To Kiss Like a Lady

Through the normally abnormal evening hours, the black cat calls woke me up from the bad luck dancing across my window sill. There was nothing left in the rest of the room that could hold up the foundation from above, so I watched as the floor sank slowly into another millennium's masterpiece. She cooed like a dove when she sang me her lullabies as she prodded me to stay awake. Stillness was surrounded by a rapid fire ballet class like the eye of the storm in Manhattan. She held me close in the afternoon breeze and taught me to kiss like a lady. The scent of her perfume was perpetually too strong, perpetually too weak, perpetually too exhausting to fathom rightfully. Yellow roses bloomed in her footsteps and she danced like a sultry queen upon her mushroom throne. I do not know to this day if she ever saw my face, because she looked at me with eyes too red and pupils too small as she marked the way my visage became a flame in the bonfire on the Fourth of July. It was then that she would break into the National Anthem alternately edited to praise the rise of the communist manifesto in Antartica's democratic lands. The wonder bread stuffing was a little too fatty for the rest of the world to enjoy, but when the nighttime met daytime and slowly shook hands to greet one another, I hit my spoon to the bottom of the bowl and laughed at the colors she painted in the wind. My doorway was darkened only once a day by the sound of yesterday's retreat; otherwise, I slept in and had vivid lucid dreams that somebody cared. I try very hard to not wake up.

Shards of Glass

           Vague wanderings make your breath run ragged and your hands feel like last week's news.
Heart attacks are less broadcast than they should be despite the natural disasters they create. You're my only
                                                                                                 natural disaster left between Hurricane Paris and the tsunami that's rolling through Japan this second...

I've dreamt about you already and the way that you might feel leaning against my inner
                            outer layer, sitting on my satin sheets of sickly sweet seduction.
Sinking, sticky, slowing inserted.

I could make you want me to want you.

                                                         I'd feel the way your pulse begins to slide along the wetness of my lips.

Music seems to smoke out of your silently breaking skin. You're shattered and explicitly harmful to the touch. I want you so much.

Blinking rapidly in the moonlight, I tattoo your sins along the inside of my eyelids til the day becomes another waterfall effect.

                                                                                             I'd like to demand only reciprocation of my wildest dreams from your blue tongued, sex scented highness.

We learned to do everything on our own with our eyes closed and our mouths open until the feeling became mutual and we fell.

Hollow

Subtle tones of writers block were touching the air around you the night that you met her one last time. The darting eyes that told a million truths while all your mouth tongued were lies; silent silences made up for all those times that laughter had escaped you two inside the back seat of that coffee scented paradise. Inside the painters cup were nothing but a mixture of things that made honesty inescapable and falsities taste like ambrosia. But blues and rhythm sounded less like your heart beat than they used to, and so the sinking dailies that watched you walking from the top of the street lamps had begun to turn them off when you passed too, but less out of respect and more from a slightly sweat tinged shame. Buttons to hold and buttons to hide the way that your skin cannot retain a scar to save its life, much less hers, and so all the times she tried to undo them, they always bound themselves back up at the removal of her touch. Minty and sugary and wet; that's how she imagines you would have tasted if you had ever managed to close the space that she created in order to protect her soul from the pain you inflicted on her anyway. She only wanted to love you. Was that so wrong? But the paint stains had covered up the ink ones and she knew, as she watched you taint the sky with pools and rings of smokey hatred, that she had lost you a few days before. And in spite of herself, she wept.

Breathing Backward

You make breathing backward look so sexy
despite all the moments that I have reached out right past you.
Licking all the leftover words off your lips while
watching your sunshine smile make the world a little less wondrous.
I hold on to your semi-sweet semi-comments in order to
learn how to swim in your eyes.
Placing your fingers, I adjust my heartstrings
because out of tune music is my specialty.
Blistering, she stood short enough for the rest of the
cloudy summer shades to make fun of my wanderlust
Too much for yesterday.
Not quite enough for tomorrow.
Take three before we start to speak in Germanic tongues
with your wildly untrustworthy smile.
I would really like to breathe backward with you,
but it's harder than it looks.

Etherial

There was something left right next to her in the corner of his heart; it was that pesky sense of nothing that we all become so familiar with once in a blue moon ago. Holding tight to the memories that they concocted in the back of his pickup truck in ‘98, she prayed for a natural disaster. Here and there, the wonder that she felt would return for a minute, but the longing for someone’s longing was about as intense as the tornado that was picking up East of the Mississippi and West of tomorrow.
She bought a color-by-numbers book to pass the time until the rest of the world realized that she was missing. Or remembered to care. Whichever came first, she would be waiting until that day to snap back from reality and toward the fantasy that she hungered for so completely. The dreams were so vivid now-a-days that she could never really tell the difference between lucidity and wishful thinking. And the rest of the fates, past and future, were laughing at the cruel, cruel joke their sister was playing on her; broken and heartless as she was, she couldn’t seem to shake off the present. Stuck in the eternal now, she realized that at some point, everything became the past and at a similar moment, everything stops being the future. Stopwatch planted firmly in her palm, she waited to pause the moment and savor it, attempting to live in the forever yet-to-be and always already-have.
She was something of a mystery, with eyes bluer than the arctic skies and skin paler than the lighted moon. She walked with a sway of a time long ago, smooth and edible despite her roughness. A year passed between each breath and the one before because she appreciated taking her time. The world all around her absorbed her presence so thoroughly that she was a little bit less of a person at the end of each day. And because of this, her gradually disappearing act, I was not even surprised when she left.

blood oranges

Silver tongues of fire lick
Your supple bottom lip
The candle with the broken wick
Your hand is on my hip

It isn’t lonely anymore
Electric blankets warm
Your eyes will surely make me sore
But won’t do any harm

Snowflakes falling on the beach
The ocean turns to ice
The blood oranges just in reach
This could be paradise.

Independence Day

The rain wasn’t as hard as she thought it would have been when she felt like this. The both of them walked, filled with a mutual sense of understanding, through the deserted streets, littered now only with the broken memories and unforgettable moments that had been hard-pressed to happen melted into the bricks of the city. The cars that passed sounded quieter underneath the heavy layer of clouds so that it was almost as if the two of them, who had so much in common built out of their lack of similarities, could have been walking through a shared lucid dream. The shops had all closed down on this gloomy independence day, and the faces of people who had doused themselves in zinc and sunscreen looked a million miles past disappointed and three thousand years behind ready for the rain. They, however, smiled for the first time all day as the dew drops and tears came pouring down from the thickening sky. Left of center, there was a wandering melody that was dancing with its eyes closed across the cobblestone streets and they laughed despite of themselves, they laughed at the way the moon tasted after three jack and cokes, they laughed at the lone sushi joint open to celebrate America’s birthday, and they laughed at their laughter because all they wanted to do was cry. Let down expectations and unrequited love tasted too familiar to them for this half-suicidal fantasy world to be confusing. And so they meandered past forgiveness and they jogged on through the let-downs and they sprinted toward a future so black and confusing that they had to forget their histories just to be allowed to enter. Their names were etched on the list which, as they could tell from all of the cob webs and dust mites, had been waiting for them since the beginning. The human Saint Peter, guarding these less-than-pearly gates, gave them a solemn nod, which hinted at an apology and a promise. They couldn’t smile anymore, but at least they weren’t crying. So, despite the rain and the pain, they felt a little bit better. Alone in a promise of what might be coming, they decided to wait.

Rooftops in Winter

it’s silent on the rooftops when you can hear the changing color of the sky. but, the difference between the music of your breath and the songs of the starlight is that i would never turn yours off. you pushed me off the ladder and you smiled as my hair waved around my face, falling down past the windows of people who were living and eating their nighttime cereal, and you smiled because my hair, flailing around my face, looked like the tongues of fire licking at a crackling log. it didn’t bother you that i was slowly disappearing to my demise, with the ground nearing my defenseless body, and with the sky disappearing behind the towers, and because it didn’t bother you, it didn’t bother me. despite the silence on the rooftops, i could not hear the changing color of the sky. but you laughed at the changing color of the asphalt that my insides created on the black, and because you laughed, i laughed. the collision might have made me sad, but i cannot be sad when i am with you, even when i am dying with you. dying every time i am with you, i cannot be sad. because i cannot hear the changing color of the sky and i cannot hear the songs of the starlight, but i can hear your laugh and i can see your smile so my dying doesn’t bother me quite so much. they think that they understand, but the reality is that if i don’t know, then nobody knows. but the silence is half way to complete, and maybe when its quiet, even quiet from the sound of your laugh, then it might start to hurt. but the bruises right now are just another color that i can’t see in the light that you shine. so, keep shining and i’ll keep smiling because you don’t mind that i die, and so neither do i.

The Kitchen Floor

There's dried blood on
the kitchen floor
There are dishes in the sink
I think
I thought
These were the days of
this was forever
until we passed forever
a couple miles back
I'm trying so hard to remember to
conjugate
my
verbs
But words escape my reality
running
constantly
jogging
constantly
walking
until I can't feel my lower half
Then you took me out
with the Trash

There are those kisses
you aren't supposed to forget
I think you forgot
But I'm caught
in the field of land mines
and babies
it's them
or you
or me
But we can't all be free.

I would wish them luck
if you hadn't got me stuck
against that empty barrack
shack
between undefined
and indefinable
Invariably a variable
The sound of glass is
just a melody
You're hell to me
Left caught on a rope
full of whimsical hopes.

Let's run off to far, Neverland
and stay eternally now
But, darling, take a bow,
the dishes need cleaning
and you don't know how.

Silent Film Star

She is the night sky negative

with starry skin

                      and eyes

                                   the color of 

                          velvet                   midnight

She is a rude awakening

and says too much

                      even through

                                     her perpetual

                                                         silence

She wears expensive clothes

and cheap perfume

and doesn't eat

until she's                      going                       to                         faint

                 She stares 

                 even though it's rude

because she

                  doesn't realize

                                       they are there

                                                            She doesn't care

Somehow her lipstick

                stays on all day

but no one

                                      has ever seen

                                                                            her reapply        oh no

It's a shame she wasn't

a silent film star.

                                Everyone would have loved her then.

But not now.

They walk on the other side of the street and think about her dreadful beauty. 

Elegant and Lucid

It's a bloody dance along the riverbed of diluted fantasy. There's a world sick with your sights and sounds, breaking through the shattered ground. Forgiveness isn't given in lucidity.
And so all the streets are darkened by your black eyes and delicious French kisses until the day comes for forgiveness to be given for free and our livelihoods to once again keep us alive.
They have forgotten how to dissociate the elegance from the illusion.
Oddly enough, the way the Frenchman holds his head is beginning to resemble that of your nightmare and the rest of my imagination.

Simply put, however, she's remembered that there are still plenty of thoughts that don't have to remind her of you. Or youth.
Because the Battle of Gettsyburg and the left-over human smeared across the stones that watched in silent horror, there is a monument to commend the remnants of something long gone. And she's grown too big and unsure to give more than a though to her childhood anymore.

What's your excuse?
Elegance isn't lucid any longer.
The shade doesn't even protect you from the sun because the world just loves to watch you age closer and closer to the last breath we all take a couple moments after our birth. But I'm mumbling about the weather and making a difference while you hold everyone else close enough to matter. The overhead bins have fallen open and nobody is altogether sure where they are or why they've come.

It's all in her mind while she dreams.