Touch

Nerve endings like outstretched fingers,
hoping for a grip, a grasp
a touch.

There are promises whirling the tips of each pad,
epidermal edicts against being senseless.

Submerged

The decisiveness I lack I make up in dreaming
the ability of my off-sync heart to unscrew your hinges.
I see you better than you see yourself
and I always see me the same: a little abstract
like a pointillist painting from a distance;
the colors are all bleeding together,
into something that could be beautiful if it tried.
I’ve never been known to try
too hard.

I can’t tell you where I’ll be in five years
or five months or five minutes, but I know my heart is nothing
if not potential
like I am waiting to be sprung kinetic
like I am waiting for you to realize I am 75% water; you can drown in me.

National Poetry Month - Day 30

Is there a sort of death in stillness?
In silence? In turning in on yourself
so much so that you are translucent. Poor
translucent stagnation; this thing that won't allow us to step forward,
we can't always be circling the same decisions.
There are no answers lying in the shadows of circumferences.
What we need is what we dream
desires
those things we have forbidden ourselves from...

National Poetry Month - Day 28

I can't imagine if your words held any beauty
because your mouth perfected a sneer
a scar across your face. I'd already lived this present
past tense on what I knew you were saying
though you'd somehow gone mute
or I went deaf, suddenly. We'd stopped speaking
the same riddles months ago. Tongue-twisting a lie to fit the scene of the crime.
I would ask for mercy if it were yours to grant.
You play executioner in bedsheets
a cop to my increasingly convincing robber. I think the bad guy wins
today. I think I stole your heart and got away...

National Poetry Month - Day 20

Transparency, a ghost of something past
I keep moving too quickly; my present
becomes a future, perhaps not mine: a clicking slideshow.

Slow-motion,
dancing to silent music

this song always plays here

It's our swan song
beautiful in it's one lingering note
we've been stretching it out by half beats

Pausing, until that plucked string finally breaks

National Poetry Month - Day 19

She wants to remind me of some good day
some yesteryear, repeats a mantra of nostalgia.
"We use to think we could be..."
anything
or anyone. We're too old for fables.
Even our dreams don't end in "Happily Ever Afters..."
They've grown up. Laid down plastic swords for real knives
or fists; your bed owns a gun now, your nightmares ride bullets.

National Poetry Month - Day 12

I wrote this yesterday but didn't get a chance to post it...hoppped up on benadryl...

"In reality there are no black outlines..." -Some art teacher somewhere

We are all shade and shine
a blended grayscale
softly, we yield to the existence of each other
malleable, light bends and breaks around us
or if we prove fragile enough, bends to break us.

National Poetry Month - Day 11

The last time I said "I love you..." I didn't mean it,
there was a pause that stretched across the galaxy
I saw Jupiter in your eyes
cloudy and searching out something more in me
some sign of intelligent life
a heartbeat, a pulse...

the words escaped me in a rush of breath
a hiccup or burp
a complete accident, that I couldn't excuse myself enough for
couldn't take back; because you held it close
something fragile you knew you would lose.

National Poetry Month - Day 10

It's nothing personal,
there's an envy that comes with death
for the living. This is just about survival;
base instincts and simple appetites.

If it wasn't your brain, it'd be someone else;
wrong place
wrong time
wrong side of the apocalypse...

One second to look away
or look off slightly to the left imagining life before
that your neighbor's skin isn't peeling from the bone
that there isn't dried blood smeared across an ex-lover's lips
that your mother's eyes haven't gone blank, flat and lifeless.

When they pull you back
with a strength they never possessed in life
how hard will you struggle? How much will you want to survive?

Question as their mouths descend on your struggling:
Is it better to run forever alone
or dying and walk in hunger together?