transi(en)t

What if I threw myself onto these tracks
Would the track marks match your arms?
Would I feel the same sense
Of relief and content
Or would I end up chasing a ghost?

And what if god picked me up in his mouth
Would I be baptized, would I be saved?
Would it count the same
As holy water on a babe
Or am I chained to my shame?

What if I keep my eyes set a year in advance
Would my pupils go white in the moment?
Could I follow your movement
Like Braille for my spirit
Or am I only chasing a ghost?

satisfied smile

Sometimes I see your ghost smiling back at me, 

a satisfied smile with straight teeth and lingering lust, 

and it hits my gut like psychedelic poison, 

spinning hallucinations and weightlessness, 

and all the fucked up weight that drags behind our spirits like a ball and chain, 

a slowly creeping advance that I can’t outrun, 

with my molasses motivation and strung-out apathy, 

and there’s a widening sliver of teeth, 

there’s a pink blossom covered in snow, 

just to prove that progress is not permanent, 

and what is beautiful in one moment is damaged goods in the next, 

a spring smile saturated by snow, 

numbed to the point of amputation, 

frozen in a mental snapshot.

careless collision

I’m ankle-deep in cinderblocks that I’ve sugar-coated with love and confusion to smooth out the edges. Something gets lost in the transition between bitter abrasiveness and sweet acceptability, shards of consequences lying among remnants of fingernails, pieces torn from clutching tight to my special brand of broken. I’m drinking myself blurry to forget the throbbing pulses of pain while I sit on gasoline-stained pavement and trace tragic spirals around my feet. It’s a potent mixture of nostalgia, ripe with the stench of the moment, filling my nostrils with fumes of past happiness and childhood misconceptions and a hint of the future. If I wear these shoes long enough, maybe I’ll grow into a beautiful streetlight, instead of just another concrete obstruction waiting for a careless collision.

sun-baked

On a scale of one to ten, how do you feel? How’s your back holding up after a year of grey haze, bottomless mistakes, bleeding broken fingers digging deeper every day?

I’d like to respond, but I’ve scraped dirt and clay from rock bottom to smear across my lips and lay beneath a summer sun that never quite faded to winter. My cotton-ball brain half-expects the shock of an alarm clock to let me know when I’m done baking, wake me up so I can kill the sound like a caterpillar hitting snooze. Give me just a few more years in this old cocoon before I have wings and expectations of beauty forced upon me like a genetic crucifix. Give me the blissful ignorance of stability and warmth and forward-looking statements spun like a straitjacket around me. Give me the awkward shifting of familial threads when they realize they knew me vicariously all this time, filtered through a chrysalis, softened by safe love and fear of a challenge. I can feel the cracks forming on my sun-baked mask as I try to stay asleep.