Runoff

The days go by in a steady cadence, like a heartbeat, or a horror film. They seem redundant and unnecessary only because you are absent from them. I'm jealous of the people who pass you in the streets, who sit behind you in class, who walk by you in the gym. They get to see you living your life, just being a person. And they can note your beauty, passively - file you away in their mental archive for the day. They don't have to hang on to your image in a panic like I do when I'm not sure when I'll get to do it again. That is fate's cruelty. My afternoons are pools filled with whatever makes up your blue, blue eyes, but I still come home parched every night. No wonder, when you've got a face like the sea and I've got a heart like a sponge.

And if I could jump into your pond for one second, I wouldn't even try to hold my head above the surface; I would just learn to breathe underwater. But right now I'm out of breath when yours gets deeper and deeper as you fall into a comatose sleep after dark. My thoughts speak with yours long after our mouths fall asleep. We clench sleep like soap suds in wet fingers. Every night is too slippery to hang on to. And if someone were to listen to me talk in my sleep all they would hear is the slow trickle of your name. Me, as I pull you out from your cataloged file, water-marked "My Favorite Daydream". What we have here is the universe's express consent and now I get to see your face alongside the sunshine every morning.

And if there is a God, then He watches us, scotch in His grimaced hand, with palpable envy.

Before You Sleep,

You are not as terrible as you think you are. When you told me how you deal with things, that you just get through it, that you tread water for a short time and keep your eyes off the future, I thought it was brilliant - the perfect concoction of distraction and short-term self-discipline. As long as you don't look out the window at WWIII, it's not happening. What luck have you fallen into, that you begin your journey with the same coping mechanism that the veterans learn to adopt? But it comes with one fatal flaw: you keep your eyes on your shoes so long you fail to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

You fail to see yourself as I do. You miss the beautiful wide-angle shot. You don't see a birthday cake with 28 candles on it. You don't see a birthday cake with 29. I see a few years in your eyes, five more in your words, a whole decade in your smile. Your strong hands grip at least twenty years, even though you don't notice. I see eons of time. You don't see the children and the warmth and the Christmas stockings. I refuse to accept your hypothesis about dying childless because your genes are too beautiful to waste. If life continues after your extinction, it will be that much worse for the world. You don't know that your heartbeat is so much louder than the gunshot fired through your consciousness each morning. You're the last copy of a book in a burning library, and I'm not fucking strong enough to yank the fire alarm. I regret to tell you that my mother only prepared me for visible wounds. You think you dug this hole and pushed me into it, but let me tell you how sweet the soil is at the bottom.

Recess

If all my elementary school teachers came out with a catchy tune about my competence:

Everyone else heard the directions, so
You're a liar
And I don't tolerate liars.
Why can't you be more like
The others had no problem listening to
Don't touch that,
No talking,
Sit down, and
Do you think you're better than
My instructions were quite clear.
There's no reason to
Go and think about
What do you think you're doing.
Ma'am we think there's something wrong with
You can't do that.
I don't know why you find it so difficult to
You're irritating me now.

Continuity

Follow my explicit instructions when you notice me getting old. Please don't miss a step. I want you to see years in my spine, crooked and chinked from use, and I want you to find a decade between my brittle fingers, shrunken from pinpoint labor, and I want you to grasp at how long my eyes have in them, wrinkled at the corners from their continuous cross-hair tasks. When you discover my age, wipe it clean with your Windex of a knowing glance. See beneath the time wrapped into my skin, stretching farther than from here to Minneapolis. Read the small messages embedded in there.

Can you decipher them? They say that you're not as terrible as you think you are, and that you drive too fast, and that I'm really really sorry for picking you up late from that flight last October, but mostly sorry to myself because I wanted to see you so badly prior.

Know that when I get old I won't mind looking this way. Know that I'll only mind that I can't see you as well, or hear your lovely voice quite as clearly. Remember that when I'm slow to reach you, it's not for lack of trying but for lack of strength. Keep in mind that my scarred hands don't stop me from feeling how warm your eyes are during the holidays.

There's not a lot of time to say all this during a car crash, when our bones are fracturing from the screeching metal instead of old age. But I would have said it. I would have said it if our young lives weren't being cut so short.

Growth Spurt

She posts the most inappropriate pictures on instagram,
And boys comment on them
So sexually.
And she's like...
"Thank you"

The dawn of the modern compliment.
Lukewarm, easy intimacy.
All the wrong flattery.
The stomach of an adult through the eyes of a child.

Have we reached the distant point
Where
In a stupid, feeble attempt to eradicate awkward moments,
Everything is acceptable?

Everything is not acceptable.
Only some things are acceptable.
And she can't tell the difference.
And it kills me.

Concerning Christianity

Is this disrespectful? Maybe I've just gotten way too used to a world where I can simultaneously feel like the largest being on the earth (while looking down on the ants) and the smallest being in the universe (while looking up at the stars). Maybe I just poured way too much of myself into sleeping within the folds of her sighs. How can heaven reproduce this feeling? Or even surpass it? How can any mystically foreign place pretend to be better than what I have right now? Being ecstatic and enlightened and fucking happy can only be recognized next to the sucky, awful times in between. And so the land of milk and honey only sounds appealing to me when it is interwoven with the land of broccoli and cough medicine.

I don't know what God looks like, the way I can recognize the creases by my father's eyes. I don't know what God sounds like, the way I know the sound of wind moving by my car windows in summer. I would feel out of place meeting Him, but I feel absolutely at home in the basements of my friends' houses. This life is all I know, so how can an idea as alien as death (or rebirth) become my eternity?

Maybe it's the lack of progression. Heaven has no evolution. Life does not change up there, because there is no life. Only continuity. It's a kind of stagnant, manufactured happiness. So practiced and detached, it has no need of emotion or rebellion. Disgusting. Monday does not gust into Tuesday (or Wednesday or Thursday); it's just one ceaseless day of the week. What is the goddamn difference. I already feel eternal. I already feel infinite. I don't need a promised land.

Contest

Half-formed, half-bearded, half-dressed and yelling. Three, four, five, cascading into the backyard. Fists up, challenging and dismissing each other's aggression. Unwarranted tackling, tumbling, grabbing.  Competition running deep as the cuts on his knee. Puppy dog tails had nothing to do with it. He was living on a steady diet of summer grass and Gatorade. Question him and he will promptly reply, devoid of all doubt, that he is waiting for Superman. How long you ask yourself.

He never elaborates, never dreams anyone could be confused by his words. He stumbles out of bed, off to war, every day, and returns as the moon does. His instincts are all he has. Guarded, distracted. His barrel chest puffs out so his words don't have to. He keeps them in his pocket, next to his Swiss Army Knife. Always scratching the spot between his shoulder blades.

The only quantifiable sign of life is how much sweat pours off of him onto the pavement.

The Nicest of Atmospheres

My evenings with you were decked with connective tissue. This was refreshing, considering I spent my years mostly pretending I was starring in  music videos and other quasi-realities of life. That's how graceless I was. Lost in the sea of conformity or death, all the time my cerebral cortex hollering at me in confusion.

I always felt like a secret game was being played and no one would tell me the rules. But the rules you came up with were explained to me by your comforting, animalistic presence so simply that the confusion finally ceased.

This idea seemed Newtonian in its novelty, simplicity, and ability to instantly solve any and all problems. It was a giant red OFF button. Anxiety paused.

And now you're in the place I was in and I can't do a damn thing about it. You, curled up into yourself, like a can of soup on a shelf, your depression swirling around inside you like broth. You're as distant to me as a fictional character. What the hell does your face look like? I rake my mind for it like dragging a river for a body. I usually find it difficult to relate to someone reduced to such a memory of a memory of a memory, but with you it's the opposite. I'm overwhelmed by the sheer number of neurons you occupy.

So stop it. I have other things to focus on, and simply cannot be bothered by the tightening of my chest muscles as my mind wanders toward you. I wanna storm into the woods angrily, and drag you out of them by your wrist like an irritated parent. Be happier and leave me alone. Choirs of angels sing in harmony. End scene.

This is How I Frame My Future

This is how I frame my past:
With gardens of learning to read and forced school pictures,
Infusing teaspoons of courage with Band-aids after bike wounds,
Looking into the yellow eyes of
The demands of the day and of the indignant people,
Unphased by the waves of the wide ocean as they play with my legs.
This is how I frame my past.

This is how I frame my present:
On the pinpoint of a human mind,
Feeling the fear in the word "decade",
Speeding through puddles on street corners
filled with sweet rain,
Struggling through the politics of hot suburban summer air.
This is how I frame my present.

This is how I frame my future:
Through the loops of tied shoes ready to move forward,
Eyes fixed on the golden trophy of campus
Every goose bump filled with anticipation,
Gaps and corners and edges making room for possibilities,
Stapling my inhibitions to the wall before I sprint through the door.
This is how I frame my future.