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.