere became silk when the leaning tower finally fell.

Living in a phrase of yesterday's forget-me-nots and tomorrow's velveteen sunrise, I could watch those eyes in the palm of my hand and trace the movement of your mouth from our hideaway to my secrets. I'm holding on to the remedy for desire, which is two parts regret and not quite enough melancholy to make it worth while to lose this beautiful disaster. Breaking in through the unlocked gate, it's fate who greets the lawful and the poet who will lead the two of us home. 

If you wake me, I'll never sleep again. 

Because it's so addictive, your poignancy, and the way that everything fits, that I'm licking little dances off of the right side of what you left, since there was daylight in your eyes and nighttime in my fingertips. Standing bare foot on the concrete, there was music falling off your tongue and landing with little splashes so that the ocean became a technicolor fantasy version of your mind. I've tied anchors to my wrists and my ankles so that I won't float away every time you breathe.

You're a masterpiece's stolen wishful thinking and, when I look in from the outside, it seems that every possibility that has ever been a possibility is made possible because of you.

It fell around us, and for a moment inside of a breath, we were still.

She

She walked like tomorrow was on the tip of her tongue. Elegant and tumultuous, if people like her were rain, she would've been a hurricane. She smelled like New Orleans and laughed like a May-Day parade. Monetarily, she was worthless; physically, she was priceless; chronologically, she was timeless; but for all intents and purposes, she did not exist.
Leather on denim on scarred skin on empty, her voice was an octave higher than her stature made you presume. She was overly stimulated and ultimately desired.
Lucifer couldn't look at her whiteness, as righteous as she liked to make it seem. Salivating at the thought of inner turmoil and disgusted wonder, she appreciated the beauties of silence and the uncomfortable truths of her living a lie. In the midst of Mardi Gras, with the sounds of a year of sin melting in the sickly sweet air, she would walk in her mans' shoes and smoke out of her teeth until her throat closed up. She would find limitless ecstasy in the starry night for a minute. She'd breathe again, then, and continue to die.
A long way from home, she caused wonder about the weather and whether she still couldn't stand the light.

Good Enough

I've seen you

And I think I might be beginning

to understand
because

unfortunately

it's been hitting me
again and again
like a Freudian slip
on Christmas Eve
that even the Good Lord
couldn't make me
Good Enough

for you.


Tomorrow seems like
3,000 years
and 5 minutes
away
from making me worth while.
And every time you make
or shake
or hold
the moistening relevancy
that destroys everything I've tried to become
it rips apart my ribs
and cracks up
my spine.


You're fine.
And I'm in line
here
waiting
for the chance to be something
Good Enough
for you to blink my way.


You're great
And I'm late
for the
procession
for the chance to be something
Good Enough
for you to breathe my way.


You're there
And I'm lost
on my way
to the final call
for the chance to be something
Good Enough
for you to think my way.


I might have figured it out
unfortunately
Because it keeps hitting me
again
and
again.

Extinguished

It was like the years before, with hands tied against the trees and the street lamps extinguishing on rhythmic dots, had never happened.
Thinking on the plank, he maintained his superb sense of balance with the wind whistling through his ears.
He cooed a gentle lullaby to his own injured mind and massaged the acid out of his tender joints. It was a few too many electrical shocks to the gut over and over again. He was losing skin now and again.
Thicker and unstable and musical, his mouth didn't remember how to not smile or say anything other than fine.
He was improperly perfect at potently saying nothing at all.
He saw the shady sunrise and she tried to remind of the light. He was so used to the night.


Despite his best efforts, he would be alright.

2038

Elegantly situated on the charcoal covered curb, she is forgetting the way that cloudy smiles used to make her heart race.
She's not black and blue anymore, though she's spending more time than ever looking for the perfect alley and capturing her reality in paranormal notation.
She's walking on the rain covered asphalt and listening as her steps make a symphony of the silence.
Everlasting and omnipotent, she cannot fathom death because she is not alive.
Fortunately, alive is lucky enough to be her.
She speaks to inform.
She moves to remember.
The shadowy audience makes parenthetical remarks on the content of her stained glass mind and licks their lips salaciously at the way her superiority melts from her harmonies.
In the farthest corner, a voice remarks, soft enough so that only the stars can hear, "I'll write you a poem so beautiful that you'll cry tears of ecstasy and fall in love with the ambrosia coating your fingertips."
It's impossible to comprehend the way that her little talks translate from the night sky to the daylight, but the shadow in the corner is holding her breath and waiting. 

You Found Something

I was busy painting lily pads in the sky behind my head so that maybe I could catch a glimpse at what you meant. Like the lighting strikes that they narrate throughout the glowing stream-lined emotional factories, it’s something that comes in rings, on strings, in things.

I’m running from the sunsets and I’m holding my own hand. Do you understand? Because the fog is so dense that I’m glaring for a reason to write perpetual or to feel disappointed so that I can hear your smile in my words.

You should think a little harder so that you can dream in color because the mountains seem so far away from now. See, when you come back, I’ll be here washing ink stains off my eyelashes and smiling while I smile. Don’t take too long.

There isn't any rush from the top of the current to the crash at the end, so merrily we roll along the tainted riverbanks of expectation and watch as they watch us. They could see, we could care or…

You found something. 

Too much Light to See

I do not know what you observe through the two-way-mirror that you have in your eyes, because all I see reflected back are the dreams that you dug out of my skin the first time I kissed the fantasy of you goodnight.
You could crush me with one blink of your hazel eye.

                                                            Because the truth is, when I looked away, I missed you. 

You could destroy me with a laugh. 

There was candle wax on all of the music notes your voice was making in my mind. 

It’s too cold to be alone
It’s too hot to pretend

There are a few more faces than yesterday pressed up against the glass cage I’ve built around my 

idealism and your pragmatism and our romanticism. 

And in the glass, you saw me for a minute.

The Stars and My Fingertips

I'm spending my time
                      naming all my sins
in order to                                acquaint myself                       with the
intuition that we've come to ignore

Cracking bones to build new homes
                          and breaking in new shoes so we can forget
Bruise
And
Break
And
Crack
And
Burn.
We're            here where we've

always

been.

Musical interludes are attempting to write
              an                  ocean that is loud enough
for us to
          think it's just us.

It's like a forced entry

into a house who leaves its doors

unlocked

and its windows

carrying a sign that says

OPEN.

You're going where she went

I'm watching you hold back

It's just another heart attack

One

Beat

Before

Burst.

Chronology

Exponential Growth

There was still the lingering scent of rebellion on her fingertips and the slightest decay of her cells gave her a look of someone a few days older than she must have been. They started to look at her differently, for she was someone who was farther away from them than they would have liked her to be. Like a mockingbird and the children who played down the street, she lived vicariously through the sounds she made when nobody was watching. She was a photograph of ecstasy, a rough-sketch of a model. Something that never did justice to what that something could have been. Everyone despised her execution of breath, so much so that she managed to hold it for a week straight. Slowly but surely falling out of reality, that same reality that had flown away over the Harlem renaissance so many years before, and onto a broken watch promise. She watched and watched until the menial behavior began to make a difference and then she stopped. Saints and martyrs were appearing before her, beckoning her on to somewhere with better health insurance a much lower acceptance rate, but she couldn’t find the heart in her to leave the last of her possibilities to fend for themselves. In the nighttime she wished for the dawn, at the dawn, she hoped for afternoon, and in the heat of the sun, she prayed the moon would come quickly. Dwindling away the hours, she looked only for the next moment in which to be discontented. However, mockingbirds do not fly at night and so, with a whistle and a little jump, she managed to reach the second star to the left and fly off to somewhere where irrelevancy was savored and all the scars she had that dotted her skin looked more like constellations than discrepancies. It was a wonder that anyone wondered about her at all. 

Truly

Facing the skies, there was something flying away from them that they could not identify. It was reality. They were laughing until their skin grew thicker than it should have been in an attempt to find a common ground and make sure that all those morning mirrored looks had not really gone to waste. Sitting alone at the end of the day, each of them would slap their foreheads as they contemplated their idiocy and irrelevant breathing patterns. Burning a candle, she would attempt to read out the meaning behind the skin deep brush and the flesh deep reaction. Gaining satisfaction, he would contemplate the power he had over the blood in her cheeks. Licking her lips as he, somewhere far away, licked his too, they wondered what it would taste like when they touched. It could be truly exceptional. Or it could be nothing at all.

Youth

There are times, I find, when my words cannot say what needs to be said. In those cases, I turn to music. This is the song Youth by Daughter. 

Shadows settle on the place, that you left.
Our minds are troubled by the emptiness.
Destroy the middle, it's a waste of time.
From the perfect start to the finish line.

And if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones.
'Cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs.
Setting fire to our insides for fun
Collecting names of the lovers that went wrong
The lovers that went wrong.

We are the reckless,
We are the wild youth
Chasing visions of our futures
One day we'll reveal the truth
That one will die before he gets there.

And if you're still bleeding, you're the lucky ones.
'Cause most of our feelings, they are dead and they are gone.
We're setting fire to our insides for fun.
Collecting pictures from the flood that wrecked our home,
It was a flood that wrecked this home.

And you caused it.

Well I've lost it all, I'm just a silhouette,
A lifeless face that you'll soon forget,
My eyes are damp from the words you left,
Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest.
Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest.

And if you're in love, then you are the lucky one,
'Cause most of us are bitter over someone.
Setting fire to our insides for fun,
To distract our hearts from ever missing them.
But I'm forever missing him.

And you caused it.

More Damned

A silky surrender down
because the ocean tastes like lollipops
with your hand sliding underneath her skirt.
It wouldn't hurt.
And your sugar scented sunrises along the foggy banks of
just enough
to still say yes.
She took a left.
Alright.
Right along toy waterfalls and back lit photographs
to purely enjoy her shape.
Clear cellophane and
black curtains hang to guarantee no privacy.
Hardly awake enough to breathe
When you paint her memory in
Little Latin letters
along
the Milky Way.
She's far more worth a sculpture.


I understand.

Figures

All the facts and figures didn't add up to the way that the sunlight was streaming through the nighttime window. It was supposed to be midnight. It wasn't supposed to be this bright.
She was itchy all over because she could still feel his fingers on her and on her at the same time, like there were little cobwebs draping themselves across her skin and across his eyes. They were all just the same.
Forgetting what was left of hope, there was something much more intriguing in the bottle of pills crushed away in her corner that she saved for days like these, for weeks like these, for her life like this. Just a moment of bliss could tide her over until she remembered that sometimes she can sleep on her own.
The sound of the telephone was too shrill to be accompanied, so the moonlight sonata that she had playing in the background, setting the tone for her feast of disappointment, was turned up a little bit louder before she sat, cross legged, and wept for Buddha's forgiveness.
She didn't need forgiving.
She needed to be forgotten.
Swallows were dancing around the sparrows who were tweeting at the blue jays who were making tiny nests in hope for Spring. It's November, see? Springtime isn't this time. Not quite yet.
With a few more swallows, she emptied the plastic container and tossed it lightly at the wall which, bowing and ebbing like the oceanic tides, made her dizzily happy enough to close her big eyes and stare at the ceiling through her thin skin.
She scarred so easily.
She had just started to trust again.
As the fan above her spun the air and made figure eights along the outside of her skin, she tried to tell herself that she did nothing wrong. But she was always the wrong one, and she was always the hated one, and there was never a moment when her best friend wasn't the now-empty bottle of pills.
It's a joke because they never knew.
It's a joke because she would never tell.
It's a joke because nobody would have ever paid enough attention to the detail like the creases next to her eyes and the way she cried every time she pretended to laugh.

She's figuring still, as falls off to sleep.

Illegalities

Singing along to the way that our musical memories melt together, we pretend that we've known each other forever. We can take a little step backward into the streets outside of your home along the stream and wander until we've lost ourselves in our own backyard. It's a mysterious pot of illegalities inside of our unconsciousness since we've understood that we will always understand. Baking cinnamon buns and coffee make the morning time seem better next to the starry eyed remembrances of last evening. It could have been a dream. Locationally significant, chronologically relevant, and chemically potent, there is something about the calculation of your laugh plus my lips that makes everything taste more like cuisine and less like cooking. Think about me when you're walking away and wonder when you're going to run into me today. It's a moment of escape inside a lifetime of walls. Let's read the map upside down and pretend we can't find our way home tonight. I pinky promise that it will be worth it.

The Lark

There lived a single story bird,
whose hallowed halls dropped pomegranate seeds
upon the ground
of the Holy Land.
The contraband eruption
could not
disrupt the coming of tomorrow.
Milking the streets and churning
the smog
non-GMO effervescence
is born out of possibilities
Something like you'd wish
withering until the flowers
fall to the grassy nook
and the pencil tree stops producing
Willingness
becomes
obsolete.
Tinker toys and magic spells
that wished for a way back to the Holy Land
Oh, Holy Land.
All the growing trees
and honey bees
are on their knees
begging for forgiveness.
It's a sin to be good
It's a sin to be bad
It's a sin to be beautiful
It's a sin to be had
All the young boys don't understand the feelings
that hit their pillows at night
for bright and bold
is getting old and dark


Maybe that bird
That pomegranate story bird
Maybe he was a lark.

Cave

You’ve lost all you have. You’ve lost it.
Frosting over on the fourth of July, God bless independence and integrity.

Break her like a promise because she hasn’t any hope; make sure she’s lost her hope like you’ve lost your mind so that together you can
leave this shit behind.

You know the cues and clicks that will make it stick.
It makes me sick.

Through stained glass windows, it looks like the rainbow brick road.

You won’t be able keep it in forever.

Or keep it all together.

So make it last, fast, because soon tomorrow will be the past.

For Chances

Another shot at spoken word, I guess. 

Bohemia

There is such a thing as feeling too alive. Drowning underneath the cloud cover until the sun was in my throat and my blood was filled with the rain of tomorrow night's storm, I stood with my chest pressed against the milky way and sighed. Could you see that I was fading when you were walking close behind? Everything was melting into nothing when you touched the outside of the inside of the outside of her hand. I would've sang you a rhapsody, set in Bohemia, but it's been done before. Everything I have for you has been done before you one too many times by everyone who has ever laid eyes on your metallic features and their pulsing tastes. Phantom vibrations play with the symphony and I stare at my fingers, hypnotized by the size of my atoms crunching and bouncing against each other inside of my insignificant skin. Bumble bees work together and I can't seem to find my brain inside my head. It's a loss of control that I'm looking for, other than the silence. Peace is overrated when it comes to being lonely. I never realized that everyone is supposed to be a child and I missed it, because life trains don't come back around. I rip tobacco up even smaller and smoke it out of my ticket that would pick me up at  kid and drop me off at you. I was sitting on seats made up of tenderness when you picked her up and spun her around the constellations in a wedding dress; I've always looked better in black anyway. The saints can't help me anymore. We're older than we should be and younger than we wish we were. We'll be alive a little white longer and then we'll be alive forever. Inhabiting the sky, we'll wish we could be rockets again. Guns in my pocket, I'll sleep on Saturn's rings if you don't mind. Close your eyes.

Laughing without Reason

The wind and the rain made love that afternoon with their hands held up tightly and their kisses like sugar plums floating across the emptied mind. The bridges were suspended by the cloudy skies and the sunshine behind them, so hot, so far away, was nowhere close to the instep of their thoughts. With a sigh and a half-fall, they landed swiftly back upon the room of no return. History slapped humanity with the iron knives of mutilation until they remembered their mortality; they've been dying since their birth, they’d been laughing without reason. The spikes fell into their skin with the bone cracking pressure of revenge. Hideous and heartwarming, they wanted nothing more than to forget the rest of the world and become something less wonderful than the books. She was raving about yesterday and ravaging tomorrow, with lighted fantasies and darkened nightmares, there was little left over from the plundering of pirates. Cheers to giving it a whirl in the middle of the eye of the storm. Waiting for rain at the top of the mountain, let the skies caress the back of your neck and give blood to the needy and hearts to the heartless. Its over for the best of them, but for the rest of us, we’re just getting started. 

With breakable silence that hummed incessantly in her brain, she understood that the time was upon her; thoughts like wildfire along the Tanzanian coast, the blood boiling symptoms became obsolete at the expense of her pain. Too little would not hold true when the many moons had set; but as so many stand alone psychics had told her in the back of gypsy caravan-filled daydreams "All that really matters is the now." Crystal balls and crystal meth could show her lots of illusions of the light and maybe, someday, she could count the nightlights easier than her track marks. But until then, she held herself on a Popsicle stick stained with watermelon juice and only made a mess on the inside. She held her head like a hero on the edge of the Olympian mountain and stood like the marbleized erection of a Greek looking glass God, Aphrodite or Persephone, waiting to wallow in the clouds instead of beneath them. She dreamed of the tops of lightning bolts and seeing the sunshine from above. Maybe someone up there knew she was extraordinary. She was drinking the drips of ambrosia that fell with vigor as she herself tried to figure it out.

Blue Lagoons

Blue lagoons are falling from your ivory tower
                     How can I key along the outer wall
of your
                           divinity?
It's hard to see which way miracles
conclude
              but allude
                              to the kingdom come
          and           it           will           be            done



The forecast calls for bloody rain
raining insides outside down upon
           our                                    sinful souls
It's harder to catch sight of the snow
                    when there is nothing to
                        hold it up                to

Young ladies peruse the silvery light
                    and flirt with the air
                          beneath palm fronds
quoting Juliet
                       to
            nobody who cares

It's just another French full moon
another silent night.

Tinker Toys

From the bottom of the toy chest, if you sat quiet enough, you could hear the slight wheezing of your forgotten treasure; once upon a time, they were the world to your tiny fumbling fingertips, sticky from left over lollipops and sneakily stolen chocolate squares. Just for a minute, or an hour, or a day or a week, they were everything you would need for forever. Their shiny plastic shells protected them from the walls and the concrete and the playground and made them invincible to the dangerous terrain of your innermost desires; they were a pirate map to the hidden perfection of fantastic daydreams. You could have held them for the rest of your life and never needed anything else.

Until the next one came along. And then they found the toy chest, right at the top, so their painted on eyes could watch you send all the love that they once owned into the next lucky one, playing until your eyes grew sleepy and your heart grew fatigued and you began to rub your tiny face and fall fast asleep upon the outskirts of your imagination. The lady would pick you up and slide you into your bed, as you slept, grasping tight on to the lucky one. They had all been the lucky one once.

But then the next one came along. And little by little, they would fall down and down into the darkened box, smelling of cobwebs, and memories, and forgotten promises. Once you had whispered your daydreams to them, held them close when you heard the monsters moving underneath, and kissed them with all the joy that your little heart could muster. Now, as you clung tightly to another, they felt the cold hard sides of the box of not-good-enough hitting their heads as you crammed more and more left overs into yesterday.

The tinker toys' lament played only when you had fallen asleep. You never heard, but they always hummed you a melody to lull you into your dreaming slumber. You never heard, but they always whispered goodbye when, backpack donned, new friend in hand, you skirted off to school to expand your thoughts and forget about them just a little more. You never heard, but they cried every time you opened the toy box to drop some other one into the blackness; all they wanted, every single one, even the busted up teddy bear at the bottom and the action figure next to him, even the slinky and the barrel of monkeys sitting on top, every single one was waiting for the day that you would find a toy and truly love it forever. But day in and day out, little by little, the box grew fuller and fuller until the lament was loud enough, for they all sang it to you ever night, that you would wake up and wonder what dull sound had roused you.

You are grown now, with your computer having cleared out the space that once held your Little Tykes play house, and your rock-n-roll music replacing your lullabies. There is a new darkness to your eyes and you've stopped playing with anyone at all. The toys in the box in the corner have grown too old to sing. But, from the bottom of the toy chest, if you sat quiet enough, you could hear the slight wheezing of your forgotten treasure; and maybe, if you opened it once, you would remember.

They call her love

I’m dancing and driving alone along the writhing roads to find a home for the homeless sense of self I’ve created out of the tulip bin upon my mantle. It’s too reflective on the outside of the coffee tin that holds the pennies and dimes I started saving a couple of yesterdays ago in order to find a place where I could forget the smell of being alone.

I would build a house on the sandy parking lot drive in if you would hold my hand in the nook by the kitchen sink.

I would know the map of your eyes like the back of my hand and the way that your lips pursed when you thought too hard about something that is supposed to be thought of softly would be my favorite sight in the world. It would.

It would be a secret little tree house in the backyard of adulthood where we could hold tea cups full of chocolate and make believe that they would never find us.

I would never let them find you if you wanted to stay with me forever. Never.

The dark days would seem like cloudy skies instead of blackened nights so that I could look through the grey skies and see your eyes still, tapping the inside of my heart like an impatient little child. Kissing back and forth until one of us hung up the shell phone, all morning times would be a relief.

I would never hang up first.

I’ve been dancing and driving alone along the writhing roads to find a home for the homeless sense of self that I created out of the tulip bin upon my mantle. But, because of the way you kiss words that you throw out the window, I stand up instead of sitting and I live like tomorrow is always a second away.

I would like to stop being alone of you.

for the road

Let the sliding feeling fall through the rest of your clothing and hold your fingernails in place until the stars climb out of the morning and into my bed. Fuck through the Gucci spit balls and light up the Webster’s thesaurus until you have enough words to combine and make some sense.
I’ve paced the floor so many times that your name is carved into the hard wood and the roses that grew up every time I kissed your cheeks in the air created a labyrinth made of thorns and perfume. If you followed it right and hot, you’d find me waiting to lick the love off of your neck and call you mine.
My hands were wrapped around your shoulder blades as I tried to bury myself closer and closer in to your heart. I find the light you shine too blinding for my bare eyes, so I put my sunglasses on when you walk by and slink into the shadows in hope you’ll look at my flickering flames and find me sexy enough to question.
There’s a map drawn beneath the bottom of my drawer of necklaces that has a circle around an x that points to the bottle of wine hidden three weeks before by a band of ever-loving pirates. There was nobody holding on to the pomegranate seeds when you spit them out, so trees have grown all around your hibernation hole, and when you wake, spring will be shady and green and red and luscious and fragrant and I’ll be waiting with a hand and a cigarette for the road.
You’ve created a monster in me, and I love you for it.

Cloudy Heaven Sent

Take a minute to                                breathe in steady longing
and make yourself into a work of art.
                                        Wanderlust
                          You               bite             the             dust
on the far side of
near sightedness.
All along the corridors of                               forbidden
and
                                     unbidden taste sensation
you make your mark in
                                silver                               and                                black.
It smokes off of machine dust when you write
                            your name in the grime of dystopia.

Hallelujah.
                The Lord and his Lady are looking
through me
                 I cannot                   locate my ability              to see or send

No mend.
A broken picture frame.

You're something much more beautiful than invisible should be. 

Roaming

Our start would be my end;
There is always a kiss left on your lips that I stare at in my leisure;
broken like a shattered stained glass window, your existence is akin to a destroyed masterpiece.
Silence hangs between our likings with a grey cloudy muddled sense of emotion.
Be there until I've forgotten feeling lonely and then hold my hand in the darkness of the afternoon sunshine --
we create something more delicious than the sugar baked into your tangy fingertips.
Touching around for soft lady bugs to grasp at good luck wherever we can find it
because we are fated to destroy eachother.
I tattoo the butterflies that you command with a smile to the outer wall of my heart.
Kiss me until I've forgotten anyone else's lips and then hold my face in the bright midnight
you created out of your mystical yeses and nos.
Yes, be
Yes, hold
Yes, give me something that I will remember in the moments before forever until I finally come to a moment after.
No, let her go
No, she's wrong
No, don't listen to what they're saying.
Stay with my one woman show and whisper the words of another into my skin.
I need somewhere to begin.
Take me somewhere only we know.
I'm roaming in you. 

To Thursday and Back

Her lips hugged the outside of every word she spoke and, in the nick of time, she managed to teach you to forget. Ghost lines danced across her face and when she smiled, something very far away sang so that if it was silent, you could hear. On Saturday afternoons, when she smelled like unadulterated regret mixed with the cheap perfume from the night before, the coyote uglies that stood outside her one room mansion howled at the full sun. Tea stained and weathered with leather trimmed fantasy, she stood taller than a tree and still nobody saw. Little birds once followed her past the old empty lot and led her to the treasure buried under the old oak. She was a wild sense of bewilderment and a loss of consciousness in one slightly lethal pill. To overdose brought about a moment of ecstasy and a lifetime of confusion. She was always a step ahead of the Windy City and a single waltz off the edge of desire. Her home was made of feather love and make believe and-- right before you realized that you knew her-- she was gone.

Spoon

The music melts off the inside of your cheeks
when you whisper those words to me off the back of the
getaway cloud.
You're only the stuff of my non-recurring dreams to be
dedicated to hurt and fantastic disappointment.
But I'll sit here hoping that perhaps my face has crossed your mind once
or that it will.
I kept the spoon to hold my hopes
Sing me to sleep in
silver and ink.

m. u. s. e.

There wasn't anything left of right with her. With hair that fell just around her silver eyes in a sentence completion sort of way. The grey sky complimented her grey heart and her grey shirt with a soft pillow top kind of lick; she looked at everyone with a question in her mouth. She played antique guitar with the lights off and the candles on and the fan blowing high so the flame danced like the motivational posters of her mother's that she threw away after Tuesday's pasta dinner. When the clock hit midnight and a half, the tiny toys she kept beneath her staircase began to dance to her silhouette. She walked with ambiguity and smiled explicitly and kissed with fervent playfulness in order to be remembered. She made the rest of everyone sing without hesitation and -- until the disastrous resemblance between her and Satan became evident -- fall in love without second thought.