how bodies turn into candles lighting up rooms of roses

these warm nights grow knife-like inside this soft body. somber city caving in with desire, drunk as sunday. this kind of night is made for lovers. the tar gone soft beneath stomping feet, running out the madness, staring down the stars like wishes were fighting words, and them up there just burning away, solemn halos of horse-hearted restless love. never beat so loud, these hearts. sweat-slick shirts stuck against the smalls of backs, hands drifting up and down bodies like shifting tides, lips and tongue rising to purpose. this is what mouths were made for. the lingering kisses, more true than a fuck. this is why they invented rooftops, for nights like this, for loves like this, because the city's rumble and the stars pushing their stems of light like brooms and the heavy summer air were meant to mingle and mix and be held and kissed and fucked inside of. light up, you bodies, you candles. light up the rooms of this night full of parking lots and strip malls and strangers. light up.

feasible drudgery

my bed spent all night twisting me in knots. it's okay though. i'm not harboring any ill will. we've had a lot of good times together too. but my bed wouldn't write me a note to give to the morning to explain why my eyelids are at half mast. i'll tell you what i miss though. i miss when me and my bed and that girl who used to love me, we all used to get together and have a nice old time. it was like a soft fireplace. i sure do miss that.

name your price

the ramparts of your undiminished smile, burning down amidst all this decadent misery. i point my flames at you, but i can't bear to let you feel them. teach me how not to become hardened in the face of a city full of grief. no one is blameless. heart battered and hell bent, we sit, count the colors of the days, tearing rose petals like lottery tickets, peeling back expectations like scabs to discover all our drowning loves. this is the thin line between fucking and getting fucked. an ugly longing. most days i still love you. most days i can stand up and carry myself into the world. i do not expect to forget you, but i am grateful that distance and time will feed my memory a lesser truth than i know now, so that i may disremember how many parts of myself i sold to a buy a true love for you.

coming of age

there she was,
just echoing in the doorway.
the moon had given way to rain,
like an army of sunflowers,
but the glow from the window stayed.
foghorn in my chest.

a slow waltz on the record player.
quiet tears down her face.
the blood pooling bright red on the black and white kitchen tiles.
slow blooming velvet rose.
feathers falling heavy through the room.
knife clattering on the floor.
i moved like sleep,
touched the stumps on her shoulder blades.
she cringed.

this was never what i wanted.
not like this.

the back of her hand gentle on my cheek.
electrocution.
never such eyes.
death a trifle.
forever become meaningless.

moss-lined and crowded with grief,
my heart continued pounding.
she kissed me,
and i flooded with light.

the magic words have stopped working

Where the city shaves slivers of itself in its own eclipsing rotation, burning at its core the molten liquid of the forgotten dreams of dreamers--spinning the unmoving spin of the center of things, the kiss of a cherry blossom frozen in midair before our shipwrecked eyes-where it conjures electricity in the snap of metal fingers - tempts wire walkers with its unabashed opulence and mesmerizes even the sky in its catatonic embrace. I will see you again. Even if only a single old man survives the glaring beauty of your disremembered eyes, I will see you again.

the truest blue of water's real name

when i am a ship, big and hulking with time's weather, having known the timber of many a land inside the splinters of my bones, i will still think of your harbor and cry. and still, sticky with salt, i will burst through the seconds of the rendered days, as a dreadnought through the armor of night's thousand shrouds of shadow. i will not call out your name. i will bury you inside the love i held for you. my wooden heart will become a graveyard, and over my stitched up chest they will put earth. and through an ocean in which each drop of water reminds me of you, i will sail. i will sail. i will sail. i will sail and i will not stop, with time's murderous hammering bearing me always back to that bed where we slept, a night when i was awoken by the moon, and you, still sleeping, raised your head and kissed my bare shoulder blade and then set it back to your pillow. when i asked you later, you remembered nothing.

put away your sleep fists when i'm dreaming

those blue clad body bruisers have stomped in to spoil lives again. and me all fog-headed, trying to breathe like a cloud and have one serious conversation with the whispering stars. tragedy it is then, for i put it to you to give me the mind of a violent man. my chest is an echo chamber that always screams the same words and they do not mix well with the rules that have been written for us. so i will go all cryptic, and i will still love people, and we all will continue to be fear blossoms growing inside the curdled heart of a thing that may never have been beautiful, but that we will continue to pay quivering homage to nonetheless, and for all the lies we are told, all the purposeless destruction, and the ruins of our own imaginations huddled in the decayed cathedrals of unchased dreams, we will be sick many a day, but we will go on living, hand in hand, heart in heart, we will go on living.