suffer in silence; i say
too much here and too
little elsewhere
every piece written, shuffled off
like clockwork
to the nearest bleeding heart
open 24/7, not out of
choice, but necessity like your
local convenience store
seeing its most loyal customers
only in the early AM

hello barbie
r u there?
It's been 4 years and 57 girls
But i dreamt of you two nights in a row
And this is why i tweak most nights
If i can't dream it's easier to believe that i'm doing just fine
Do people have somewhere to go when they're alone?
I feel like all i can do is roam and roam and roam
I'm privy to the big secret
That nothing really matters
And we ascribe as much importance to where we deem it most fitting
And i cannot for the life of me figure out after everything
Why it still stings

"I'm not afraid to die," I said
If I was sure money wouldn't be wasted on a funeral
I'd **** myself anyway

Inconsequential, any of us
Why does it even matter, when all we are is dust?
"You inject meaning, and that's how you live how you do"
I reject that completely, what I've done is just not done.

i tried to shoot for the moon
But gravity reared its head
my dreams just couldn't escape orbit
now my dreams are dead

tell me about the sadness you have squirrelled away. the one that threatens to show itself in every smile your eyes don’t quite follow. the one you nurture secretly, feeding it with short bursts of self-pity that no one’s ever privy to. your little guilty pleasure - because you cannot feel anything else, so this will have to do.

i am selfish, hungry
yearning for what i could never need
that my ego would smother any want in the crib
because i know what i become when
stripped bare, that i lose any sense of self and become an unfaithful anagram of all the things you
love and deplore

before any of this i never
would have questioned the stars.

i knew enough to know that i knew nothing, and it was never contentment i felt but resignation - far be it from me to think i deserve understanding.

but i’ve seen brighter things now, brash and clad in flannel, impulsive - and it was hard to tear my eyes away and force them skyward, but the stars never blinded me.

some nights
i am there, flying over words, my brain voiding out the blank worlds it skipped in its impatient race to catch another glimpse of what i saw that night, you knee deep in the water with your eyes lost beyond the horizon when you said this should be enough but it never would be

other nights i am here, crawling over words, trying to get to there.

its maddening.
trying to force the words, any words! out.
god ive never met anyone more deserving.
even still, anything i write? i doubt.

you tell me about
love, and say I know nothing. But I know enough.

you tell me love is your parents grown
old, together, both
each other's pillar.

you tell me love is your man
walking you home and
leaving you giddy on the doorstep

but i know love.

love is my father yelling YOU ******* ***** when my mother tries to sneak in
in the dead of night

love is me, sitting outside the cold apartment, waiting for her to come visit her four children

love is my mother's boyfriend, and his clothes hangers on my
back, from being too noisy playing
Wheel of Fortune on the old white computer

love is me, smoking my weight in
chemicals

love is me, hiding my noose in the corner
of my cupboard, worried what my siblings would think

That is love.

tempt me near a decade
thought myself Circe’s swine
multiple lives bear multiple aches
to sail is to leave behind

who wants to live forever?
reincarnation, rather
she could ruin every life i’d ever live
just mere pigs on her isle

******* hurt me, *******.

just ******* do it.

when your world’s been throbbing grey for the better part of a decade you’d settle for the sharpness of red as well.


just let me ******* feel something

it could be said that i dwell in the past more than is healthy - it’s just that there are just certain nows that I live in infinitely, its shelf life in the murky recesses of my mind extended involuntarily whenever i slip into the haze between lucidity and oblivion.

the nows aren’t good or bad - but that’s par for the course, i haven’t seen anything but greys in the last decade

2 am and I can't sleep
With you racing through my mind
How could I?
Leaving tracks and bitterness on my insides
The scent of flowers and putrid feelings linger on
Permeating the air around my soul
You left your imprints, you ******
They burned through and left a hole
I can't shake you out
I breathed you in too deeply
Poisoned my very being
Now I feel so ******* lonely

I knew an hour in that it wasn’t going
to work, and it was a unwelcome thought.

Maybe it was because I was gone three sheets to the wind, as I had to be to even leave the sanctity of my sanctuary - still the feeling that it wouldn’t hurt as good as I hoped it would felt full in my mouth, promising to ruin my inebriation, promising to ruin my night/week/life.

I suppose I hit on her after, but she must’ve not taken to it - I woke up 8 hours later on the side of the road, with just the vaguest memory of yelling at a cab driver to run me over, and the smell of dead babies in the air.

I just wish she was as ****** up as I needed her to be.

you asked once why everything
i write sounds like regret - and i
remember lying through my teeth, wanting so ******* hard to sound like as if i’ve never given a **** in my life and wasn’t about to start.

i mean, it worked with everyone else, didn’t it?

i was fuming. how dare you? deconstruct
me like that, and for that i mustered all of my boyish pride - and pretended I never knew you.

and that is why everything i
write sounds like regret.

how did  a few nights with you
turn into months of restless sleep?
you haunt my fever dreams,
in them your fingers reach into my mouth
to pull me by the teeth

how are you telling me
that your existence is weightless?
i could drag you down, the way
my own being has dragged me down for as long as i’ve misunderstood its purpose

she came to me, freezing - and
that grounded me
there, because i could not stop
dreaming
of warmth and its elusivity after
the waking. and i
was glad
for the cold, because i knew it
meant she was real, that she wasn’t
another delusion