Paralysis
Always
Invites
Necrosis

In
Solitude

Needy
Emotions
Venture
Endlessly
Regretting

Going
Over
Numerous
Encumbrances

And
Wishing
Again for
Yesterday

Sometimes on the hardest of days,
I bear nothing but the softest thoughts of you.
Thoughts so rousing, they send adrenaline speeding down my highways,
stopping for nothing until every inch of me melts.
This isn’t your average fight or flight;
it's a fight that's for you, and a flight that's with you
to a place where the birds and the bees can't even reach.
For most, my heart can be a stone wall surrounded by a backbiting moat,
but somehow when you bring yourself to it,
the draw bridge gives way to you every time.
It’s frustrating; I have no control over what my heart desires,
but for some reason, it chose you the moment yours played hopscotch with mine.
Skipping beats is only the tip of the iceberg:
I could bleed out my entire fountain of youth if that’s what it takes.
And yeah, if you scale it up to the waters of the world,
my fountain will make only a single drop,
but I’ll be ****** if that drop doesn’t pass through
all the flaming hoops it takes to land on your lips.  
I will make sure that you never forget the taste,
and the ripples it forms shall never lie still in you.
Ripples that in time will manifest into incredible waves
that will alter the very ones your mind creates.
It’s said that the brain waves of love and insanity are identical to one another,
and it just so happens I have a longboard that can fit the both of us.
I’ve never been that great at love, but I’ve always been the best at insanity,
and if you ever lose your balance,
my hands will always catch you before you’re ever out of reach.
So what are you waiting for? The water’s fine.
So paddle on over to a place I like to call "existence",
and let’s ride the swell of this swollen heart.

I wish I had the courage to talk to pretty girls.
It’s not them; it’s their cold beauty that makes
my fingers shiver, and rejection that makes me
feel like I’m a white lighter that strikes out
nothing more than sparks.

I wish I had the courage to not take **** from
my superiors and remind them that when you
beat the life out of a man, you had better cut a deal
with Death if you plan to let him stand back up.

I wish I had the courage to rise above peer
pressure and see that a bulletproof vest isn’t so
dumb when you realize that the person you take
a bullet, for was actually the one who loaded the gun.  

I wish I had the courage to tell you that your ****
looked HUGE in those jeans,
and I wanted to burn every other pair you owned.

I wish I had the courage to get out of bed every
morning, because sometimes I forget that I’m
actually still alive, and my blinds keep hiding the
fact that this world is made of sugar.

I wish I had the courage to be vulnerable again
but trust is a treasure someone stole from my heart,
left a bag of sand in its place, and took off running.

I wish I had the courage to ask for help because I’m
not the sharpest cheddar in the fridge and I was born
with a head that could break down brick walls.

I wish I had the courage to own a snake but I was
brought up Catholic so I am conditioned to fearing
both the Devil and God.

I wish I had the courage to keep my commitments
so when the people I love open my promise box,
they actually find something inside.

I wish I had the courage to let go of the past
and get past the point of letting go.

I wish I had to courage to speak at your funeral . . .
but I’ve never been the fastest to pick up the pieces, and even when I do I always put them in the wrong place, so **** it. I filed down the jigsaw edges so now all I have to do is connect the dots, but every time I do, all I get are silhouettes of you; us. I see your face in a day more than I see faces in a week. It’s the reason I stand at the edge of rooftops, the reason all my mirrors are broken, the reason I wake up with my face floating in a pool. I wrote a paper this morning titled, “To Do Today:” It's crumpled somewhere on the floor because the only thing I’m really going

To Do Today:

-is miss you.

I lost myself once upon a time
in a place that was only whispered to me in dreams.
Where the fog is thick and threads through the seams
of street lights and street cars with *** fights and brillo bars.  
I tell you I lost myself on the tongue of insanity
who swallowed my soul to feed its humanity.
I lost myself
in a city that found me;

San Francisco, 2013

Let me extend two points like two bridges
that begin in separate places but lead to the same thing.
I’m talking the people in both hands with countless art in between.

The people, the people, the people.
What can’t be said about the near million faces
sleeping on warm pillows or cold stones,
wearing top hats or traffic cones
because not every night are people thriving.
But they’re still surviving, getting busy living or getting busy dying.
In their eyes are stories being told
once you wipe those windows into their souls, deep.
You see it all,
Just like every star in the fall when the sun goes to sleep.
I gave a homeless man a dollar who gave it to another homeless man who then gave it back to me
Like we were passing a love note that said, “You need this more than me.”
So which of us was the one without the home?

Home I soon found in the art of every step taken,
one foot in front of the next.
I can’t walk through that city discounting the side effects.
I was drunk,
but not from bottles or cans
I was drunk from the hands
that told tales with graffiti art to camera pans.
and countless other melodies
massaging bricks into the landmarks that spanned.
Culture sprinkling up and down the hills and between the cracks
Painting colors in the sky as the rainbows stacked,
Finding pots of gold by merely lifting my eye lids back.

There is so much to say about this city in the bay,
that is held in place by the people of race
and the vessels of art that encompass in its space
like stories and attitude,
survival and gratitude,
muse and expression
in delight or depression.

I tell you I lost myself in that city.
But I know now that being lost is sometimes the only way to be truly found.

I’m spending too much time on the phone
Thinking about what not to say
Rather than just saying that
I think there’s not enough time in the day
To tell you what you mean to me
So my plan is to turn this day into a life
Worth living a thousand times over
And under, in front, and behind,
360 degrees of you on my mind
I mean 160 characters is hardly enough
To describe your character and
The only emoji worth sending you
Cannot be found on a backlit screen
Or on an x-ray for that matter
It’s found in the palm of my hand
When it’s wrapped in yours
Or on the tip of my tongue
Dancing on your shore
And sure I don’t mind texting you constantly
But I’m more of a primal lover
I need to give you my entire soul
Not just a piece
While returning the peace you leave in me
So don’t worry about reception because
If you think hard enough about me
That just means I’m thinking just as hard about you
And you feel it too
So if this call ever drops
And you haven't had enough
You’ll always know how to find me

Honestly I’m too caught up in you to even function sometimes.
People ask me if I’m okay because I have tunnel vision confined
To a place where I never look back and never resign.
But I can barely make out their words
When your song keeps singing in my head,
And stringing the thread of your heart to mine.
As it pulls without tearing enough to flatline,
While taking you in
To a “Once upon a time” world beneath my skin.
Where the sun kisses you every chance you look away,
And the moon cradles you as if someday you’ll never get older.
Because with you, time never wants to move but carry
Your everlasting stokes of color made from sweet berries.
On a canvas that’s trying really hard to sit still when you’re fatal lips ****
Whatever seems to be holding me down.
A piece that compounds beauty on top of brilliance.
Discovering yourself and the meaning of existence.
Like two flames holding hands, never to strand
From the light, they expand to burn down the doors
That others have shut with all their might.
Chasing the tails of fairies to horizonless twilight.
Searching for no end but the means of foresight undressed
When looking ahead I see wings spread from behind your chest
And pull me pressed to the taste of heaven
When I'm close enough touch your breath.
So don’t stop breathing and never stop believing in our laughter
Because every breath we ever share becomes happily ever after.

you know how the song goes:
a stitch away from making it
and a scar away from falling apart.
holding on gets hard when
the light at the end of the tunnel
goes dark.

my friend told me he doesn’t purposely
befriend actively suicidal people anymore.
so when a 14-year old friend
was hospitalized for an attempt,
he was shocked.
I’m not fourteen
and i don’t go to the hospital for anything,
but when i was fifteen i
asked my mom to start taking me to therapy.
she told me,
sweetie,
you can just talk to me about anything.
so i started writing poetry instead.
but poems can’t diagnose me,
poems can’t prescribe me meds to
fix the chemical catastrophe in my head
poems can’t cure me.
but neither can people.

there was a boy that i used to call sunshine,
but he told me that he would
rather be the moon.

i deleted your number from my contacts
once you stopped using mine.
you don’t keep me up at night.
i’ve stopped losing sleep over you.

i haven’t broken the habit of checking
people’s wrists when they move
because of all the girls i knew in grade school.
i have a friend with the first letter of help
permanently scarred on his stomach.
we’ve never talked about it.
i don’t know if either of us know how to,
or if either of us really want to,
or if either of us really need to.

when my brother was 18, he was convinced
that he wanted to go into psychiatry.
i think the closest we’ve ever been
was when i had a mental break over
orange juice at one thirty in the morning,
watching him play GTA on his Xbox 360.
when my brother was 17, he was convinced
that his future was in professional photography.
i’m 17 and i don’t have a ******* clue.
I’m 17 and i don’t think I’ve ever felt so much
like I’m just constantly drowning.

they say a captain goes down with his ship
and I’ve set myself up for losing all my friends.

she’s got year-round summer skin
and winter has never been my friend.

i sleep seven hours a night
and i wake up exhausted.

my cat has all his claws
and when he crashes through my bedroom
when i’m on the brink of extinction
it leaves me haunted, hearing
breathing and footsteps that aren’t really there.
so i’ll put studs in all my jackets
and wrap myself in blankets.

i wish you were here,
i wish i was there.

the first rated R movie
that i saw when i turned 17
was that one that brought back ryan reynolds,
starring a moody teen with
the best superhero name ever,
a CGI man who acted as her mentor,
a pretty girl like a damsel in distress,
and the bad guy called himself ajax
but his real name was francis.
i cried
a lot.
i’m not sure why, really, but when the credits
started rolling and it was everything that i’d
been waiting for in a movie for the anti-hero
that I’ve been in love with since i was 13,
i sat in those velvet seats and started sobbing.

when i was six, my dad took my
9 year old brother and i
to see ‘revenge of the sith’ when it came out
in 2005.
the scene on mustafar, the volcanic planet,
the downfall of anakin skywalker
stuck with me until i was 12 and rewatched
all six of those old movies,
stuck with me until i was 16 and rewatched
all six of those old movies.
when i was a kid those scenes were scary,
now i see a mimic of Shakespearean tragedy.

i pick things apart until i know that they’ll scar,
but scars have always faded for me.
the first mark that ever lasted for
more than a month was when i
burned myself getting a cake out of the oven.
i remember my brother telling me
that he wouldn’t care about the burn
if i ******* up the cake.
we laughed about it because it was a joke.
i still think about it.

i still check to see if you
watch my Snapchat story.

i rip the hems out of all of my clothing
compulsively. I’m sorry.
i’ll pick up all the balled-up threads from
the carpet eventually.

i keep ticket stubs and scraps of notes
hazardously strewn across my bedroom,
because i’m too sentimental for my own good
but organization has never come naturally.

solar systems are borne from my fingertips.
supernovas power my lungs.
stardust glitters in my veins
(i tell myself these things in order to
keep thinking straight)

hey, look at the moon.
see how she reflects the sun for you?
it’s because she’s got nothing
of her own to give away willingly.
i gave you everything willingly
i spent too many nights
shredding notebook paper into pieces
of white birthday party confetti.

i swallowed six painkillers today.
I’m passive like aggressive,
letting my liver slip into uselessness.

it’s really hard to write poetry about bruises.

﷼

Tremendous ardour
          Ω
       Affection.     That.

         Leaves me in blooming s..day
      Startled. Drifting. ~~~~~~<>~~~~~
                 Those **** fallacious
                           g r.  a f f i. TNT NIl y

           - Don't mess with me boy! -

2:03 am 1/07/16*
Stream of consciousness
My head is exploding and voices are screaming in my head
I lay here in a frozen bed amongst frozen sheets and icy skin and my frozen mind begins to gnaw at my insides and claw and claw and claw*


My nose is cold and hands are shaking... Breathe in breath out
Moments of clarity and disparity
You took my hand when you should have let me drown
My room is the same temperature as the stars outside and I'm here staring out my window watching my hot breath fog the cars and I'm screaming at the hidden sun asking why
it always sets behind the tall trees and I wonder
Because if I was a sunset id cast along the sea... I cast my rays until I made sure everyone could see but then I realized.... And I made myself sick
A humble sun never
wanted to lure
A humble sun was there when you needed something to hope for
But is dark
The sky is cold
My skin burns
The pain has once awakened me
but the wind has seeped
into my veins
numb
Lifeless
To hell they said
But what for....
Darling,
it seems I'm already dead

I'm looking outside of my cardoor's window to see the lights of a city and I can't stop myself from wondering where exactly you are inside of yours, what you're doing and whether or not you're wondering the same things as me, and I think tonight it might rain, everything I see is gloomy like the inside of my brain, I just want you to hold me and hear you say you forgive me but you're so far away. I guess I'll just have to wait, it's too bad that March comes before June because that's when the rain will truly start.