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.