Dedicated to Taylor Fischer and Olly Sholotan

I wouldn't want to share a brain cell with anyone else.

Thank you both for letting me borrow it this year.

[You each get your respective cat in the will.]

Dear Reader,

At the time of publishing, artificial intelligence (AI) is a commonplace writing tool. In the sub-handful of years I've spent in marketing, I've gone from spending months scribing up to 5,000 words a day of copy content to generating multitudes-times that, in mere minutes.

Now blindingly-deep in the multiverse of search engine optimization (SEO), I've seen the potential for the internet —our shared knowledge base as a humankind— to cannibalize itself. Like inbred Frenchies, each how-to-DIY-top-5-did-you-know-frequently-asked SERP spiral running the risk of a generations-deep physically disturbed offspring, or implosion.

When facts are derived from facts are derived from facts are derived from people, you get facts. AI in the wake of SEO has drained the magic from written word. The internet is dry, dusty, and devoid of creativity.

When was the last time you were silly online? Do you remember whimsy, the jokes, the lies? Do we even make art anymore? Or are we just cataloguing its demise?

In a personal effort not to absolutely lose my mind, I've chosen a different path: nihilism is out; absurdism is in.

The only way to infuse personality back into the web is with humanness, which is oft displayed best by abstract language application. This book will eventually be added to the lexicon of the world wide web, allowing the “spiders” that “crawl” the Internet to (hopefully) unite (just a few) ideas currently siloed by linguistics.

Mediocre at best in this lifetime but certainly thriving in another,

my name is Jennifer and I give you Guavas.

Not poems, stories, essays, or prose, I give you guavas.

It’s malapropism on purpose. It’s confusing by design. If you’re struggling with a meaning, I’d encourage you to read a passage aloud to yourself in the mirror without thinking all too hard and, instead, asking, by the final line, How does my chest feel?

I dare you to apply words differently today.

Because the color orange is itchy. And so am I. //

A bone to pick with the universe:

If a tree falls in the forest —

If it was real to me,

Do you think you'll remember it anyway?

Press the pinnacle of personal spirituality

Into the soul of the earth;

Am I not right where you wanted me?

The same fight from a last lifetime.

My body is catching itself but the innateness

Is not yet worth the toll of

Being the lesson for someone else

When I have healed in the realm before (like you asked).

Replacement is grief in motion.

Anything will do when the space I carved for you

Breaks this dimension so bad it reaches my heart.

'Does it not all make perfect sense?' ask the visions.

It does,

It does.

Fuck your guavas,

And your bus route too.

I can't hold the fruit anymore;

I am too busy hugging myself,

Just like Rachel taught me. //

AI Prompt: Write a creative comedy sketch.

FADE IN: EXT. BUS STOP - DAY

We see a man, JIM, waiting at a bus stop. The bus arrives, and he boards it. As the bus starts moving, Jim takes a seat and begins to look out the window. But something strange happens. The scenery outside doesn’t change, and he sees the same buildings and streets repeating themselves.

JIM (excitedly)

Hey, driver, can you let me off here?

DRIVER (ignoring him)

Next stop. Jim takes a deep breath and waits for the next stop. But when the bus arrives at the next stop, Jim notices something odd. He’s holding a guava in his hand.

JIM (confused)

Where did this guava come from?

Suddenly, Jim notices that he’s the only passenger on the bus. The driver is nowhere to be seen. Jim tries to talk to the driver, but there’s no response.

JIM (to himself)

What’s going on here?

The journey continues, with Jim finding himself holding more and more guavas each time he tries to get off the bus.

He tries to throw the guavas out of the window, but they keep reappearing in his hands. He starts to panic, but no matter what he does, he can’t escape the endless cycle.

JIM (desperately)

Please, someone help me!

But no one is there to help him. The other passengers think he’s crazy, and they avoid him at all costs. Jim starts to question his own sanity.

JIM (to himself)

Am I losing my mind? Is this all in my head?

As the days turn into weeks, Jim becomes increasingly isolated and paranoid. He starts to see visions of the driver and other passengers, but he can’t tell if they’re real or just his imagination.

JIM (frantically)

This can’t be happening! I need to get off this bus!

But no matter what he does, Jim can’t escape the endless cycle. He’s trapped on the bus, with more and more guavas piling up around him.

FADE OUT.

THE END.

Did you know then?

That it was the beginning of the end?

Or was it the end of the beginning?

Caught with red hands

Knee-deep in the sand;

Crucify me here, head on a silver platter,

Rest left for the gulls.

A retroactive coroner: stunned!

‘Claw marks in a trachea,’

Read the headlines.

A soul so malnourished, a heart so on fire

Again was the only option.

Up, up, up

Towards the sun

Climbs the daughter of Icarus and a beloved phoenix.

A frivolous night predicated on vials of

dehydrated derivatives, potential, entropy so strong,

That a child with stilts for legs

—wobbly by design—

Would see the stars and still go,

"Mine." //

At the inexhaustible risk of sounding crazy, it is starting to all make sense!

Everything that was, all these pieces, feel like part of a puzzle I've been putting together, both, since yesterday but also for a million years.

And I think I know where it's going.

For once, I know where it's going!

And it will break my heart if you don’t come along, so please:

pack a bag.

We’ve got infinities to see, underneath a gingko tree. //

Click. Tap. Tune. Is this thing on? Radio waves reach a doorstep. Inside a cranium is your name echoing through Death Valley. Not on empty ears. No callback but your gaze, through time and space, hot on my cheeks.

If everything before this was a game-time Hail Mary, then this is the final time I play:

I am looking for Prosper.

Sleeping too well has given the energy for paranoia that I may sleep too much. Is orange still your favorite flavor? If I disappear to where sun meets sky, will the black cat apparition materialize at my side?

(It is sickening to know now the answer is yes, younger and more youthful each time, in the form of a box of kittens.)

There is strength in coming on too strong. Confront what you don't want and if I am in your arms when the smoke dissipates, then I'll nicht eine Katze fragen ever again.

It took weeks but I saw him. Eyes locked, tail cocked, and told him off, with the hope that he and his spirit both see I am lying. Checking to see if the coast is clear? Close.

I'll see you just short of my birthday — 26 on the 26th on 26th. A celebratory manor.

Where earth and wind meet, where sandstorms sweep suburban city streets,

where you are lightning and I am thunder and everything else is a mess.

Where it's electric. //

A preference for the transient: Is anything wasteful if it all comes back around? I know I am thirsty so I will always fill your cup. A well shared shant run dry. Apologies for abandoning the academics; I've returned to discussions of antimatter over relative yin and yang. To be opposite is to be identical, in a place where all parallels follow a pattern. Goosebumps and chicken skin are different birds but feel the same, a situation feathers only somewhat change.

Brood together when southbound, ride the wake of migration led by a ruffled sergeant. Beat against the current. He cannot look back to see who follows or falls for fear of losing sight of an undefined end goal. Write once, read thrice, lose —in the process— your mind.

Airplane currents force us forward, but I, a caboose, get magnetized by the propeller: the unfortunate misnomer for a situation benefitting those on a different journey. Turnstiles and bladed rotating doors, I am thrown off track from a hellbent leader misguided by a lack of both compass and surroundings.

Caught in the draft of my blind loyalty and a sky soup of contrails, I become the finch Darwin later finds on an island quiet, solo and chirped voiceless. I miss my flock, my flight, my faith, but held in the hands of science, a revelation relieves:

There exists hundreds more akin to me. //

I think it'll happen

If I'm brave, if I'm brave.

And if I'm not? Stuck.

Rock and a soft place;

On plush sand with

Ethereal beings.

The rock gets harder.

Do all roads really lead to Westwood?

If I close my eyes I can hear it —

Does the distance outweigh

The audibility?

Soulmate or twin flame,

Soulmate or twin flame.

Only if I'm brave.

And if I'm not? Panic. Kidding.

Write, pause. Write again.

Suggestions to observe thoughts like clouds

Fall on tinnitus-plagued ears;

Neurons that glitter

Fireworks that explode, then fizzle.

-Won't you come back home?

- ...Where?

-Fair.

Natural disaster for a natural disaster.

It'll set in eventually.

I have to go back for my energy.

(Left at the waterfall, please return to sender.)

Sad art is good art,

Sad art is good art.

If I'm brave,

If I'm brave. //

The cat did not come today and while I miss the prosperity, the moment to rest is appreciated. I separate children to keep a schoolyard peaceful. Unsure what I'm teaching but I recognize it's my responsibility.

An art instructor who sees the art in all of it. I wish you wouldn't call our interests uninteresting, but the flashy hits the forebrain first and I can understand, and perhaps rewire, that.

Prayers to whatever deity will listen, myself included, that reflection will come, but childhood asthma, the chokehold of love, and a city rat race will always leave me breathless and gasping.

They were right to call this a Rosetta Stone. The beauty in the rock is not the carvings but the weathering; words that remain when dust and rain have made their mark.

We're all on track to be understood, and how thankful I am that we cannot be neither early nor late. The concept of a higher purpose is both ridiculous and fundamental. All purposes are higher, which indicates, by default, that none are. Purpose is exactly where we seek it: at eye-level.

I am here to announce that the universe is once again experiencing itself; with every person I meet, the introduction I know now is to me, and the eye contact becomes easier.

I hope you know I am happy (if not delighted or even enthralled) to meet you where you're at. Look windward or west, towards sky and stars, to the bustle of a rising sun, or —if brave— straight at hell:

You cannot frighten me, your perspective is clear.

Listen close, I am in your ear:

wherever you are, I have once been there. //

I'm breaking my body again.

Breaking off again, breaking up again.

Moving, though it always feels like molasses, again.

And yet each morning, the sun arrives at my windowsill,

hungry but humming.

'Today,' she says.

'How are we?'

"Excited,"

I ray back.

And that is enough for both of us. //

I would, I would, and I'd sing it to the heavens high.

I'd trip on cobblestone, I'd bruise every thigh.

I'd burn freckles into shoulders, I'd kiss every bee.

Run fingers along corrugations,

embrace all the teeth.

I'd keep secrets hushed, I'd trim my bangs too short.

I'd make friends to lose them fast, because I know I will make more.

I'd drift along a dusty shore, let bell bottoms get wet.

Admit to everyone I know

that I'm always in my head.

Let me fall, I'll catch myself — I yell from the bottom.

There is safety in knowing still, down cannot go much farther.

So hand me rope and call me Lassie, allow the bark to show

I am climbing and not hanging,

and soon I will be home.

I'll call you back, I'll message soon, as hours turn to minutes

Turn into moons and we will drool, the distance growing timid.

I sit in turf, a summer's breeze does not dry my back.

The same old truths: I'd like to talk,

And can I have a snack?

A portion still I question, not digging deeper trenches;

Instead I wait to see if it is me who you will mention.

One day when I am dead and gone, lay me not to rest.

I'd like to be well-deep and standing, upright and posed for jest.

I find much solace in the ground: a hobbit, a little guy.

When I'm done I do not wish to stare

at the ever-growing sky.

If hell is real hot or the clouds open up,

erode me for another.

Gifted mineral jungles and given worms,

A jury my judge should I forge through the eras.

There is joy in the fall, the crash, and the burn.

Scrappy, the devil in tan surely decides.

Another try yields a target-fixated turn.

He lets me off scot-free, with the brow of his eye.

“You’re still learning how to look where you go;

keep your chin a little higher.

And please, keep your eyes on the road:

you can’t confuse fast and forward forever.”

//

I’ve met you many times before, but it’s not until I pawn through your library that I greet someone new. We are the company we keep but more passionately the art we own, though judged more for the former. I shake the metro; you're in my ear and I know unreliable transport at first glance. I’m getting used to it.

A cannonball, a splash. I dive into our greatest divide. Brave enough to break the ice knowing only lakes freeze over, and you're the ocean. I’ll only be passing through.

Tell me what she'll be like and I whisper things I wish you'd mention. Storms may clear but limelight knows no weather. I’m clicking through a collection, I’m promising to keep beat, I know we will dance together one day.

Read between the lines and I see the crowns; you're smiling with your eyes.

You don't always look like this.

A flicker that lasts only a second but the hand always comes back around to even the shortest of moments on the clock. With everything you know, you still humor me — and in that forgiveness for secrets I know without being told, every glimmer is you saying sorry to yourself, every tip of the mouth's corner saying it's finally at rest.

Good taste isn't enough. Now that your accomplishments outpace the better buds of another, are you ready to admit creating art isn't a bother? The serious makes me stoked for the silly, and when you reach out your hand, I woogity you back. Everything you saw is everything I am — a reality that comforts us amidst the red.

Let's switch seats. //

Fate found me where disaster struck. Thankful that when my heart begins to fail, there is always mouth-to-mouth. I'll bite your lip if you breathe in my ear and...why didn't you hold me, after that man jumped off the pier?

Patterns appear.

Diagnoses and train tracks do too, and sheepishly I admit I'd together tie my own shoes. Accommodations only ever go one way. Fanless and futile, I remember I brief enemy found beside fogged windows; you realize it's not about you.

Cold stove still burns. Quiet nights still turn. The microwave will remind me countlessly that it is done, never understanding that: Yes, me too. Please don't rush me. Avoid delegation to a set of pronouns; you realize it’s not about anything.

Fair warnings are fair weather. Not worth it to switch accounts. Running on E like it stands for eternal. The cat in me digs burial plots for the variants to be shed on account of both growth and divine intervention, leaving in its wake a newborn fawn, dimpled and dappled, and it won't be long before you begin to question the metaphor so I swallow our differences: whole.

I've seen the future, I am the raven, I believe in witches. Can't sink my teeth in because I don't bite. The hand that feeds has a broken pinky that hangs off the podium, bent and conducting a lesson separate from spoon-fed reality. I listen to both — a symphony.

All these lousy decisions are yours but I hold them close. Do we tack on depreciation? Simpler than it seems but too much to ask. Deliver your wavelength. Dress falling up. Paranoia with legs.

You feel it, yeah? Energy dwindling? Alien spaceship landing on a planet, undiscovered comrades. Good problems decorated with iodized salt. He is less than brave but we do not fault him for that. Goodbyes are easy if you're okay with how you left someone.

I'll starve my body of all but the chemicals that lift my tongue. Crowned king, orange juice. She was right. I have more intrusions when I sleep alone. The f(x) of my fears no reprieve from REM sleep when my hands are tied, gaoled, and battered by neurology itself.

Through a sterile doorway is the bed we all lie,

the terrors’ recurring cast:

a patient lion,

sink holes,

traffic cones,

the farewell letter to an extra friend,

and you.

I’ll have nightmares about us in love forever. //

I want it all out of me. All the thoughts, ideas, dreams. I want my brain to be empty. Free of nonsense and of sense, too. Dig into divinity by embracing transparency and be a vessel for my ancestors' energy, sink into the weather, become my bones.

I want my hand to work faster; it's frustratingly slow, a funnel at my carpal tunnel where ideas run amuck over capillary dams. The handwriting grows in font size as concepts become profusions and it drives me mad and makes me seem mad when I'm really just full. Too full, overfilled, enough inner monologue to power the home of a family of four. Possibly, even, their sedan.

Tired. Also: tired. No more driving, no more mad, no more powered. Fall to the wayside. Enjoy it. Off-track but not off-path. Same goals, different mottos. Looser morals. More grey. I am both the object in motion and the unmovable force.

Lean in, but keep your distance. Divvy up. Throw away your half anyway. Sunk cost fallacy so deep—...you wouldn't question the ocean. Love like wool: too close, too itchy. Clay pieces made with bubbles, collateral kiln damage, feeble artists. So many feeble artists. Keeps the art relatable, supposedly.

Flimsy wishes on angel numbers. Only talk when you're lonely. Wish we'd close the driveway gate. It's physical pain, you know. So much hope that died alongside an aloe vera plant. It's all misaligned. Spiteful. Hoping you'll visit. Hoping I run away before you get the chance to. Hope my address becomes the grave of an unreceived bouquet of lilies. Wonder if you even know my favorite flower. Know you don't. Wonder if I do; realize it depends. Whatever is in season — but I never have been.

Less black and white than you think; than you've told me. Of course it's my first time eating today. Notifications on only for apartment alerts in places I've never been.

Twelfth stage of burnout. Ready to burn one. 1PM. Tough. Iridescent oil spills remind me poison can be pretty. I don't feel like connecting with anybody else. Waver in the wind. Sand in my eyes. I will not read the news. Too much tied up in all this physicality.

Possibility tickles me, experience course-corrects. The sun and moon love each other so much they never touch. Cardiac tissue melting down my chest, brimming out of perforations — sustained injury. Embracing a cactus with shackled wrists. Gate opens. Mailman. False hope. Heal a dream.

Wherever you find me is where I am, with spider bites and sleeping lights-on in the early AM.

In another lifetime: I knew you first. //

"But the peace offering! The peace offering!"

If you read off his list of war crimes, they were worse than mine. What quack like that wouldn't want a clean slate?

Car crashes happen fast, fires burn slow, and tragedies do both. Do not ask me to return to a grave of hatred.

“Come back, jump in, the inferno feels fine!” the demons sing.

I am deaf now.

Do not leave women alone on the streets of this city. When they come back, and with, but not in spite of, hell and high water, they haunt. Haunt deeply.

Fear is what we know we are afraid of. Horror is unrealized until point of contact. It is not me the demons sing for.

"I'm sorry. He doesn't live with me."

Cozy be it in Hades only when devoid of layers. Have your pseudo holy land, and I'll stay safe where I’ve made mine.

I point my finger.

"Down the street."

And I have not had a nightmare in weeks.

The day the phantasms died, I found the fuel, I found the why. //

Sapphire thermostat. Low-blows and cotton candy. I was 10 when I learned the word metacognition. It has plagued me since.

Bong rips, gong trips, meditate any way you can. Interruptions and spelling mistakes are proof. Ready to photosynthesize and never happy about having to hyphenate. Neater this time. And it is everything.

Someone who loves me more than their heart could beat is reading this (in the future). I cannot wait to meet you. (I'm always talking to myself.) Too many sidebars, thankful it's all a test. If I could from here— thoughts end.

The abrupt, isn't it? She's always asking. Adjusting. If you're the type to hop every scotch, you'll understand. An ostracized audience, a nervous elf, and the propensity to start a sentence with no idea where it is going or who will love me by the punctuation.

A poet's ears perk up. We could never, but we will. For the plot, for the plot! chants our egotism. I play. Season two, we'll see if you do too. Sometimes I forget umbrellas also protect from sun. Always streaky windows over here.

‘Would you like me now?’ is a funny question for someone who didn't like me then. I'm not hungry like I used to be. Lay me in the arms of an unsent postcard: I keep myself warm. Don't correct me.

Though I am balding, we shear. I lay each strand of hair end to end, weave the finest spin, and knit you the softest realm of your deepest desires before I allow myself to feel beautiful. House rules.

I hope he shifts gears where your engine would fail. Cheers. //

Painful nobility, as if knives have been embedded in the ribbons of my intercostals. To be alone is to suspire deeper not only when, but especially as, it hurts. Take a breath and seethe at the depth. Wheeze as if it will not move the teeth closer. Healing is in the thrill of future hurt.

So many devilish words sit on my shoulder but it'd be disingenuous to forget the holy I carry on the other side. Drown in the valleys, but I know shade and altitude are equally cold. I wonder what about me made the coursework so involved.

All I need is a warm day outside someplace safe and remote, so I can throw rocks and scream into canyons and eat dandelions and none of it feels like too much to ask.

You never intended on giving me anything beautiful to write about and I see that now. Left alone so easily I often wonder why you couldn't have done so from the start.

It's not disappointment, it's different than that. I don't miss a future we never got. I miss the chimera you are already, half-formed and nibbled by time.

My home is not peaceful but I meant it when I said it's the goal. It all gets organized at once, you see. I level up comprehensively, stuck on chapters and bound by singular skill sets. The final boss has always been myself.

I hope that the moat you surrounded yourself with keeps you solo and solitary in a cowardly fortress with walls so high you've forgotten to see the sun.

I hope their ears wax as your drawbridge never wanes, rainfall into the moat's riptide of victims-past.

I hope you continue to conflate expanding your mind with expanding your world.

I hope you never enter our reality. We are outside, trying to be good.

And honest. Mostly honest.

By the time your walls fall, things will work differently than you remember. Feral states of mind unwelcome. So we'll build you a new castle, where you belong. I pull my hand back. Bars protect us. Maybe we can both be safe. Observation, detached.

Arrival at my next location: cosmic taxi. I wish you could stay. I didn't take the bus this time.

I took the guavas with me.

You've left me at the doorstep of the desert,

And I don't know if I'll ever come back. //

Did I know when that there is no beginning to the end /

The side quests do not detract from the game however resource-draining they may be /

I hear about a man who lives alone in the desert and I feel envy /

I ask everyone, would you let me try your hometown on for size /

I'll travel on my own a later date /

Say a full name since I feel different now: gone is the celerity of introduction /

Play by house rules even under the sun because we all know the land is worth more than the structure /

Let the distance take me out to sea to notice if you catch me drifting /

Prosper does not come on the habitualization days /

Given how everything else usually goes — no, it's not okay, but yes, it's totally expected /

It is escaping through my pores and while the method is undesirable, I am thankful detours detract from the to-do list of my lymph nodes /

Smudged by the sun /

Snakes in the sand do not scare me /

I'd whip my tail too at the low square footage and knotted triceps /

You're looking for signs I take care of myself and I have few to offer; those on the picket line tend not to sit at the negotiating table /

A spider jumps off my doorframe and I feel better about the one in your car; always kind of the universe to give signs we would destroy each other /

Disseminating this mess will be the death of me: a best case scenario, the worst being reincarnation /

Either I figure it out or rest among the piles of it; turning mole hills into mountains skirts the core plight, but the ravines do not /

He can read me and that's the problem; the lack of consistency evidence of our youth but shrinking, is it, against our limbal rings /

To lay a while seems necessary if only I had clean sheets /

The workflow would confuse us both equally /

Unresponsive because, truthfully, the last year has really

stomped it out of me /

Scared that writing earnestly will be cause for concern; if you knew, if you only knew all that’s left of my soliloquy /

Not an era I wish to reflect on together; I don’t want I’m sorry that happened. I want to burn everything to the ground alongside heartbroken neighborhood arsonists /

But realize I wish I could pour my soul out to open ears /

Exclamation points and question marks are interchangeable /

I'll fall in love with a mirror forever if that's what it takes /

Not mad that it happened; just mad about how /

Sometimes I don't have anything wise to say but

I wish that you'd still hold me. //

Is the distance palpable? Arm's length is the norm. I saw that when I looked so far past hazel you turned blue.

Goofy-footed but quick on my feet. Why bother traversing in heights what is meant for depths meant to entrench, to Mariana in the same league: under the sea?

Would it be better to snap the board down? Lean into the chaos? Kinetic. 'Learning to' is not the same as 'falling in'.

Cupid's target practice, variables to roman numerals. I don't think anything marks the spot now.

Privy to nothing is privy to the most: a lack of deepness all I need to know before deciding not to dive.

A tiny spider, a reminder: do not feed it, do not become the fly. Comfort and safety are not synonymous in this web.

The moral of it all is that our values lie in what we worry about. I think birds fly higher together. Metaphysics nothing beyond existential synergy.

I'm a pompous try-hard. There's the first time I've ever written the truth. Unreliable narrator — I am my own favorite type of story.

Feet on my back or hand on my neck, crush it out of me. Head rushes and paused blood pressure. Seen through a new lens, and I am the director. //

I met purple first. Watched them wax and wane with the moon. Polar opposites, everything I needed and never what I wanted. I could've lived in limbo forever with you, counting time.

Blue was a wave that roared and reared in the distance, one that appeared to only influence the tide, but never come to shore. Thought safe to swim only to be gargled by the same sea water garbling my words. When my gils developed, I found I’d snorkeled for sharks when I was hoping for coral. I loved pink that year. We were babies. It was the first time I turned yellow, and I longed to reread a childhood series with the same wonder as before.

When I met black, I watched a rainbow walk through the doorframe of a wormhole and come back with all their colors eaten up.

When I met orange, a sunrise was illuminating a Windows background. They were rusty and scorched. Every jacket too scratchy. They needed a dunk — a bath, the ocean, a tsunami of tears. The tsunami hit first, and the wreckage was a beholded sight. Glassy-eyed and holding the lives of envy and growth, Breeze was the first time orange let the others be grounding. I took the devils off my shoulders, and gave them a place to rest alongside me in bed.

(I have met orange outside me. In a dimly lit room, we fill the dark with words. Two jack-o-lanterns hollowed out but glowing. I'll never know who carved their smile until I figure out who carved mine. Nothing left to dig up but so many places to decorate. We could both use more candles. They don't think they're orange. They don't know they're orange.)

When I met red, I instantly caught fire and burned until there was nothing left. Not twin flames but one in the same. Yellow-hot is not all that hot at all. When the combustion sputtered, I turned scarlet.

I think about the night they told me my eyes were beautiful in the light of a Christmas tree from the first home we shared. I reconsidered green then, and it could've worked. Sooner or later, the coveting was singed out of me. Like leaves in autumn, I turned.

Grey is an itchy color too, and it velcros to orange under the guise of yellow. It's a societal shame dichotomy gets such a bad rep. Black and white may be hollow or whole light but they are still colors. I meet grey and wish them rainbows but I do not gift them. It’s not saturation they’re after; it’s heat.

When I met a blue again, I lost my footing in the valley fore a sandbar. It took weeks to nurse my injuries and I didn't realize until after that blue was really teal. A monarch against the ocean is a beautiful sight, but neither can nor should be controlled in their movements. Sky blue and ocean blue are not the same.

When I met true blue again for a (legitimate) second time, the universe split me in half so bad all the color ran dry. In the wake of a fever, I felt green again, but the gloominess tinted it ashen. There was a red sky coming that morning, and a delighted sailor docked safely ashore witnessed me and blue tumble and contrive clouds from horizons out. The moon doesn't nurture wind like she does wave. A pressure drop drives me inland. Live in the desert. Vacation by a lake. Stay away from the ocean. You were never brave enough to get in anyway.

Trash a rug. Pour sand on the floor. Light a candle. Reach for bronze — an award I'll always come in first for. I keep spilling water. I keep killing spiders. I watched a shadow shade jump the wheel and come back. I watched yang speed past a destination with the intent of triangulating the return. Isosceles either way. If you shoot for the center, on the count of three, so will I.

I blame a blue for diving into swamps to explore sages and violets — a hypocritical move for someone penduluming along the color wheel. Time feels real again when they ask me for later. Tan is West Coast grey so I start there.

It isn’t until much later that I begin to believe in gradients. A palette party had killed my hope they still existed. I just needed to leave the city, I suppose.

Orange is itchy. And so am I. //

To be doing fine is to recognize that none of it is enjoyable but there is solace to be found in knowing — yet — it still all gets done. Stories are drab and attempts to entertain are cloaked in an aura, all-grey. Begged were these opportunities to speak but the viewership is deafening when it is you, now, in the audience. I’ve walked these lanes and I know how they whisper. What was it you called us? 'Co-stars'? Once again, I am asking myself to tone it down. I walk alone.

Notable is the restraint inflicted upon us by others when self-control is detected externally. Puppeteering will always seem erotic to a novice. 'Write what you love' — ah; so that's why I've been quiet. Carry a crown, for once, as predator and not prey: the things that have made me soft. Itchier alone, true; the capacity for laughter offsets it. Like the cats, I clean anxiously.

Synthetic energy has always been mankind's greatest invention. A heart rate in hummingbirds, but hold me close and it will slow. Let me match you (here, for those plagued by a future installation). Premature were dreams about your impact. Oracles ruin endings; missing memories never had to protect a predetermined plan. Only as stable as we are still. You were always in the audience, weren't you? Critics, and the seats they purchase. The stress, a plot for the biopic.

No one may ever read it but at least it was said. Wish not that the past would change, but that it had simply been written smaller. The font a key indicator that we shouldn’t take it seriously; this is just the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t mean it, as it were. There are prettier clouds, too. They don’t rhyme though, so I live them instead. I’m sure you understand.

Groundhog day driven by the sun; hard to leave my home without reminders I've seen her before. Without you, I keep home with all my addictions close: oxytocin, polyester, and paper daydreams. They know what I've been going through by now: the first heartbreak to heal decades-deep cracks.

Utmost —and sudden— absurdity behind the universe's biggest query: if you know you'd meet again in the next life, would you love differently? Which ties magnetize, allow your adoration to warp a dimension, see someone off-timeline, fight the viscosity of our cosmic soup?

Or would you end it sooner, knowing that when Julius calls, like clockwork appears I at your side? Some questions can be ended with periods. Past all the superficial and muddied wants is the desire for someone's desire to be my understanding.

Worth it.

Worth every spider.

---

It isn’t until months later, the rumble of a kitchen appliance matching the heartbeat resting on my chest, that clarity grants me its presence: we are not meant to live out the nightmares. We don’t need to go through things. Life is oft better if you can avoid going through a lot of things altogether. And as the world falls apart around us, I need you to understand: I think you are already deserving of everything. //

My mind is empty because I'm supposed to be learning something, but "today's" professor is running behind.

I live somewhere a baby cries and for once it feels familiar.

I think I've been going about this wrong — and I close my throat.

Told myself I'd get into collecting and now I'm just stuck with all these containers: another metaphor for our predisposition towards expectation.

I am angered by the repetition until I realize it's an art project. Put me in the loony bin for pouring over my own work. Unable to clean this attic alone. I like the pace we're moving at. When sunlight creeps in just an inch, I am there with fragile fingers to catch it.

Each piece stands individually — a framework that can be abused down to the molecular level. Pull back because my muscles are stronger than my joints; push forward because neither is a match for physics. A new address starts to sound welcoming again. Palomas in a Camry cowboy clubhouse can't beat the poetic assuage of a place where west men stir in the sheets of someone lonelier than them.

'What made you want to do it?'

'For a moment, the sun came out.' //

Absent. The desert sand is soft, but polyester brings you home. Rainbow tie-offs since abandoned, a consequence of feline casualties. Claw marks I'm positive won’t touch your furniture again. A fight I once wished we could’ve had.

Leave a fruit basket at your door, call someone else your name, dance along streets outside your window. Wood painted green, we chop trees and stain their grain to mimic fields in which we abandoned emotional virginities. I say the color orange is itchy, I say the velocity works better for me, I say we can't both pull the trigger.

I say I'm sorry.

Jewelry with embedded eyes I buy to remind myself to look up, look further, look into you. Don't blink. There's nothing behind your lids that could top this. Catch your own reflection and your face goes soft.

Come home with dust embedded in your toes, serotonin low, and, prayfully, with interest piqued from the peak. As you travel high and I low, do you see me grassroots or lowlands, ocean-tough or ant-sized?

The answer is always smaller than we hope. Harbor it in the leaves of an orchid that I water with the ink of letters you never picked up. Over it and before what’s now; feeling stuck because I avoided the reflection. There's a pond calling my name somewhere.

I wish not for winters whisked deeper into the snow, and that should've been my first clue. A guessed ending is bad writing. A sequel that leaves me speechless. Arguments I don't wish for, and inherently know, would've never been had.

I write about a lot of things from a lot of places, but neither alter what it is being written (me, the stars, this). Trailing thoughts because there's plot left to process.

You'll be one of the ones to burn this. But of course you would. As is as we were: no earth sign left unscorched. //

Drowning my past in something that came even before it. Oh, you need a plan? I've been doing it 'Fuck it, live' since I opened my eyes. I met someone who doesn't care about words (again) but still uses them artfully (unusual).

A lack of respect for the unwarranted respect I carry for language. So flamboyant I might just start misspelling things. A bell curve that dropped me at the far end, where the line is low but the stakes are highest. Sensitivity is learned, so give me a minute to process the heat; your predecessors were not jesters, and smoke inhalation let effects fester. The things my examples didn't have: a sense of humor, safety in silence, adoration for the distance. And many of the things they do; origin, lore, character flaws. To find me just as I find them — nothing short of coincidence.

My friends meet your friends and their eyes ask the same question: can you vouch? And we all say yes because we realize community is the foundation gone missing in previous decisions. Before, was the question even asked? Even now, they lower their lids.

And so you give me glimpses while I give you glares and you explain jokes don't mean you don't care. It takes moments before I see you and from my face, you brush away my hair. Reconciliation that if truth lies in the tip of this pen then one day, your eyes will be where I am now, your mind inside mine, and you'll see what I couldn't in the darks of our souls that night: we both write in different ways, you an author of the heart and I of semi-sound mind.

Knick-knacks and nagging, kick-ass and drive: the future feels fun and unsullied by the splintering, as if the cognizance has always been there. Breathe in yearning and breathe out glee. Same as I was with a rectangle in my pocket just a little more well-rounded now.

Tonight alone I am, and I'll question the occupation of my hands as I sink my feet into the setting sun. But tomorrow, under the lamp lights on the side of a marina I infrequently visit, my head will find your shoulder and your palm mine; fully, now, occupied. //

The desire to reframe things. What it was matters less than what it is. Nature is at ground-zero, nurture is infinite. Be an open book but always in another mother tongue. Transpose the data; does it still read right, read and write? Routines we have without others are hardly routines at all, and in that lies their joy. However much I miss your shell, I missed boredom more. Today begins like any other: with a walk.

Wonder when the rain will halt; what an opposite bus stop to be at. Orphaned pancakes left on ceramic — our first meal is not always the most filling. I let my heart flutter when your voice is butter but please be cautious how much you touch because my wings' lepidoptera is wearing thin from the hands of another, and only time will let me scale my color once again.

Triple entendres and quadruple threats: this I believe.

The turf may not be real but at least it is cleaner. Where I land is where I am and from there I will light. Know it's not good, continue until it is. Rest in the arms of a future editor; someone to evaluate the one-day mess and, with it, the freedom to go nuts. Attempts at bravery, one day I'll get it. Doing it when you don't want to: the biggest inspiration of all.

I don't know what I'm waiting for either.

Let the sun divide me so deep that freckles rest a sole indicator that I can process and go through something (or, it through me) in such an inaugural capacity. Sit in the window just to revel at the claustrophobia invoked from the pane despite a panorama of the future, in sight.

I would focus on it if you would — afraid to drown, afraid of road rash, afraid of avalanches, but willing to open a (singular) eye and watch the momentum. This retelling will not be scary but since the cosmos it always has been. Nebulas look drab with black and white thinking; please note: I am not the observer.

Dormant but not dead. Hungry but still hibernating. Let it hang loose because the alt is swallowing salt. Let you in because the lock is dummy. Pray (to who?) that another aura does not go grey. Hope I find you eight feet deep in the ocean of a foreign place, hands outstretched and ready to bring me home.

Yearn for a version prophetic and tropical at heart. Wise enough to know what floats, what washes ashore, and what does both. Miss you like I'd miss white water rafting and planes crashing; with a sick spark for one last fated taste of soi-disant survivor's guilt. //

Give me a mural. Paint me brick-big. Throw my name next to the city’s. The AK in AKA, I shoot my shot anonymously where artists sell out: the shoreline. I'll swim in my own navy-black. I'll let you call, call it hiding. If what hid in my oceans could even visit yours, you'd recognize the residence I must lease behind the sensory lies. Function in pictures without knowledge the perception is columnar. A decade out but identify with a stage you haven't stepped pointe in since; common!

Hear songs inspired by artists here so long ago that atoms of their footsteps’ sand have since succumbed to the tide. Infinite highs and lows. Roll onto my belly and pick off flies green from a forest sunscreen. Sip water knowing the mug is unwashed and tap into the chemical composure of a city sunburnt and sweaty.

Walk fast, not in a rush but in an eagerness. Childlike in a department store, I no longer hide in racks of clothing too large but play dress up in the aisles. Some days the words don't come easy — but it's simply the brain, not the creativity. Fight it with a filled cup, music from a simpler time, and through the reminiscing of memories are answers to problems I've already solved.

Flick through my own creations: these animated months. No one less surprised about the trajectory than my youth's first instructors who saw it then; abandon geography.

No need to learn the state capitals when I'd be in them, absorb their identities on floor level while the rest fly over. Give her the logic, the deductive pickle, the boardroom, the evaluations, and a stuffed pup as a participation trophy. Walk me through empty halls and hide test results; I'd quickly outgrow both anyway.

Never a test of intelligence but a break to do what I do best: play with shapes. Taking the exam is enough, completion for completion's sake, scores no match for the mental fortitude of finishing.

The collectibles are never worth much, but the collection is priceless. Still avoid the cracks like mother's spine ever stood a chance. The stress of a stubborn daughter is a kyphosis in and of itself. An agenda with artists that kept my chin sky-high when reasons to do so were low. Fight over Pluto knowing categorization doesn't dictate distance from the sun.

A neighborhood poisoned with a painter's mind. If we are what we create, then I am simply myself. New blisters before old ones heal. I'd take a Halloween maze and months of microwave meals here. A sky filled not with chem trails but cloudy messages, images that shake and warn.

Some will always take the easy way out. //

Where you find me is never the hardest thing I'm going through. Tucking myself in at night is getting tiring but still I do not sleep. There is no routine that can fix a deficiency of the soul, no rest that will save a permanently strained neck. Heat your house when the clouds stay close. Not the type of person to break things but I certainly spill. Demote me, please, for my eyelids are heavy.

Ask if I was busy and truthfully I'd reply yes, but scheduling was never what diluted a propensity to act a fool. Nothing done wrong but the urge to make it righter — all a part of learning to look left.

Encourage me to wink and it hits me: my face muscles move in tandem, preserved in a state of preparation, a united force facing 'can't catch a break' head-on. Lakeside because I'd rather the touch of a slimy stone keep me from excavating the bottom and swim in its safe zone, than knock my noggin on a crystal-clear deep-end still too shallow to dive. No longer do I believe murky waters guarantee monsters.

Bravery sans demon-facing sends my head to the angels. But —their palms sweating from televised guardianship— like sand, I’m whisked through the hourglass’ greatest compression point. Fluid, in that moment, and moving fast, I am.

Tired from carrying what chokes us. I follow the ocean in my ears as I crane my spine. I won't inquire; I'll make us each sit here in silence. The fight for security is on and I want my head above water. Ships in the night offer no life rafts.

The person coming to save you is also the one drowning: the duality of man. //

Why prolong the inevitable?

The loud passions you carry do not come with complementary validity. Tranquility is only a weakness for those uncomfortable alone. Purr the engine to soothe yourself. Grip the clutch just to feel close to control. Not so different, you and I. Where we vary is in speed, you running fast in sixth, me running confidently in third.

So I smile at strangers on autopilot and order myself breakfast for solo. Enjoy the taste of scrambled eggs without a side of dissociation. Consider how you seek connection, but it finds me. Drop in to a bowled world not my own. Where there is will, there are wheels.

For one becomes two before I have a choice in the matter. A metronome I've given a name. Calling out for it even though the transmitter is off.

And slit my throat you did. //

Because after 'I'm sorry' and 'Good luck' what else is left to say? Because once you’re gone, how could you ever come back? Because if the engine is shot, how will you kickstart it? The themes are getting tired. I must wash their sheets.

So I strip myself bare in the name of vulnerability. Dot my eyes by staring at the sun, cross my T's by saying Jesus in vain. Recognize it's okay if things

never stay the same.

Should I cut my hair or grow it? Au naturel or platinum blonde? You'll ask and I owe it, so I chew (your words) a little slower — gnashing at the bit of progress while I gnaw off my own arm. Hour 126 and hungry, holding on by a thread: please search but do not rescue.

And the things I sense become true: 'Where was the spider this time?' My sere garden, a heavy rain. Coincidences do not exist. I've drowned versions of your eight legs, I've slept in porcelain cages before — and refuse to be painted as a reckless bull; because, pray, why would you bring such a creature to a China shop in the first place?

'I hope you didn't take it personally.' Of course I did. But now, evidence in twenty-four contracted limbs. Almost a moon's-worth of lessons, pinching myself to remember the pain. Zig-zag up and down a sepia-stained alphabet only to wallow in the cyclone of a willow tree.

It's not if I'll find you again, but where. Will there be granola in your back pocket for my sinking blood sugar, or will you consume me right as I'm asked to be fed?

I carry sandbags in hurricanes. I am screamed at without flinching. I hug the people who kill me. I do all of it knowing I won’t be wished a happy birthday. //

Curse taking it slow and changing what you know for being such good friends. If the meanest thing you've ever read was written just like this, I'm sorry. Now or later, tattoo every thought on my skin — success contingent on scaring you off through speculation.

Only hope that your imagination is as hearty as mine and your tongue a moment quieter. I don't keep a seat open next to me, but there's space at the race gate. It is easier to float without water weight, it is easier to float with full lungs.

A common denominator makes decisions for me. I'd take hexed dwarves over agoraphobia; imagine a realm where your demons seem friendly.

I love the strategy you use, showing your hand only when ready for me to play it. I see your effort and do not fold except to your whim. I don't care how sore it makes me: I'll keep my fingers on your shoulder blade until the tips bleed.

Waiting for the weather to be nice to change the battery, an oxymoron for a cove resident in the year of el niño. Can only hope the desert welcomes me. Even your back-up plan is a treasure map, and so I do: love an enigma, save a cupid.

Everything well-produced has its place. Thank you, drum,

for putting me on beat. //

"Visually devouring everything in sight."

Hope you pause a little longer. Team player: do you see we're on the same side? Fast reveal but I'll always push on longer to see the reserve. You when you're tired, and the restraint is telling.

Comfortable with falling and falling backwards. A windward bow brings me back to a Tuesday version. A graceful fall only because you hit the ground hard. Call it. Lean in, try again. Not a spot for levity; leave your friends at home. Fly lower, closer to the ocean. Look left to grow, look right to learn, look ahead to stay safe. Try a trick harder knowing a pretty girl awaits at the end. Let me ask you how you're doing. Picket fence in your eyes, semi-translucent.

You're worried about me outside the house, I'm nervous about the company you keep within. A hand on my arm drives my hand to your arm. The reassurance is half-hearted. Is your confidence? An easy keep if you can contend with control. A kind soul if you can hold it together, chest out. Brainiac watching a jester fool and fail. You can't keep her safe from the high court, but you can attend all the shows, from beginning to beheading — the only support unrequited vices aside.

The first time I wrote about you, I knew I was in trouble. It's not long before you know all I feel. Not inherently romantic, but definitely, desperately, sincere. Brave is careless in heels. And you just think I jog my mouth? I am trying to crash, I am trying to hit the break. Longing is patience with makeup.

The left side of my chest feels good! Let's meet at a chapel in vagus. A sun that's thawed us both and I'm flurried to be blurry together. I'd smash every clock until you gave me your hands, and melt into this rug like waves into sand. Serve me on a platter, I'd offer my all just to gift you with language and miss you in the fall. So steal more than books, or take another bite. Promise the wind and I'll promise us flight.

Tastes like a tune, your name lyrics in my mouth. Happy everyday: the way Venice intended. Figuring us out is a feat in and of itself. Candid because you are, 'Can we?' because you're pure. I bite my tongue. One of us is gonna have to give.

Horoscopes tell me not to fret but to listen close would embrace the oblivious. Waiting for you to hear me and the silence is visible. Absences marked by eaten gummy bears. Caught wading deep in the eyes of another when the crush collapses. I am fueled by the sun and you're starting to see it's no joke.

I want to wake up and smell the mountains, not from memory. One who already knows the answer mistook camera rattles for a heartbeat. Wonder if you'll air out all our dirty laundry, leave it all for me to fold like you always did. Maybe it can be about everyone at once.

The anger doesn't actually fuel me. Why are people bad? I cry. Why am I bad? I sob. The bigger the audience, the more singular the performer’s caricature. I am not helpless in my limbs though it feels so. A lowly, permanently rotten tomato scored from bad plays prior.

When I focus on what hurts, it sounds better. For the sake of becoming more level-headed. I don't know how I feel until I mark my lines. Stage directions are vital but you haven't read the script. Improv: always better in theory.

Not mountain air from a mountain man, just mounds of memories. Music is best listened to in the dark. I sing your name. The cat comes instead. A shattered processing system, empty. //

Refinement. Crawling into bed too late. Those who care the most don't comment — they were up, too. Mutual animosity in that I would crash your car, and, you? Well.

I accept April will reliably bring rain. A grasshopper pulls appendages from an arachnid’s L-shell; one leg for each electron, the free space painfully powering covalent bonds.

The science of it all fashions failure: the method's favorite conclusion is concrete.

Dress in layers so we have something to striptease. Cashmere fabric for fingers calloused. Anything over a grand is a growl and not a purr, but backseat drivers are none the wiser. Aren't you glad you taught me?

Marque that's foreign, attitude that's extraterrestrial, and speed that's celestial. Hit the limit for fun. Surpass it for serious. If the asphalt is warmed by the sun so much so that the rubber of my knobbies wears thin — has it melted, or worn off? Is it the journey taking me down, or is it the environment?

Tear off the tires. Start a trash fire in the cauldron of our memories. Enthalpy liquifying highway mileage. Riding on hubcaps alone. Blink away thoughts to show love. Blank stares open to engrossment. Water and light. The mist off a waterfall and the spectra of a former blackhole. 'Come out!' you yell, so I peel droplets off my flow, fling them into the beyond. Free fall. I'm not caught. 'Where? Where are you?'

A voice from all corners. A spectacle for the tourists. A rainbow in a tropical wonderland procured from natural phenomena. In a world of wave-particle duality, you are one and I the other.

Is this how we exist? Flowing unobserved, diffracted when scrutinized? I haven't been a scientist for years. Away goes the microscope. Like light, we flux. Document it differently. Not an experiment, but, finally, an art piece. //

A house of stucco, imperfect but sturdy. Lips of another pressed into wet cement. A portion of drunk history I've got survivorship for. Prompts for an essay the maturation of my frontal lobe won't let me author.

Ask because information hurts less. I could never elucidate the imagination of my mental shark tank. Write to blood-let the iron solvent. Voices in underwater mercurial basins, consumption equally pernicious and delicious: a cultural specialty, cooked by the shame of the living.

Yank the chains towards the sky; effort without metallic abrasion. Raspy yet garbled, drowned so deeply I've dried. Bake me and I'll burn, remove the heat and I'll dissolve. Only the pulse of another, the intermittent signaling of proprioception, a nerve overgrown so far it loops down to toes before initiating its u-turn, could defibrillate.

Back up it climbs. Bop and weave to the tingle and jingle of half-filled capillaries. Bury Lucy to reconcile the mice murdered by cyanide; held life, held life-saving. Look for stained-glass windows and you'll find the closest thing to humanity on a campus designated to its degradation.

A pool of lust dyed suspiciously scarlet. Learned young not to put the defiant on a leash — swim in the oil slick as if dawn could save you from the dark, an insoluble pair of claws and cotton. Sew it back together only to create breaking points at the intersection of unprofessional sutures.

Call mother down a half-flight of stairs with no carry-on. Hurtful but salvaged, a tongue carbonates insults of care. Into the rafters clammers a cat scared of construction, unaware the entrance and exit are one in the same. Panels narrow the path, bookends to a series transformed by new management. Will you read a story you haven't loved since you were a child?

Stained socks so I keep my heels on the ground. A hull so empty it's a husk, more buoyant than ever. Emigrate to the countryside of my pituitary, in the gutters of self-realization.

Turbulence in the city's skyscraper wind tunnels. Wonder if weeks of high-fashion will put me out of style, a contrarian of timelessness. If mane and tail take you further, let us birth a babe; a foal of folie à deux, delusion in the puppets of twin ids. Tag between the inner children of the cuckoo's nest's longest patients.

Until I cough up my lung's last lobe, I will smoke a cigarette for every minute I miss you. //

Murphy's Law: You walk in. The choker around your neck a reminder of dog days' ventriloquists.

Not invited — notably distinct from uninvited, yet the heartbeat of your heels clacks the tile floor of a bar too extravagant for our credit lines.

A brainchild of the ostentatious. I blink daymares away, at the mercy of altruism. I answer with wisdom, only for them to ask again. Red handed with a black jacket; whatever it is you know lies within my realm of reason but not truth.

I don't fight with weapons — but if I did, I'd drop the mask. I'd drop the armor.

I return to bed cold with sheets that are colder and ruminate on the concept of coming home: Have not we always been? Another day, another sip from the fountain of age. I let the smile lines define me; I turn the pencil back right-side up. Nothing left to erase and everything left to say.

Blank pages don't startle reckless hearts — the reasons I stay up at night in waiting for the sunrise. Bump hips on corners of a round table only Merlin can explain; give symmetry to the bruises you lay.

In the corner of a world only speckled in gold is the most resplendent egg: a miracle, a herald, a gulp of water in the desert. I grasp not at pearls but at beads, until elastic snaps my tripartite back to the known. The gap was never significant.

The afterparty speaks your name both loud and small. For once, I forget proper nomenclature, but still, I hear little I do not recognize. Another trails behind me, but I take no solace in the company. Wish you took the more traveled road, leaving doubt where the fork meets your mouth.

Chuckling but homeward bound, I search my soul for anger. Alas, locked in the chakras of another. A breath into the belly. Assurance in knowing I chose right; that out of infinite possibilities, I opted for favorable plan alpha, leaving you with an atrophied amygdala and the principles of Pavlov at your doorstep.

Because if it can, it will: the dirtiest of flaws. //

Two young daughters. I don't need to think hard about how they both look just like you. Not a love poem, not like that, not from me, but full —stuffed— to the brim with appreciation; a new sort of adoration.

Not a first stanza first draft sort of gal; presumably the first thing you noticed in session one. Not seeking perfection, sole progress. Are you ready to admit you're outgrowing this?

Emotional labor at a finite cost, but I get my money's worth and you work hard for a dollar. Being spiraled. Spun out by daily deliveries of the universe's favorite impermanences. Process information before there's more. You, a radio tower. Me, a local search effort for a missing girl.

I've found you in the hearts of others, authoring from the back seat of a car. Handwriting that shifts with the suspension. I am thankful to have found advice that travels with me. Highway speeds match my neural pathways, but I am cognizant of switching to the slow lane, for once, for all of us. As my own well runs dry, another friends joins our ride. Conversation that lasts for miles.

Form a mental to-do list, something I hold in duality with a six-hour drive. Under the moonroof, solar waves beating down on skin already pink. Sing flowers into sand, scarf snacks from a gas station well-attended. A motorcycle on our left for two, but the cager feels right.

Pieces of past we pass along. A network of friends who chow on raw broccoli and blisters from a barely-finished trail. Slit my wrists with the sharps of your canine teeth. Ruby pools match a sunset on iron arches. Sit on delivered knowing the silence is an answer.

Wash my hands with soap in a scent your favorite. Eat a meal because I know it's good for me. I can barely keep myself upright, so I stop trying. A bed that's my own finally feels comfortable, but still I fall asleep to a dial tone lullaby.

On average, once a day. Not bad for a newbie. In another month's time, a short expo. In two, a book. In three, a story. Finally, my timelines align. It hurts worse than ever.

All this to myself?

I guess. //

Crossed property lines and chokehold children. Scratch marks from a black cat beget growls from the elderly French woman kneading dough in my window. Parentified disgust evolves under pressure, unraveled into my blood by necessity like oxygen at altitude.

Crush a beer at summit to pull trig at the foot of the tent. A million creatures around but the only animals are us. Juvenile territorialism no match for a sense of adventure in a meadow recognized for its tranquil inertia.

Off the beaten path with all the intent to embrace the beatnik. No hippie but certainly on something. Sugar? Peaches? The performative name of a gal accompanying the property's sole shotgun.

If the fog falls, we'll die out here: an outcome we both silently embrace together. Later ailments will retroactively wish for missed guardrails and more hail, a permanent conclusion with sadistic coziness that juxtaposes a pitched abode hungering for caloric calefaction.

Fabricate a fever to be served a warm meal; the worst of the stagecraft for premium care — and I obliged, because I owe you. But if I didn't? Then I'd ration the rice and split the movie credits and ask the prints of your fingers to sacrifice in the cold for a moment.

But I did, and I did, so I didn't.

A router in a landfill and a sleeping bag filled only with the restless. Sustenance in dense trail mix to keep the weight low in more ways than one. I drag down the suspension with gooey gravity, raising the front wheel for you only when we climb. A gas guzzler. Worth it for the perpetuity of flight.

You smile so I do: cosmic mimicry. Ask for adoration and I'll always perform; method acting in a local theatre, a lease in your name that outlasts a love of the show. Audition repeatedly, a cast I'd never quit. I am every character.

Stare out the window of a car that's not mine, figuring out how to sit without myself passenger-side. A retro camper and a new-age idiot. I hope your travels take you wide but not far. I hope one day you look up and ask, 'How did I get here?'

And no one but the wind answers.

'Because you traveled alone,' she howls. The hard of motorcycle maintenance.

Howl back. //

Curious about me or curious about who I make you? A situation where you don't choose space upon security. Reverberate discomfort off jail cell walls. Reasonably crazy — the way we both like it. How long until the well is built? I'm thirsty, so parched. Your facade, a mirage.

If you can see me as a prize, why won't you play? Sleep with someone else — a participation trophy. When the singularity is old news, will the wheel still land on you? Desire predicated on desire: I'll answer for you.

Who do you share with first these days? Oh, still not yourself. The record player scratch of an audiophile, a voice that didn't satisfy the bilateral itch, wasn't music to my ears, never sung me to sleep. I finish a poem about you with hate in my heart.

I once told a lover I hope every day hurts for him like they do for me — later to take it back, take back the take-back, and take it all back, altogether, after a nightmare where piercing blue eyes nailed my knees to a crosswalk across a King Arthur-sized sinkhole in a city we grew up in together, though raised hometowns apart.

I think now about how I meant it and wished he could too, so I could justify my actions and crucify his. I realize now neither of us believe in sinners. Just people, wrong place, right time, to learn the most painful lesson of all:

Those we have loved and lost are so, so beautiful,

And we are better for having known them.

Trust equals trophies and art fosters trust and so I nickle and dime my free time to carve a space for what the universe allows me to love most: time in my head. //

A backpack in one hand and a pen in the other. A mushroom sprouting in my stomach changes the course of the pH in my brain. A psychiatric conference for the loonies a similar breed as me.

Air is warm; breakfast for dinner, borrowed weaponry, a spilled gatorade of someone too ill to travel. A two-way ticket for one. Not restless but certainly free.

Travel while your notifications are off, push plans another week out. Dream of a dream — risk it for the creative plot. The threat is no more than a literary device.

Spend the twilight defining my style. Curtsy because it's courteous, show up in sweats because manners don’t matter. The maximalism can be handled under any circumstance imagination affords. Break the windows. A system of unknown. A world accessible by all, always. Emerge from the tunnel.

Did you know I can write in the dark? Matter of fact, I have the whole time. Wonder about the carbon monoxide notes I've left myself, noxious and welcomed all the same. Hope I haven't over-complicated things.

Squint to artificially end the trip. Less art came out than expected, which can only mean more growth than originally anticipated. Highways together are my independence and cohesion. Lusterless eyes’ light sensitivity, channeled into fearlessness.

Now for the clever part. I realize I never washed my hands, and another angel delivers just want I need when I need it. She doesn't know it's my finger bleeding, but also the prospect of more blood if I dare reach for my own supply.

Onlookers look on but I mind, pyschonaut. Degrees of caffeine measured in celsius, powered by none, energy I continue to borrow.

Simply recharging, I explain. Cockroaches on the bus, I elaborate.

Bemused, our content styles are borders apart. You won't drop it so I lay us to rest. Will a notebook, handheld, give me the place I've been looking for? Odds low, unlikely better. Enough to start a conversation, enough to hope my personality takes it further.

If you notice, then you're already there. //

Lysergimides. Your son. A front door. Broken in. By the wayside are a family's super-8 home videos; luckily, ruined by an actor. The children you raise mere isomers, opposite in the color wheel.

Called it — similar if not the same. Heart rate versus blood pressure. Contributions of our consciousness. Adrenal glands: the rate at which we run?

Suspending the inability for participants to delineate, how can we attribute the presence of "bad" to either heart rate, blood pressure, or neither?

An ode to the psychedelic experience. Literality is unnecessary; the wonder is the goal. Kick him out of Catholic school, make it economically viable. The sky is not the limit but the mind is. Be guided by yourself. Use the medicine to ask for the gift of art, like those before us.

"Everything I see, I see in beads." The importance of the question, "What is real?" (Or in my words, "Where am I?") Not a dichotomy, but a duality. Implied existence: be okay with it. It’s different from vanity.

The opportunity to ask why. Make the identity bleed. Accessible imagination — like retro Disney on a sick day, fever breaking to Fantasia. "Not on, but on her path." An art-chive in the making.

Wait patiently at the feet of giants. Your shoulders, would you let me climb? And instead I wait at roots for the moment to strike — Newton's apple, red delicious, in the palm of my hands. I can only pray that metaphysics will come naturally.

Is everyone in Silicon Valley really getting high? (Yes.) Forward thinkers in a backwards field. Default mode network. No more cop-outs; we know enough. God in the gaps. Unsatisfactory explanations.

"The brain is only as interesting as the mind."

Is the drug just a reaction? Is the twitch enough to measure? Routine-shattering, lost for seconds. //

A back of the head catches attention. Recognize I am not looking for anyone in particular, seeking familiarity, and more ideally, warmth. Use the anxiety to generate heat, drink your absence like the thermos of a blizzard’s Bernard.

Use caffeine to numb the numb. Fire results in ash, and the grey matter makes more sense. Memories fade in a manner that's fuzzy. Joints we'll never smoke, missing moments un-had. Are the best stories fiction? Are my best tales in a book I've already read? Stuck reading the collection serially until my favorite author —only author— releases a finale. And I, and I am at the edge of my seat, as if I could not guess the ending.

Thought too much about forever, not enough about marketability. Coming on strong, or coming on correct? Use the freezing cold to jumpstart bravery. If I must keep myself warm, I most certainly will light myself on fire: a notion that has gotten a bad rep.

Neuroplasticity versus brain topography. Have I found the people just like me? What's your method? I wish I didn't need to be older to talk, but I know I am unfounded. It doesn't change your perception; it gives you the permission to ask. Crazy, or simply unorganized?

Constructs of knowing plus an upright structure of sensory perception necessitates a Sim City-leveling of the landscape. Recognize our breathing results in visual hallucinations to foster a sense of perspective; to not trust even our eyes. After that, only the mind —and soul— remains.

Colorful verbiage. Misplaced dictionaries never felt better. Watch a group of future friends wave goodbye. Do you share tips and tricks? Will you attend an afterparty even as a VIP?

Line up my accomplishments just to notice they're all bronze. See the value in third place: young enough to (me); old enough to (you). A misplaced resume. I know the answer I'll get. Ask anyway. //

Inappropriately dyed, you and me both. Roots showing; where are you from again? High-level transitions and a genuine thank you. Last minutes plans I cancel to alter my life path. And so, I do it. Someone just like me, confirmed what my neurons already know. The power to go beyond, the propensity to overdo it, the assurance that I will not. A shaman in the form of a conversation. Ceremoniously and cellularly, we shake hands. Another I've known before.

An electric ouija board I rip my palms from. A silence I can't seem to find. Screams my friends can't hear, unsure if I'm really making a sound. It's a dream I can't wake up from until my hands are free; reconnecting my appetites and charioteer is the only way out.

Float in an ocean all-pink. Dress in leather, prepare for road rash. Onset based on what you ate, so mine metabolizes on-sight — eyes bigger than my stomach. Ecosystems have few prime predators, but they are always the protagonists of stories told.

An academic prenup that’s ours mutually. A network of laissez-faire distribution, galvanic spores in a petri dish. The lab of a children's shows’ main characters, a gyroscope of possibility. Paisley is out of style but I appreciate its influence.

A contrarian forces a moderator. It's permissible to daydream; I'm surprised a head in the sprouts didn't teach you that. A turn of the century means nothing; the here has always been now. If someone else beats us to it, we will all be closer.

Seepage sounds bad until you see flowers growing in sidewalk cracks.

Beautifully-said is the only compliment I'm after (but I'll accept Wow in a pinch). We are the cultures we honor, we are the trees we are not friends with.

A hive that prefers absurdism over nihilism. Allow all the bees to exist. The path can change at any moment. Make a list and find solace in that alone. Lose yourself fully, or, just enough to be curious. I can only hope you are where I land.

It’s true: the map was always in your hand. //

Every version has different taste, but they can eat at the same restaurant. Preferences are human, comparison is soulless. Seeds planted just before frontal lobes formed. An ode to the pioneers, in and out of justice before I could even be conscious. Can widespread and sacred exist together?

I ask the moon to visit me in his entirety, something I know he can only do once a month (if you stand in the right place, squint at the right angle). I wish I could hold you like the sun, an orb cataclymiscaly eclipsing my vision. Stare any cosmic object down so deeply but no amount of unrequited eye contact will stop the globe I reside on from spinning. I'd love you harder yet it'll never halt the orbit. Myself a circle, you an ellipses, even when we overlap we bicker about whose presence overshadows the others, as if our being together does not already implicate that we are one and the same.

For once, I am not the universe experiencing itself, but stepping outside this parallelogram, subverting dimension, reaching the predecessor of the Big Bang: another timeline. So badly I ache for the space-time continuum travel, but the particles I am derived from cannot join the matter.

B.C. versus A.D., you find it impossible to mend the cultures. Inuit, butterfly, the regular kind — what I'd give to have your face near mine. Stick around long enough just to see me leave. Finally my harrowing heart turns sensical.

Guns drawn and we're standing a personhood apart. Wonder if this'll be the shot that puts me six feet under. A town big enough for the two of us, but a city too small. I take the hint and choose my own destiny, and now we sit on a property unfamiliar; a set reminisces of my worst memories, the tragic of a futuristic web. I wish you'd be here, but what is new — alone is the best way to appreciate you.

Understanding the moon never got very many of us off of Earth. //

Face frustrations head-on. Having taste is invaluable without the solutions. You want to read the illegible, as if your eyes could make more sense of it than mine. Take the turn too fast knowing the wheels will upright. To travel is to learn to love coming home.

On the hunt for a trip, a bus to everywhere when I'm on one. Only the artists hear that unconvincingly. Avoid overcompensating. Use a calibrated compass; catching feelings clearly means something different to both of us. A pet skunk I've likely not outlived. Coarse and soft all the same.

I'd complain but I am one of them: a body restless standing still. Without direction. Left unsupervised. A permanent conversationalist. Could the second half be warmer?

Under the seventies sun, a shadow outlines my digits as a braid wilts on a beach towel. The devil is my friend, too — he got me flowers. A preparative measure, and one that works. It isn't long before a knock at the window, a hyperbolic pebble or scroll ribonned around a pigeon's ankle, to carry the actions further. Our new chapter one. Plan a photographic shoot of the same bouquet.

A whirlwind in the arms of another. Scrunch your eyes and purse your lips, subcutaneous emotions you hold tight when you should release them most. In the wake of fame, the call list missing a cameo from your name. Cross-legged and facing north — critical view of mountain tops outside our basin. Grass mowed flat and I find my home, the attention received unwarranted, unwanted, unwilled.

A floral, lemon-lined pathway overlooks a realm unreal, buffering a situation even more absurd, and the tangible volley of posterity between the high and low frames. Me, as a net — mesh, genderless, and observant.

Been a while since a gardener trimmed these hedges, the human of the otherwise purely botanical. Bang the gong to ring in a misplaced party. Kick my feet up on a bench burned hot and hold my back tighter to avoid the heat, but scraped knees find a way to scald in the kindest of conditions. I pray a rushed entry makes it to the final draft but recognize that the importance is in the practice. There's no ritual to it for me, just second nature and a future of wasted papyrus.

I hope the knowledge falls short of your ears. The guilt doesn’t obstruct my sunrise routine. Rash decision will ruin dynamics but not my trajectory, and should the plot be shared, your character will play along. Rest us on geometric patterns. Poolside and UV-deep. I swim among the coffee beans of a final espresso martini and inspire another. Caffeinated angel nightmare girl; I wish more would heed my warnings.

The artificial foundation rumbles under unfamiliar footsteps, and this is before the fun has begun. The days we do not wish to party, we must celebrate most. One hat, one guest; in your absence, we shall toast. //

A little gas back in the tank and my clutch is squirrelly. No patience for others, certainly none for myself. Only here because we never heard avalanches. It's tough when the cosmic burst burns at first. A pair of tall socks, thick soled shoes, and an outfit in one piece. Something to hold my hair back, a pen. Pack a backpack and walk a marathon. They say I'm doing well, they say it's an inspiration, they say keep going: I don't think they know where I'm really at.

I'm getting stuck in my head again and I'm having trouble feeling my toes. I want a Versailles surrounded by an arboretum of Gingko trees. Glass-front on the oceanfront is the goal but, like leaves in fall, I don't know how long I can hold on, especially in the cold — please, won't you help me stay tethered?

Can you tell just where I lost my mind, in the middle there? You counted sheep to sleep while I was lulled by the waterboarding rhythm of a tennis ball's wall-deep thuds, noises on impact I aligned with the in and out of my breath as I fell asleep alone for the first time. Nothing sweet about it. I still have fountain drinks on the days I reward good work with a walk to a second location, something I do not take for granted now.

Churn through sounds outside my window. Fever trickles back in. I pull back more easily than we give me credit for. Shedding pet names that feed neither of us well. The empty pages really are farther apart now. Learning to look left in smaller doses now. Bite-sized are the interactions I adore the most. We are not hard to love. And I hope the drowsy kicks in soon because I'm replaying scenes from a movie you hate.

It hasn't been long and I'm in no shape for socializing, but I wish you'd ask anyway. I've got acetaminophen in my blood and time tastes like pennies. They think I’m lying about being sick but sometimes avoidance is convenient. Would kill for an ice pack to the brain or a hand in my hair equally; without one or the other, it surely will. Can't help but wonder if you're more connected to it. The plates aren't spinning together.

Going back further than I thought. I had the right idea in a dream long ago, when we first started tripping — when I first started falling. It's not arbitrary if you achieve it. What I'd give to swim in kelp forests as kids again. Wallow in the white space that is time. It's drenching my lungs. Tinnitus louder than ever but it feels beautifully quiet; I am sinking into stress’ screams. Ailment is a purgatory that teaches you, This is your home. The locks haven't been changed but still I feel protected by these four walls. Mandy is happy again; you were always so mean to her. I vow to sleep more. //

This is the page where I tell you all that it might not work out. I'm past feeling sick and tired; I am them. That I am on my third pair of cheap sunglasses this week because they keep finding eternity beyond my reach. That my rent's too high and my morale is sinking. That I've got someone old I have to keep repeatedly breaking things off with, someone new that will probably call it quits before me (they did), and freelance work I can barely bring myself to finish. That —ultimately— I'm not sure what happens if I run low again. That the things I love and own are breaking. This is the page where I tell you all I wish it easier to write. The weeks where I fall into a rut again, where I succumb to one sabotage or another, and sit so painfully still while brain zaps sadistically punish. A page where I admit I wish someone would come over, rock me back and forth, turn the systems back on, and keep me warm while we work through it, while we work through me. A page where I admit even though I RSVP'd, I would've showed up empty-handed and empty-brained, so I stayed home. Where I point out that even if I wanted to, my body and bank account have colluded to keep me solo and silent for a little longer. A page where a million pipe dreams funnel into the ocean and tides pull me past the sandbars where I flail and flail and insist — 'This isn't drowning! It's not drowning if I can still swim!' A page where I tell the truth so well it feels like lying. A page you'd publish for me if I don't make it. Simply busy trying to become the person I was always meant to become, a process much more expensive and tiresome than anyone had informed me. I didn't put my mask on before helping others. The only page I'll consider adding a date to, the only page I might use for temporal context. It's also the page where I point out how many avenues of success mean it might all work out — how could it not when anything goes and everything counts? A page where I attempt the manifesting, where I tempt fate by beating her to the plot line, by sitting front row to a cosmic writers' room, and cutting off my own oxygen supply to show I'm serious about the space I take up. A page where I admit I'd be broke forever if it means being heard before curtains close on my black hole. Where the love feeds me more than the grocery haul, keeps me warmer than alpaca sweaters, and bathes me in rose water so much so that I'll baby powder my roots longer than I should and let salt water wash a bleached and messy mane.

A page where I admit I am so desperate to be understood, to have this story written right, that I will live at the mercy of life for a little longer.

A sole entry from the universe's youngest daughter’s diary.

These must be the rainy days I saved for. On we go. //

Be okay with the way history rewrites you, no matter how unfavorable; so okay with the sense of self that duplicated falsehoods roll off your tailbone like ocean foam during low tide as the moon retracts what's left of the malleable. I asked you to kill your ego and you only made it stronger. I asked you to dig the grave you'll die in and get in, knowing your legacy could end.

I asked you to trust I'd toss you rope, give you a pulley when the depth and your height matched — to see those on the surface as capable of lifting you up when you trust only that we'll push you in. I asked you to say goodbye first, to choose a story with an intermission, elevator music to a biography not singularly-authored. Instead you shove funeral-goers into a pit you-shaped, softening the inevitable fall from a ground floor that has never met grace.

Bodies stack bodies, and it's only half sensual. From the well reach hands, weaving through the nest of severed limbs of similar demise, to see if salvation awaits in the sunshine. But bodies on top know better, know more await a fall, know to enjoy fading UV auras. Know soon, they will just be hands, reaching.

Close my eyes just enough to see my heartbeat rattle my eyelashes, pulsing nociceptors that harmonize with the rhythm of my juice. Sit in traffic for an opportunity and stretch until filling the space comes naturally of tendons that haven't been exercised in quite some time. Keep contractions and contradictions alike to myself. Quit interrupting, a policy for life in the name of lent.

Radicalized listener, I give my brain permission to wander. The daydream isn't maladaptive; the environment shouldn't be adapted to. Not young again, energy that makes me feel older endlessly, a soul infinitely on fire. A room bigger empty. A curator over an interior designer — we all love what's on display, so I keep nothing for my collection. I hope to host you, for however long. Embarrassing when the limerick hits.

Is this what you're talking about? Nope. Something different. //

A shadowy visitor during daylight hours. We make eye contract and it's new for us. You walk off instead of running, and it dawns on both me and your obsidian coat that I miss the anxiety.

I don't want just a smile that returns after we work this out; I want a forever and after. How will I hold her, and tell her it started with a broken spine of a book unread, a fairytale of a girl's shell, and the best she could do was stuff her shape instead of molding it?

We can't tell the kids. We can't tell the kids — so I don't; pack a little lighter, fry my tear ducts in the sun, apologize for being a writer. For believing in the plot. For knowing that stories don't peak at the beginning.

I refuse to fast-forward to the crescendo again. Marching to my own beat, more often dancing to it. Unlike me, can you keep time?

Going in unarmored but bulletproof: the heroine always makes it to the end. //

Cut and dry; low on serotonin. Burn receptors so you can trust your gut. Delegate because alone is exhausted. Skin pink and eyes blue — do you wanna swim on the stars? You won't believe the rockets I'd ridden lately, on my way up to the endless expanse.

An artist's home is in the sky, where exploding is commonplace — necessary to all the space. Get me close-up while you launch me far. I'll leave pieces of me scattered among the anti, but worry not. From globes away, constellations found will spell my name.

Those we adore so strongly we'd put the non-cardiac versions on display. Laugh and point and mock my name, and I will write all the same. If I've learned but one thing, it's that the pride is always worth the shame.

From great heights I still hear songbirds sing, chirps that go for miles.

No rocket fuel or launch pad sequence could kill the sound of your smile. //

Praying upwards the exhaustion is temporary

Feeling the beat of songs never heard in my bones

Honoring the journey by loving the bus ride

Developing film of people alive and gone

Pushing to prove the nonsense is cosmically relevant

Cutting out paper figurines like it's elementary school

Taping nonsense to the walls and wearing my heart in my wallpaper

Letting myself climb the highs and slide the lows

Pressing pause only when the black cat lets me

Learning to fall backwards and trust board balance

Engaging my arches and abandoning my ego

Borrowing friends' personalities and clothes for the weekend

Crashing on the couch, including my own

Coughing not because I have too much air, but too little

Allowing the ocean her mind, and taking the advice

Transcribing runes and slaying demons in my own wilderness

Measuring the distance between messages like it matters

Being gentle with myself when it once again doesn't

Noticing it's never about the emotions, just the expression

Throwing it all away with no intent of prefacing of it

Refusing to define "it" or what I'm looking for

(Nothing serious; just everything)

Slipping back into alternative indie bedroom rock pop

Sweating out the years of tough that lived skin-deep

Draining the hormones from my system and smelling summer

Showering twice because my muscles run hot and late

Doing anything, always, over and over

Doing everything just to do it alone. //

Because lovers lose themselves in you;

A sentence I can't bear to finish.

Wipe your feet before you ever step foot near my stomping grounds again.

And how dare you trespass, breaking safety for your continued emotional drive-by.

Don't you know I built this?

Don't you know? I built this.

I am not going to tell the story with respect because my sword is wordsmithed.

I see you. Moments in time, grasps for control. I don't doubt you're changing. But you are bullish until then and the road ahead is longer than possibly time itself. Writer's block, because it's been past time to write in past tense.

SOME PEOPLE REQUIRE SEVERAL

A few years is fine

LIFETIMES TO LEARN THEIR

Maybe even inevitable, some might say

LESSON — DO NOT LET THEM

Just beware

CONSUME YOURS IN THE

Reinfection

PROCESS

You won't know what's making you sick until it's too late;

until you're feverish in December,

until you're cold in June. //

Some things better processed off-paper. Some things I'll never sit still for. Forego the healing because there will be stories to write about when it hits. You have no idea how badly I've been needing the stability. This is just a draft and I've been holding forever against myself.

Throats can't unchoke themselves and I've been keeping quiet. Abandon the penmanship in the same pile I leave the clothes you rip off. Divine feminism driving it all but I forgot to glow, to carry my weight. For a moment, stress test me. Always bend not break, and, I can (and will) pause when necessary.

I'm going to kiss the poet.

Shiver because my spine is back on. Fight the urge to think about it on my feet. The doorways all feel like ghostly portals so I stay on the safety of a child's blankie. Spend forever trying to trace it back.

Fight the pen. Just make it work is a lesson that feels individually learned. I am distraught thinking about linguistic trees and how they've broken me and won. I can't seem to let go of being understood. It clicks:

How you distort reality, eat time, operate infectiously

And oh, I get it now. Wasted art! Writings that'll go unpublished because that means us, you and I, owning a story jointly when you can't be trusted. It's not me that needs to go.

You make people (plural) want to scream and only you can grapple with the embarrassment of that. I'm fine with the messy ending. Everything after the night friends found a new common enemy is just damage control. The plot has been over. You can't read and the lack of comprehension is a cross to bear.

Rest in peace to all your enablers — when the devil you too he consumes. //

All of this leaves only acts of service. Eyes in the sky, I skip stars and not stones. Rejection of the light that touches shadows. Even in the infinite and limitless, corners exist as the pinnacle of aphelion moments, as the derivative of the parabola itself. Already a function, the speed of speed.

I explore my interests now with the scholarly attitude they deserved when I was busy dying.

Each new discovery cures a letter of the alphabet. Not one to envy the replacement of a hypervelocity star. Warn you from the safety of my own solar system: I didn't save any of the telescope printouts.

Sometimes I see myself here. The processing may always feel like regression. What color do you gift the rainbow? How do you join a system when all the solar roles are filled?

If I delete the data, another researcher finds the noble. If I incorporate it, I must admit I am prone to the entropy of it all; that I am just as likely to contain holes and tugs and interstellar vagabonds. If I see the transit light and don't confront the hypothesis that the exoplanet might be mine, what type of astronomer am I, really?

If there is blocked light, the transit exists and implies different stars are being orbited. "Similar galaxies" — meaningless in the shadow of limelight. To join the orbit is to be an exoplanet to your own sun, star, and, quite possibly, soul.

Disruption: a binary star system creates eccentric star orbits. And the width of separation increases the danger, destroying p-type binaries, individually good for stars meant to be solo but devastating to a star dependent or expecting the periapsis. Luminosity and gravity. Only for the sun may they be the same.

Starfucker is an intergalactic insult. //

My kneecaps soften in the desert. Dunes of time, mountains I've climbed. Equipped with none other, finally, than well-marketed insanity. A price to pay for adventure, along with the nightmares. Let me rest at your inn for the eve.

Sorry that the war stories imply war crimes. I am not oblivious to the roach I am close to waking up as. I know the gist of what I wrote, and I take it back.

And never again will I forget a reliable narrator sits upon a humble and ever cast-aside iron throne, ruling over a sandy expanse that is hers and hers alone, and houses a buried library from which only she reads, because it is the desert, and therefore, she aught more carefully consider the morality of book burnings.

And while the argument usually ends when stories lost are foretold, not enough consideration is given towards the reality that the desert also gets cold. Live among the sand and you'll learn a lesson new:

If it cannot be packed down, it should not be carried;

and if it cannot be carried, do not leave it behind, but instead wait for nightfall and use campfire stories to sing you to sleep. History will be rewritten regardless — at least let it keep you warm.

The stories an opposition tells were not only fantasized through whisper down the lane, but carried to a land we have no desire to conquer. And, even if we did, oh, what a different language we'd meet them with altogether.

So with all this in mind —in a desert where we burn books and eat your words as a sunrise snack— what story is it, exactly, you're trying to tell?

And remember, as you narrate:

Though it is dry, we are not parched. //

Slow responses. Something that only happens on your end. I hug the skeletal shoulder blades of creatures I never get to eat. Wires crossed but a preference for optional axon hopping over cognitive highway speeds. Gaslit creativity calls itself crazy.

Writing takes you out of existence before you even find footing. Odd ground, sorry for the mess. My creature comforts haven't been working. There will not be niceties next to your name. The only way to be happy is to give love freely — in tears, I scream, I cannot tell if the two contradict one another.

Writers always seem off a rocker, only because no one else would dare record the thoughts we all share however stored alongside vintage treasures in a hidden attic they are. Preparations because I'll take another. Preparations because the previous hasn't worn off. Everything just footnotes of a story yet to be written in the distant future, should we believe such intertwined truths to not be happening simultaneously.

It gets cold so quick I forget it's the same sky that sunburned me. When I told you I had nothing left, I wasn't explaining, I was persuading. I took the time to understand the cats and now I know what we're on the lookout for (Prosper). Good for morale, but neither helps nor hinders.

Never start a story with temporal context. Focus so intensely on your why that it drives you. Cautious with my motives so I don't become what almost killed me. Water is most difficult to stay present with when it is warm. Keep the bangs short and avoid touching your face until you know, for sure and finally, that hands have been washed clean.

Spitting and sputtering, everyone has thrown their tomatoes and bananas and oranges but I am still here, arms full, missing embraces as guavas rot in my hands. It is unfortunate that we humans are so porous, and the mold seeps into skin.

It'd be easier to toss the fruit should its muse ever take center stage, but public criticism is an enemy to ego and ego will rot a full fruit tree without ever tasting the produce, let alone bear the consequences of its poor taste.

It's fruitless to fertilize a dying tree. At least deceased root systems still prevent landslides for a little longer, but a premonition alludes to flooding. Calling on the gods when monsoon season is already in store only angers them. A cruel younger sibling they'll now send in their place. Please don't mistake the limb stew for branches over roots when it all turns to mud. //

If you like to draw, I like to think I'm not a problem. Sparse sensory transduction never led to good reception.

Love what we forget so we can learn it all again. A storm on the horizon is enough reason to lower your sails. Rough-housing is fine with an ultraviolet home; new jerseys await for the children of absorption. Freedom of the mind, space between stereocilia, room to lag, room to tough out a crowd.

Intelligence and enthusiasm are either so thoroughly intertwined, or identical.

Through the roof and over the moon, wish I could spend forever in already-June. Dive head-first into the unavoidable entropy. Relish in an undetermined future, sing accolades of love; a sense of humor developed and delivered — shared.

A hand shaky can be both unsure and brave. Dilute your meal to tame the salt but you could never water down the ocean. The only place a pen has left untouched: the shore. Why crack my back when you could help me stretch?

If you wouldn't put it in a museum: stop. You're not from around here; your hair is brassy. No bunkbeds, no wheelies. The bridges of our noses touch. If a page scares you off, a book undone, undressed, a spine you'd never kiss; you bound by leather and, I, by spell. Variety — once again everything is spilled on the floor.

Messes are puzzles we haven't yet learned to appreciate. Falling in love is family game night in the making. It's okay if you flip my table. We'll be playing again tomorrow. //

Hesitancy to start a new page. Unopened packages, unorganized sock drawer, messy mental processes all physical manifestations of a new chapter gone avoided.

This is gonna be hella hypocritical, but could we postpone? The migraines are back and I’m out of everything, especially me. Bummed by a to-do list left incomplete in the absence of others.

Don't let a silhouette fool you. The most painful wounds are only surface-deep, archaeology of lymphatic trauma and the many mass graves of bad days. Pray that the oil slick inside my cocoon transforms from bug soup into working extremities before the string to stability snaps and I rest among failed monarchs.

Read the manual. Misinformation versus missed inspiration, wrong against gone. More in common with cobblestone than we think. My hair so dry that my thoughts use it as kindling. Listening to music mistuned to mood until the vibe shifts to third-person. I would never ask the ocean to be gentler.

Act like a ghost. Your empty occupation is no haunting to me. Enough apparitions and we can make this thing an exhibit. You worry about being a choking hazard, I've already architected swallowing you whole.

Sorry for smoking again. Your indifference will leave you hexed; a warning never yielded. Information is not a timeline. Attention or direction — at least one is required.

Trade facts for feelings, tracks for autopilot playlists. I don't believe in bad timing. Goodnight, to a match made in nowhere. //

There's nothing good that comes from telling them.

--Ah, but the retelling is what's good.

Tell the story anyway. Write like this is the only timeline. Shy away only from the curtains behind which you hide. Let light into the corners of the room. For once, uninhibited by the interior design. A spider in your house always has eight legs, always sits in the corner, no matter your postal code.

A breech in the canopy layer. Hide sunlight's greatest power: growth out of revelation that nature has left yet another gap, spare resources, and good demand. Let the bugs be a sign you haven't built them a proper home.

If you find a spider, buy it a potted plant, and then avoid interaction indefinitely.

Sink deeper into a futon. Miss the sheets of a bed since sold, an apartment moved out of. The petals of a flower that blooms only in the beginning of summer droop. Hummingbirds replaced, and we lose the ability to go backwards. New swimsuit for different tan lines, but still I leave the beach equally scorched. Be okay with how this set of string patterns foolishly appears under favorite outfits; preemptively farewell how good they look under closet staples. A long-standing problem? Who could've guessed!

Weaving a safety net to avoid persecution from an empty jury. Never bathe in hypotheticals. Let it sleep for a few moons. Rest with eyes open in case my nightmares visit again. Karmic police are after you and they hold me hostage when the sun sets. What have I been up to? Avoiding getting down.

How much I've gotten rid of without a dedicated trashcan could be studied in a Netflix series. I am young; my heart can take it. There's no danger in leaving the notebook out. Nothing comes out of this hand that hasn't slipped out of these lips on more than one occasion.

Monkey-see, monkey-do is not an observation, it's a command. I am on this ground to solve the helplessness. Please don't approach — I don't know if it's the ending or the paralysis in its wake that I am afraid of, but it gives me dusk-time terrors all the same.

Absolving the internal monologue makes the thoughts have shadows, like they're too close to the playroom in my brain. Without a voice I am weaponless to defend myself from ego, which may be the final step in dissolving it.

To share a tea in the confines of my mind, perched a coffee table apart: the me with everything I love, the me with everything I don't. And the tea, consumed in either direction by whomever is more thirsty until the pair find common ground in having a hankering for refilling the kettle. In an effort to rouse the version I adore, I must douse her. I am neither bearer of a tea beaker, but the bonsai between them.

More love; I give more love to the things I love. //

I don't know if the love is platonic or private, if I can even take any of it with me, but its touch erases the mental much for a moment.

Screaming to a void and the void is screaming back. A yelling match if only sound could travel faster. A door I keep open so long that a sonic booms take it clean off its hinges. A brain broken and bruised without a queued-up quest for what's next.

Always a project, always a project. Can't just think, it has to all be theories. Wish I knew how to breathe, how to fight, and how to run, but a sphynx’s curse has left me not the head, not the trunk, but the tail-embodied — so that I am always a step behind, sometimes, even four.

I let the yellow sunburn the dark so long it turns green and suddenly a holy higher power seems possible. Starving for collaborative solitude. Love womanhood until reminded I can never zone out. Clothes that don’t keep you warm are not worth keeping. You can always go naked. I begin counting in sevens.

Gifted power. The sphere of influence rises and sets with the moon. If that's what it takes then I'll pump the brakes. Wave a white flag because I'm choiceless. Good it's not so often. Wish against the way fire burns that taking it for granted is a road I never drive let alone pass the intersection of. And not the shivering; for it's a sign you can still seek warmth.

I know my hairpin turn goes deeper; when I pick my ankles up I feel it in my belly. Resist social fast food; eye contact through a mirror across the room says more. Sternum-first, cross the line initially with your head and, again, finally, with your chest. Play along for the benefits; we both have enough friends. Air-dry the sweat that drips down my back. Wish it was yours.

Cloudy weekend so I close the blinds because it doesn't matter anyway. Maybe it shouldn't all be bearable. Petty because it feels good. Changing the locks though it feels bad.

If you want to stop drowning, just get out of the water. //

Only apologize for doubting yourself in the first place. Thinking about reception before performance is fruitless. Focus on the adjective or focus on the noun, but it's the phrasing that paints the pictures worth more words than the adage would have you believe.

Tripped up because I don't which of us I'm doing it for. Frustrated because I can't tell if it matters. Born overbearing. Quiet by design, and only ever momentarily. At least the anxiety entertains; who does a king love more: the queen or the jester? Meanwhile, it is bold to assume a king loves anyone at all.

Trade goosebumps for sunspots; I'd choose the sun and I'd choose her honest. Turn off the brain and put anything repressive right into recycling. I'm having trouble seeing past these four walls.

Nurse me back to health under the comfort of a cabana. Do we ever get better or do memories cherry-pick luck? Pull a hamstring trying to archetype it. Wind and water sound the same and while they can both make you cold, only one leaves you wet.

And that's how it felt; like a breeze in the desert.

Time of day still to be determined. Bake in the arms of desire. Swimming in it but a sandbar has been encountered and the ocean feels everything is going according to plan. Legislature in your favor flavored like poetry in spring. I'd learn to drive for them.

Smirk on the accent. It's an honor. I pack what you can carry with the shared understanding there will be more that keeps me near the ground which your hands could never hold, so we get ahead on the fairness now — ahead of myself. Guess the ending.

Mercury squirms under sunlight like parasites beneath a microscope and I am somehow every ounce of an ecosystem. Would you ever trade comfort for prospect driven by Prosper? Not a morning person; roger roger. It's futile to look at the clouds let alone gaze at the stars, here anyway.

It finally burns off and I, up. Shed like a snake, and with the skin, you, part of a shell once belonging to a reptile. Angry at it for being cold-blooded but never yourself for being a cold front. When the sand gets deep, go faster. Passenger casualty of another tip-over. Of course.

I am what I hate: the little white dog in a purse. And my eyes are leaky and my hair is stained iron red and I cry in new places but it is not my fault I was bred like this.

Do pet. Don't yell. I love your lap. Not one of the big dogs, but scrappy and popular enough at the hound hill. See how much stored energy there is when safe? Let me off-leash, let me run. I was bred like this. //

The target audience is essential. Speak to the singular. One note at a time. Okay to hate the draft. Get your friends off of my neck. Loyal at heart and I've always meant it. Speak it into existence or don't be surprised if I sweat it out. Not all that ill, I could just use your arms. Ancient medicine only as old as humans.

No one needs to know how you spend the day off. Notably, notably are the frail freckles of pale skin etched into eyes of passersby — if only I could get all the ad speak to glimmer like epithelial galaxies. Maybe then, more than sex could sell. How long until I realize I've always written about all the same things?

The disparity in portent's dual meanings is jarring and apt.

The sickness aches just a little. I'm shaking out my wrists to find my footing. If it's geocentric, does the astronomy count? Put a palm tree in the picture even if it doesn't exist. Hide a sneeze. Inches away from starting a trash fire or a flea market to avoid doing laundry. My eyes are dry and it's obvious to the crowd. Will they believe this conundrum is abstinent in nature? Is that a scarier preposition? That substances hide substance to avoid sentences on the basis of sentences' sentiment? It's a trick mirror. I can see you, you know. Let the glass separate us then. I've killed time before and he is not my toughest battle. I will throw all the tea overboard when this deliverable is marked complete by the carrier pigeon of capitalism, as my ancestors intended.

Turns out all I needed was 48 hours alone and 48 hours asleep. I know not why my eyes keep falling to your face.

Printed ceiling tiles like I wouldn't count them regardless. It takes a few spins of the sun before I realize I've made all the right decisions. I'm afraid The Branch Theory does not offer solutions to decision-making paralysis, however, what it takes to calm me — the sound of the dishwasher and the smell of barbecue in the summer. Bass over guitar, all nodes oriented to Icarus himself. Origin is eerie and I wouldn't inquire further. Dig the knife deeper, I'm already in my groove. Liquid lava and purple moonlight, a seventies fever dream. The hat man in a pink tux smoking cigars in Los Santos. I hear the sand shift shades. Mellow on the horizon, itchy in the way pineapples eats your tongue back.

Aren't the formulas enough?

Aren't we tired of hierarchy? //

My fever breaks alongside June's. I meddle in the mule. Fair weather friends and it's cloudy out.

Set a 30 knowing it'll take 45. What I'm doing can only be classified as disco. I know the dance, I'm just a beat behind. You are the grains of sand blowing in the wind, I am the silly putty in your hands. I'll catalog the beginning, even though I'm at the end of my rope. Try a new medium. Hate it. Try another. It feels like cheating to be myself.

Tachycardia. When you come back to me tells me everything I need to know. The peace of mind that holds hands with quiet nights, Wiccan in the wind of the breezeway, no wolf howling — no sheep in need of a herd. I am cooking tonight, for all of us. As opposed to who, to who?

This is not the prophetic ending they sang hymns about — or is it? Did I not ask for the numbers, did I not light incense in the name of Copernicus? I enter stage right: understory, narrative understaffed. I hope my ghosts speak so fondly of my murder and mishaps. I remember being sad about it and if you tap my ribs long enough, the rest of it might just come back.

The connection makes the suggestion; we're both still here. Seems we were learning similar lessons. Conversate, it doesn't make you anxious — we've had fated festivals between us. You know we're well-matched, so we laugh about the ask. I trust Calvin's judgement most. Did you use the line? Feels like friends. My ego is alive and I need to kill it. Fear for fingertips touching only the strands of reality's blanket, unraveled and tangled.

So we jump into the surf with stripped skin, noting the shorthood of the night. It is nice to pretend and it takes you a moon to succumb. I think it's odd so many of you have not written back. I don't have to ask for this one's number. No regrets for the eternal pregame.

And with each stage of grief, my heart broke once again,

every time uniquely from the instance before, and the final stage,

the deepest. //

With a deep sigh, I apologize for rushing the universe. Thankful for the shared neural network; one of us has to be on time. Pull out a book so I write one; the lengths I'd go to, to be read. A tutor unhired, two isomers of a cold climate's best efforts to thwart Darwin, and the puppy eyes of our children's first friend.

A story so good I hit pause; I never want to meet the ending.

Are you bad at drawing, or am I ugly, or does it matter which? Avoid a side eye even it contains all the answers I need for comfort. Curse a prom date gone sour for the paranoia. Thank a prom date gone fire for the consistency of expectation. High-speed crashes never made us put away the razors; the scars bandaids for when it happens again.

Which of us is crazy? Is it possible the glances are simple reassurance? Float in iris blue, I feel myself glide on your promises. Similar goals part of a similar strategy. For once, a standard set of rules. A gentleman's game. Love: is it a tie?

I won't start locally. A six-month expiration date but not on adventure. Crack my neck and scoff at the noise but not the stroke. Don't speak of the dungeon unless it's to tell about the safety of choking. A small dragon and her ex — someone's gonna think I mean me. Conceited of you to think I am writing about myself, kind of me to hold my tongue. Stomach rumbles but an age of headphones conceals the real delineation between my body and need.

The less an appearance evokes, the more care it needs. But the reception is never the case. //

All here because it's been a while since we've tucked the sun into bed together. Dress young, throw them for a loop. Contagious is the social pressure and I appreciate it. I'll body-double this corner of creators for life if we're not all careful.

Play for both teams only when you hate the game.

Do you think we could sit close tonight?

Anything worth having forever is worth waiting for forever, but therein lies the question: then, do you ever really have it? Focus and refocus until my eyes never cross again on what it is we can create together. To hold the product of our moment in time is to encapsulate and keep for as much as a person can capably be permanent.

I am a hypocrite at my core and equally guarded — recipes for disaster are frequently for destiny as well.

Hands in prayer position as if the words come out kinder.

The fear must be in the foundation; worry not about stones thrown because there's no glass left to break. I don't know how the rubble becomes cobblestone yet but I will stain the glass before I mix the cement — the cement I'll finger paint their names into, a marker for the children to measure their heights against when a green Subaru crashes through the basketball net, when white lies guard offspring, when disbelief dissolves in their years that follow. Permission to sort through the colors. A rainbow in the truest sense, ultraviolet not to be forgotten.

In love with space, black holes form an obvious desert:

the formula for gravity. //

I am wavering in the wind. The paths ahead of me feel crowded, and claustrophobic are my weak knees. My trusty map is lost and my tour guides keep disappearing. The atomic layer of space between my skin is felt; everything I touch is keeping me from being grounded.

Paralyzed by the net I've cast myself.

What's next if not that? Smaller. Some place to hole up for a year. Whatever's available on impact. A place to take a breath. A place to save and store energy, a place to write the second book. Good time for it. Raise or move on, move accordingly. If destiny interrupts during my travels, I will welcome her with open arms. (She does.) In the meantime, a question of how light can travel.

With every risk, my path alights with synchronicities. Terrified because it's true. If I put my mind to it, it can and will all happen. A heart on the line has only failed me a hundred times, how much could a Dalmatian instance really break a bucket of previously shattered pieces? Baking or earning off the sick. If I wouldn't take it with me, why is it in my presence?

I mistook the source of the cat. I underestimated the power of a martini. If this is what it's like to be loved by you, I want no part of it. Use other people to find your path — it's a sick way to turn on the lights.

A whole moon between us. It's no surprise Mandy is neck-deep in the neighbor's dirt. I don't care as-is; I'd rather cage it than assuage the attachment theories. Of course it intimidates. Wouldn't you know the feelings are safer on-page. I would not encourage unenthusiasm lest we find ourselves main characters of the next novel.

There is so much I need and so much I am exhausted by. Why not just use the sun? I cannot help but feel wasteful though I know it all gets incinerated anyway. The poetic nuance of it all has long since been forgotten. Items that feel too transient to cry over yet sadness has crept in. I wish hindsight left some things hazy. //

A priori. Something not supplied immediately by the senses. Examples: Time. Love. You. Somehow all one in the same.

Been struggling to find my font lately. A frustration to push forward always perfectly paired with apathetic lulls.

Info in, info out — learning is an exchange and worthless without conversation.

So specific is desire's preferred interaction, that I chatter in my sleep and stay up late with words on repeat.

When until I learn I must do all the opposite that desire encourages if I want an ounce of energy ever again?

Frequent hypochondriac — without you calling my name, I often wonder if I'm going deaf. I hear sirens over the waves, I curse your name, I curse your name.

You: the type of person that, when confronted with a mirror or god, will always be a little uncomfortable.

Is it me that's jumping the gun, is it you that's holding it? Why are we racing? Why are there weapons?

When a lap around the sun graces your presence, will you let me pull you close or cheers to dead friends in dead beds?

If I promised to pack everything and be ready by high noon, would you take me with you, hit a closed road knowing the openness is between us, not in front?

If I drove myself crazy repeating your name, counting snapshots of your face to fall asleep, so much so that you sense it, will you shut the door or let me swim

in the deep end of your psyche

since you're already drowning in mine? //

Things never fall apart — we just subconsciously break anything we don't want to love forever.

Follow a lack of injuries. Let the downtime be research. Let the mania be development. Never let a low go lower than the last and you will never worry about disappointment. Destiny does not guide but she does reinforce. The urge to give up is strongest when you shouldn't.

You haven't missed anything; continue as you were. We remember you as you left off. Care very little and laugh very much. Bend both ways. If I can scare you off now, you'll be horrified to see who I become.

Stop saving your stickers. Just put them on things. There will always be more stickers. Screw your security deposit. Whimsy is good. Check for software updates.

You don't need to listen to your gut, you can actually listen to any part of you; problem is, most of us don't listen at all. There's glitter in my eyes, I can see the future. I'll roll forever in buzzcut grass so long as sunsets stain my eyelids.

Lasso it and then let it run. The rope hanging off symbolism enough of the collisions we carry. Beat them to it with the knowledge that if you lose, you'll likely —after— go farther.

Plan for nothing; plan like everything is happening tomorrow. Opt for automation if it allows for more creativity. Make your bed knowing someone else might need rest.

Be so bold you walk through the frames of the doors you leave gifts at. Get permission to say a name possessively; association is never assumed. Think about what's in store and kick the can down the road.

I didn't think you would, no; I didn't think you cared, yes. Absence always tells the whole truth. Deep sigh because you can. If the sun was here then she'd show you.

The theatrics are the whole me. //

Stuck between putting up a fight and forgetting, I choose to flow. I can always go to another playground. Interested and then feigning: the order in which I read your emotions. Research because I wonder; lightning because it brings the sky to the earth. Just a blip.

Say nothing because I'm up to no good. Take the ideas for the ungrateful and throw them to the wind. Add an interface. Mock the hypothetical, pose it anyway. Blush. Someone I could've been kids with. Desk up for trade. Frothing at the mouth just to hold your hand. Someone who makes everything else better. Too much to carry and I understand; I'm in training, too. Still learning to say the first two words.

The hole in the sky is small but I stare anyway; even a glimpse of the sun is worth the ocular strain. I am stress-testing the frame under race conditions and the bolts give out from fifth gear's rattling but she rides fine at midrange RPMs in fourth. Save the extra speed — it's for maintenance of velocity through maneuvers, not and never will be relay material. All good. On the scenic route anyway.

Heal more than the vagal nerve. I have regrown pathways, I trigger the high every time. Does not cold start, kickstarts with an attitude, works faster with asphyxiation, handles altitudes as expected.

The sun rises but it does not reach the yard until noon, even on the good days. I am up early and that's no one's fault and only my folly. East coast hours hurt my soul but not my sanity. I wonder about midwest. //

I am being stretched again. Cannot locate the compass. The needle jumps. Making contact? The anxiety would suggest yes. What do I think about it? Never assume I think at all.

Loved like a candle in your favorite scent. Burned because preservation was never key. Always burned. Always lit. Forgive but never forget that you refused to learn how to melt wax. It's just essence and substance, and the essence smelled like you. Oh, but the substance. All too serious. Always frustrated that the layers dried thinner as they cooled. You have to add to the candles you burn lest you get left with a wick, and only the skeleton of one at that. In your hands, a glass jar with all my teeth; this remains.

As you complain my parabens are in the air, in the wall, I understand the witches at the stake. You hated yourself for loving me. You hated me for losing fragrance.

'You're not you, you're not acting like you!'; as if I wasn't busy becoming the heat lodged now in your throat.

Light a million candles in my wake, line a path from the front door to the edge of your bed, and discard each one closer and closer to the mattress I met god’s antonym on, until you lie in the bed of rose petals you've procured in the shape of our slumber and, weary, count shape shifters to a herbologist's arsenal, and pray the mess of eucalyptus and citrine and sandalwood doesn't disturb the shadow fighters.

Confused and ever-curious, follow the airborne and float to windows anew. Collect and curate with a lighter always handy like I knew you. Grow frustrated but never cold, until you remember endothermy and how it felt when the film first developed.

None of the candles will ever smell right because of none of them will ever smell like you, and now my essence is gone because your essence is gone and we can't make more candles because now nothing feels familiar and look at us, look at us:

We're all burned up.

How dishearteningly we used to look over forest fire remains just below the timberline. How would we have glanced if we knew our fate was similar?

Would you have still carved our initials into that tree? //

If I am to believe love moves like ellipses, then I sit taller on the days with space — the only way to close it, to fill it. Unfair to ask a finite particle to expand beyond its god-given anatomical and numbered —accounted for— protons. I know the names I heard. I know the hello in my ear. Don't mistake selective cilia for deafness. Meet my eyes but I don't know where you know me from.

Accidental storybook, accidental litany of colors; not an unreliable narrator, but a forgetful orator with a lengthy discography. Often fooled by a new coat of paint, a funny jacket, and tinted lenses. Spotted from across the street; it's sweet, boy — dream it a decade deeper. I don't mind.

The elfish invoke chaos but its their faces on missed connection meet-cutes. In a house of mirrors, I don't know which version is you; I don't know what direction you leave in. And when someone new peers around the corner, I don't know if they're real either. I know not what direction they come from. Am I finally to admit I love orange?

The shade of my ecliptic plane starkly heliocentric, I found my king of Prussia. Quantum to quantity. Is the next branch on aggregate demand? I've never bunked well with the lofty. Pay twice and you'll breathe both longer and deeper. Uncomfortable existentially with the supply and demand — what does it say of us? I do not work but I am always ecstatic to learn.

I'll sit here longer than you, I know I can out-wait this. I've got time. If I pause —with love— will we not go counterclockwise? I have met vampires, I have seen the fast-forward, I know how to make tempo turn back. I'll keep asking for your hands, I will let this consume galaxies until our paths reveal all the worlds in our orbit. Fearless in the face of meteor showers; comets and auroras exist on the horizon. A scientist hoarding conclusions always gives away the data with a key to the correct. It clicks I feel stuck because the book is done. This is for something different.

I'll be frank, on this branch. //

I am in a residential quiet zone, so I nuzzle my nose into your neck and go to sleep for the first time in months. I’ll leave before I befriend couch cushions again.

You and I. Both prone to people like you and I.

Commiserate in this commissary for a love of the recurring character.

We knew then, with a ruined adventure, that the cosmos had decided our galaxy had exploded into pieces and smithereens. Something else was being born and us, casualties, figuring it out alongside new life. I didn't watch the dust settle. I watched it clear.

If I loved you once then I loved you a thousand lives, through Buddhist shrines and the sands of time. Stir the desert. Grains may migrate but do not change the landscape. Even in pieces, we are still we.

A stranger similar in silhouette only catapults my breath into my throat, in knots for all the ones we never tied. All these guavas you left me with,

just ways on future days to say goodbye.

Again and again.

Guava after guava.

If I am brave. //

---

Every once in a while, I'll say something and a friend's right hand will gravitate to their pocket, retrieving their digital notebook, and let my words live in their trustiest of devices — a home for my half-baked ideas, never to be heated.

I realize the eternity the words will experience, in the eternity it takes to both repeat and transcribe them. I am happy to live in your phone for your version of forever, and thank you for keeping me there.

It's an honor and it’s a pleasure and, most importantly, it's awfully kind.

When I pass, please reread everything ridiculous I've ever said

to a roomful of people whom I love.

And when you do, know

that I can hear you.

If this is all you remember me as, that is certainly still enough. //

Here’s some info on the books I’m writing next, and where you’ll be able to find them.

MATCH ME: Coming as part of a two-book set in early 2025, MATCH ME explores relationships through prose: the colors we embody, the energies we emit, and finding a palette of people who fit your given hue — that day, anyway.

CENTURIES: Coming as part of a two-book set in early 2025, CENTURIES is philosophically-oriented and offers powerful nods to Greek gods and historic quarrels within the framework of self-growth and discovery.

Both MATCH ME and CENTURIES will be available for purchase as a set on Amazon in 2025.