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

stairs

I walked down a damp sidewalk and I saw a spiderweb, stretched out to full and catching each drop that fell within its grasp. I heard violin; I smelled you on my shirt; I watched another drop fall to be placed carefully among thousands, a shining connect-the-dots that took on a meaning entirely its own. I traced my tongue along the outline of my lips, taking mental pictures along the way of the places you had left your mark. I left my mind in the crack running down the stairs outside your front door, and I brought the rest of me, useless and hungry, back home. 

Funny

I feel this rabid confusion settling into my brain, holding my breath for anxiety to pass like a kid in a car on a burning bridge. There's always someone there to make sure you're not cheating, sneaking little gasps of air through your nose while you choke on smoke and funnel hate through your irises. We're just along for the ride, right? It's all bullshit, it's all a lie, no matter whether you believe in truth. I've been drinking and dying trying to keep my tongue pushed back into my chest where it belongs. If only I could speak from the sternum, if only I could be as hard and brave and powerful as the bony armor over human hearts.
Funny how the tone in your voice changes. Funny how I shake when I taste the bile of words backing up in my esophagus. Funny how that infallible chest plate can snap with the right amount of force. If only I could recognize the pieces after fracture. Funny how things change.

Blacked-out

This is the only thing left after a week-long bender of swallowing heart and anxiety with a whiskey chaser. There's a shell here, but a shell is a place that used to be a home and I'm not convinced the name fits. The blurred truth I slurred through drunken teeth holds confessions of love and swearing sobriety, hanging like a blanket over my head, pulling my neck this way and that while heat builds with every exhale and loose strings fall in my eyes. This is the first step towards suffocation, the fabric calmly climbing up my neck until it pulls my lips apart with gentle cotton fingers and softly settles at the back of my throat. I'm holding my nose and telling myself it's not the end, I've swallowed sheets and pillows since childhood but I'm afraid there's no space left for oxygen. These are the last few minutes of frantic, and I will revel in the fireworks behind my eyelids. I will revel in blacked-out love.

Fever

I can leave you to yourself
You can keep the parts I left
Like the lingering scent
that you can't quite place
Like a memory that only fades

We all have trouble sleeping
None of us can make it through the night
We all have restless evenings
None of us can keep our eyes
Shut through the night

I can let you live alone
With the fever in your brain
I will cut dependency
Like a cancer from my veins
Like a memory that only fades

Like the image of my face
Through your irises at night
Blends together with the shadows
Oh, the lines around my eyes
Will sink into my skeleton
The lights along this drive
Will illuminate,
and find nothing.

Ocean

My eyes are covered in sand

I fashioned a mask, hardened with sun

that smells of a sickly sweet hangover coast

and shows me a silhouette, dark in the distance 

My eyes are covered in sand. 

My mouth is silenced with strands

You fashioned a needle, cooled with a kiss

threaded your hair in and out of my lips

and left me with meaning trapped under my tongue

My mouth is silenced with strands. 

So,

I captured a bottle of clear ocean water

and swallowed it deep in my chest

it stayed quiet and calm

when removed from its home

but the walls start to ache

from the crashing of waves

and the swelling of salt

and the moments of memory

and the hours of asphalt 

and drinking the sunset

puts salt in my blood. 

I feel the ocean, 

pushing out of my chest,

reaching for you. 

tunnel vision

I was alone and it was snowing. I rode my bicycle over creases in the asphalt that buckled up to meet my spinning spokes as they rose and fell with the consistency of a heartbeat. I ended at a restaurant, just a glorified bar where no one really expects you to order anything complicated – just fries and a beer, please. Maybe a double shot of plastic bottle whiskey if I’m feeling extra self-aware, a double dose of certainty that I’m alone and will be for a while. This place looked so damn cool the first time we walked in here, together, and yes, we’d like the patio seats; it’s such a nice night. We’ll spend too much money on watered down beer and pretend I’m not drunk when it’s time to drive us both back home. Our home, our overpriced, faux-chic apartment next to all the other families who can’t afford a house and want to act like they don’t want one when it’s really the husband’s blooming alcoholism or the wife’s shopping addiction keeping them from actualizing the title of “homeowner”. I’m getting off track.

I sat at the bar with a plate of half-frozen fries sprinkled with hypertension and a hint of future obesity and thought about nothing. This is something I’ve been developing recently, a talent I never thought I’d have: the ability to remove you and the years from my head for a few minutes at a time. It feels like Atlas shuffling the earth from one shoulder to the other, but it’s worth it - especially when I have my hands around the glass, slippery from condensation and concentration. I barely maintain any periphery, any awareness of any other sad fucking soul crouched over the bar like we’re all panning for gold with our pints and shots and fancy fucking martini glasses. I’m just trying to count the rings in the fake wooden bar in front of me – another beer, please.
I think she sat down somewhere after the fourth – not too far to catch up, if you’re really trying. She’s talking to me and I’m following her lips more than her words, the way they grip and grab each syllable before it tumbles out. I’m watching the way each word is shaped, molded, spit-shined before it hits my ears, and I’m in love with language. I’m in love with the ideas she speaks, but I can’t remember her name. I hope I’m responding, I’m never quite sure, but the sentences keep coming so I assume we’ve made it another moment further into the conversation. And another, and another, and another. It feels like I’m walking deeper into water with every sip, and I’d say it’s somewhere around my throat by now, that semi-frantic feeling where you tip your head back to gasp for air and stare at the sky like a cloud might see the whites of your eyes and let someone know you’re drowning. She notices my eyes sliding, notices my hand clutching the empty glass like I’m a cheating student reading all the answers by braille. She’s watching me and the water's up around my head now, so I feign surprise at my empty glass and signal the bartender. By the time I’m full, she’s gone, and I’m alone.

uncomfortable shifting

I used to think about death, your death,
dying suddenly in an accident and the process of coping with that loss

I used to think about devastation, hopelessness,
shaking in an emergency room while your body lay on a steel frame hospital bed

I used to think of you broken, as a shell
a shell made of flesh to contain all the love I felt

I used to think about our children, and the future
and the future that died along with your fragile frame

I used to think of how I would kiss your dying lips
Now I wish that I could lay by your side
For another night
For just another few hours of uncomfortable shifting
From side to side and wishing
Wishing I could get out of bed
and comfort a screaming child
Wishing I could stare out the windows of the house we bought together
bathing in the orange streetlight.

Dusk

I saw the color you love as the sun disappeared behind clouds. It was thick yolk slipping through syrup on my California approach, a sinkhole tugging great flat horizons of colors I've never been able to empathize with. Comprehending a thousand miles is violent and stunning and sits caged behind two thin layers of window suspended in the nowhere desolation as land slides sluggishly past my dark endless reference frame. The sunset was a framed picture spun at rapid speed and set into false motion, the illusion of escape before I let my mind wander to those minute connections that build into bullshit interpretations of fate and significance. Pockmarks of city grids flash into existence to spite this funeral for a sun and I can almost smell the city lighting its cigarette under a streetlight struggling for life. Dusk is a line in the desert for the boiling tar to relax with a shot of jet fuel and crossed fingers.