DEPRESSION IS REAL.
depression is not being sad. depression is gray-tinted glasses that affect how you see the world, depression turns your emotions from stone to glass, you never knew the meaning of "emotionally unstable" until someone drops you half of a foot and you shatter. until someone cancels on you and somehow you find yourself sobbing in your room because the demons in your head tell you that nobody ******* cares about you, nobody ******* cares about you, nobody ******* cares about you.
depression is real. i can feel it in my chest and on my eyelids and in my head and i can even feel it's iron death grip on my throat.
some days i swore to God there was a four-ton elephant sitting pretty on my chest, but i was the only one who could see it. some days there were five-pound weights hanging from my eyelids and the only way to keep myself awake was to pump myself so full of caffeine that my hands shook while my eyes were still tired, making me exhausted and anxious and hyperactive all at once. some days it took hold of my head, squeezing my eyes so that my reflection was warped and twisted and grotesque, whispering into my ears that i needed to eat less. you need to eat less. some days it attacked my heart. i can not describe the sensation better than to say that some days it felt like my aortas were being beaten by dull wooden stakes or like my blood had been replaced with icewater.
you're sitting in class enjoying a captivating psychology lecture when that thought pops in your head: "why are you even alive?" and your blood freezes, your ribs tighten, and something grabs hold of your windpipe so that all you can do to not say "i want to die" when the teacher calls on you is shake your head and say "i don't know."
you're sitting in math class and you're supposed to be learning about integrals but all you can think about is everyone's reactions if you didn't wake up the next day; you're sick but all you notice is that no one noticed you were gone. maybe no one would notice if you were gone.

one year, food was all that could make me feel happy; i found hope in the dopamine rush from the sugary calories; i rejoiced at the satisfactory feeling i got from devouring half of a pan of brownies.
the next year, yes, i know i have always loved dark chocolate but today i just can't seem to taste it. or anything for that matter.
the only thing i could get myself to ingest were liquids that would take my memories away for a while. i had no problem pouring cheap caramel apple ***** down my throat but could not get myself to pick up a golden delicious and bite into it because i knew i wouldn't have be able to finish it anyway.

depression is real. depression is a ****** up monster that leaves no part of you untouched and can steal the very essence of who you are if you let it. depression can ******* rip you apart. someone will tell you that they love you and all you will be able to say in return is "no you don't."
depression takes away who you are. because you haven't always cried every day, you haven't always been unable to eat, you used to be able to stomach an "i love you" and you used to smile when you saw your little sister.
this is not you, this is depression, depression is real. you are not pretending, you are not 'not trying', you are not 'broken'; honey all you have are some unbalanced chemicals in your brain. but we're going to try as hard as we can to make them go back to normal. i know you're in there.

depression is real. but so are you.

We lay down together.  

Unable to move.  

Our smell the same.  

Skin stretched out.  

Holding each other’s hand.

The days and weeks we hadn’t been eating properly didn’t show on her figure as it did mine.  She still looked full.  

Muscles and waist growing tighter, thinner.  But hers,
Hers

Her face, *******, lips, hadn’t changed.

An animal in love with beauty.  Old beauty, future beauty.

Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia.  We had been travelling Europe for some time.  That’s where we were.  One of those places.  All of them.

And the heat kept beating, making me sweat.  
It made her sweat too.  
But we always had enough energy to be together.  

                  As our bodies become hungrier, our need for each others skin increased.  
                  Her sighs and moans and thighs becoming louder.  Penetrating darkness.  
                  The cicadas.  Black trees.  Collapsing.  Grinding.  Feeding.

Our love, returning to dusk my dear...  

Giving life back to the morning.  Killing each other.
Controlling hell.

A stretch of green.  Hard hills.  
Sand inside our **** and hair;
The ground, and her perfect smell.

We stand-up, and continue to walk through the breeze towards the train station.
I pray the monies been wired.  We stop.  I pull her into myself.  
Tell her all these things.  

She smiles  
our bodies join  
and hills the size of Gods

                                                           ­      Became nothing again.

                                                         ­                          :::
            

‘We will be fine.’

She said gracefully.

                                                    ­                               :::

            

There was nothing at the station hardly  
but a shop was open in the blazing afternoon
the unknown shop-keeper didn’t smile
but sold us enough with what we had to get us drunk;

There were no people or trains/we had five hours to burn until the next one came
the day stretched out and up into the evening as we laughed and screamed like two boiling oysters drunk in a kitchen time passed into and through the hours we wound around each other like two fighting seas her thighs tensing with absolute strength on my lap moaning from her stomach and into the sky

as I did
we kissed again, slowly and absolute - celebrating release
making the day travel into night

my back lay against the cold wood of the station seat
we began to wind down.
and the need for hope faded as we both began to sleep

I said one last thing to her to make her laugh a little, before we rested in wait for the last train.

She began to curl into rest, her hair across my lap, but I notice that she sees one more thing before her eyes shut.  She was looking down to the end of the station where the entrance was.  Her eyes burst.  Her laughter stopped like a match being put out.  
Her nails dig into my leg.

I smile down telling her she can’t fool me with the same old tricks; then I look too.

He was coming.

He moved like slow clay.

‘No.’

‘There’s just one of him... I can take him.'

We have to get this train...’  I think.

His lips lay still like two grey worms on top of each other.  Emotion.
Less.  Moving towards us.

And there was no-where else for us to go.  No more running.  
And I wouldn’t have run even if I could.

And this is what I thought seconds before he was near us.





11.46 pm.
the train nears
the night mixing with the hopeless age of the station
gently moving her body to one side I began to run at the man walking towards us
i call every mutilated thought I can from my mind and air
silence them
and pour them only into my movemnet

He was Russian like her.  Old school Russian.  No sympathy for an English ******* wanna be saviour like me.

No sympathy.
I jumped into the air - I could see he hadn’t expected that  
the time I hung there expanded for miles dying slower than normal
i have time to see his cold receding head,
the lines across his wide brow/the shoulders of a man half-bull
eyes etched into wood
he looks up as I connect

I land an elbow directly to his face before I land fully catching him with my momentum
all of my weight landing on his nose and mouth
‘let this slow him down’  I ask fate
the adrenalin jack-knifing through my body like a restless rush of pure red almost bringing it to a halt
tt rocks him, a little...
next: left
left
straight right
the biggest one i've  
Blood.

His head hung slightly low in sudden contemplation and pain
he still has a lot left.  I think

A gorilla dancing with a fly.

i follow up with more punches
his hand shoots for my throat faster than I can react

I can punch.  But he’s taken many a man like me.  
I think




No air.




I hear Russian
And parts of the station again.
I hear her voice
Straight in its pitch and unchanging melody
But-without-the-laughter.  
I can tell she’s scared from the way she puts too many words in her sentences, too fast.  
I see his grey outline pushing a much smaller one against the wall.
I think about Natashka back inside one of those rooms.

I think about her sorrow and strong will.  
Defiant, but captive.  

I was certain at every turn that she was misleading me.  
(She was)
She had bent my logic so far back it stayed there and made sense again
like a wild contortionist miming a perfect song

I had travelled miles to find her
after three months of dream I finally did.

“ah Jerome”.  
She Said.

We drank and made love for hours.  
reality adjusted to us
not the other way around

dark forms behind the curtains of an apartment
a bed of velvet sweat
wrapped around you, inside you.  

*****.  No air.  New life.
  
“Jerome”  She said after three days.
“You-must-go.  I have lied.  They come here when I call them.  They make you give money...”
“I know hon.”  I said.

“Lets go.”

We made final, violent, love.  
And then left.
I will now owe ‘at least 25,000 Euro’s’ she tells me

I figure it’s all worth-it
“That’s alright”  I reply
and light up as we leave the building





My rib-cage roars into the ground with disgust and rage.  
My remaining spirit pours into my hands and knees as I rise.
A dead sprinter.
A dead man
still rising;
A spitting snarl.  A scream.
The rats are woken.  
Old angels are woken.  
And I ask all the beer drunk spirits that are close to help me.

I tackle him hard into the wall, we crash into Natashka
but she moves just in time, even his legs are heavy, they slow my rage,
i only manage to get one, its under my right arm, held with both hands, my left leg steps inside his remaining right, behind it, I pull, the trip works,
he falls.  

I hear the train.  I follow me in
again
all I have in the world is surprise
and his squat body is the strength of three of mine
emptied into one.

And at the maddest of times it’s the strangest of things you remember:  
i see the lights of the train flashing across her whole body
and for a moment she transforms
and is complete light...

I’ve climbing on top of him
i strike down with the madness of ten days drunk on whiskey.  
aortas ventricle pulse

His powerful fingers grasping at my limbs trying to stop me, but it’s no use.
spears made of bone ****** down into his face
and the old angels watch, as I connect, drooling and enjoying the show, happy to throw me a few chips

His arms begin to flop down like tired wild animals returning to sleep
and perhaps my fury and revulsion can break even him
my hands on her body;
i force her on the train with the last of our money
the conductors can only see two drunks fighting beside a beautiful bystander.
I force her on.

“Jerome.”  She says screaming.

A clay hand takes my breath again as it locks around my mouth from behind me.  
I manage to hold the door shut long enough while being suffocated so that the train is moving with her inside
and when the train is leaving, I finally feel joy.

“Jerome.”  She says still.

And  finally I hear not.  

Not the man choking me or the time of day.  
In the seconds that my lungs drown, I feel only the bliss of having known you, a last toast before I rest within the driving sea, salt-water changing my lungs
but I know my last action was with all my soul, my mind, my body.

Natashka, I drink to you, fully.  Finally.
This thought fills my gut.
His hands across my mouth, my eyes begin to shut.
Her smell.  

That was the last thing I thought about.



                                                       ­                                ...




I’m looking down at my body, the Russian’s beside me breathing hard.
Tired.  Big.

And then to my shock I see Natashka again.  
Walking from the far end of the station back to the area where all the scrapping happened;
one of her knees bleeding and ripped, she limps, as if something is completely broken, her foot perhaps, out of time with the rest of her body.  

She drags her handicapped body all the way towards me and clay man standing beside me.
I can only watch.
When her tattered body gets close, I get to see all the cuts, one side of herself is badly damaged where she jumped from the train
and dislocated half the joints in her body

And when she is only a reach away from him.  She touches his chest.
Hands that can change anything.

And I look at them both.  
And death saves you from nothing at all.  
You just observe the same things, at a slower pace, from a different position;

you try to tell the suicides this, but; few want to listen...
there’s nothing wrong with oblivion, just remember that once you’re there, you still need something to do...

I break down.  Knees hitting the ground.
I see her body slide into him, closer, her hand disappears behind his back
like thin snake wondering around a rock
searching

Now

she stands pointing his own gun at him.  A shot goes into his head.  No hesitation.  Now she looks down at me, beside my choked corpse, a gun still in her hand. Weeping.

My hand wants to reach up to her.  
I can't.  

Another bullet fired
it discharges through her mouth, destroying her head.

Now she lays down beside me too
between me and russian hit man

The station endures our blood as we bleed out
forming one river that trickles down onto the tracks and gutter
you can’t tell whose blood is whose
or who is bleeding out the most

I look up at a light-bulb in the roof;
it tenses one more time, making the mosquitoes dance in quiet frenzy, before it lets out a final scream, cracking out of life.  Going-out-softly.

My head comes back down and I see another person standing only a few steps away from me.

With a turn of her head she suddenly flicks me a half-smile
the kind she knows I like
the kind that rips the spirit right out from your chest and makes it feel good.

Before we begin to walk away together something makes me turn
and we both look behind ourselves. The Russian looks down at his body too, the lines in his face are still, and yet we know how he feels.

He looks across at us as we walk away down the tracks
we can see only the deep set hoods of his brow, shadows for eyes;
he moves his feet slightly so he now faces us flat

he raises one of his palms
as the other searches for his cigarettes
in the first movement I have seen him make casually all-day

I hear him say the words:

“Do svidaniya. Moi druz'ya. Byt' khorosho"

And although his language isn’t mine, I know this means:

"Goodbye."

"My Friends."

"Be well."

                                                         ­                             ...

she sat next to me near the window
at starbucks on
41st and madison with a journal
covered in pastel lines and a black backdrop.
on the top center read “2011 was the year i screamed
**** life’ and ‘**** me”
as a running header. she ran
through my head, tilting this little snippet
of her brain
towards me and i swear that she looked at me
but all i could do was make the sign of the cross
hoping god heard my muffled voice, drowned out by
the sounds of yellow taxis on the crosswalk and
whispers of angels on the corners asking for my pockets.
i’ve never tasted sixty miles
per hour but i can imagine it’s the same
as when she writes “your shirt looks like my thoughts”;
i’m falling in love too easily.
i want to read every inch of your body; your arms
have the bible etched in your veins and a fifth of my poems
are scribbled on your aortas; my mother’s wedding vows
are in my right eye and my father,
my father just takes care of himself. i don’t think my eyesight is
getting any better, you slid the note two spaces down
and i think i shed a tear but i can’t remember whether
you were smiling for joy or the fact you missed my hand.

and there's the etch a sketch again,
dragging the metal 'round her wrists,
just to feel,
and heroically I fight to be her champion,
waging wars against the depression of her breaths,
and I remember her pain,
it hurt more then mine,
and I stood beside her
and we paired mutilated aortas,
with decaying hearts,
and I thought this would be different,
that some how the story would change,
because it was us,
us against them,
us against the lust,
and all we wanted was time to be together,
time bleeds love into,
us against crumbling trust,
us against us.

I thought this story was different but in the end,
we speak not,
we trust not,
and we forget and forgive not,
and all we bring to the table of life is left rotten,
desires and dreams untended,
all we are and all we are not is shadows now,
and we are stuck waiting for a train that may never come.

Stars pulled from their suspends,
I watched the night bleed onto me.

The moon is just as dangerous to your
naked body,
as it still is to my naked heart;
a misfit artist perched softly in starlight,
reeling in hearts with faulty chambers.

Two aortas and the taste of your neck.

Two empty bottles of red wine
and the dark smothering something
I was never taught could shine.

Intertwine our pulmonaries
Pull tight, tie together our coronaries

My superior vena cava resting near yours
Hear that, the sound of opening ventricle doors

Beautiful looking aortas fixed
Winding together as a double helix

This heart of mine will skip a beat
Just so my arrhythmia and yours might meet

This ticker will only continue to tick
If next to yours it may stick

Not a murmur because of bad health
A murmuring of loves bountiful wealth

Atrium to atrium, heart to heart:
Blood's continual pumping, so long as our valves never part.

I will make a fangle of mechanisms,
a creature with iron snouts
and concrete aortas.

Its fevered howl will wake the duplexes
perched on sloped land,
built from collected tins and bottle caps.

Boys sooted in grief will balk like ravens,
chew sweet dip, and spit,
but never reach the foreman’s gate.

They’ll crave a tavern with antlers as chandeliers
where a black flame burns
on the brim of a zinfandel.

But tonight they’ll gristle through streets
to a stale room
where fluorescent lights blanch a young widow’s skin.

Basic cable ministries will flick and dim
in the homes of the wigged ladies who wait for them—
the howl keeps them

breathless, each of them fearing
the slow swallow from a snake’s mouth
to its furnace.

Some blades sting
as they slice through skin;
laced with backhanded
compliments, a withering glance,
and the steady hand of
an executioner, they aim
to demolish, stick by stick
of explosive hatred.

Some blades have poisoned tips,
dipped in a brew so wicked
that it lurks from vein to vein
and blacks you out, strikes you
from existence by hijacking your senses
and drowning them with intense,
heady emotions like loneliness, and fear,
and fiery anger.

Some blades are disguised as a handshake,
one that grips and cracks your bones into splinters,
shards of what once was dignity
and pride. A grip that convinces you
to admit that you are nothing, that you are
less than, that you are inferior.

And then there is the blade,
tipped like a pen,
upon which I ****** myself. This
blade, unlike the others,
is choice and stupidity and release.
It is a forfeit, a crushing defeat
that the writers succumb to. It is this
blade, ink pouring from our pumping aortas
to our gnarled, stained fingertips
that dance across a page, that charm
our own minds with the drowsy lullabies
and delusions of omnipotence so that
we can spill the deepest, blackest pits
of our shriveled peach hearts
and spit them out into the universe.
A million voices collide and create the void
where we all end, where we all begin, and
forge the path of self-destruction it takes
to fish out a handful of temperate words,
biblical verses, even historic epics
to release ourselves of our woes
and of every singular thought.

Some blades are caused by the average,
the ones who would not ****** a dagger
through their chest, not even
for the truth.
But our blade, the wicked fiend,
sweeps through every bone and ligament
until she reaps what is due;
the words you're reading,
my thoughts scattered out
for you.

i.

What sustains me is the lushness of vulnerability.

I live in pursuit of exposure, soul-baring, the practice of being what we are without apology. We are all different. No one else carries our specific memories or desires. No body is formed exactly like ours. We play at oneness, but shared experience only stretches so far. In the end, we are left with the reality of what this really is—a colony of beings, endlessly individual, utterly separate.

ii.

Sometimes, I catch snippets of the light inside us.

Maybe it’s the boy with a pegasus tattoo laughing outside in the cold. Maybe it’s the parting words of the librarian as I scrape my pile of poetry books off the counter: Take care. Maybe it’s the eyes of old woman at the corner of this street and the next, so clear and penetrating, like an elephant queen’s. Maybe it’s as simple as the wisdom offered to me by a friend, as quiet as the man tipping his face toward thin, Decemberish sunshine.

I hunt for it. I await its presence. Where is it, I wonder? Where’s that throbbing openness I covet so fiercely? When I am feeling especially aware, I see it everywhere. Beneath these layers of makeup I apply to my skin. Behind the gloss of sitcom utopia. Under the practiced apathy of all of us, under our coats and scarves and skin, curled up over our hearts, in tangled love with our veins and aortas. A luminous octopus, a sort of eight-limbed love.

It’s there, yes. Indubitably.

iii.

Tell me what shakes you.

Tell it to me like you would tell someone you are in love with them. Be trembling and slashed-open. Be frightened. Stop holding your facade together. Don’t clutch your persona so tightly. It cannot contain you. Let it pass away.

Tell me what elevates you.

Is it the warm burn of your favorite song? The tin-gray feathers on a starling’s belly? Bonfires in autumn? Say it now. Quickly. Without pausing to make it coherent or acceptable. Be as jagged as you like. Give up the dream of normal. You’re dirt and madness and screaming beauty; normal is never going to fit you. It pulls on you already, pinches your elbows and upper back like an old ill-fitting sweater. Loosen your fingers. Let it fall.

Tell me what moves you.

What climbs into your cells and bones and tells you to inhale, to make something of your precious time here? Speak it. Speak it, and it will wash over you like a great light, and it will feel good, better than you knew possible. It will feel like being alive, which is what you are. Not flawless or bad or worthy or weird. Alive. A deep continual sweetness of breath.

iv.

I’ve fallen in love.

I’ve spit words onto pages I later tore and tore away. I’ve run into the ocean in mid-October and shouted at the cold pooling around my ankles. I’ve cried at the death of a dragonfly. I’ve taken a fine edge to my flesh because I could not bear to be the person I am. I’ve said ridiculous things. I’ve walked beneath ambulatory stars and felt great, expansive joy at the fact of my existence. I’ve pinched the wobble of my upper thighs, the places on my body that are round and soft, been ashamed of it. I’ve written things that will never see daylight, because they are too indicative of the darkness I carry with me. I’ve been very loud and very, very bright. I’ve longed to tell people how I feel about them, how my heart swells or shrinks in their presence. I’ve bled. I’ve changed. I’ve danced so hard I thought I would die, and laughed afterward, laughed and laughed.

I am a creature of unearthly peculiarity, and I will not pretend otherwise.

This is my power.
This, too, is yours.

v.

It feels like hell, I know.

Nobody ever likes saying I want you or I need you or I am afraid or I love you. In the moment, the fear is nauseating. In the moment, we are small as children, and just as breakable. But you have to trust in the majesty of vulnerability. You have to trust that even though your throat is a vice and your heart is jumping like hell, these things you’re admitting—they are reaching through. People are listening. Their souls are shifting into resonance with yours, and you are there, standing together in your realness, all the armor gone, all the light rushing in.

Missing you; it came as a shock.
I was knocked onto the sofa, out of the
Conversation, down with the drops of confetti,
Stepped over and under before the screams started.
But I should have seen this coming.
Before, it had always been you
Letting me down, standing me up,
Calling me closer, beckoning with your
Finger by your lips and then
Shoving my head down right where you wanted it.
This time, it was me.
I told myself that there was a chance.
I knocked myself from the world.
Expectations had wound themselves inside of
My pockets and I couldn’t shake them off,
And there was no friendly boy with eyes glued to mine
That could come slip them out of my jeans.
I was alone and unprepared, without adequate supplies,
Without the veracity to watch myself unwind.
And so I was the one that lit the match,
Unbeknownst to even my own mind, wanting to
Rekindle our past, but only burning
Down and down; - I tried to drown it out,
Until the alcohol added fight to the flame.
Water was not on my radar and I was
Lonely and lost, fenced off from a savior.
I disembarked. I was the captain that does not
Sink with the ship. I left myself in a pile of ashes
And was briefly resurrected on a blank kitchen tile.
This is my fault, and I will not be rescued.
This was my fault, and I am the only one who can go back
To salvage the pieces of my shoulder, liver, aortas,
That I left behind. I will stitch myself unto myself
And I will leave you out
(This time)

Exits the friendly
From sun circled centre
Where no wispy 'membrance,
though 'tis what we're made of,
dost tangle in beaches or camp grounds.

Forgetting is lonely
in mustard seed corners
though lonely has purpose,
if purpose is stardom,
when taken in two over doses.

Chopping aortas
from hair raisèd partners
and sewing mine own onto
maddery night times
where blood is awaited and tha-thumping rythms exchange their romances thu-thampingly.

Grasping at cries,
and at nights overlapping.

It is May again;
And this means you are coming back.
You have registered once more for your territory in my aortas
As if you never left,
As if there was never a five-month ache
Before the last beat
Was heard again.
You’re back just in time to celebrate
The anniversary of our high school hookup
That you expected me to find my way
Out of
On my own.
Part of me likes you because you are
In no way condescending.
The other part wonders how you could
Possibly think that my skin,
That you touched, that I thought you knew,
Could ever be malleable enough
To be full one moment and empty the next.
The hole you opened inside of me waxed and waned
For months,
And I found someone else to slow it,
To fill it until it was still.
But here you are again,
Back as an echo,
Reverberating throughout me,
And here I am divided.
Still alone; because it is May again,
And this means that I wait until you decide
You want to be back.
You always do, but only in
Bits and pieces,
And you stack our memories together as stones,
3 piles high all around me,
Dulling the edges so that
I will not remember being made your
Sacrifice the last time.
I wonder if I should be worried that I
Already want to talk to you every day again.
I shouldn’t feel so lonely
After six hours back with your words
Not wrapped around me.
I shouldn’t wear our conversations like
Tattoos, and feel off-center when I cannot
Touch what you told me.
But it is May again,
And no one is surprised.
I am still alone, but
Hope whispered that you told her
You were on your way home.

No, I've never touched you in the ways of lovers
Or in the ways that awe stricken girls might
Yearn to be pressed against your hands
But if it makes them let you next to me
I will say that your fingers dug into my rib cage
And rolled around my aortas until I was screaming
Softly as if someone had tested the noises
I could make in that moment when my adrenaline
Pulses through my veins and you pinch
My blood until it would clot under your nails.
I will happily say that my legs wrapped
Around your waist and my lips held yours
I will tell them about your hands behind your head
And mine gripping at your wrists.
If it would mean I could have you again,
I would lie and say that my fingers
Grasped at your core until you smiled like
I imagine you would and your eyes would
Close under my soul that you would have
Tugged out by threads found in my folds
Regarding my mind, I mean,
But if they would be okay with that lie
I would not mean the folds of my mind,
Rather the folds of my being.
They said I was lying to someone and that
They hoped it was you, but the lies I say would
Happily be for them if you got to touch me
In a lovers way years from now when
It wouldn't even matter, because you have
Touched my soul in a way a lover never could
And my heart is waiting to be warmed by
Your soft and inviting hands.

J. C.

twigs dangling from their medium.
bodies tearing,
aortas stretching.
smoke doin' the tango with the esophagus.
salination forming in the crusts of receptors.

i have no concept of time
other than it soars.
i am a bald eagle,
soarin' high till i am shot down,
left on the ground.

love don't live here.
embrace me till the sun rises.
i wanna stay down
'cuz it feels alright.

i am at the bottom.
and I kinda like it
struggle for me.

she sings
in the summer rain.
hear the lyrics
within her amethyst heartbeat
as she reaches
for your lavender locks.
the rhythms
within your rhapsodic bones
stand a little straighter
with every stroke, every strum.
the chords of crystal chrysanthemums
cascade through your veins
as her delicate songs
draw dimples into your amygdala.
her melodic nostalgia
mesmerizes the matutinal lights,
her battles inspire instrumentals
into your branches.
you'll find twisted tempos
at the foot of her talents
and come to admire
the a cappella hegemonies
that hum into her aortas.

The windmills swallowed
Don Quixote,
Ocean spat out Atlantis.
Nothing will surprise their hearts
Captured by stony aortas.

The boy from family portrait on the shelf,
Dag his bitten nails into remains of rotten orange
(which left the trail in colour of the burning hearth
across the sky),
And probably not even then,
Not once, has he wondered
What are the trenches on his mother’s face
Channelling salty water
From two black amulets.

Sister’s arms grew wings and scattered
Toward the hanging tree,
Row and untouched by loneliness,
The dog was staring
At the dry terracotta peel,  

Only the father,
Smiling and handsome in a black suit,
Resisted the tide of the scorched sunset.

They have always been among us,
Preening and parading through their brief tenure,
Those acolytes of taking their final bows
While safely in their prime,
Ensuring the photos and screen-shots
Scattered on walls and tables
At their memorial service
Are the remnants of an eternal if truncated youth.
I would (having passed such a time anyway)
Demur to embrace such a notion,
As such an exit strikes me as the final half-measure
In an existence comprised of nothing but,
The process of having left hearts a-flutter,
Cleaved in half yet never made whole,
The tales suitable for guffaws and back-slaps,
But invariably involving merely one protagonist.
I have looked in the mirror, and wanly recognized
The lined face, the thinning and graying patch
Topping that sad apparition,
And I have resigned myself to the notion
That, when I am a thing of the past tense,
My remembrance will be in quieter tones,
The attendees with faulty aortas and rebuilt hips of their own,
And though the anecdotes about my final years
Will be short on notoriety and things
Not subject to the statutes of limitations,
Let it be remembered that I not only loved,
But lived that love as the contented part of a whole,
And that, though those days were not raucous
Nor involved more than one end of a candle aflame,
That I squeezed every **** last bit
Of all that time and tide had allotted.

i stole a list of emotions from the morgue.
they'd kept them separated, in listed folders,
with timings, factors, ways of inhibition,
and the reasons for which they bloomed or decayed.

as they'd cracked open the skull
to research, i believe,
ennui had whispered like a dull hum:
                                                            ­        how i wonder, why to live.

envy leaked next,
an orange, a tad too bright,
slithering in things it would have wanted,
could have liked.
                      i'd want to be that way, oh i wish, so lucky they exist.

disgust clung, cracking open the chest, to the ribcage,
a green fluid so thick they had to leave the rest.
                                                           ­        they are putrid, stay away!

anger roared bright and heavy,
red through the veins, plastered to the walls,
seething with something beyond comprehension,
living off the ache, having consumed it whole.
                              let me breathe, just not simmer below the surface.
                               i'm meant to erupt, how can you push me down—
                                                           ­                            this is a furnace!

joy, intact, lay in the eyes.
it glimmered, even with no life,
marble-like, sparkling — the only one.
                                 oh look how beautiful, i love that and this—
                                                           ­     hey let's go watch the sunset.
                                                         ­   do you dream and believe?

skepticism lay coiled in the gut,
along with jealousy's mold,
while awe cracked the jaw wide open.
                                                           ­           i wonder — are you sure?
                              sheesh, i'd be better, they just don't know it well.

nostalgia clung to the fingertips
and the memories,
whatever remained of it,
while gloom seeped to the bones,
despair settling cold.
                                             this heaviness, have i been here before?
                  oh i wish it was easy to breathe as it is easy to pretend.

schadenfreude grinned through broken teeth,
piling along every single intended well,
disguised as joke-shields.
                                                   ­               hah, i bet you couldn't do it.

love was stitched deep in the aortas,
the heart hummed a beat.
                                         i live for you, stay as the reason i breathe.

pride, lust, greed slithered like birds out of their canopies,
in the liver, excess fat rotting,
put to decay by the one they owned,
never again intact.
                                                         want, need, give me it, on repeat.

sadness and fear collaborated at some point.
the former resided in the head,
the latter took over the mind.
anxiety was born,
a cruel little monster, clown-like,
with no circus.
once these met, impossible to separate,
they lived together, grew closer than facts.
                                                          ­               this isn't okay — it hurt.
                                they're coming, again, protect — hide hide run!
                                           what if — what if — what if — they see!

embarrassment flushed through the skin.
                          oh i wonder why am i turning pink, i need to hide.
shame pressed down, chains at the shins.
guilt nested in the throat,
a lump formulated,
watching truth come close.
                                                          ­      shouldn't have — but — did.
                                                           how do i change the outcome?

suspicion and doubt whispered,
pressed down, leaving intricate triggers.
irritation pulled at the skin,
leaving behind scratches — grave sins.
                  do you believe — verify before you trust, are you sure?
                                                       this doesn't fit too well, take it off!

surprise had busted open the chest.
infatuation took its long-lost, last few breaths,
what was left of the heart remained uncarved.
                                                      ­oh — i was shocked for a moment—
                                                         ­               i've wondered since time.
                                             you're the only one, only only only one.

at one point, perhaps they'd gotten over the autopsy,
and so, without looking too deep,
they threw aside the body,
missing out on the only being
that existed at the pit of the heart.

consummated by gold, surrounded by a cage made of picked-up twigs,
hope, fragile yet glowing,
resided there and under the tongue,
waiting to be spoken.
                                                         ­    but i've existed, and i intend to.
                                                             ­                 do you not need me?
                                  don't throw me out and away like you did to —

i’d stolen the list and the reports,
but carrying them with myself and reading them alone,
i realized all these lived,
changed lives and bodies,
never dead, never ceasing.
emotions brought play into feelings.

what do you feel?