Paper Mask

There's poetry in everything
They said
But I'm sure they meant
Ballerinas and sunlit meadows
And not corpses and politics
Sure there's something pretty
About a grave
When it doesn't belong to anyone you know

But I saw a paper mask
In a puddle on the asphalt
Slick with shimmering chemical rainbows
I took a photo
And maybe there's a poem in there

But I mostly felt uneasy

And I think to myself
This isn't timeless
Like I haven't written poetry
That only speaks a fragment of time

I think
This isn't beauty
Like poetry is always meant to be pretty
Not ugly and crushing
Burning from the inside out

I think
There are millions of poets
Screaming out words
People with more loss and suffering
Whose lines bear more meaning
Than mine ever could

And that's probably true

I can't say anything
That hasn't already been said
Written better by someone else
The poignant needle driven heartwards

But I saw a bit of paper in the rain

And everything felt so heavy

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

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

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

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

I spill myself outwards

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 what else could have made me

Drain myself empty

Bare myself open

Into a vacant uncaring void

Lyrics

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 one

Clicking her nail

Leaning toward me tilting forward

She points it at me

Bathes me in it

But no

This isn't right

It doesn't match my memory

Of how it felt at all

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