Rising with the moon,

her selfish heart felt its pull

they say, the gravity of the situation

but they really mean the mass

amiss,

the frozen tale, the heart wake  

She drained for months, the

old acidic build up,

left--and her body now, hollowed

sore from a wandering soul

Depleted

Under her new skin, taut

and thin

spreads her love where it will grow

and on the rocks, and thorns

like the parable says

old caricatures, a new love for it’s ignorance

and she sucks out the bitterness of the year

underneath the bark, invasive

quietly to feed

quietly to breathe

for life is insistent.

and so is she

Your variance,

ripples

But is it the symmetry in the rings I adore?

Crinkled smile

was always your most beautiful state

Oh should I pretend to know these heart droplets

In my opened vessels, cracked-

that ocean she shook me to the bone

Respect her roar, it’s love

it’s the first swallow of the sea

the brine and the brittle,

I  broke down and coughed up

Yet kept coming back for more

Will you preserve me?

How you sting. How you replace,

my love with salt.

I say I am tired, but really I am

dry

and packaged

Perhaps one might

so reasonably be dropped off at sea

My tethered bonds

eroded

My right angles, soggy

Return to the birthplace

I wonder, what is anchored

aimless without my love, and scouring

the horizon

floats (how can you judge it)

back. Acceptance in dissolution

I am a

repressed smile

sometimes it’s hard to remember

what heartache was like

Until you rip the band aid off.

I will not edit these words.

I will not bite my tongue.

I will not lose myself inside your soul.

I had bunkered down so long

and forgot the brightness outside

and how empty the space can feel

I close my mouth around the sun

she will not shine on this part of me

instead, inside will boil me to the surface

she will grasp on my bony wrists

and scorch them dry

What’s to (a)void

you fill my cup and drink my wine

and I relish in my dry eyes

It’s a strange kind of growing

Where at once I am not lost

amid your insistence

A struggle for breath

So that I forgot

That it didn’t have to be conscious

That it didn’t have to be labored

So breathe inside 

these parts of me

And scribble your relentless lines

Exhaust, stings in the morning

when I’ve run dry of distractions

acidic

reflexes

Smoke screen of childish laughs

and a heartbreaking simplicity

don’t coddle my

corrosive

love

Dreams and rides

and eyes and skin

and smelting and gooey

and rough and awkward

Be. Yourself.

and combusted, and stalled, and empty

check engine

Light, is on.

Wake up

Listen

To do: be happy 
To be: (in)action

Penned up inside these little lines 
I want to be swirled milk in your coffee 
Separate but encapsulated, oozing and embraced 

I know what it is to fall, but I can hardly believe the distance
If I could 
list 
it
all 
down 

Scratched, checked off, 
isn't that the opposite of complete? 

I heard once that fear and exhilaration were the same emotion 
My trodden heart will rarely accept it 
She won’t complete her sentences, and form the emotion around my mouth 

I pick her up like straw wrappers on the carpet
and tell her it’s not because it wasn’t important 

Unwrapped, chaotic, careless
List yourself, 
List, in to yourself
Listen. 

She beats with a reverberation that echos into space
Small or holy or wholly uninspired 
Good or wrong or grey, diagrammed or misunderstood 

She is. And it is true. And it is all in universe that matters. 

Perhaps all that we can say

is it’s more beautiful on the page

perhaps since the urge to scrawl

on the cavern walls,

we wait to write out what’s known

what we call beautiful

well I could define, the lines around your eyes

and wrinkles on your sheets

But, I shall not reminisce.

Instead I eat chinese food with you,

holding my chopsticks improperly

and your tutoring ways, I read as condescension

and you, so keenly aware

at my anger at my own injustice, at my own mistakes

I write words to say I’ve accepted my shortcomings

But it’s a rather large pill to swallow

or I guess that’s what they say

as If we could really be medicated by our own sinful ways

Churched out of forgiveness, but I will bear the weight

swimming in this universe, each day

knowing, that so little is known and it’s so beautiful and wonderful

and frightening, and heartbreaking

like you.

always, like you.

Insistent life

the description I can’t erase

Rhythmic, and too easily poetic

chances were never good

perhaps, neither were we

My pulsating heart and circulating blood, 

remnants of one unlikely cell

that began at one time or another, to replicate

So cleave, my heart,

in content with descendence 

Permissible summer

and static air

truth hangs low

waiting to precipitate

Confidence into my pores,

commend her dripping beauty

fluid, speak life

like we are still wriggling out of the ocean

Cotton clinging

and I attempt to snatch these metaphors,

I gaze half intently at the furiously moving dirt

to understand why

pervasive and complex, a wish, an expectation

it’s the simplicity of which I fear

an afterthought, a careless blunder

but life is insistent

and I too, answer her bidding