I've broken into a new cycle. I am reborn with a chip on my shoulder.
This whole time I've run in circles searching for what is in my hands.

Territorial-I scream lung pinched showing off my k-9's chipped+sharp
It ain't my first night, but I've been blinded by hope. So blind.
Let us feast wine until your head is nodding
Warm until you're found wanting
Close enough to touch but not
I feel her breath burning hot
Hands dancing in the darkness
Eyes eluding contact
Fingertip contract
Lips

A quiet kid,
lonely in the rain,
fingers the nickels and pennies
in his pockets, waiting for the bus
to splash around the corner,
so he can get to work.

He lives with a demon of a roommate,
and shares snores with the roaches,
Bathing in the shower of their incontinence.

After college, he lost it and wrecked his mind
in a haze of liquor so foggy it
swallowed the moon for awhile.

He stumbles through pitch black nights
with an ugly soul and redemption on his mind;
The worst kind of late night wanderer.

Coffee and sugar keep him alive--
just like war and famine are the black angel's wives--
bringing him back into this liquid reality.

In the mornings he breathes in this world,
totally sober.

It tastes like sourness
and the milk of ***** entrapped in blue jeans
in 100 degree weather
all day.

It was the worst kind of sobriety.
All the horrors of birth.

He lives many lives:

One for his mother,
where he plants fruitless kisses
on her cheeks.
Little wreaths of future disappointment.

She hugs him so warmly.
It makes him want to suckle his .45.

One for work,
all smiles
and plumb submission.
9-5.
5-2.
12-9.
6-3.
4-12.
And if he's lucky
12-4 on saturdays.

All this in 5 dollar clothes
and a rumplestiltskin attitude;
trying to weave his own ugliness
into truth.

One for his girl,
the one who'd hurl her tongue at Appollo,
puke up her month's sugar intake,
and curl her fingers so tight that she cut the cappillaries,
making a red and white fist like a christmas cinnabon:

If he ever told her who he really was.

His love for her is secret.

One life for himself,
to keep the mirror happy.

This kid.
He's all or nothing.

yeah, read an old poem again and remember sitting across a dark sticky table, pitcher of beer to wash down the fear of losing control. the guys told jokes - called them "brain droppings", like intellectual pigeon **** puked on the window -  but i was fighting not to get lost in the patterns of condensed water pooling from sides of the pitcher, laughing on cue because it seemed the right thing to do. i counted bright flashes, blue, a neon sign - froggy's bar open - for clarity, my fingers still melting into pencils at fine edges of the discussion. i carried a notebook to write in but nobody noticed. i thought i was a poet.

green sat there, slack jaw acid jockey, dead eyed silent fish out of water. educated somewhere. not here. it was hot. i think he'd had too much magic mushroom or that black sticky stuff we smoked in the bathroom that made me choke like a dying newborn, or maybe the pale colored microdot collage on paper rolls we all shared at a concert hall earlier. the humidity.

cool, man - i quietly pined for some brown-skinned chick away at college, home again but still not calling, so i wanted to forget my own name and split in some dime bag fog when the sugar slipped out over my lips; i spit, he didn't, i drank. green was hungry, brain-******, out of time, dreaming about some key lime trees in florida, ogres in fairmount's forests, the dealers from new york who wanted to **** us, then gut  laughed at something funny he saw in his sneakers. we hefted him by armpits to the stairs and left him there; it was too hot to walk all the way up to the flat's front door. green **** himself;  we left. green, by any other name, got lost like smooth longhairs on motorbikes, that girl, the pretend hit men from uptown, none of whom ever cared who i was, because i wasn't  really anywhere.  but i didn't realize green could fly. it was a secret he'd left on the pavement outside. i'd wished i could fly like green. but he died. i'm still here, bluffing i'm living.

the girl took a long shower

she scrubbed until her skin turned red under the too-hot water
she scrubbed so she could feel clean again
she scrubbed away his fingerprints and his warm breath on her neck
but when she had scrubbed away her outermost layer
and stepped into the cold air
waiting to be the old her again
she still felt wrong
instead of clean she was raw
every inch of her skin fire, every nerve ending feeling too much
she climbed back into the water
she started again
she scrubbed so she could feel the same as before

the time never came

When we met inside a Dunkin Donuts on the corner of two busy streets, I ordered a small coffee. I said I had a lot to get done tonight, so I can't be out too long. If you knew how well I can lie, you wouldn't recognize me on a crowded street. I always ordered a medium before, because it took longer to cool, so we spent more time taking cautious sips through the small opening of a plastic lid protecting a styrofoam cup. But I dreaded seeing you again, because it'd be so long since I remembered the angles of your face, and the deep darkness of your swirling brown eyes, and the straight sharpness of your thick locks of black hair. Because when I'm not lying, I can say I don't miss you anymore. A busy street full of strangers is plenty company for me, and I don't mind my right hand catching a cold November breeze, instead of warming up inside your left. You said you're doing better, that the emptiness of your studio apartment isn't as lonely as it used to be. You said sleeping on your full-sized bed was okay now, that only one side warmed by a breathing body wasn't sad anymore. But you still missed me, my scruffy, uneven beard, the boots I look my best in and your head on my chest. We walked outside so you could smoke a cigarette, and I left quickly. I lied and said we should see each other again. But I hoped you'd lose sight of me on that busy street, becoming ambiguously shaped inside a scrambling river of cold winter bodies, all with cold hands clenched or covered in gloves, not holding any others.

I don't know when I lost myself. I don't know how, or when, or where. Was it eighth-grade science class, where I sat alone and prayed for opposites? Half of the time I would pray to be noticed, the other half I'd pray to remain ignored. Or was it the lonely nights I spent tangled in sheets, reminiscing about every insignificant little mistake I'd ever made? Maybe it was the books, or maybe the music that made me disappear. Maybe I got too caught up in the beauty of others' words that I lost any beauty in my own. Maybe it was the nights I snuck out or the days spent in the ocean that did me in.  
I don't know who I was before. She's gone, lost forever, and she's not coming back. The only thing I know for sure anymore is that when I lost the girl I used to be, I found myself.