The realness is slipping
into memory and I’m reminded
of the ocean, its skies just another body
bathed in rain.
I remember we held hands
so perfectly in the deepening light,
the air around us dusking a type
of lead never erased.
I used to write you buckets
of words, letting them pour across
the space between us as I prayed
a bridge or a boat.
Your hands were the bridge
You’re slipping from mind
You were my favorite ocean
You, I prayed, You.
You are so busy eating,
the dirty black crayons.
In the backseat of mom’s car.
To color the words,
of your anger and frustration.
In the backseat,
there are more crayons.
Other colors, for you.
To draw the pictures,
in your harsh language.
You just don’t see them,
or the other passengers bleeding out,
after the impact.
Are we there yet?
No.
We are not.
The woods were frigid,
I miss it there
with you without a care
inhaling breaths of frosty air,
between laughter we would share
the snow showed the glow of the suns rising light
as we mused along to the song of the northern shrike;
listening with much delight,
in our tree house of great height!
You worship my body
but despise my soul
The body is without major flaw
but the interior is tattered
Torn and stained
you can gut me
refurbish
change all the things you distaste
in the end
I’ll be the make and model you always dreamed
but something about me
will be off
you’ll never be fully happy
with me in my entirety
I try to look for you but I keep seeing a girl
nursing her stuffed bunny with a plastic water bottle
except every time I look
she’s lowering it. I keep missing the nurture but I know
it’s happening. where there should be words
of affirmation—pink and tender—there’s fizzing static.
I’ve swallowed gallons of sparkling water
and it’s sitting in me, seizing. we can try to channel
surf but I’m afraid we’ll end up on something
I’m not allowed to watch. it’s perfect, I promise—it’s so perfect
I spilled it all over myself. I’m trying to stay
stitched up like a good doll, but my mouth is too tight.
record a punk love song
in my voice box. it’s all
or nothing.
I’ll
cling
nails deep
embed you
tell you to just leave
then smear us across our old bed
how can I peel away when your taste is so woven
into my marrow, we were one
hungry skins, hairs raised
at final
the last
of
us
Storefront shimmers, a rainbow plastered facade,
like a spire of steel and stone
stabbing the sky, this story
of the city slipping sweet
into the sinews of citizens,
this syrup of sound spelling out
ascents and sorrows,
strike down the scaremongers
selling sham stumbling blocks
and successes when the sincere
ones are suffocatingly
accessible nigh assured, send for
the soothsayers and charlatans,
the sons and sisters and siblings,
the spiritual psychopaths
and seers of visions, those
who surmount and those
who succumb, the sinners,
the signposts, the stained-glass
saints, the scuffling masses,
the gone astray, steady Yorketown,
site of so many songs.
they say beauty’s pain.
must be true; the best dresses?
require two to zip.
The sound of
