i ache to have you near
my heart bursts with too
many beats per second 
thinking about how i can’t
put my hand in yours
no longer
memories become shrouded
in the dust of my mistakes

and all i want is for you to forget
wipe them away
with the promise of growing old
& never looking back

romanticisms fall
from your lips
like blood from
an open wound
i don’t know whether to
believe you or dismiss you

the little voices
inside of her head
don’t dare to go away even 
when she tells them to

don’t let them break you
don’t let them define you

but from a young age
we learn to judge
to look down upon people 
who aren’t multi-talented, multi-faceted
who smell like whiskey and cigarettes
who don’t have a degree

and there she is wasting away
wishing she were any place
but inside this four-walled
300-seats 
claustrophobium of the arts

but you need it—
you fucking need it

but need is different than want
and all she wants is a chance
to close her eyes 
and not study astronomical 
equations
paradoxical abrasives
that scratch away
what she really cares about

and she’s yelling
at them now

shut up & let me be

but she’s a little too—
no that’s not the problem
wishful prayers leave her mouth 
and tickle the air for a moment 
then fade away with the wind

and they never stop judging
while she never stops yelling
and four years down the road
all she has is a degree in analyzing rhetoric
and a bad case of anxiety 
that ripples through
her like a lightening storm

she’s there again in the corner of the dark bar
drinking wine, rum
and irish coffees

lost in the forest of memories
fighting bears, claws
& trees

blacking out really screwed her up real good

he greeted me
with a smile
that melted my
bulletproof heart (enclosed in a brick palace
with guards who held swords, guns,
anything that would inflict some sort of damage)
into a pool of sin
laced with kerosene & pulled dreams from
the bottom of a dank wishing well
dreams of a happy place
a man and a woman
smiles a plenty creeping
across the face

but everything was twisted convoluted
screwed up like a knot you can’t untie
lies spilled from his lips
like a mess of boiling water & foam from overcooking

and happiness was a thousand-mile
plane ride away among perfect white clouds
away from my life—

he set me on fire the first chance he got.

always burned my tongue 
on hot liquids,
froze my mind with
icy cream & slushes
tap tap tap my pencil, my fingers,
anything on table tops
to pass the time
as i was waiting

but i waited for you

never thinking that time
would stop and
lead me to you

because i’ve been
waiting 21 years to live and love
but was only consciously
waiting for six months
for you when old love failed
& it was only nine years from when i
learned what a prince charming was

i waited for you

and brainfreeze
& the tongue burns
were worth it all

inhale dreams
in the form of cocaine
powdered white
whiter than the dingy
edge of the sink basin you decided to
snort off of
where that prima donna debutante
all done up
in red lipstick and black lace
bled and threw up into last night

hyped up hopped up

exhale in the form
of dying dreams
that placed themselves
in the field of disaster
jettisoned themselves out of the sky 
and bloody wishes
of enemies finding themselves
impaled on a rusty nail

drugs create a threat
an enemy that doesn’t
stop growing inside of us
within our waiting minds

and right now you just want to have fun
a technicolor paradise that doesn’t end until 3am
a hypersensitive you that doesn’t stop until 3am

and you wonder where has time gone
you wonder who you’ve become

are you a coke lord or a human being?

childlike nostalgia keeps my tank from reaching empty when things get hard. when we’re children, people ask us what do we want to be when we grow up. and the children around me always said they wanted to be firemen, policewomen, astronauts that jump around on the moon defying gravity tethered to a spaceship. but I always held onto this impractical dream, this dream of writing, as if it were a robin that needed nursing back to health. writing came easily to me, nature’s gift to my hands that don’t do much of anything else; i can’t cook a four course meal, i shrink the laundry every other time i do it. all i do (easily) is read and write. when i was in kindergarten and first grade, i ate books like they were breakfast, lunch and dinner. and by the time second grade came (minus the flaming fire of harry potter that blazed upon us children) i knew that i wanted to be a writer (this dream turned into journalism but then i realized my hands weren’t as good at depicting real life as it was at capturing moments in a reality created by myself). a constant stream of verse, poems, and prose find their way into my hands and fingertips, dripping from a pen or becoming words on a bright computer screen. creating constantly firing synapses and the occasional foreign design of ideas. i’m rearranging histories that we’ve known, recreating stories that we’re fond of. and even though it’s not practical. and even though i risk becoming a homeless vagrant wondering the streets trying to hustle. i live to write. childlike nostalgia, don’t fail me now.

consumption of a poison of mass production, yeah, we’re drowning in pools full of liquor all around us. pain masked by the intricacies of faulty false brain chemistry our minds swirling around blurring the images of everything around us - where lust turns into love at the bat of an eyelash. where the smell of damn near rubbing alcohol lures us into a world beyond the one we’re living in. and the melodic happenings of a song just fuse into the syncopated beats and we’re dancing a bit off step but it all makes sense within the nerves of our feet. and lyrics aren’t words anymore but they’re stories of our lives and we internalize personify personalize them. we’re last friday night, we’re swimming pools, we’re tik toks and thrift shops, we’re material girls in a material world but immaterialized and we’re just matter almost no better than stardust in the skies our neighbors in the widening universe. 

we’re going to hell tonight. 
but at least it’s a fun ride.

i’m bending backwards
on my fragile wrists
that burn and ache to break
to make ends meet
to gain experience

but my happiness is
a sacrificial lamb in all of this —
where can i go from here?

and i
as i rest
my mind
to sleep dreamwander
around the earth
that is not made up
of real things
i pick up on
your wavelengths
dip my feet into the water
that creeps up
on the shore
of your mind 

and i am you and you are you and me
all in the same
you’re the dream
i dreamt of
every night before i saw you 
you’re the chilly ice water
that wakes me up as

it slides snakes past my toes
as i’m walking along the beach
in indian summer and
it’s still overcast
and foggy 

chilled to the bone
my body quakes
but my eyes widen
and dreams
the visions of my mind

they come alive
one day one moment
that relies on the
cosmical alignment of the stars—

they were always meant
to be you and i

we were born, you and i
born to be breaking past barriers
to be
with the one
who compliments us
behind the looking glass

but we’re far from mimicry,
we’re just two people  
who compliment and supplement
the other 

two people that wade in the water
the sandy shore the beach
of our mind
hand in hand until the end
of our earthly time

she’s crystalline
her body formed from shapes
of perfection built to fit only each other
little crystals form her bright blues that
twinkle like stars and i’ve realized she’s
not too far from saccharin’s structure
sentimental tooth decay as i bite
into her core and i reveal the dirty brown
that forms when you’ve let her sit for awhile

let her sit for awhile and
she’ll rot
right in front of your eyes 
a sour smelling
sticky rotten mess
that was whole only
a few moments before