as

they're teaching them how to march

and mark

and march
like they had any sense of why
they
did it
any of it
i
watch
i
watch
and
i
watch
and i'm looking for the future in their dead beat, dead pan, heart break, no shame faces, still jousting with themselves on the rooftop gardens that their parents made for cocktail parties and intimate gatherings of the faces who matter.
i watch and i keep trying to figure out
make all my miscalculations
add up
to something more
substantial than a square
full of money
or a square
full of
heart
artistically endowed to become
a feather in the wind
and a stone's throw away.

VELVET

Perhaps it stems only from the fact that I've taken to writing in all capital letters, or maybe I'm becoming a hoarder of sentiment and relative confusion, but I am unusually sure of my excessive belief in the unbelievable and I'm recalling you in a manner that is way too fresh to be debatable.
I'd rather lay in velvet and let the spiders move across the sky without my involvement than dance with the hummingbirds, so obsessed with successful pollination. The flower to flower life never caught my eye, because I've been staring at the same sunflower blossom for months, years now, and waiting to become the sun that turns its head west.
Everybody, sans Dostoevsky, is west of the ice so I'm burning on the coast, trying to evaporate the Atlantic with my mind, watching the concrete rust unseasonably soon.
And though they still don't know, all patiently marketing my manipulation [eyes closed, tongue dancing and the like] I could not believe the signs that pointed me away from Waverley Place that Wednesday night. Rather, it must have been Thursday morning by then. They wanted me to think thin, but my mind is getting fatter to accommodate my physical wasting away; velvet on my skin can't keep my mind thin.
"It's all a metaphor for the homosexuality of the urban youth."
"What about the suburban youth?"
"Oh, never mind them. The gay ones skip town and the straight ones keep on praying."
And when he offered me another coffee, too closely entwined with his dirty fingers (too interested in pollination), I smiled. "No thanks, I skipped town."
Too much velvet pressed against my skin, and I'd rather touch her dirty palms {addicted to her fabric} and find reason for my ultimatum of confusion.
It makes no sense, the way I'm forcing myself deeper and deeper into their mad treasure hunt, but I find that I'm addicted to claustrophobia and the fact that I like being whatever everyone wants out of me.

I'm just so young and ____________________
                                  a. restless
                                  b. beautiful
                                  c. lucky
                                  d. fucked up
                                  e. fucking sorry
                                  f. all of the above

I'm sorry that I did it, but I'm really not sorry about the fact that I'd fuck her velvet all night and that I'd rather philosophize than economize.
The sun is setting on the square and I keep trying to make it into a triangular prism

but no such luck thus far.

calendar year

There wasn't a breath left in the room. All of the air had been soaked up by her whispers and the muted responses mumbled through kisses under the pillows. The electricity in their fingerprints was enough to shock sparks of light into the otherwise dark stratosphere. They couldn't be seen and they couldn't be heard, so for a few precious moments in that century-long evening, to the rest of the world, they did not exist.
She pulled the pen out of her pocket. Without any light other than their after-glow, she wrote on her thigh:

"Incongruous as it all seemed, when the midnight hit and the windows broke, the words that flowed from your mouth to my skin weren't anything less than miraculous. Buildings were falling around us, and the mechanized sound of periodic destruction had begun to ring out, ring up, through the spine of the structure. We must've been high up; we must've been floating in those sheets. I couldn't feel a thing that wasn't connected to the smile that you get when you're a few more remarks away from sleep.
Yawning like a child, with your hands glued to the steering wheel and my eyes glued to your whitened knuckles, rubbing against your flesh like they were itching to get out in the same way that I was itching to get in, you scanned the windshield. It seemed to me that you were looking for trouble, but there wasn't anything left in front of you that could've done anything but love you. I stared at the past the way that you were staring at the future, until I took my turn behind the wheel.
I'm starting to feel something that I'd sworn I'd thrown away.
I found a calendar with a map that you drew."

Funny enough, neither of them remembered a calendar at all. But the energy it would have spent on the asking was energy that could've been harvested into a few more thrusts of deliverance before the clouds covered over their eyes again. The time must have been passing at some basic level, for the moon had stopped throwing light through the windows onto the sheets and onto their eyelashes, but they couldn't tell if anything had been living whilst they had made paradise under the covers. And as they continued to lay, because it was an occasional experience wherein they found themselves all alone in their mutual solitary existences, they reveled in a momentary lapse of judgement once again, until the curtains couldn't contain the steam and the flowers bloomed despite the lack of spring.

10003

there are one way streets
[pointing]
all mixed up
[to your]
sensations that always lead me down
South
downtown.

it's beating

your

pulsing

pulse

pull

p

puh

puhpuh

puhpuhpuhplease

miss                         the                    way

one way

sunday morning

just-fucked

no shirt

my skin

everywhere

feeling                                                       of my tongue

                                                  against         your   cheek. 

[ext. fade in. nighttime. paris. 

one year later]

They couldn't stop seeing the sunshine in each other's eyes, even when the new moon was blackening the velvet night and there wasn't any sort of summer time life left in the air. They managed to find the springtime in their fingertips when they held hands in the ice, though, and the eiffel tower's glittering music made for the only thing they could hold onto other than the hope for another year to stay. 

are you 

still

finding

my hair tucked into the secrets of your clothing

folds

holding just enough

of me

to make

sure you

wish at

every 

possible

minute?

for a second

I was thinking on your effervescence in the shower, attempting to reconcile the whole hole that was ripped a while back, all frayed and tattered in my limbic system. You kept me from getting sick, but you also kept me from getting well.
Your face was reflecting off of all the drops falling down my skin, so delicately detailed that I turned around frequently, hoping that you would be standing behind me. It could've been a trick of the trade, but it sounded almost like your fake whistle was seeping through the water, through the pipes, through the walls that Jesus himself paid for; then again, it could've been just the rusty waterline humming along with my own wishful thinking.

I'm not completely sure if you're aware of the way you kiss, so I'll break it down real slow in the essence of your own marketing rally, no techno-parade prompting my adequate stripping down to nothing at all.
You always kiss me hard enough to leave a bruise, but you never kiss me hard enough to take any part of me with you.

It feels the same as it did before, and I feel the same as I did yesterday. You, on the other hand, feel like a monsoon's wet dream, and all my lightning strikes can't begin to permeate into your enigmatic notions of the beauty of nature and the inconsistency of aesthetics. Examining your own clicking jaw, you watch as my thoughts spin circles around yours, but with only one out of every ten words I write meaning anything, your calculated molasses pace seems to be something worth aspiring to.
I don't think you'd like me if I didn't run as quick.
I don't think I'd like me either.

3 hours, 27 minutes

It's all music in your
spinal chord
hyper-linked
underlined
melodies
marking your
mooooooooovveesssssss
against
the checker board
that's empty
in Washington Square.

You should probably start
fucking me like a rag doll
and
I'll probably start kissing you
only long enough
to keep you wanting more.

Nobody knows why
or how
or
[silence the formatting process to retain creative individuality]
why you would want
or how you could try
or when you will remember
or why
or

don't throw my legs up over your shoulders
and
scream like
your fingering
a centigrade century's worth of
studs' girlz
with overly-defined curlz
because you can't stop picturing me coming up your driveway
with my ripped-up
torn-off
bra-free
sex
moooooooooooving
along the yardstick
to mark
off
six foot two
one hundred and eleven pounds
of bubblegum candy cake.

Maybe I'm a little crazy, but I think you might be a little crazy for me.

anagram

volvo

Incarcerated inside of your outcomes
I forgot
forget
what it feels like to land
without my hand
in your-----
I couldn't stand to hold it in (on) me
one
more
bite
and I made it stop before I started
cumming
coming
out
laughing
to stop the gasping

even though your breathing was 

seething

and I could have gone

for

hours

picking your powers

like flowers

                  all third grade shit like

                             she hearts me

                             she hearts me not

                             check yes

                                             or no

               check check check. 

all these days are feeling like milliseconds

billiseconds

trilliseconds

but I like spending them with your eyeliner smeared 

across

my skin

in

the

highest of fashion

clashing

like I've never 

smashed

crashed

before

and                                   burning                        on                      your                  ice

is so fucking nice

twice

thrice

and every time

it happens again

and

again

                                         until i'm sure that you're sure.

I'm for goddamn sure

that the holy

spirit

hears it

and

likes

the way we sound

here on the ground

because we found

a slice 

of

something

dice

for

nothing

bullets in your 

mind. 

Please, just for my heart, 

be kind. 

eulogy

A pastor might say this of the evident equation encompassing my life when the time comes that I am more gravestone than human:

She lived her life like it was a scratched record. She didn't own a record player, and if someone had asked her to set up the music, she might have made a joke pertaining to her own incompetency, and flirted her way over to the window to stare at the street below. It would be only the silence that would really recognize that she couldn't even start up the soundtrack to the moment, but eventually someone would grab her hand, smile at her porous nature, and begin the tune. It always started in the same place, and she was constantly surrounded by too many people who were far more enchanted with the idea of understanding her inconsistencies that they ended up listening to songs twice. It would start again and she would fall back onto the same leather couch, still moist from last night's indiscretions, and begin everything all over again. She had learned something from the last time, but nobody else ever seemed to. If they had, they might have politely excused themselves from her smoky, stinking presence to find a space with a little more sunlight and fresh air, but they always stuck around until it was too late for either of them to change. It was in this way that she collected all of her friends, like murals plastered to a decaying wall, adorning a worthless room with art that would never be seen by anyone who could ever appreciate it. Then, when the nighttime had finally struck, and the candles were burning low enough to make an impression, she would light the whole room on fire and start over in a new place, with a new sound, and a new scent. Marking up the path that she walked on with ashes and legends, she travelled around like a wafting raincloud. She was rain in all senses save for the fact that she never really nourished anything. She was more like a flood than a sprinkle. She was more like a fire than a flood. She was more like destruction than anything else. One day, she ran out of options, and decided (since she had been telling everybody all along) that she was just always meant to be the narrator to her own thoughts rather than the character in her own life. In the dead of winter, when the chill was something that was more of a comfort in assuring her of her pulse than anything else, she watched the moon that was only hers--there were nights when she thought that the moon belonged only to her-and she would stare at the face on the other side, conversing with it on the nature of existence and the truth that she hadn't ever appreciated a single person in her whole life. The sick little game she played with all of her healthy players was the same as arsenic in cookies; you didn't taste her poison until you were on the brink of death. She had enough heart, however, to leave then. That was the moment when she burned down the next room, when all of her cohorts were chapped with venom and sinking into the blackness that she had manufactured for them to wallow in. Pulling up the curtains so they could watch the day around them grow bright with flame, she would kiss each of them on the mouth and apologize for her lack of conscience. She wasn't ever diagnosed. It could have been anything that brought around the end. But, for the good of all man kind, the end finally came. She's gone now, and everybody can breathe a little easier, fall asleep a little quicker, and pretend that they'll miss her more than she is going to miss herself. Nobody read her writing anyway, so her "purposeful existence" was most likely another trick of the eye or slide of hand. She always pretended like she didn't understand magic tricks, but really, she was living one all along. She just had to wait to until everyone was hooked enough for the final stage of her biggest trick yet to be truly set up for her; she was to disappear completely and never be found. 

You were all hooked and you played right in. 
She would thank you if you were here, but then again, if she were here, we all wouldn't be. 

arrivals

You fuck like London

She fucks like Paris

I fuck like a lover

another

eviction noted on the door

sore;

far more

into

nothing and 

out of

everything.

Sex me up like a rag doll

and 

pour your insides onto my skin

to

test

my pressed

arrest

and mark it on your excel spreadsheet

document

full of permanent

beliefs

and 

fleeting

facts.

Silence your qualms

and give me all of you

in my palms

balm

and 

charm

to undo the harms

done

and undone

against my 

definition

of 

orgasmic.

Ask me about it.

I'll point to my stencil of you

and make you cry

Nightengale

When I’m with you, it’s less like a quantitative analysis and more like a qualitative dialysis, 
excruciating paralysis, 
thickening calluses forming from the cigarette burns that I say I don’t feel. 
It’ll heal. 
When it comes down to it, you’re a steal, 
locked up in stainless steel
because only the most enigmatic blatantly refuse to feel.
I’d rather learn that the imaginary speed limits you’re abiding 
as I’m riding
are just your excuse for hiding,
writing our stories in a book 
for someone else to take a look; 
I’ll hook them with the line, “our love was one of those that should only be written on handmade paper.”  
See you later. 
I know. 
No... 
yes, I know, there’s no snow in San Diego. 
It’s a desert. 
You’ll desert me while I’m sitting with my cookies, wrapped up in your jacket, holding on until
holding on until
holding on until
holding
on 
until I find a faith in something a little bit bigger than the love you parachuted down to kiss me with last night. 
I want to be tomorrow’s first cigarette, and the next day, and a couple thousand days after that until we’ve sat in a salon and talked about the necessity of call boxes. 
All boxes just there to hold things 
we burn and burn until the fire is bigger than the ice and it all evaporates into embers of what it could have been if it had ever even gotten the chance to soar
I’m on the floor
pacing
my pulse is racing
and it’s strange because I feel like dancing, 
romancing,
because you’re entrancing,
like driving the wrong way down a one-way street,
an empty alley with too many police cars to make this at all representational of her existential behaviors towards those people who are
too disgusting to not kiss.
Hit or miss.
Miss? 
Miss?
Yes, I wanted to let you know that the lights are a little bit brighter when they’re reflected from your eyes. 
How did they get so goddamn blue?  
You stole the skies. 
Sighs, sizing me up and down, 
waiting for that effervescent frown 
that can illicit more out of a whole lonely town 
than one of my smiles 
could for miles. 
Parking in the no park zone, 
trying too hard to hit all the caution cones, 
waiting for you to answer the phone, 
coming home. 
You’re home? 
You are home. 
Such an awkward sensation to feel alone. 
But I locked the car 
and I have to walk pretty far 
to see or find where you are.
Shit.
Fuck.
I’m stuck.
I forgot my key without a doubt, 
so locked out. 
I have no idea how to be
me
with all the lights on
It’s too bright, these songs. 
I’m turning it off to start all over. 
Pull off the covers and find another lover. 

It’s difficult when you only believe in believing just to give yourself a reason to stand up.

Yup.
I wanna hold you in my mouth for the next three months and see if you grow into something edible, or credible.
There are very few people who can leave me without a thing to say. 
But you’ve hooked me that way. 
And that’s not to say that I wouldn’t love
love
to spend forever trying to find the words big enough for you and me to be heard
Let’s lose a generation in grand central station
and find it in the middle of your bed
standing on my head trying to clear the wet clothes smell
pungent enough for me to tell
or sell
really, sell anything just to get by.
Just to keep on living this little lie.
Too intimate for me to ever say goodbye.
Happy today, sweetheart.
I’ll tell you it tomorrow too. 

socio-

I am always faking it
        always
                    faking
                               it
and always fucking it
       always
                   fucking
                                it
into a resemblance
semblance
resembling your scheduled

yessums and no ma'ams

all coated up to butter

anyone's biscuits

and lather        us               all                     down                like               masturbation         and         power          struggles            after      midnight

don't give me a single hint

because i wasn't supposed to tell you a single word

or actually follow through with a single kiss

since i am better at living in a single herd

i am wearing that dress without a bra so that you'll fantasize about my fingers and your tongue or 

the other way around                                                        its all just fine with me

even your narcotics 

[too addictive]

are goddamn waterproof uno

compared to me

[too predicted]

God, kid, your ritual cash deposits are making my skin twitch

and i'm pacing in my room

[too ready]

keep pressing me

bite my lips a little harder and tell me that you've got a couple more secrets in store. 

I'll take that challenge 

and up you two games of strip poker

starting 

                                                                          with you

stripped 

in stripes

and mocking me just a little bit

it's a safety hazard

but challenge accepted

because

the only thing i love more than you 

is winning

-path

I could have attached a picture of the tattoo you burned in my mouth
but I'm rolling through hell at the moment
and
I am not interested in letting you think
                                                    know

that you won.

He loved them fiercely, but he had to carry on business as usuAL

I like smoking with you because I like watching you smoke

Cigarettes are just an excuse to stare. 

Start again, from the top;

Okay, so I was born.  

99 Market Place

I wondered every night because you're effortlessly undeniable. I fancy the point where your lips begin to burn and my heart begins to yearn for a taste, all coated in chili and curiosity. Ulcers are coming into style they say but most likely you'll be coming in and out of consciousness at just the right time, probing the yellow jackets enough to mark your sibilance with sincerity. Write it up and wait. You couldn't create if they paid you to

Bullshit. 

I should stop lying on this thing.

We are just underneath the morning side of the sunrise, and counting the pheasants who got shot in the night. I loved thinking about a tiny pocket of life wherein bark and leaves are the same, bushes and trees are the same, and you and me weren't… 

I managed to fit an ellipses in this thing, just trying to extend your metaphorical "resemblance" to the memory that I harvested. This distraction is becoming something that might be too obsessive and compulsive to destroy any more. 

It's all looking bold when I write it, like the letter each want to scream out their own story; a thousand little reasons why the moon has always favored the stars and the calendar numbers are no longer dictating my happiness. The wind is singing like it wanted me to be cool, and my sunburned palms don't hurt nearly as much as ink. All around, the striped, stripped off humanity is asserting its dominance with a leash and pretending. They watch me in a way that makes me feel akin to the termites that linger too long in windows and the aphids darting at the lemon tree. I might have been a pest, pestering at the oxygen that they had bought from the government before I was even born. I almost forgot what it felt like to be a child, and then I let you fucking kiss my face. 

There's a keyboard for French and I wanna fuck for the rest of the revolution and I will follow you to Narnia. You're remembering earlier. I can't take this song and, sadly enough, it's always like this. You're holding you're words and woods to try to tell you'll hold me and call you yours. 

It's all I've wished of and all I've wondered of.  Who plays the symbols at a party? You know how I live, and how I love you until the second that's going to destroy your dreams. It's a serious debrief of humanity that is going to destroy you dreams.  

You wanted it. And then she saw you cry and it might as well have been a splint in the time- space continuum.  Don't.

Don't drink that. 

You're and you've always been too wonderful for me. 

Landmark

Just waiting with my eyes closed, my own recollections fading in and out of modernist rejection toward all of which may eventually culminate into something                      glowing.
I wanted to sit on a plane and watch the rested, resting, restful resonance underneath me fade away with your reticence and my resistance. It might have been your reticence and resistance, but I wasn't keeping track anymore.
I only could count the bruises on my neck, my skin holding in your breath more than your lungs, locating every molecule which could have interacted with your thoughts, and squeezing them until the squeals of my memories actually could be relived again.
Centigrade and the metric system, both intensely more useful in the management of my linkage institutions, were falling off the books, shivering the way you made me when you played me like a 3-year old piano in your living room. I haven't heard your music, but I felt your rhythm against the palpable grey-space, white-light, black-lit mutual breath that we shared a couple times.
You were alright.
You could have waited.
You managed to wrap your inconsistencies around my neck and lock the key beneath your bicycle 5,000 miles away.
Lucky moi.
Action was called about a year ago, but you were getting coffee and another cigarette, blatantly ignoring the way my form was molding into a bluish representation of a spirit I once attempted to tame. My lips are pressed up against your glass and you're watching the lights on the Christmas trees so that you can be the first person who watch the season start. It's a little ridiculous to assume that your mind, all tightly knit like the sweater that's going to cover the evidence of your momentary satisfaction, caressing rock-bottom, could ever meander into the monumental idea of the pyramids in Egypt. I'm Cleopatra and I've been ruined.
As the story goes, though [I know because I've watched the trailer forwards, backwards, left and right] these seconds are going to last only long enough to be documented in 1,001 Arabian Nights.
27,001 Nights of Me.
It'll be a someday, and you'll see it on the shelf by the children's section where you'll be forcing intelligence onto the spawn of your creation, and you'll laugh when you touch all the pages that your tongue carved into me. I'll cross your mind then, and you'll wonder how many more stories you could've worked into the novella if you'd given me the shot.
Truth be told, a whole book on the strategies of your kiss is a waste of pages.
Published and bound, it's being worked through the upper-crust, where they will discuss in Saturday's book club what the endless repetition of "perpetual" could mean underneath all of the period marks. They'll find it far too unintelligent to believe that I only said it in an attempt to fathom your endless ability to encompass me completely, until your presence alone was enough to pool in the center of my stomach, and pull noises out of my mouth that only the most skilled had ever reached before.
Your eagle eyes will watch me, the way that I watch you now, and God, You and Satan will pow-wow about the fate of my soul.
Send me a letter when you decide:
     Brynna Hall
     666 Salvation Lane

I'll be eagerly anticipating your response.





Don't keep me waiting.