Helix

The clouds of your breath decorate the windows in my mind, fractals etched on frozen panes smothered with foggy confusion. Your lifeline is painted on the glass and I recognize outlines of stories along its blurry path. This is my defense, averting my eyes from lines too sharp for fear of seeing too clearly. My finger lingers near your line and draws my own, a helix of intersections and missed chances cutting through the haze.

this moment

I am in love with this moment, and my head turns in the widest angle possible to absorb the beauty surrounding me in this small white room. The plastic ceiling and half-open blinds reflect love in blinding fashion; there is a muted-grey sun crawling toward our feet as you place your head on my chest and exhale. My head oscillates left and right, charting the front door’s poorly polished golden handle and following a line to the lamp standing at attention, the empty wine glasses next to the chair you claimed when we ate breakfast on that first morning, the lonely clock muttering the ticks of time to itself as it hangs above the limp sleeves of an empty jacket clinging to its resting place. My head turns and takes in the speaker humming under strings of year-round Christmas lights that outline the calm chaos above our bodies, huddled together in warmth on the couch. My eyes reach the edge of the room as the other side of that same muted sun strains to touch the mementos lined up on the side of the couch, a holy trinity of items at equal distance from each other, sacred symbols of the space between our bodies. I realize you are watching me from the chest you claimed, and your mouth remains pressed to my shirt while your eyes twist upward in loving silence until a smile lifts you to my lips. I am in love with this moment, as you place your head on my chest, and I inhale.

miles above

Somehow,
I found your lips in the dark. The blackness of this cave was so complete that the outline of your body was a hidden thought, but my cheek brushed warm sheets and suddenly connected a kiss that felt as though our lips had been together throughout the night. This is how I found you,

Suddenly,
and this is how you remain, every day as though I have watched my finger trace the lines of your face since my mind began recording. I am reminded of the exhilarating terror standing on the edge of a plane, miles above life, and I swear I've never felt solid ground before.

crippling craving

All of these begin the same, and this will be no different.
There's a repetitive cotton cloud in my nose, pushing deeper, begging for my brain, holding my breath hostage and siphoning sleep out of my blood.
There's a film of plastic sweat covering my skin, stretching over my head while my eyes make frantic motions and fragile eyelashes bend and break against the hazy air.
This sleepy green syrup is plugged straight into my sockets, and I inhale apathy mixed with sluggish sickness while I exhale pure lucidity and a crippling craving for your skin.

shadows dancing

I’m stitching together memories, hung out on power lines with fingers crossed for high heat and desert sun. I lay next to you and make promises in the air with our fingertips. I confess sobriety while you’re drinking beside me and my words force their way past a reckless tongue holding my teeth at gunpoint. Tiny legs of panic crawl across the pillow, tickling my eardrum and whispering their way deep into my brain. This room has become a cave and your skin lights up our shadows dancing on the walls. I watch the long rise and fall of summer with you stretched across my eyelids.

first rush

There’s this blue-grey twilight in the middle of the day, with the blinds closed and shards of light cutting across white walls. My thoughts are curling smoke, lazy dips and turns in a sluggish upward fashion, and it strikes me how easy it is to feel euphoric with the right combination of chemicals and connections. I’m an addict to these tiny triggers, a network of electricity across my skin that follows fingernail traces and shows me the shaking intensity of touch. There’s this beautiful exhaustion in my chest, and it’s everything I have to keep the rhythm of the rise and fall; it’s always jumping to another tempo, an entirely different song as my body winds in and out of you. My fingers are bending and straightening, tapping and turning and scratching and nervously cracking against kneecaps, sending Morse code messages of flight to my feet, but those sluggish thoughts keep curling in their drugged stupor, refusing to transmit urgency of any kind. I’m vaguely aware of this internal power struggle but couldn’t be less interested in anything that takes me away from tracing your chin with my shaking index finger. I am chasing these drug-induced delusions of grandeur like that first, great rush; I am recklessly discarding the present in pursuit of the future; I am watching decades appear as your eyes lovingly convince me they are real. The future is shaded in this blue-grey twilight.

drugged divinity

There's a glow in the corner when I wake in the night and this is the closest I've come to seeing spirits, believing in something as beautiful as your ghost. Your shadow rolls across my bed, leaving shining strands of heroin to prick me in my sleep, and I settle into numbed, euphoric possession. The room lightens in shades of grey and turns to muted blue as I slur a prayer to this drugged divinity, raising words from the dead like a junkie savior.

curls

I climbed back into bed, still warm from your body, and inhaled the ghost you left lying on the pillow, the traces of drunkenness, the kiss-till-our-lips-went-numb, the strands tied around fingertips, the parts of you lingering on lips. My lungs swelled with anxiety as my throat reached for water, oblivious to the tattered thoughts and nearly spoken words resting heavily behind my tongue. I sank into your memory, stitched onto eyelids, shaded the room with rosy ignorance and pulled the curls of your smoke into my chest.

fog

I've been up at night 

In the darkest room I could find 

Knocking on wood

Holding my breath

I've been whispering 

To the cracks on my ceiling

Biting back fear

Waiting for you

And I painted pictures

With the blood on my lips

Dry from sleeplessness

And I found shadows 

Moving on the wall

Asking me to break

I've been awake

Tracing lines down your face

With the fog on the window

And the blood in my veins. 

calm

For all intents –

I’m purposeless, wandering. Let’s remove aimless pretense to describe this lazy limbo year, fucked and hopeless. The teenage cancer I knew a decade ago has grown six feet and sits low on your spine, reaching for the grey matter gold, waiting to choke the saviors in your brain with fingers in your mouth. Tilt back your head so I can feel something, navigate to the stem that pulls your strings. The ground is a calm I can’t touch, so I dig my nails into your skin and pull myself up a few inches until my head clears the fog. I’ll balance on fleshy footholds until decay drops me from my pedestal