A Closed Letter

To happiness,
or whom it may concern.
I don't think I'd recognize you
at first.
Sparkling, transfixed
inside me.
I'd wonder how you
didn't clutch guilt like a
sparrow in the spring.
Would you be like they say,
the ones with smiles?
Could you be so easy to kiss?
To lick like a paintbrush?
Sometimes, I think, I regret
the break up. As though I'm sorry for broken
wills and iron bloodlust.
But more often, I
imagine how you feel in my clothes.
So when did our ambition grow eyes?
The way you used to remind me that
breath and believe both started with
letting go.

highku

she gave me a choice
her or alcoholism
I chose being drunk

Un Tren! Un Tren!

I gave up experimenting with
train sets when
the breaker wouldn't stay flipped.
It's hard to move on track
when electricity doesn't exist.
You aren't
impossible,
but loving you is.
I let the Pacific Ocean run
up the rocks to
slap me a life-awakening.
And when my glasses got
wet, I saw water
prism bricks stack
up and mortar
themselves with salty breath.
I don't have patience like this.
Come down from blimp-clouds.
Trickle through bed rock and
basalt. Clean
the crops.
Promise me a rainy season
so I stop these ankle-
extensions dancing.
So I quit praying at 60 mph.
I wonder if oil would make
you thicker, like
feathers,
or slick.
And the smells of rewound tapes
leak out of our arguments.
Next time, you have the fight
and I'll read
the transcript. That way I
won't set fire to your
repeated mistakes. I'll just
love the way
your cross-examination makes me
feel guilty for moving my tongue.
How many stenographers did you hire
before you found a deaf one?

Train tracks rust in
the cuffs of my jeans.
This great escape led me to
a spine stronger than mine.
I performed the transplant, and walked
back into you upright.
Rearranged your veins until your
heart could finally beat again.
A shakey-handed surgeon with
ball point scalpels and morphine
in my touch but it wasn't enough.

Your Colosseum held peanut cans
filled with springy snakes.
A defense mechanism for those
easily afraid of a lie.
Thank your god I was born with blind faith.
Thank mine I was born with round legs.
Lay railroad ties and I will
dream up steel
pace to keep moving through
these dried-up jerk towns.
There is coal burning in the
back of my perseverance.
I study medical dictionaries
in the headlights. But
she's running me down and I
haven't found
the chapter on terminally empty.
I'm out of time
and I'm sorry.

Blue

There are runs in our stockings.
We shouldn't wear such things in the snow.
It makes us slow to apologize
for mistakes we purposefully
make. And quick
to make love
by smacking our glass against
each other.
I could have loved you,
if you hadn't reminded me of myself
so much.
We shattered,
but before that we had cracked.
Hairlines and fractures in the
concrete wishing wells
we call eyes.
I exchanged life savings
into pennies.
Muttered a prayer in Hebrew.
Translated it into promises.
I promise to never be good
enough for you.
I promise to pretend
I had Eloise in my sights
and an eye to shoot straighter
this time.
Grant me a seventeenth chance
so I can fail to make it up
to you.
Blue is not pretty
like eyes welling up with wishes.
It's lying about sleeping
when I lay next to you.
Blue,
like the bay I threw dollar bills
into. Signed
with your middle name
and the love I fell
into. It was wet.
Warm like a bathtub with
the arms of an ocean.
These are things I am not.
I am not disgusted with myself.
I am not holding grudges against
my mistakes.
I am not looking for problems
or sabotaging us.
I am not afraid of being a father
like mine.
I am not lying!
I am not blue-eyed.
I am not blue.
I don't regret every goodbye
that I painted on my voice.
I didn't want to stay.
I didn't want to wrap myself
in your sheets and forgive
everything. I can't come clean.
I'm stained with spilt faith
but I've never lost God.
I tucked her deep, next
to my self esteem.
Locked them up and
threw away the key.
I don't miss me.
I'm not lying.
I'm not blue
I don't miss you.
I can't tell the truth.

But I've stopped sleeping,
hoping I can be happy in
something other than my dreams.
I'm not ready.
I can't burn the list of
sins I drag from my wrists.
Or the failures
bent like staples holding my smile down;
it'll never be big again.
So let me be the body you
left behind.
And perhaps I
can forgive the
weight of my skin
and find you.
Intertwined in the padlock.
When the key clicks,
the world will have to
forgive me.
I will be useless,
except for loving you.

Bleach

When you pulled your skin back,
did you find what you were running from?
Was it shaped
like slow, open arms, lit
with magnesium? And
do you need me to undress you now?
Because I remember turning myself
inside-out
for your enjoyment and
losing my good coat in the process.
How we float,
dunking our heads to test our breath.
Slowly,
we are drinking this river to get closer to each other.
Catapults line our thirsty throats
and we cannot scream.
We cannot present our anthems of
frustrated worth. Tie
collapsing fortitude to my limbs.
I will not quarter.
My shoulders are cementing,
stagnant clay pits.
I've dyed my earlobes red from
all the shrugging. But when I sing,
the clay goes slowly soft.
And after 6 months of staining like children,
for my birthday
you gave me more bleach.
I scrubbed until I was clean.
Last night,
I watched a middle-aged man lose
two weeks of self help tapes in
a coffee shop.
He had been turned down
by a twenty-something who
didn't trust innocence.
So is this my sentence for giving up on love?
My dreams and nightmares are distorting.
Horses are running wild through cemeteries
and in the background you
are laughing.
I need an exorcist, most nights.
But I settle for a finger-painting,
or more bleach.
Which leads me to ask;
Did you understand I wasn't a jeweler?
Just a stranger who knew
rubies were found in the hearts of the missing.

If I had touched you
as hard as I wanted to,
my lips would still be imprinted onto your fist.
After all,
this explosion began
with the kiss
we missed.
But that's not to say I couldn't bleed still.
I digress.
If it wasn't for the scratches of the win,
I wouldn't remember the good parts.
Like the night we waltzed
between the knees of the butterflies
and you laughed,
and said it tickled.
Or those December windows
we steamed without breathing.
I've gathered these memories into
the type of neighborhood where
porch swings don't budge.
I watch the porcelain grey in the bathtubs.
I watch the wallpaper creep from the molding.
This is where I learned
to lie,
and to shiver.
I always imagined I would marry the girl
who left: the painter blind, the
poet speechless.
But she would want to see the neighbors,
and I can't go back there.
So instead, I will marry
a girl with eyes like walls.
A girl who fancies herself.
A girl who can't see the backgrounds in portraits.
And when she sleeps, I'll
sneak out into the night, alone, and
ask how we could forget that
flowers are still flowers in the rain.

I still water the plum tree you planted.
And sometimes, when the wind blows.
The branches scratch up against
the inside of my ribs.
And it tickles me to tears.

Reding is phun

If you look at Glenn Beck's library
record, you won't see...much.
Kanye West has admitted to
never reading books,
although he wrote one.
1 in 15 Americans
can't make sense of a newspaper.
Every first world country
teaches at least two
languages to children starting from birth.
And we don't know our own.
Where did we go wrong?
Did television announce itself
as a deity?
Did our busy hands move too fast
for our eyes to see?
Did we trade poetry
for portability?
Or was it when we knew?
When we knew we were smart enough.
When we knew the coldest wars were over.
When we knew how to advertise.
Maybe.
But maybe,
the end of culture should be blamed on us,
the weak.
The death of our language happened
when we were far too bold to listen
and far too scared to speak.

4 minutes, or damn near.

In the passenger seat of a
Chevrolet Cavalier, one of the
greatest gifts I've ever met
confesses they call her bipolar.
I tell her I am, too.
They just haven't caught me yet.
If they set a trap made of
6-pack rings and suicide attempts
I'd be fucked.
But they won't.
Instead, people become uncomfortable
when I tell them I was a canceled abortion.
Do you get it yet?
I'm not supposed to be here.
I drank a bottle of nail-polish when I was two.
Gave my mother a week before I tipped
the aspirin pill case back.
Stomach pumps are longer than you'd think.
But perhaps you can tell me what
it's like to have a purpose-filled life.
I party with the best of 'em.
Which means I drink alone.
If you ask, I'll tell you it gets
rid of the headaches in my chest.
Some days I feel like a latex balloon
no one has the breath to fill back up.

So where's the ambulance?
Where are the white apes in white jackets?
I respect this world enough
to leave it
with one less dreamer.
One less chance.
And you can doubt my wings. I wouldn't expect
the lot of you to
see anything you couldn't proclaim a war against.
For calling yourselves believers and faith healers
you sure are blind to a love
built on empathy.
Pull the bit from your mouth
before you speak to me.
If you're right, I'll hang myself from your reins.
I've wanted nothing more
than to watch you watch me
suffocate in a hope chest.
Tucked underneath forgotten birthday cards
and a first marriage wedding dress.
The only thing worth hearing about me
will be my eulogy. It will read
like a grocery list for insomnia.
They'll decorate my coffin with
Parisian cafe charm because
I was an artist,
and artists adore elitist culture.
But if I have my way.
they'll march my body to a landfill
so I won't ever decompose.
And there I will lay, staring at all the stars
I threw away.
The sun will rise
to broken promises dancing on my grave.
And I won't blame them for holding a grudge.

I want out of a world where
your sins outlast you
and riches are held in currency.
Give me a world
where Raskalnikov weeps
and New York can finally sleep.
I want truth stitched into me
like a Star of David in the ghetto.
The Gestapo better bring their rifles.
I have no intention of going quietly
into the night.
I encased my heart in iron bars
that rusted when I cried
I pried them apart.
So don't call me a tin man
I have miles of love inside.
I'll rip open your permanent
record and stamp
"Too Gorgeous To Die".'
Just like the sky,
your eyes hold the stars in line.
Don't shut them, yet.
Sacrifice complacency for
acceleration.
Put your lead foot on the
burn pedal until
we all catch fire.
Mimic the sun.
Chase down the dreams you had before
they told you it couldn't be done.
They are trying to cut off our fingers
so lets all give them one.
Lick the teeth of your heroes
and call it a kiss.
Spit on the wrists of
anyone who tells you fairy tales don't exist.
Because we shouldn't be here.
We dreamers.
We rogues of a new dawn.
We love-song singers
and tear-hiders.
We were always told
to fall in line
so we leaped out,
foreheads glistening in sweat spelling out
"we aren't beaten yet".
And I'll keep
playing psalms on the harmonica.
And you'll keep painting smiles
on nativity sets.
And before this shit gets
us in the end,
we will weep passion
until those empty veins
run red again.

My grandfather was 85
when his wife left this world
and him.
He told me it wasn't enough, anymore.
He had stopped moving inside.
And I said "Grandpa, I don't blame you.
True hope in this world doesn't
come often. But I know,
for all the things that
want to kill us in this world,
when we love,
we find the only
thing worth dying for.