g.r.i.e.v.i.n.g.

 I used to do this kind of thing a lot.

Put on some sad music, pour my soul into a piece of the internet I called home, thinking somewhere, someone might read it. If you were that kind of guy, that kind of person who still reachs into the depths of the underworld, sometimes, occasionally, to feel the brush of another set of fingertips.

I have felt for yours.

I think I'm looking for my twin in pain; if not my soulmate, just a woundmate. Someone to stroke the chords that sting in this set of bones. That you might know just how my soul screams...It's done a lot of screaming this year. Can I tell you? A part of me leans on God...but the other part, the kind that stirs in moments like these...says justice is fake

Can't belive in karma 

If that, then we would deserve what we get. And you don't. You don't deserve it. Not this time.

You are that young guy, with his fingers stumbling over guitar chords, singing off key and beautifully, in his dorm room freshman year. I remember always thinking things went perfectly for you. While I was struggling, in loss, to put food in my belly, to absolve myself of guilt...you were just growing up. We haven't been real friends since we were kids I think, yellow jerseys playing on the same soccer team. Comparing heights, comparing minds, comparing hearts. Who was better at art, at school, at sports, at life. Maybe the narrative I told myself that set us apart is just the story I tell myself to forgive the distance time has grown between us. 

Can you ever be so unlike your blood? We share

50% of our DNA

a sardonic sense of humor

and 28 years of memories

God I hope there are more. You deserve, more. Stop me grieving what's not yet gone. 

early birde.

Something about being profoundly lonely. I saw a man die today and I didn't think it affected me until I lay down and looking at the sky from six feet up something just broke. Sometimes it does that. And there's no one to talk to about that.

You deserved better.

What do you do
When you fuck up
And realize you're not a good person
Say you are sorry
Let the axe fall
And watch as your head rolls away.

winter.

I wish that phone call was not the last time we had spoken.
I was walking home in the dark after a shift; you were calling at a bad time. I said something stupid. True, but stupid. You were always so sensitive. One wrong word and you'd turn the house upside down. You hung up on me.

I think a part of me felt obligated to talk to you that night after you stuck your head into that lawnmower. A substantial suicide threat and the world would tumble at your feet. Were you that manipulative? Or just sick.

I think about you every day. It's the kind of thing I can talk about now. But I listen to our songs when I want to feel close. And it still hurts. First love's wintery bows, long dead, can still crack the silence when broken.

This tome is really just a montage to you. Scattered with musings of other lovers. But mostly you. It's where I keep you, because there is no place for you now in my life. It's a sad thing, but I wish you read it. So you would know I care, despite the silence and space. And if you needed me, really needed me,

I would be right there at your feet.

this might hurt.

You vex me.

You dredge up the past in some simplistic statement and suck me in, spiral down into webpages for a sign of your name, keywords and it's all spina bifida foundation and space: here's to me for remembering how you feel about asteroids and inside jokes.
You remain frustratingly relevant in a world I've built without you, and what I can't fully erase I intend to suppress; a flaming foot stomp on the fuck you I've sent your way so many times.


Fuck you for being interesting. and mysterious. And for sending messages like that, when I find it months later, myself, caught red handed ripping up the past again. At least I know you do, too.

Is there a future? I so enjoy your company. But you always want from me something I cannot give. I feel it, it pulls. Into bad dreams where I wake up shivering, scared, and think, if you were a good man, a really good man, why did I find you there?

Want can pull a man to madness, don't you agree?

this human thing.

When you're barely holding it together, the littlest things can set you off. One thing goes wrong and it' down the rabbit hole again, and you're crying but it's got nothing to do with the trigger. The bullet wound was already there.
I'm not supposed to talk about it. Worst it's embarrassing. Who wants to see a person crumble like this. People don't understand. Today it was a grade, a shitty grade apparently for all the shitty work I've been putting out there. Why are you crying over a grade? It's not the grade. It's the cherry on top of a whole lot of raw emotions. I hate to admit it
but,
I'm more fragile than I thought. I don't know if strong people reach out, but I hide, and the more I hide I go unnoticed, something scattered like a stack of paper that blows away, page by page into the wind. There's a very real part of me that wants to disappear, to melt under the sun and evaporate. Be reborn as mist or wind or a fleeting raindrop and just take the fucking ride...People don't want to hear that. I don't want to say that. So I bring bird feathers back to a damn picture frame and realize my life was build on a house of sticks. One stone and the place falls down.

little one.

LC. My little elsie girl.
Here lies grief, a stubborn old seat in a game of musical chairs, nowhere else to turn. Have I failed you in some way? Reason and emotion argue a tempest inside of me that rages, trying to turn back the clock with its centrifical force. But here I still am, standing still in a world that keeps moving forward. The awkward I'm Sorry's, and mumbled it's okay's. It's old, and I'm tired of it. Like maybe I could just quit and go spend some time catching up to you. Come back to me. I love you. I'm not strong or resilient, I'm not functional. I want to die a happy child in a sea of cats and dogs and horses for family. No good at growing older. Where does your journey take you.
Today you came home in a box and i thought only a year and a half ago you came home on that same passenger seat. If I could change things for you I would. And not to save myself but because you deserved better. You deserved longer. I'm skin and bones and the echoes of the same thoughts that bounce and rebound over the same issues. Grief, the only chair left when your time is up.

All the words in the world don't change the simple fact that you were a cat, and I was a better human with you here.

sampson.

what if I was the one who would have ruined you? It was I who loved you first.

stray.

Like them, I'm a stray. Sniffing garbage cans for scraps and wandering place to place with a smile. Settling for the stripped off bits, your unwanted pieces are my prize. But home is where you are now, and I'm loyal as a dog.

i am jack's festering guilt.

No matter what I've said, it will never be okay. And I've tried getting older but time is blind and the words I find are merely echoes of each other...raising circles on my palms. Still counting, 5 years, your name in the searchbar. Looking for just a clue. The last bits of 2009 strewn about in this head of mine, but the bar blinks back, silent as the dead. I am Jack's festering guilt.

The night you don't remember

I can't stop thinking of your hands, lingering around my waist and drawing wanting patterns...and these shivers echoing through my core. Oh chemical feeling, and this undeniability. And words in my voice said "Just hold me." Who was that?
You say you'll always be trying to kiss me. Just once, if there is nothing there, we will go our separate ways. No, I say. It won't be like that. You say exactly.

How long now? Cemented to your porch, and fear. You lay beside and wrapped yourself around me, I asked, who are you? Because suddenly I do not know. Our conversation is frank and clear, honesty corralled into one tiny night and you're calling me out for never having the courage of honesty before now. We both messed up. And ache, like a hazy blanket over my heart. My chest is a cloud I'm only floating on. This girl I loved, you say. Loved? I reply. I love you, you say. I love you. I messed up. 
You should have married me. I know, you say. I know that now.

Our hands somehow flit in finite spaces and it's this magnetic atomic exchange. I say hold out your hand, marry me. You tell me you don't have a ring, and I slip the rounded rope of a dog leash over your ring finger. Now you can't ever say you've never been married. 

He tells you how lucky you are. This man walking down the road says I'm beautiful and how lucky you are. You say I'm such an idiot. It's abundantly clear. And I never want you to stop touching me. And it's mine, all mine, this memory; it's surreal and it aches, like nostalgia and whiskey and laughter and loyalty. I never knew you loved me. I thought, but I never knew. You should have married me, you idiot. We would be infinitely happy now. We would smile and we would fall, because at last, at last, the emptiness would be gone. And now nothing will ever be the same. So we exist in foggy memories and haphazard meetings and we'll never get away from each other. And something about that will always, always, always. hurt.

breeze on your cheeks

I admit, the sound of your voice feels like the dots on the wall of the house I grew up in, morphing shadows into faces. Vibrations that transport. Sickly and toxic still but I love it, wrap around it because it's dark and familiar. Little bits that make acting out seem like stranger's folly in my freedom, I wonder where the shaking stops...but not here, not in this place, where the music surrounds and greasy sweating monkeys suck away the last days of their youth, thumping club to wicked feet bumping up up and up - you make me feel at home here in the land of everlasting heartbeats. Did you follow me, the sound of a base pumping out steady punk rhythm from the days of leather jackets, buckles, spikes and sticky floors. Many years later but enter impression, sweet face, fractured in cynicism I stopped and let my eyes rest upon you. Maybe you were the worst thing to ever happen to a heart like mine, tiny veins and capillaries spread out wide to feed immortal soul, you sick crust, you vagrant, you vampire. You fed, unforgiving beast that rippled once, twice, and died, disappeared without remorse into thin air. How could you play such tender games...I split in two, pushing outwards like a hatchling from the prison of eggshell, shed my skin and tried to burn the world with my tongue of flames. I needed to watch something die. What was slain becomes the slayer, yes, a petty paradox but it's why I shine tonight. glitter glitter and who wants to bite.

Succubus, angel in red. So I trick myself, like everybody else.

i am more than my baby teeth

So I failed. Again. Over something tiny and nearly insignificant. Nearly. And I get to try again so why am I so upset? I think it's just stacking on top of each other. Crying is so graceless. Why take it so hard? I should be stronger. I feel isolated and in many ways powerless here. Selling my stuff to barely make any money. Looking at an empty bank account and trying to be strong. I could use a cushion here. I just hate not moving forward. I guess this is just the cherry on top. This is just too much, today. It's just a raw wound I guess. Tearing open a scab. Poor baby ego.

Get it together. Keep fucking going. Just keep tearing through. It will get better. And it could be so much worse. Remember your heroes. Become greater. This is part of it. This is part of growing. I just need a couple good weeks I think. Turn it around right?

primal thoughts from the blank space

I had a dream about you last night. We talked. You were you, and we met and talked about life, where I am now. You said "I thought I was doing pretty well until I met with you" like I made you feel like this life was passing you by. Well maybe, but that's what I think. In my isolated repose, where I never see you and we never speak and I speculate on shades of grey from far far away.You could be anywhere. You could be happy. But we embraced, and I felt safe. A strange whole feeling from long ago, an empty box reunited with its heart. You tossed away the dove at my neck, took my wings and safe landing with it.
We spoke in symbols, online realities and words that lose meaning now, hazy unclear flickers across the front lines of a battle you would later lose. Do you blame me? You still don't write back. I used to say you'd rear your ugly head again, but its been five years, and three without a word. I don't know if you've ever read a word I wrote for you.
Did you know, I can still draw your face, in perfect angles, the divet in your chest and the scar on your skull...how many new bits of you exist? How many demons made their mark on your soul? Do you remember me, superman? I was the one who loved you the most. But again, sink or swim. I still keep your heart in a box, hidden in a box, hidden in a drawer in a house that I live in a world where you can never find me. Is it so clean? So cut and dry? Not for the girl who writes to a dead boy. Not to the girl who converses in dreams to a ghost.

But thanks, for being there. Even if it was a dream. Thanks for caring, even just a little, about who I turned into. I will choose to believe you aren't as gone as the world says you are...We've always been a chapter too beautiful to burn.

Stains on the carpet and stains on our memories.

drifter.

Somehow, I am not anyone. Just a spindley song, carried over the wind on a reedy voice. The notes that wander and grace your ears, the edge of magic lines unfold.
You stop midstep, to listen.
"Where did you come from? What are you, little fairy..."
Surround. Ghost orbit, slow motion spin. You're looking for a source that isn't here. It's the breath of soft green moss on a river bank and the smell of earth after a rain. It rises like steam from the soul of this earth untold. A cold winter kiss.
It's never enough but it's all I can give from this place, so out of sync. This weathered dimension, my cage of ice. This is the part where we embrace. This is the part where the miles wither, time springs into step. This is the part where I say, I love you so. How many times, but I love you so. I've been listening to too many opinions, and too many sad stories, and too many tall tales.
Will it ever be enough to know
you are not alone?
 it's just a song
 it's just a song.

indirectly yours,

Here we are. Out of the dark and into the day. Ok, I'll start.
Well, it's relief I guess. You are so heavy. Heavy for me. You felt it too, and admitted as much, in the intolerable poetry that is your voice. Oxygen. The space to breathe, further and further away. Away, till your lungs fill with air and the thoughts are pushed from your head. Only then you realize you were drowning in them. There it is, a clean getaway. No ties, no calls, no checking in. There is nothing to say. No words to lift your pain. No words to tell you the answers to questions you already know the answer to. So let it be static. Let it be the white noise that fills your mind when you fall asleep. It's the wind, it's the butterflies. It's a wash.
The truth is, I'm not feeling very verbal today. Certainly not a day for writing precocious monolougues or narcisistic tangents. Mostly I just stay here in my circle, and that's fine. But sometimes I find myself humming the words to your songs; vowels and consanants that take shape within my subconsious. My litany of you.

good mourning.

You know why I stopped listening to music? I can't hear anything really good without conjuring ghosts. I am safe in the drivel they play over the radio. Total bullshit.

You me and a receiver. Trying to swallow me whole.

game on.

We're passing letters over time zones. Flicker, bend, screen vibrate. You and me, we're the lakehouse. Aligned in two completely different dimensions.
Here's the thing: you begot me. We're related. We're strings, and they can't be cut. Nothing so real can be severed. It's a wire. I still send to you like you send to me.
I read it and got butterflies. My heart stopped a little. Whatever it is, I've missed it. Can we keep this up forever? I got a glimpse inside, and laughed. You think you are the only lonely soul on the planet.

We are nothing without pretend. Child's play. And ready or not, here I come.

It's your world I live inside.

I think it dawned on me today that I'm never really going back. And if I push myself to let go...

You lay in my memory, pristine. I turn the pages back more times than you think, soldier boy. You're like paper left in the sun too long, bleached and warped. Tossed out, but the space you once were an echo to your existence. Oh, god. It terrifies me to think I may have to relive that pain. That anyone around me might fall down sick and leave only a trace; such a feeble testament to meaning. I am the keeper of your best years. Just when I think I'm close to forgiving, infinity...you are the space between 99 and 100.

Tick tock.

Again, to you.

Do you ever wish that
We'd met
In a field of flowering poppies?
Do you think that
maybe it make
things a whole lot different?
The truth is that
You were much lovelier
Than I've ever given you credit for.