I'm trying to see the world
Through these glasses
But I just see
My own reflection

All these glasses
Empty around me

A wisp of floating smoke
Is carried blindly into my lungs
And embraced warmly
By the clammy bruised hands
Of a girl I no longer really know;
A girl whose chapped lips reek
Of two-year-old chap stick
And the ephemerally tattooed
Moments of mine

But then I exhale
And the smoke dances up to light
From the almost new moon

I was written over
Again and again until
When the pen
Ran out of ink
I was simply stabbed instead
With the dull ball-point
Forming a scar;
A sideways eight
Like my sideways heart
Scratched across the skin
Of every moment
I can never un-wear

A tattoo is just a scar;
A person is just a human being-
Not much more than a Wendy’s bag
That looks like road-****;
Not much more
Than a series of frames in a film
With a blackness in between
That our minds remove,
Creating an illusion of motion
Similar to the illusion of effortlessness
Created as we drive up a hill,
Pumping fossil fuels into the air
As everyone breathing outside the car
Rings like the aftermath of a gunshot
Or a screaming plea in an unfamiliar ear
“Stab me some more, dear,
Let the ink flow,
The film is running out
And I can see the blackness finally
Of the space that’s in between”

Though I’ve been ready for bed
Since the moment I woke up
I take one more sip
Of ****** sangria

One more “drag”-
As I’ve been taught to call it
By the older, cooler, kids
Who take a lot more drags
Than myself-
On a cheap cigarette

One more kiss
On one more set of lips

And one more fleeting thought
That maybe it’s all just part of
A single careless search
For the set of lips that kisses back;
A search with no regard for
Whatever face to which those lips
Could be mounted...

Though I know that’s not true-
As I finally
Close my eyes,
I know (I think)
That’s simply
Just not true

I wrote you love poems
In a pink sharpie because
I was falling in love with you,
And the more I listen to this song
(Sixty four times tonight),
I think that it isn’t fading
Like the chords she played
As I held you
And as we swayed

I wrote you love poems
In pink sharpie
Not thinking of you
But thinking instead
That the four shots of *****
Maybe made it okay
For me to kiss you

I wrote you love poems
In a pink sharpie
And then I threw the love poems
In the trash,
Not drunk enough to forget
That showing you
Might make you cry

Those love poems
That I wrote in pink sharpie
Came out of the trash this morning though
Because somehow
I thought a few tears
Might make everything better

We sat at the melted granite counter
And your hair glowed a reddish-orange
In the light outside of the darkness.

You held my hand and you blew bubbles
As I laughed, as I cried
As you laughed, as you laughed.

I told you I'd misunderstood you,
The playful little spirit hiding
Under the layers that popped that night.

Your eyes, all to meet mine,
Looked up in an inimitable way
From your bubbles, now overflowing
Onto old drawings made by strangers.

You gave me the kind of moment
I can write books about
And poems too.

Thank you so much for holding my hands
That night and every night;
You kept those hands from popping
Like the bubbles did.