Sunday, August 18, 2019

Untitled

The time we spent 
Together then
Reminds me of
Poems I used to write
And it's not fair
It's not fair
Because
Looking back
I'm not sure I even know
How to be 
That person anymore

Sunday, August 11, 2019

Your Heart

I wrote a story into your heart, boy.
I burrowed my way in,
The signs of my passage
Scratching into your veins
I found some unguarded entrance
And I stole myself into your very being
The things I've left have become intrinsic
Inescapable
A thing written into the first stones,
Into the walls behind your eyes,
Littered in fragments across the soil
A stranger's thoughts,
Buried under a foreign paving stone,
Upon which you've already begun to lay your foundations
Even if you were to find the things I've left inside you,
The sentences that come uncalled,
Certain feelings that ride in with the rain,
A slowly dissapearing photograph
Of a photograph within your mind,
You wouldn't be able to extricate them
Even if you were to flay yourself
With the most surgical precision,
Unravel your thoughts like taffy,
And attempt to remove those single threads
From your gilded tapestry,
You could, at best,
Re-write yourself,
Putty over every sign and symbol,
Scrape off every fingerprint burned into the bastion walls
But even then you'd know
Every time you stumbled over
The chisel marks and paints
That marked like graves
What you'd fought and labored against,
Reworked into an image so carefully chosen,
You'd know
You'd remember having done it
And remember what you'd tried to make undone
And in this way only deepen the marks,
Tracing and relining them
With both reverent and hateful fingers
And maybe no one would know but you
But every stone is built on top of another
And from now until your body stills
You will live
Carrying onward,
Carrying some part of me I left behind,
Writing stories across the secret chambers
In the beating breasts of others
And I'll always be there with you, boy
Together you and I will walk this road
We will walk this road forever,
Heart
To heart
To heart

Saturday, August 10, 2019

Untitled, Unfinished

The trailing end of day
Makes mist of concrete slab
Puddles pooling
In the uneven dips and potholes
The rain comes down in soft lines
Like a rip in fine stockings
When it strikes the water
It makes silver rings
And points of brilliant light
Like diamonds
Sinking under the surface
Like ice melting in the heat
Vanishing into nothing

Thursday, August 1, 2019

There's This Thing

There's this thing that has grown
Crystalized inside my chest
I know it to be so
Because I can feel it there
Like a gnawing weight
A peach stone
In the pit of my stomach
I can sometimes feel it
Catching on my insides
When I see you
It seems that somehow
The world has become pinned
A moment sewn
To some fragment of you
The curve of your eye
The light in your hair
A needle in my breast
A quill in my throat
And as my blood heats
And the fire spills
Down through my veins
The thing inside begins to thaw
To melt and run
Like wax
And honey
And my heart
And it rises up and out
Falling over my tongue
Dripping between my lips
Condensing into words
I love you
I love you
I love you

Monday, July 29, 2019

Future Glass

** This poem is, in my humble opinion, not very good **

I feel I'm wading through a desert
At the bottom of a glass
While the future rains without reprieve
To bury me in our past


I struggle to find purchase on
A slope that just keeps rising
A mountain range of distance
To set between our two horizons


I hold on tight but all I grasp
Keeps slipping through my fingers
So I seek to pin it down with words
But summon only ghosts and whispers


As I fumble lines my throat recalls
Sand has this certain way
Of stilling tongues and stealing things
I'd never meant to say


Because I'm worried how you'll take it
If I land close to what I mean
As the streaming granules slow
I worry how you'll take it when you leave

Thursday, July 25, 2019

Call to the Void

There must be something in the void
That made me feel loved
Some comfort in the warm velvet blackness
Something that filled my aching chest like a cup
Did I catch my breath on the jagged edge of stars?
Or lose it from my lungs 
Pulled into the hot stirrings 
Of echo drenched canyons?
Or was it the way the waves 
Seem to whisper like a beckons
That wet thing calling in it's dry voice
All sibilance and crackling husks
Something within it's depth 
Always urging me onwards 
While it's infinite collapsing hands 
Keep pushing me back
Returning me to shore
I must have seen something
Felt something churning inside me
When I stared out into the abyss
Because I speak to it
Sing down my sorrows, my wants, my dreams
Like I could call down the heavens
Fallen stars to pool in wishes at my feet
I pin the things I barely admit to myself
Upward into the infinite tapestries
As if they held them sacred
I speak the words
In the same way I'd say them to him
I spill myself outwards
The words gushing like rivers over my tongue
Like rapids over my teeth
My insides swollen over the dam of my throat
And surging up and out and endless
A siphon I can no longer halt
Until I am wide eyed and hot and racing
Until I am bathed in silk and softness
Until everything is wildflowers and honey
And without pain
So I must have felt some sweetness
From the thoughtless depths of dark
Found some reassuring notion
Woven from my reflection on the moon
Misunderstood the weight of everything
To be a kind of heavy comfort
For how else could it have made me
Drain myself empty
Bare myself open
Into the vacant uncaring void
The way I do 
To him

Sunday, March 24, 2019

Untitled

I'm sorry that life has been unkind to you
She says
While slipping back into her clothes
And I'm sure she means it
And I know that she's right
But I'm not thinking about that
Something stirs inside like moth wings
And I'm reminded of a song
But my head is like an empty lot
With spaces where my thoughts once parked
And nothing is forthcoming
She's since moved onward
Tapping at her phone
Her face aglow 
Her hair like a hanging halo
She says
Maybe it's this
Leaning toward me tilting forward
She points it at me
Bathes me in it
But no
This isnt right
It doesn't match my memory
Of how the lyrics feel

Friday, January 11, 2019

Sick

My head feels heavy
A weight propped up
On the rope of my spine
My eyes feel like small peaches
Set into webs of tissue paper
Threatening to fall back into my skull
My tongue fills the space of my mouth
Spilling into the sea wall that is my throat
Barnacle clad coquina
A whetstone that puts an edge on my words
Someone has taken my arms and hands
And sewn a ribbon under my skin
Wrapping and binding the flesh onto my bones
Pulling the line too tight
And my feet don't exist at all
Just bare bone and tendon
That push into the earth where I stand
And something in me burns
Is burning me alive
I feel every inch of my existence
I am a fire