ours and not mine

There are no answers, I am selfish and drunken and smoking cigarettes with ghosts behind the clear glass of airport smoking booths. I trade smooth filters and notice lipstick; I extinguish the ember and wrap the treasure in a napkin scrawled with black ink. I am twisted and squeezed while my tubes are replaced with wires and synapses fire shots into the back of my throat. I plug in, sit down, and shut up, letting my fingers tickle my vocal chords in their halfhearted attempt to read braille. Fruitless, they scramble down further to find stomach acid without clarity, scramble to find a fingerhold that can feel something. I read their skewed translations, their feedback reports, and I feel helpless and heavy with addiction. Scan my chest, pull apart the hinges and sketch photographs of clues, trace the organs without clarity. I am lucid, I am staring at fluorescent sky, I am flat against the wall and spinning. I flick the matches in my palm, long since beheaded and useless, and I remember asphalt in parking lots. The ringing in my ears leaves a trail of fucking breadcrumbs on the shoulder of every highway, down the wing of every plane. Cyclical and beautiful, at least I’ll be able to get back somewhere.

I think I'm too drive to drunk.

I can feel that current fill my chest
And it smells like asphalt and shifting gears
It tastes like reckless and air pushing back
Taking wasted oxygen and replacing with sweet euphoria
Maybe it's the coffee talking
Maybe I'm an addict
Maybe it's last night's whiskey flowing
Straight down my fingers
Across the steering wheel
And into the engine.

This is meta, right?

I've been feeling something less than beautiful
Standing between distortion and escape
I've been clipping stitches from my lips
Just an inch for my lungs
And I taste the air
Just an inch for my tongue
And it sways in rhythmic circles,
A raindance to the sky
I sway in rhythmic circles
Of hellos and goodbyes.

Clouds swell with sentences
Oxygen thins without breath
I exhale euphoria,
Mixed with sedatives and irony
And let these vague fucking phrases continue their attempt to represent something meaningful. And I edit this because I can't let myself show anything less than meticulous word choice and structure.

And somehow, it still helps to write.

Buzz

Sweet nothings fill my head.
The sweetest words have silence behind them, and my ears have been ringing for a lifetime with a beautiful buzz.

I raise my fist in a room full of strangers, in a city unknown, and I feel unity.
Drunken, slurring unity.

It is a false representation of something I grasped just long enough to know what fell through the cracks.

Stoned happiness, something like acquiescence, an imitation of that buzz in my ears.
A sound persisting through each new place I place myself.

Holden

Next time,
I won't sit across from the window
So you don't have to see the light in my eyes
And next time,
Maybe I'll just keep them shut.

And I can't wait
till my hair goes grey
and I don't recognize my family
And I can't wait to forget you
And I can't wait to forget you

There's a lot of "too soon" and not enough "someday"
It's like winter with no fall
And the shadows are leaving their corners
and I'm scared that it's my fault

And your name
catches in my throat
With a choking melody
And I want to swallow
but I'm scared to lose
The parts of you trapped in me

Fading

Last night I dreamt the sutures
Fell from our lips
And our atrophied tongues
Lay limp behind teeth
I dreamt enamel cages
Decayed throughout time
Exhaling clouds of a beautiful grey.

As ghosts fade to shadows
Retreat from the sun
They leave whispering darkness
And lingering smiles
And threats of returning
With sharpened words
And weakening wills

parking lots

Well I guess this is honesty
Or at least my attempt
I've got this grey space inside of me
And it's filled with contempt

For the phone calls in parking lots
I never wanted to make
And the weeknights alone in bars
With thoughts that I couldn't shake
Thoughts that I couldn't shake

Well I guess this is for the best
Or at least it's for now
I'm losing memories of sunrises
Wishing you'd shown me how

Not to fuck things up again
And stop making casualties out of friends

I'm begging strangers for lighters on the train
Bumming cigarettes off your ghost
Filling the asphalt with ashes
Explosions in the street
I want to watch it all burn down

Well I guess this is honesty
Or at least my attempt.

strike anywhere

There is no more waiting in parking lots, sharing cigarettes with your ghost. The asphalt took some salt and saliva that I’ll never get back; pieces of me left behind like decaying bread crumbs dropped in case I found myself somewhere far away. It’s a pentagram, a sacred circle, or just a pile of garbage waiting for a gust strong enough to shift into another parking space. This was hallowed, wasted, beautiful earth that has been flattened and pressed and turned into a cemetery for bad ideas. Aquamarine stories and deep shoulder sighs meet long stares and solemn tones; it’s pretense and pretend, it’s real and relevant, it’s hurt-or-feel-nothing ultimatums that lay scattered across the white stripes keeping everything contained and organized. When your foot presses the accelerator, when my hand shifts metal into gear, the ground feels smooth and natural beneath the tires, physically effortless but mentally it’s Atlas shifting the world an inch to the right so his shoulder can breathe. I know the asphalt is an illusion; I know if those tires were replaced with my knees they would slowly drag and rip, cartilage cracking and tendon snapping with my two thousand pound metal cage pressing down to meet every crack and crevice, every steamroller signature carving into weak flesh. There is no more waiting in parking lots; there are loitering ghosts that never have a fucking lighter when all I need is a box of matches and your phone number on the side that says “Strike Anywhere”.

mind

Traveling years in time
I have been someone else and seen myself in many lives
Tossed on wind and rain
But threads connect each mind
Back to mine

There's a strange sense of settlement
With a backing throb and pulse
And rolling mountains under storm
Wave the sunset back and forth.

Empty spaces

I am checking empty spaces
Vacant with purpose
I am finding new cobwebs
Tracing spider spines

There is clarity among the dust
Wrapped tight with web and saliva

I am pouring wax onto liquid crystal
Divining hieroglyphs
I am three lines from goodbye
And I cannot reach through the cracks

Cough syrup

Silently striped with streetlight window painting, I stand near my borrowed bed and stare at the nearsighted fuzz of solid objects around me. I see my future laid out in tea leaves, hazy and steeped in green cough syrup. My finger swirls liquid and I drink before answers dare to show themselves. I am released from the harness of consciousness into free fall.
I run through traffic and stop in the center of 90th and State, an intersection amphitheater for this typical tragedy. I face twenty lanes of traffic but need just one open window, one purple striped painting that I will cling to and consume exhaust until my oxygen is replaced. I trail behind as body and asphalt meet and explode, sparks of spine littering the eastward climb toward somewhere.
I lay alone, lips melted onto metal, and breathe a forgotten pixie scent mixed with poison. I let lenses settle over my eyes and there are no objects, just familiar outlines. Veins like interstates, I will follow as far as my lungs allow.

Violence

Last night I dove my head deep into rough grey fibers
And let them touch my skin as if they were your fingertips
A moment of connection threw my head back with violence
And chaos turned to structure turned to flushing heavy breaths
Spread apart and pulled in direction with your eyes
Nothing close to normalcy, you held the weight of fate
A moment of another world threw my dream away with violence
And the silence in this borrowed room was broken empty space.

oxygen stains

When there is no sunrise
The world is our grey
A place I have learned to love and hate

I am glad I am blind
I can press these pieces of your spine against my irises
Mirror shards from my throat
Show me outlines of your face

When there are clouds
The pieces have been buried
Carefully placed between love and hate

You breathe into my mind
And I collect oxygen stains across the dome of my skull
Patterned reminders of haze
Bring the scent back to my face

Treasures

There can be happiness and decay
But I remember what I have seen
There is no need for color
When black and grey hold treasures.

When need fills the atmosphere
My veins slow to a seething crawl
And I will speak,
Even if there is no reply.

normal

I see you all around me
You are strangers with masks
Molded copies of your face
And there is beauty,
Even in false representation.

I see the world going around
You are newfound vertigo
Rolling eyes in my head
And there is oxygen,
Even without air.

Cocktails

I have been chewing on your lip
Tasting bitter flakes of skin
And a salty sunrise in the east

I have been chewing on filters
Tasting arsenic and cancer
Lacing cotton between teeth

These words are grotesque plastic
Melting as a twisted conversation
Their shape is madness and rhythm
Their stems are thick and I sharpen my teeth

I have been chewing on your lip
And I taste dirty tavern floors
A cocktail of dust and blood.

Receipts

All I have are receipts
Tucked into pockets
Framing moments and the in-between
I wear clothing to match
And keep my eyelids tattooed open

I have lost your scent
So I crawl under the table
Searching for plastic reminders
With a hazy drunken wish
For you to meet me on the floor
In our vacuum of irises and apologies
and our own inevitable grey
I've built a fort the color of sunrise,
like postmortem veins pumped free of blood.

raven

If Van Gogh can sever his ear and still create

Who am I to think I cannot blindly make

Something disgusting and selfish

Covered in blood and bile

Held out to you as a cat brings a dead raven

Or digs a hidden tell-tale heart

To lay at your feet and wait for praise.

ex nihilo

There was nothing to lose

And nothing to gain

And nothing is nothing

And nothing has changed

I gave nothing to you

And you must have done the same

While I stared at the sun

You called on your wind

And swept me away

split between

In my dream
I watch you slip from your ladder
I wet the rungs with honesty
and grey salt for your wounds
I watch understanding fill your eyes 

as I bite your fingernails to flesh

When there is nothing to grip the soft wood
of your boring perfection
I will be the gravity that pulls you
not to salvation
not to damnation
not to happiness
but to the impact of the words you dared to speak

The spine you claim to have
will split between love and distraction

#selfish

This bottle is my own

And I thank the clouds above me

That I am selfish and cowardly

This ribbon stays tight

Around my finger

And I chase your voice with whiskey

There is a timbre in my chest

That reminds me of you

It smells of Pixie dust and loathing

There is a drawing on my shelf

That was made by your hand

And it shows your moth

meeting my flame.

heredity

Like father, like son

Homeless and wandering

Retreating to known

And eschewing the rest

Like father, like son

We are tangled fibers

Of drugged decisions

And paralyzing doubt

Like father, like son

I drink and run

While he sits and sinks

And we both stay still

Like father, like son

I replace synapse with smoke

Pack a few clothes

And leave home

Like father, like son

We look at the ruin

Shrug our shoulders

And meet in the valley

Away from the sun.

Blind

I stare at every car that passes
I wait for what I do not want to see
I sweat blood mixed with sin
And the sidewalk bucks and spins

I watch each spinning wheel
From behind drunken slurs
My throat is full of smoke
And shards of deceitful mirrors

I thank the sky above that I am blind
Without these mirror pieces pressed against my eyes
I pray to no one and nothing
But I am bound by the same fate
Rejected years ago

I hate the state you tainted
I hate the words we spoke

Remember ruin

I made a promise I couldn't keep
As my blood ran grey
As I clung to the valley
And it burned with the dawn

I promised both worlds,
Their best and worst
To keep the flames
Behind tattooed lines

I promised a sunrise,
Harmless at most
To flood the sky,
And blind our ghosts

When the last strips of dawn
Shattered the ridge
The flames and ghosts ignited
No promise kept, or choice maintained
My blood burned out and faded away.