You can't conceal,
Those darkening blemishes,
Laced upon your skin.

Where's the fabricated necklace?

Was the knot too weak, too thin?

As we wage war with our loneliness, We must be forced to face our deepest desires.
Our deepest needs.
Out deepest unknowns.
Our deepest fears...

As we wage war with our loneliness, we must be forced to face our greatest enemy. And often times, it proves to be ourselves.

As we wage war with our loneliness, we must force ourselves to love the parts of us that we hate. When 5 am consumes you, there is no choice but to crumble under it's pressure. But we shall make like the April Lilac and bloom in beautiful praise of our constant struggle.

I write this poem in the presence of others, and I can't help but long for my own solitude.

i found salvation in the
molten crown
at the end of a cigarette.

salvation walked barefoot
on its pilgrimage to me
through twenty-one years
of scars—
it walked through my grandmother’s
lungs,
scorching them black,
and through my mother’s
cancerous and toxic
trachea.

it walked through
a thousand anti-tobacco ads,
nondisclosure agreements,
hospital wards,
my father’s own clenched fists,
and soft yellow stains on discarded
funereal vestments.

it found me after all that,
waiting patiently
for a way to **** myself
slowly,
something that mixed well with alcohol,
and would leave me
bitterly satisfied with the semblance
of poetic justice.

She has a smile like broken glass,
sharp, glinting in the sun,
and her feet sway with the secret rhythms
of a bonfire in the wind;
maybe one burning books, cassettes, and *****.



Her hair is the black of nights that inspired poets
to write odes to broken gods.


And her eyes—those swampy, willow-the-wisp lures
that guided a hundred men
to ecstatic and drowning graves under the murk,
they call to you like misplaced lighthouse beacons
yearning for a shore and harbor.

So when you see her vampiric skin,
white as cobwebbed moonlight,
of course you are drawn to it:
drawn to the bleeding gashes she makes when she cuts you
with her tongue,
the furrows she sows with her fingernails in your back
to plant the seed of unrequited want,
drawn to the burdened lockboxes she buries so tantalizingly deep
in her soul.

Go, excavate them in the drunken sharing of mysteries,
and then tomorrow morning,
when you know better,
leave her curled in hangover,
awaiting the next in line to pretend that they only want to heal her
of the infinite, parasitic sadness
that people like you
have built up in her like a lonely castle
slowly and endlessly
over the years.