Late afternoon
Train rides
I tell myself
If I could be anything right now,
I'd be fine

You stir the oceans inside me.
We just got settled into a dream,
And we keep falling deeper,
Deeper into the sound waves
As we play telephone through the wavelengths
Of our consciousness
I want to be the one to open your insides
And make them glow with the patterns of light
In my eyes
When we wake up,
I'll tell you the dreams that I dreamt
You tell me the hopes that you've kept
We will lay motionless until dawn

I won't be any fun tonight.
I know everyone wants me to come home thrilled to see them, crying at the gate.
But the truth is, I am waiting for my delayed flight,
I gazing out at the California mountains thinking of the night I first landed in Brussels,
how the trees and grass
looked just like trees and grass
and not like anything foreign.
I am begging the mountains to take me back to Europe
where I could see all the foliage
that made me feel at home.
The desert here raised me for eighteen years but I find there's no longer any tumbleweed that satisfies my need to belong.

I want mountains I want oceans I want valleys I want canyons I want city skylines I want tropical jungles I want beaches I want the Great Wall

I don't want to settle.

Ten pm,
You're brushing your teeth
In preparation for bed
Have I said I love you yet?

Sometimes I think if we were to hug close enough,
we'd melt into rose petals
that cover the dusty ground and
await the day eternity
feels more like a memory

If I could write everything I'm feeling
On the tops of the walls in acrylic paints,
Would the words drip down the wallpaper
In silence,
Reminding me that emptiness
Is only relative,
That whatever magazine cut outs
And indie band posters I've hung over the years
Can dissolve into the vastness
Of my memory?
That somewhere in my organs,
There's pictures of you drenched in
opera house pinks,
Van Gough sunflowers,
Georgia dirt reds?
That the paint ran down the walls
As quickly as you ran to me,
A four minute mile of I Love Yous,
Paint dribbled bursts of joy
concaving over the stillness of the pavement,
Blissful evenings where the wallpaper
Was hardly a bother,
Just white noise blurring the rest of the world so I could focus
Focus on nothing but you