The french restaurant

The lighting is dim. And I am sitting cross-legged, in a floral sundress; , waiting for you to respond. It’s like there are fire crystals stuck behind my tonsils. I can’t get a word out. On this red suede table, are my empty hands clasped nervously tight together in the center of my place setting. Although none of this even registers at this moment, because my heart is being dragged through these fire crystals I have somehow swallowed, but cannot remember their initial taste. You are looking down at the table, like you can see through me. Like i’m not actually in front of you, bawling and crying hysterically, in a collapse of your arms—my words jumbled, but important. But no. In truth my hands are only holding each other, nervously. I can hear nothing but the chatter of other tables. The waitress sets down two hot plates, just before my silence provokes you to think unquestionably. As the heat steams before us, temporarily fogging up our point of views, I am reminiscing about times when I couldn’t read your thoughts. I can remember the disappointment in finding myself out to be human, and simply incapable of superiority. That hurt a lot.

When I was little my father would spoil us once or twice a year with extravagant vacations. Upon every vacation’s airport arrival we would play this unspoken  game, that became so much of a habit, it felt like tradition; of pretending to be shocked and in awe that he had upgraded us to first class. Pretending not to notice or god-forbidnote how the amplified version of us three screeching out no way’s, thank you’s and you’re the best’s bore a kind of addiction in our father, who had always been thirsty for affectionate admiration. At this time, at this table, with my hands folded nervously, my throat closed, and my heart aching, I am re mincing on good times simply for distraction purposes. When the steam settles down from my sight to the tops of our bowls I am awaken from my day dream, with the hot, slurping realization that none of this exists anymore.
That hurt even worse.

But I wasn’t playing pretend anyone. I felt cut open, poured out, dissected, and exposed. I wasn’t the same person I had once known so well, for years. I was different. I had my shit together 4 days out of the week, and it was more than I could say for the past me. I couldn’t even concentrate back then; my mind would wander. Which is why I cant possibly eat right now. I mean look at you, really look at you. With your hair unintentionally swept across the side of your face, your shirt half tucked into the jeans I helped you pick out. Now our laughter and our love making feels trivialized, and unspoken for. I was free just moments ago, in the second when I could hear nothing but the chatter of my heart, speaking another language again. One that I just can’t understand. 
That hurt the most.

I thought about the mountain ranges, competing for 10,000 lakes, getting lost within her sea, lying restless and awake each night, going over which season made them individually happiest. They remain so different, arched across my ceiling in an accumulation of frightening shadows, said to help put me to sleep. I am never trusting anyone who claims to have good advice ever again. Yet in this second, I want you. Somehow sitting there in irreversible silence, I am craving to know the weight of your body wrapped delicately in my arms; our magnet fingers tracing the amber lights across each other’s skin, wondering which one of us will leave their mark.
That never seems to stop hurting. 

It is so difficult to remain calm, to remain open and accepting
Not of another person’s lifestyle or a brand new idea set to print;
so hot off the press its ink is smeared.
But of love being away from my body, while holding it inside my heart.
it is easy to be in a panic
I find myself okay with chipped skin 
an over caffeinated soul
and an ankle that will never heal
HOWEVER

Later I find myself,
cold and miserable. It’s like my skin has finally been ripped open enough.
negative thoughts are so absorbent 
They devour written hope, let out on a Sunday morning
next to the coffee that is never strong enough
to keep you awake 
when all you really wanted was to sleep forever
but even that gets old

I remember when I had yet set sights upon the gleam in your eyes-
that electric jolting shock down my spine when I kiss you.
When my heart did not yet understand what it meant to feel at peace
Before I cut the cord of the new year
It’s now silly to dream of the past, when it is gone, and wasn’t really worth any of today’s glorification 

I remember when I had yet to touch the soft creases of your skin at 5:30 in the morning,
Before I knew what being in love meant
 I still couldn’t explain to you, what it means
to be in and out of a coma, searching for home within bad dreams, feeling dizzy when lying next you because the floor is taken from under my feet just as the stars become strong enough to confide in

I had you,
Last night, half naked in my sheets
My arms cradling you close to me
Those quiet moments, when I wish I could remove the other pieces of me that crawl between us, protecting me from the darkness I would be drowning in if I had not met you.

I still can’t say love is something I know how to sow
But I want you to have my favorite poems
because all of them are pieces of you
And the pieces of me, that come between us
decrease in size each time you visit
and even though my heart literally breaks to watch you leave me
I know it is a milestone from where we both began
Before we knew how to tell secrets in the wind
so we both can be comforted 
even if we are hours away

Before we knew how beautiful it is to see your love teary eyed, kissing your hand to say,
2 more times and this world is ours. 
 

Getting drunk by yourself
In public
Its like being
A lost puppy with an owner searching for you
Amongst the hounds and clowns of a humane society
You’re barking loudly but all they hear is everyone else
What a true testament
To public loneliness

I am not like you, because I am me

It’s almost comical that you cannot have “everything”. One thing is always missing from the mix, and it is always a significant piece that your heart has endlessly, but wearily desired. Sometimes when it’s late and the world is fast asleep, with the exception of planes overhead, it is just me and my clock—starring at each other like we are waiting for the other to give in, to give up, to blink, to change time. I never know who wins. All I know is what I have, and what I am without. And unfortunately the two never mate happily, skipping off into the sunset, fingers laced; they are angry enemies, secretly longing for one another more and more with every fire ring toss that tends to go without valid score-keeping. I want you two to put down the matches, look fearlessly into each others eyes, like me and my clock have done infinitely, and acknowledge how beautiful it is that you two are so different. 

And so it goes

Love is a temporary madness.
That is equally as pleasurable as it is painful.
It Continues to be THE most important thing in life,
And yet it is a game that requires sentiment and skill.
Not the loving.
We all know how easy love comes. It’s inevitably so, that love will forever be the guilty pleasure of a lifetime.
So hellllo enigma, pin me down.
I want to know the feel of your skin as the thin waif relocates, to be closer to laughter and smiles.
HA!
These things are cheap.
Easy, like love falling in.
Painful, like love falling out.
And so it goes

I am constantly angry with the concept of time; maybe it is because I don’t understand how quickly it can drift from my eyelids each night,  or maybe it is because I have been in such a hurried rush to grow up and “find” myself, that I have been unappreciative along the way. I suppose appreciation really is the moral of this story. In 2007 I was a typical sophomore, mostly concerned with which outfit to wear to school and which AP classes to take next semester; that is until my world was shaken and spiraled into the air like a hurricane mating with a tornado. As a writer with high standards of vocabulary, I never imagined that a three worded sentence would be a 5 year commencement to a very steep downhill spiral of destruction. As the words rolled off his tongue, as smoothly as his 5 o clock shadow had felt in the palm of my hands, I could feel the backs of my knees slowly collapsing. “I have cancer”, he muttered, looking into my eyes in an attempt to show his heroic fatherly bravery. (Even though he was sick, he was still strong). It was daunting to be met with such an excruciating verdict. I thought that day would be the worst day until I sat beside my father during rounds of chemotherapy. I watched the needles dig into his skin, the poison fill his veins, the sparkle in his eyes dissolve, along with his once resilient spirit, and with that his existence. Losing a parent is an indescribable experience. People ask me all the time about what it was like the day he died. It was so easy for many to pay their respects, offer their condolences and quickly turn away from the subject without batting an eyelash. The biggest misconception about losing someone close to you is “time heals all wounds”. I would have never conjured in my wildest of imaginations that I would one day be staring at old photographs in tears, with the unwanted knowledge of never having those precious moments back. With the month of my father’s death drifting further away from me, so has my childhood; like a beautiful piece of myself that has been torn away, like a book with paragraphs too real, too raw to truly feel, without becoming forever changed. With this loss I feel completely shocked and hurt by what it has dragged out. The experience of not only losing him so early in my life, but the agonizingly long fight my entire family put in for five years still throbs like a wound unwillingly to heal. But the thing about life is that it must go on. It will never “get better”, but hopefully I will one day function like a normal human being again. There is hope to awake from a restful night sleep, draw my sleepy arms to the sky in an exhausted stretch, a smile gleaming on my face as I head to school to study my passion. I want all this because I promised my dad the day he died that I would complete college. I want to keep this promise to myself and to him, I deeply do. I’m not someone who stays contently in depression. I acknowledge sadness, as a poetic process— a rough patch that can be looked on constructively. It is something one grows from; it is experience and if you try hard enough you WILL grow, with time. I will never understand things like cancer; how it could take something so precious to me, so vital to my being. Because I am a person who believes in growth, I hope I am somehow being molded into the person I have always wanted to be— The person my parents raised me to be. The person I am becoming with time; and that is, brave. I am doing the best I can to see the meaning in everything. Believing there is a reason to all things, makes me want to push harder, strive for straight A’s, graduate college, and raise a family, just like my father had dreamed I would. 

What you need is victory; Life to be sprawled out and spread as easily as butter melts. She was on fire, or maybe we were too high to notice her without drifting in and out of consciousness. She would spend Saturday nights alone, too tired and uninspired by absolutely everything, or maybe absolutely nothing in particular. She wanted time to be within her control, to create some type of justification for everyone who could never bring themselves low enough to console her sadness with theirs.
But she is too beautiful to be sad, and to many of them she was too beautiful to be gay, hell maybe she was even too beautiful to really be beautiful. She always had this knowing look in her eye that made me wonder if she even knew how lost she was. Without haste or struggle, she takes me in her arms; I am wrapped into the core of her. I scarcely find acceptance for this; all I can think of is how restless I am when lingering through, what I don’t know I am looking for. This never bothers her; the story’s antagonist was easier for her to concern herself with. And like an anticipated plot, she had the habit of becoming attached to things that are unlikely to last. She would lie underneath the stars at night, on the forest green lawn of childhood, ready to risk everything for anyone she admired. Clinging on like superglue, I was happily trapped inside a cage of butterflies, instantly reserved by the slightest sound. Her voice was magic, but the kind of magic that always seems to find its way in and out of an old hat, effortlessly fooling us all. The truth was, we all knew where this kind of magic came from. How it wasn’t really fate but more of a put-together concept, believable enough to transform string into golden ribbons.
 Things always had these hidden secrets; secrets we craved to understand, but never could accurately decipher the meaning of. Behind forced laughter there lay a wounded feeling from postponing an ocean bed of tears. Sometimes she wanted to be numb. She sat quietly beneath the trees, breathing in the inexpressible taste of the falling sunset. She drank me up like candy wine that night we pretended to be crying about how religion continues to be a legitimate excuse to ignore the screeching plea from humanity—which was undoubtedly a critical issue, but far from our minds at that moment in time. You opened me up to show me what the moon looks like when it’s slanted across the sky’s black canvas of cellulite riding baby stars. At our feet were made-up water lilies, blooming adjacent to the orchard of sweet hydrangeas I had imagined we would plant as ideas before getting on our hands and knees. It was the most beautiful thing, to see two such complex beings affix together so faultlessly; neither bud relinquishing what it meant to become. You slid down to your left knee, and my heart reassured my eyes that happy tears are just as acceptable to weep.  

All of this was just a heavy process,
twenty pounds added to bony shoulders
He wraps it up, afraid to construct reason to love you forever; the way I did.
I can never comprehend why it is so vulgar inside my eardrums, despite the inaudible whisper of the winds hum. And what someone should do, when the aching hole in the center of their chest refuses to subside.
 Mermaids swim, birds fly
And sometimes all I could do was drown respectively, as my sorrow would tumble deep into the bottom of a one-night-stand at its best.
The alarm screams panic into the blinding divide of a morning sunrise,
as the sun divorces our melting-pot of counterfeit kisses; each piece, a rich amount of hopeful, attempting to fit into heteronormative bliss.
But It was useless.
The feeling of falling into someone else; the hardness of life pressed against the satin lace of tights—It was almost hot enough to fall in love with.
But lust is not admiration;
It is selfish and altogether boastful in its masculine glory.
All I wanted to do was love everyone,
feel the gradual up-rise inside me
 within a symphony that required none of the labels that society desired.
The pursuit of attention was merely intended for the ache of reality to subside
Screaming had pleasurably been known to quiet the mind,
Until the alarm rang
And little Cinderella would always awake,
to a piercing glitter headache
and postponed truth, bound at the wrists by rainbow rags.

Noah said two by two

An unwinding swirl

Hanging from a long distant chain of events

You walk away from this safe circle we’ve both built, trying to keep the neighbors and the monsters away. Out of our head space

What we had was enough to fill up already

And it filled our glasses

I always wanted more

You became the color of emergency, and hated me

for everything I couldn’t reach

My back was punctured come evening

When the lids had been hailed through explosion

 I pretended I could not feel a thing, but the wound was something my quivering hands could not cover

We all began avoiding upstairs

With meals, brought the clink of knives and forks

It was so empty following battle

I scraped my knees on the desk of the last year

No one heard me call

Because being lost means

no one listens

so I fed my crumbs to the monster, even though I knew he

could not digest

what I offered

yet I accepted it.

Time drips from the nozzle of a leaking sink

weeping like there is nothing good

left to come

but it keeps rushing

my bill escalades

and my clocks are now flooded

hating is so much easier than this

blissful state of committed memory

I ask myself, why couldn’t I be committed?

And you reply, how can you fall without dragging the world down with you?

I am just waiting to hit rock bottom

Waiting for the phone to ring

Waiting for the break of thanks, when I can confess why I could not believe in pairs

Temperamental Courage

I wish I could make love to your insides.
I wish I could love myself as much as wholesome people have
loved me and struggled to let go of the idea of me.

Loving me was always too big a chore for most of them 
Like hungry weeds in a summer’s thirsty garden of daisies,
they would  grow uselessly weary, just too sleepy to continue the fight. 

I can’t say I don’t understand, because the insides of me do
The same way they ache, knowing they will never mate with the warm depths of yours. Sometimes your skin scalds me up, until not even band-aids can possibly sow me back into one fine piece.
I can still smell the seaweed, taste the salt of the ocean on your skin. 
Sometimes I wish I had an easier time moving on
It is strange to me how easily it is to move across the country, and yet how difficult it is to put away old love letters
the ones that remain untouched, as if they had never been opened.

Those moments are when I wish I had never read 
the meaningless I love you’s.
Those moments are when I wish I could erase the meaningful goodbyes
Cover our scars with cotton sweaters, so that we can ease into winter better
I have lived among snow for 20 years of my life and yet I can barely make it through a single blizzard
without sobbing 
my tears tend to formulate frozen icicles 
I can’t help but see as weapons
easy enough to utilize
this realization scares me

But usually when its late at night
and I am sitting, silently sobbing on someones bathroom floor,
I almost feel worthy
just for having the courage to weep 
without throwing in the towel

Comedy is my insides, swallowing strawberry vodka down to the brim because it is available.
Comedy is the panic that comes over me in waves, too easily.
I realize pain and self-loathing can be more addicting than women can be, but I can’t help but fall madly into them all, crazed and hungrily. She makes mouthwatering circles with her tongue against the soft vanilla ice-cream of me; have you ever seen something so intoxicating? The very presence of her robbing me of oxygen, but in truth she is only tracing my fingers upon the bones and bridges of hers. She bites my bottom lip. After a few sips of cherry gin, we lay upon the night’s canvas, our longing bodies made of static cling, painted in kisses. Every inch of her was delicious. Our hips met passionately, and in the moment of lust and earth shattering desire our starry eyes would lock, jolting electricity through the curly phone cords of my veins. I allowed her rhythm to sink deeper, because I wanted every bit of her, and I knew she would be hoping to make me moan louder. As the power outage quickly purred our world to sleep, I dug my fingers into the arch of her back. With the moon shadowing our bed sheets, and the sky tilted slightly off its axis, she had me gripping the mattress, unable to exclaim anything more than oh’s and my’s and god’s