lights.

we all wish on empty nights

full of bright-lights-blank-faces-fast-paces

and we are getting old enough to see

the broken spiders on our

white plaster and

rubber soles



you were my only silkspun escape

to neverland

you dirty fucking liar.



sometiems i want to say something

so profound

it will tear back the nerves on

the surface of your brain

and blow

your

house

down.



this was always such a shame,

you beautiful

shitfaced

man

begging strangers for butterflies

and putting down stories like a backhanded sunset,
bonesbrokenribschoking.


sometimes,
to be nameless is to love
more than yourself.

PNS

"stunning."

"hmm? what is?"

"it is. you. your hair."

"oh...thanks."

"....i wish you wouldn't do that."

"do what?"

"thank me."

"well...i'm sorry."

"no."

"no?"

"i believe you."

"then, i'm glad. what's bothering you?"

"me? nothing. except that the clouds are falling apart."

"no, it's more than that."

"how?"

"you're wearing red lipstick."

"yeah?"

"it's devastating."

"...yeah."

"so what is it?"

"maybe it's an End."

"an end? what's ending?"

"me."

"you aren't ending."

"this morning i forgot how to make my heart beat."

"but it was raining this morning."

"it was quiet. did you hear it?"

"hear what? the silence?"

"there was no thunder."

"yeah, you're right."

"...."

"what is it?"

"i envy your autonomic system."

"why?"

"because you don't have to think about it."

"but i have no control."

"look...it's raining."

"your lipstick is smudged."

"...yeah."

a tweet.

i am just tweeting to say
i love you
and i am afraid to say it
but i am not afraid to
type it in my twitter box
for everyone but you to
see.

i've never had copper in my mouth
but around you everything is
copper-tinged and copper-tasting
and swiftly turning blue.

we could develope the sweetest migraines
the world has ever seen,
you and i and the intruding light
from my monitor.
we could twist brain stems around
eyelashes
and pretend we've seen Forever.

as nature goes,
rain turns into snow turns into ice
and you are in every stage
of my unfortunate osmosis.

miscellaneous

dear you-

it is unfortunate that you are not an equation,
calm and cold and calculating,
all yellow and steel and answers.
i cannot imagine you because my throat is falling out,
unable to speak your name
now my dreams are all sand-and-butter lashes
and blue kites and
green hardware.
you are an End,
all wrapped up in a Man.


dear me-

your fingers will never callouse
and i tell you, the night breaths in more of you every time you close your eyes.
you are still cheating, still stealing,
still transperency at its finest.

you dress up like the ocean and pretend
there's something better,
waiting for you
even as the blood in your cheeks seeps out through lies.

how have you been sleeping?


dear x-

you are the final element, influence and beginnings,

you say you're such a wilting flower
but you tell us in turn that the wind is made of wrist bones,

clinking shyly together,
a chime of our own design
i wonder sometimes if you can hear my blood
slosh around in the empty spaces of my skull

the way i can.

equals.

Hours of nitrogen in our bones
we melt like summer-shine petals and words of cracked pavement
lies and flies and falling.

tunnel vision:

butterscotch and porcelain and heat--


meanwhile i inhale the sun, implosions notwithstanding.

sense of Belonging.

my memories of you smell like
twisted campfire
that does not belong to you
but i hope your hurricane eyes
drown you out
and we can be two of a
pair
of broken refugees
stealing room in ourselves
for another half-oxygen breath
of twilight.

if we asked you to forget the world,
you would say no every time
but every time i close my eyes
i forget a little more
of what you look like

[except your seabourne eyes--]

subtlety.

sometimes we don't notice
splinters the size of lamp posts
lodged in our soft calves
but we forgive this
every time.

some parts are oxygen--

i imagine you as dust
angry children kick up;

you are
on my lips
in my eyes
you cling to my hair
you are a layer upon my skin
you sit between my teeth
you are rough in my throat
vocal chords
lungs--

you are rapidly becoming
my
air.

a personal need.

i am sick of saying
'we are this, you are that, i am--'
instead i watch water and grass
sparkle in lighthouse teeth
my elbows are softer now
and i miss you.

my body is different
without yours for company.
it is messy and foreign and
unwanted
and i can hardly feel my own
tendons
anymore.

you have taken away
breakfast and ankles
and i am not okay.

there is no day for this.

happy is the resistance of cold air
between our chapped, tired lips.
it is the volume of our screaming
and our dreaming and redeeming
and sometimes on rainy mondays
it is the white sterility of medical
walls and the talk of drugs and
the underlying lies that jab at our
skin from beneath like
broken bones.

sad is at five in the morning
when i still haven't slept and i
honestly have nothing to do but
lie in bed and imagine how i might
be laying if you were there too.
today sad is the decrepit way
my fingers forget how to bend
to just the right shape in order
to conform to
yours.

opposites are a child's dream
they are glossy paint on green
unbroken lips and they are
swimming just beneath our
veins
white and red and
could-be's.

tiger lies and eyes.

i want to be the one loose screw that causes you to collapse
because you are already a supernova in the depths of myself
but lately my dreams are sewage soaked and quite flammable
so i can turn up my nose, now, for i have found the tigers you
swore were hiding in my lonely retinas and pieces of wounds

[but you will always be the first to see them]

we are two parts suicide, one part skepticism.

they say, tell me about him.

so i tell them about how:

your knuckles are a story of loss and work
and i like to press them against my
smooth, inexperienced
cheek
and laugh at the ridiculous contrast
i've created.

your worry is venemous and it
infects my limbs rapidly
dragging me down
with paranoia of my own.

your eyes glitter like an explosion
and i would burn to
death
in your gaze
because some things are better
than asphyxiation
from jumping off the Royal Gorge Bridge,
but not many.

your tears burn holes in my memory.

you are more than i
remember
every time i see you.
more:
handsome, caring, brilliant,
ridiculous, intruiging,
lovable
and i love you more every single time
and sometimes when i lay in bed i
wonder if i'll ever burst.

i never thought mowing lawns could be so
dangerous
so i worryandworryandworry
every day
that you won't come home
or that you'll return without a
limb
or an eye
or you'll be in a coma
when i see you next.

when i see the sky
i always think of you and your
obsession with storms
and sometimes i can see
the outline of what comes next
in that cloud you used to say
looked like a tornado cloud.

i tell them about how i love you
but you aren't the only one who
doesn't believe me.

leave the room to cry.

today i cradled a pair of blades
in my tired, tired lap
and i cried, sobbed,
remembered.

i am cold fingerprints on
rain-flecked glasses and
i am ingesting all your shields
within my wicked bowels
so that when you next lay down
your bones will melt into my voice.

but you are an unstoppable
Force
and you can crumple Lives
with one look
and i love you but what really
matters here
is that he loves you
and somehow i am still
without a square
but searching for one in my own
retinas
because he told me he saw
tigers there, once.

my sidewalk is grown over like
childhood socks
and the sun makes it look as if
it is slowly decaying
and i imagine that's exactly how
i look in the sun:
rotting
soon
to
be
useless
even for you to walk on me.

misconception.

today the fan feels like
the heavy thumpthump of a bass
in my marrow
and i am only disappointed to see
that it cannot reorganize my
eyelashes
into the shapes of Forever
or Always
or even Never.

now the chain clinks lightly
against lightbulbs
and i am light-headed.

i am in a pattern
of glass and brambles
and i find that i cannot fall asleep
until i have made myself sick
to my heart
because water should not drip
from my eyes
for such a broken cause.

remembering, your multiplication tables
are broken and deformed
like my lungs
because you think there are three of us
when there are only two
and i wonder how afraid you are
that there could be many more?
Infinity is terrifying
i should know.
don't worry though
i can put your math together again
it doesn't even need to sit
on a wall
for me to try.

but i want to write you 99 letters
explaining how much i Love you.

you are a hole through my lung.

sometimes i miss the way your
ribcage holds me close
to your heart
or the way moonlight sits
or slides
on the curve of your neck
the way tragedy slides
from raindrops
hitting people, innocent or not.
or the way your hands
are strong like thunder
or the look in your eye
like after the rain melts.

sometimes i miss the way you
seem to think i'm beautiful.

i know you're wrong
because i know that whispers burn
our tired eyelids like acid
thin and screaming.

sometimes i miss the way you
pretend you don't have the most
beautiful face in the world.

they are all sick.

you are plague

i slide incomplete thoughts under tinfoil fingernails
and wish in fragments tonight.
the sound of your breath is a cadence
to which i fall apart
and my pieces land on your skin
like broken scabs
of loss.
every moment i want to scream
because my voice is decaying
at the speed of light
alongside your heartbeat.

i am fever

a symptom against faded machinery
a system within a system within you
i never stand but crumple
into myself.
half-closed my eyelashes are a screen
and i make believe
i can see reality through them.
i make you believe
you can see me
and i make myself believe
i can too.

concave.

when i fell into bed last night,
my stomach felt as though it were eating itself and everything else
it was mutiny
bodily conspiracy
and i wanted to claw my insides out
break every rib out of its Cage
always save the Heart for last
because it deserves to be Eaten.

my heartbeat was irregular like the freckles on my arms
less like glitter
more like the Plague
and as i heaved and sobbed my head collapsed in on me
so now you could never identify
me
if you found me in the river


i always said that asphyxiation from that jump
would have been beautiful
my favorite way to die.
my veins burning with adrenaline
wind tearing the skin on my face Backwards
no time for thoughts
silly, maybe.


i think about the curve of your mouth
and how i could never admit to liking it
even now.
and the way your eyes change colors
the way they change is like pollution
it makes me worse every time and there's no cleaning this up.
i'm not the only one.


i told you i wish you could have seen me
it seems like it was seventy three years ago
back when i was still trying

[i tried harder than anyone's hardest but i never could remember what for]

now i know i lied
because that's what people do.
i would give anything to make you forget last night
forget the way:

my sobbing kept me up until 2:30 when i was finally so exhausted i would have shot myself for a good night's sleep
i cried for something that i don't deserve to cry for
i cried at all because how embarrassing is that?
i joked about suicide in a way i couldn't tell was joking
you said you would never give up on me
i said i already have
i apologized for being horrid
you told me it was no one's fault
i woke up four hours later
i asked her if i could call her back but don't have the heart to



did you know i never dreamt about you until last night?

not once
i was never like that.

i wonder if you'll read this. part of me hopes you don't, aren't


that part of me is losing.

i deconstruct my thoughts at this Piano.

somehow, with every window open and the sounds of Life
[[traffic,birds,laughter]]
Outside,
it feels like the very last day of the World
and if i dare to close my eyes it will never come
Again.

---

do you know,
every time i put that big
soft
leather jacket on
i feel like i'm six years old
wearing mommy's red
high heels.

---

i say, 'it should never happen'
you say, 'it is necessary'
i say, 'the situation could have been avoided'
you say, 'maybe not'
i say, 'it could have worked out'
you say, 'i don't think so'
you leave
i cry
again

---

every time i hear a
gunshot
i remember when i was seven
and there was blood
everywhere
and mommy yelling to go in the other room
like i couldn't already see
like she could pretend he fell
if i just left now
and didn't stop
to
stare.

---

sometimes i get angry
and i just feel like putting on my
little black dress
and red high heels
and going out to
Destroy men

---

the hurt when you're gone
will be like hail
in a hay field
it will throw me down
and come harvest time
i won't be useful anymore
and no one will
bother
to stand me back
UP

---

i wonder if he ever
stops
to see himself
and i wonder if he ever
stops at all
and i wonder if he has time
to breathe

in all the loving he does

and sometimes i even wonder
if the love will ever stop
seeing him.

Perry's Truck [thatDelicateBalance]

Then and there, I decided that if I could live in a single moment forever, it would be that one. His truck had the soft, worn quality of home, the familiar comfort of a childhood blanket or toy, and a smell that was impossible to place but had every characteristic of a good couch: impossibly warm and soft, old somehow, and one you could sit in for hours without any urge to move. I curled up in my seat as if I'd grown up there, wearing a tanktop and loose sweatpants, hair in a pony like I'd just woken up even though it was past 9pm. One of My Chemical Romance's softer songs kept us company from the stereo, and I closed my eyes, inhaling the rich aroma that was my raspberry-caramel cappuccino.

He said, " I saw these guys in concert once," but the only important part was his voice, and the way I felt like I'd grown up hearing it. It was an old, dear friend that I'd only known for a few weeks and the soothing effect it held sank into my bones like the most welcome of all painkillers. I replied, my voice barely lifting above the music although it wasn't loud, and sipped the warm liquid from my cup. The heat slipped down my throat, flooding my body with a tingling kind of delight brought on only by hot caffeine. The soft music seemed to dance in the atmosphere and the streetlight behind us flickered, but never in a way that was interrupting. Outside my truck window the night was cool, but between the two of us and the music, the temperature was perfect.

I didn't dare glance at the clock although the numbers glared at me menacingly. Instead I leaned my head against the cold glass of the window and let the gentle sounds emanating from the stereo lull me into another place. The hard window supported my cheekbone in the most ironic way, and I stared ahead into the dark street in the hopes that if nothing moved, nothing would end.

To my dismay, a group of teenagers rounded the corner just as this thought registered, shattering the illusion that life could be this simply beautiful forever.

In the end I opened the heavy truck door and made my exit, but I felt as though I had been in the vehicle all night and it was a gentle form of comfort I had never felt before. Life can be found in the pretty little things--the way his voice diminished all stress, the way the wind didn't dare move but the streetlamp flickered sporadically, the smell and taste of coffee after a good cry. When I closed the door of his truck all those things disappeared, but I carry with me the calming feeling that it will be there always, and whenever I need it.

Like a good friend, like a homemade cookie, like an old CD.

It Stretched Out like the Rest of our Lives

Yesterday I woke up to a brilliant, shining spectacle of a morning. I was groggy, but what lay ahead of me was sharp and clear: Rafting. Sun, friends, adventures. I had to rush to get ready, and this resulted in minor razor burn on my legs, but once I was out the door my spirits were blazing. I climbed into Josh's car and as soon as we picked everyone up we were racing down the highway, windows down, Swedish techno blaring. Halfway to River Runners and the volume was suddenly off as I listened to McBride tell me over the phone that they had gotten lost and had no idea where River Runners was. A few simple directions and broken speed limits later, we arrived, only to find out the trip would not start for another two hours. In distress, we searched for something to do and found:

Kiel.

Kiel, who works at the Royal Gorge park. After some begging, he called and got us [all of us, all seven of our loud, teenage asses] in for free. Carousel rides, phobias of heights, and a petting zoo ensued, and when it was all over, we rushed back to River Runners to suit up for our trip.

The wet suits were the worst. It took a ridiculous amount of pulling, tugging, jumping, squeezing, and pushing to get all of me into such an unforgiving material, and even when I was finally finished, the crotch of the suit refused to come up where it should have been. Wearing jiggly booties and a latex wetsuit, I did my best to saunter instead of waddle out to the car to throw my sweatpants and tanktop in the trunk, get my lifejacket and windbreaker on, and pile into the van. Driving to our destination, the summer day was splendid. The trees were a livid shade of green, the leaves big and ripe in the summer heat, and the sun cast its brightness over what seemed like everything in the world, making the gravel hot and blinding. When finally we arrived at the river's edge, the guide, Kc's father, got out and explained some basic safety rules concerning swimmers and flipped boats.

At long last we situated ourselves in the raft, took up a paddle, and began sailing down the river. The water turned and curved like a great, shimmering snake, and when we hit white water, it roared and twisted and rose and exploded at us, angrily rocking the raft and soaking us to our overcharged bones. At one point we were allowed to get out of the raft and go swimming, but swimming was absolutely the wrong term. It was more like being swept down the river, making a vain attempt not to hit our heads or be tossed too violently or have our legs ripped apart by rocks. It was insanely fun, but we sadly had time to do this only once on our trip. We piled back into the boat after watching McBride attempt to avoid two very large and very intimidating cacti on an equally narrow path, and off we went, paddling hard enough to leave our fingers sore the next morning.

When it was finally over, we went home, changed, and decided to have dinner at Village Inn, where our check was messed up and Perry ended up paying seventy dollars for the seven of us to eat. After much persuasion, I was convinced to play a spur-of-the-moment game of Manhunt. A lot of confusion occurred then, but when the game was finally set up and ready, we set off. I Chased first, and climbed my first fence. [Can you believe it? I have never climbed a fence before. My childhood was ridiculous.] Then Josh, Perry and I set up a jail, starting in the high school parking lot and moving to the Abbey, and eventually to Walmart. However, we ended up letting every single prisoner escape, and the game continued, surrounded by the crisp, energy-charged air of a late June night.

Kc had developed angry rashes on her legs and arms, and her throat was swollen, and it succeeded in frightening everyone present into watching her like a hawk to see if her condition changed, but when it came time for her to go home, she was mostly fine, and she was alive in the morning. We proceeded that night to Nick's house and watched The Lion King, and it was relaxing in a way only Disney movies and sore muscles can ever make a person.

All in all, much was discovered that night, and many memories were made, in hearts and hands and heads, and we rest easily with sun just beneath our eyelids.

Until next time.

You may begin. {run with wings outspread}

The first month. The month that entails wild parties practically reeking of Peter Pan complexes, week-long road trips with friends just because you can even without solid planning, bonfires that shoot high, fueled by the year's Geometry binders and history notes and English reports. The month that consists of late storms, late mornings, and even later nights. The month of three-second plans, spur-of-the-moment ideas, and adventures you'll be talking about years from now.

This is June, in all its reckless, untamed glory. This is the beginning of summer, a three-month taste of the rest of your life. We forget responsibility, logic, caution, and all sense of self control as we charge forth in this world toward our lives, where reality meets reason and dreams are a form of conscience

It is in this month of total abandon that I choose to begin documentation in the form of Words. What better way to recount the excitement, energy, passion, and love that will certainly be my life for the next three months? Small things, tremendous moments, unbelievable circumstances...

all will be written here, from my heart and hand.

But to what end? Perhaps my children will read my Words decades from today. Perhaps I will find myself looking back and remembering what Was, because everyone has

to take a break sometimes from what Is. Perhaps every Word and photograph will be forgotten, lost to all who would ever care and even to those who wouldn't.But this is a month of possibilities. This month, and this life alike. So for all the possibilities, I Write. And for all other writers, it is Possible.