Lessons Learned

Behind poetry

is a song of wanting,

a one-man harmony

in the voice of an alto.

Art hangs from the crook 

of her lips: "When I read, it is 

not to lessen the ache in my thighs

or to draw forth birds,

but to remind myself

of my own humanity."

March of Sunrise

Our silence is languid:

the rolling of clouds,

Neruda at the door.

Your pen's scratch

is a serenade of syllables. 

Dew slants across the orchids.

In the name of poetry, your

fingers become folded messengers,

carriers of the rivers,

words fashioned from how

we feel in the mornings.

flesh and bone

she was a patchwork
of faulty memories
and fraudulent memorials


and there's tumors
in the perfect pieces

the next jesus

i want to be
the next jesus -

shortened pulse
and an overture
people remember

as they argue
the exact color
of my crucifixion

stillborn

her tea cup
heart cracked

and god
smiled
over his
newly-fashioned
halo and tucked
her beneath
his quilt

halley's comet

i.
we caught halley's comet
in trembling palms


ii.
somewhere over the horizon
the first Lily takes a breath

dormant

i do think it's morning
because the floodlights
in the neighbors yard
outside the blinds are
obscuring the near black dawn,
graveyard white

irises are peeled wide open enough to
see the leftovers, clumped around muddy puddles

deep indigo tinted orange by the streetlights
(what lovely devices that dance
their still shine over the ground)

my skin is purpling, a dripping process
like squeezing the juice out of berries
or stealing grapes off of a vine

the feral cats are meowing,
whiskers invisible in the lamp-lacking room
my coffee is somewhere between bitter and smooth
curdling on my night stand from the night before

i think it may be colder than last thursday

i grind my eyes shut and my fingers 
tangle in the ridges of these bedsheets

lily (xlv)

she sprouts in
sacred water

and will blossom
no matter how
many springs
it takes

twelve split haired moments

Why must I write all my letters to you?
       


Your sea foam eyes, pink lips I can taste from across the room. I hoped humans weren't made of glass; that we weren't all going to hell, to perish in echoes of revelations.

I thought you knew all the answers, so I didn't have to be afraid. You were a boy with ice cubes for fingertips, who drops you hot and cold out the back of a hell bound red wagon, smiling. It's the way your face functions when caught in the wind. Inside a structure of art, there are four piss-stained corners to be used.

(shadows on your collarbones
the folds of your boxers
the waistband of your jeans).

everything
is composed of opposites
and defined by metaphors
                                 
you knew that,
didn't you?

The way your lemongrass grins tinted my life in yellow and rose. The way you make me bite my lip so hard my tears are trapped just inside my eyes. Simplicity is eventually the only way to speak.

Twelve split haired moments of pain,
you can't leave me now

It reassures me to distrust yourself, the whole wound knowing of the inside of your soul, holding bamboo spine. Why do I love your bones? They are your structures, the key to your sturdy self-assurance, the glint in your eye.

I can recognize you from the back a mile away and now I'm a thousand up in the sky, hating wishes like tomorrow's day-glow. Brown must be the softest shade there could be.

I was unknowingly conceived a sordid half year after the blistering sunset of an outcast king. He was made of silver fire and something unalterably soft. He is dawning a new nation, a million smaller parts of your master plan.

I downgraded from a 5 to a 2 in hope that you blossomed. And there are so many shades of green. Why is it that only I can name them?

hot as the sun

she savored the taste
of french roses
as textures of
summer bubbled
on her tongue
         
he watched her
on humid afternoons
biting apples and
sipping black tea


though he knew
she also wanted to
bite into the sun

ephemeral forevers

you lock away tears of hysteria
for skeletons and choking upon one's own breath
proves just a bit too overwhelming in the light of perfection

the invention of nostalgia is anything but dim
salt-shed past and clementine-marmalade are
spread upon hollowed palms; and your soul is a record
scratched by thunder and the illusion of time

you were my lost boy and i was your shimmer breath
i begged to let me live beneath vocal chords and
and planet-letters, but time stole you away from me


and ephemeral forevers are just
contradictions living to be proven wrong

bud in winter

he painted lilacs
along her spine
and nurtured them
across her shoulders

she welcomed their colors
into her nicotine stained lungs
and ran her fingers over aromas
that pointed to the sun

he showed her the seasons
with resting eyelids and reminded
her in the summer she could
lay amid august and flourish


and in winter she'd
be the bud that 
melts the ice

lily (xlvi)

after 119 days of somersault kicks
trapped happiness inside
and me - soothed and round
like a digestive biscuit

you were here

a moment
a burst of haloed light
and God's fleshed face

muddied wooliness was my mind
oh my, you were finally here

a shade somewhere between
eggplant white salmon pink,
my six pound miracle
covered in leftovers
of my insides

syllables escaped me,
you were it


i was looking at my heart

his garden

he painted daisies over
her jade green irises

he smothered summer
over her shoulders

and when she bloomed
plucked the purest 
bouquet from her gaze

peachy

feminine lips
cradled soft thrashes
and cleansed peach ripples

thirst

stuck to the roof of her mouth
like sugar on perspiring skin

and muscle mimicked
birds of paradise
and melted into

syrup

aydan

Somehow our stars managed to align at the same time, I felt my bones might burst in that moment. An overwhelming ache permeated every lonesome moment and I did myself no favors by force-feeding it the lovelorn lyrics of myriad songs. Self-constructed tragedies played out in my head, bringing the end before we’d even had a beginning.

Tentatively, we let our constellations entwine. It should have been a mess; two celestial dot-to-dots occupying the same space, but somehow we seemed to grow into more than the sum of our parts. Yet I feared the burn-out overfeeding an infant fire can bring. 

All the things I dared not say, subtly inscribed with temporary-finger-trace tattoos on your silent skin. To keep them in was like cannibalism. Hoping that the vague reply of your fingertips, in a casual caress, somehow expressed a similar longing, beyond the collision of collapsed syllables caught in the teeth of open-closed mouthings. 

Words ensnared by unrelenting apprehension were expressed through the asymmetry of criss-crossing blood vessels beneath a translucent veil. They outshone the actions they entailed and that goosebump braille was your tongue.

If you were here, you would often catch me staring, eyelashes snapping open like a reverse bear trap. In essence they were holding me hostage, until I’d wake sometime later to find myself smiling in almost comatose grandeur. Fairy light suited you best. A pink coursing so softly across your eggshell shoulders it seemed to be emanating from within. I was captivated. And you only glowed in my bed.

I've created my own scent of you, and now it refuses to leave, remaining and radiating from saturated sheets; the very outer essence of your presence. Clothes lay abandoned like empty shells for me to crawl into and call home. An exoskeleton embracing my most fanciful dreams. Maybe the next time you slipped and slithered into them, my unvoiced melodrama would seep and collect.

i caved

i'm speaking of the sort of boy
that's not nearly a man
   
"what are you?" the sky asked questions and laid eggs in flowered trees. he touched the ground and it crumbled wetness onto his cuticles. he hated being undeserving. hated the way his fingerprints were broken in two, thinking, maybe we were alive once.
           
maybe, one day a long time ago we were all so alive that our cheeks sang songs, and our eyes were more colors than one. we planted flowers everywhere the sun shone and sometimes they blossomed into animals with golden coats and translucent pink wings.

his name was two-syllables that seemed to trip over one another.

it didn't matter. foreign countries tasted red, and my voice was made of cracked thyroids while he was burnt honey.

dear romance life, and whatever lies in between,

you remind me of a merry-go-round in a place where the elderly let children lick the water beads off of the beers in their coolers. where the paint is cracked and brown like the insides of your eyes.

         

     
     
     
   


and the grass in his yard still smelled of alcohol.

unaffected like your unaffection

and as i think
of his death

i am terrified not
of the clawing sorrow

but of its absence


i am terrified
of dry eyes

because you're a thousand miles away and the crickets are loud

i.

we'll never be a supernova splashed across the sky. there will always be an antebellum war raging inside of me, a black-eyed monster haunting my room with wilted flowers when i sleep. have you ever seen a shooting star? they brighten the sky for a moment, a flash of color on a coal-black canvas, but when they're gone, they leave nothing behind but broken promises and a sour taste on your tongue. 

where are you?

he's far away.

come back.

he wakes up for someone else now. 

no he doesn't he doesn't he doesn't he doesn't

ii.

you said distance would be good for us, but all i can see are the clock hands edging backward with every breath i take. i want to take this distance and put it away somewhere it will never get out, like a planet struggling to burst free from its orbit. i believed this for so long that my brain doesn't know how to think anymore, how to look at a flower growing between the cracks in the sidewalk and think how beautiful a small miracle is. there's a whole path of heartache from here to wherever you are.

he's missing me.

he's hand in hand with someone else.

he can't breathe without thinking of me.

my face hasn't crossed his mind since he left. 

iii.

i brew coffee when my eyes won't close.

i can't stop thinking of you, of what you're doing now that the sun is slowly rising wherever you are. is the shower steaming, the mirror fogged over? is there a whole new day at your fingertips, waiting to be sliced open and delved into?

i think you're still sleeping. you always did go to bed so early. 

iv.

let's leave this town behind and never return.

there is a pounding in my ears and a crick in my neck. 

take me away like the lovestruck romeo you always wanted to be.

i don't want to fall asleep anymore. 

i love you.

i don't.

she loves me.

she doesn't.

yes yes yes yes.

no. not anymore. 

v.

there's an avalanche of regrets i can sort through, and i'll still be looking for traces of your smile when morning arrives.  i'm looking for some sort of miracle today. 

i wish i could forget you when i wake up. 

cracked

    There is shattered glass
    from where I broke a bottle yesterday.

Let it fall, he says.

         Wishing there was more in that
         flask to go around twice,
         I watch Saturday's pinprick stars
         and the spiral of smoke. 

Inhale cigarettes.

          I love those sparkling eyes,
          the way we smile under
          a canopy of constellations.

Exhale the meaning of us.

Full Throttle

Dear you:

I have found someone who could ignore the cancer in my ribcage, the promises withering inside my lungs. If you were to turn me inside out, you would see a flushed pink happiness spreading up from between my ankles and settling in the crevices of my stomach.

There is just something about you that stays snug in the crook of my elbow-- and I don't know what it is, or how you do it, but now I am, and you are, and we are.

How easy is it to know me? 

To know that something in the tips of my toes should warn you away, to know that if you looked at me, my face might be as cratered as the moon? 

I know you would tell me to ask myself the same thing about you if I asked, so I never ask--but I know what I would say to that. Your lungs are concave and gently bent the way they should be, and your face is as smooth as an alto voice. 

And when you worry:

I want to show you a thousand different awkward stares, a million crooked hands, as many deformities I can find, and ask you, "Are you still worrying now?" Because you have always been beautiful, and if this abundance of sadness is what it takes for you to see that, I will pack up this exhibit in the corners of my mind everyday for you.

your frigid touch

i.

you gazed at me
with an intensity,
decayed by peppermint
and cold glitter,
bubbling
with dark energy

ii. 

you gripped my fingers
with a confidence
that only comes from a perfectionist,
the kind of assurance
a delicate artist
resonates from his brush

iii.

i never saw the stars
through a frosted telescope
until your frigid fingers
guided me,
my eyes glazing over
at tarnished constellations
but more so
at the touch of your frozen palm

iv.

i traced your shadow
with red-hot lips
that longed for a fierce
sprinkling
of shards of ice,
coveting your perfect shape

v.

and when those poisoned lips
met mine,
i lost myself in your storm,
drowned in your thunder,
sizzled in your lightning,
numbed by bitter
sips of winter

Bridged

When we find our reflections

in the lake — the moon recites a

sonnet for your fair head, a rhyme

scheme for the crook of your elbow:

The purple crocuses are listening

with morning, and your footsteps

are music to their ears.

Can we flip the channel to change the scenery?

I.

When you were born,

your mother ran your curls

through her fingers

and named you after 

Athena's wisdom--

but it was all a ruse

because while she held you

she was thinking of Hera,

the queen of the goddesses

who turned around 

when her husband had his 

godly hand up a nymph's skirt.

II. 

The jeweler on main

thinks that your alabaster skin

is the perfect backdrop

for a string of emeralds.

When he offers you a drink,

he flashes his teeth

and tells you he has never 

seen a girl better suited

for the color green.

I think you would look better

in the faded loafers

you sometimes forget to take off.

Envy's mottled color doesn't suit you.

III.

You can sew two dragon heads together

but it's so much harder 

to take out stitches on scales

when something goes wrong.

There is something to be said

for moist hands in the winter. 

The sun goes to bed early

during these dark days,

and you would be lucky

to catch a glimpse of your own

reflection in the mirror

before daylight fades. 

iii.

Can we leave this town behind,

you ask,

and I find myself saying yes

because I am parched

and tired

and ready for something else.

you breathe too much for something so small

you swallow pills
as if you were
catching moons
between your lips

and i am convinced
that this collapsed bone
structure of yours is a
constellation, because only stars
can twist so much
and somehow still be poetic

but i wonder which is colder:
the winter sky or the cover
i want to hide your halfhearted eyes


because your arms stretch like the universe
and make me irrelevant