For a Good Time:

Call me.
Getting better, biting bigger,
Being bitter, fire starter,
Call me game changer.
Call me close shave, close call.
Leaps and bounds, call my bluff.
Put me on a shelf,
Put me in the zoo,
Put me to sleep,
Put me down,
Call the shots.
Call me.
I answer to sleepless nights and ringworm days,
Toothpaste kisses and  2 am power plays.
Lofty rivers of sweat.
Call me when I least expect it.
When I'll most regret it.
Call me.

On the Inflation of Fulfillment

My life got full so much quicker when I was small. It took a lot less. My day felt heavy when I was learning that a peninsula was a stretch of land with water on three sides of it and choosing to sit near my male classmates in hopes that one of them might bring up the rarely exhaustible topic of boobs.

It might be greed... or boredom, I don't know. Maybe it's just that my body is physically larger now, but it takes a lot longer to fill. Days melt together and are smeared with other distractions. It's a lot of pressure to have a good time before life fires stress-missiles up all of our defenseless assholes.

We all desire to be the sole survivor of a crippling shitstorm of commercialism. We all desire to be the martyr of this Applebees. But beyond the moral high-grounds of the mozzarella sticks is an exceedingly minimalist realization: that you have all you need simply because it's all that you have. While some may chalk this one up to confirmation bias, strive to experience the moment where what you have is enough. And focus on your work ethic and your attitude and your fucking daily water intake. I mean shit, in the grand scheme of things, $8.75 an hour is devoid of glamour but enshrined in importance. So what? So what. If you can no longer stand writing about depression or sobriety or... um, the seemingly cyclical nature of family secrets, than write about a dog you saw that day. Worldly significance is an illusion because the only mind through which you can interpret it is your own. So make it matter to yourself... that's it. You're all you have.

And then, when it's over, thirst again. For boobs. Or mozzarella sticks.

The End

I covet your intelligence; I am a glutton for it. I want to bottle every one of your words and position them on a shelf, like organs preserved in formaldehyde. How do I write a thank you note to the person who introduced me to myself? Who retrieved me like a discarded paper fucking bag on the side of the interstate? How do I explain that knowing you for a couple years is like driving a v8 for a couple miles? Or like going to the beach in November or only seeing the moon in the daylight? I don't own enough lifetimes to pay you back.

So please don't meet me in the middle. The middle offers only false contentment and laziness. Nobody has to try in the middle. Meet me in the end. Meet me immediately before my annual grudge against Mother Nature, where the earth brags the same temperature as my gaze. Meet me in the waiting room, where the slow melodic tones of the machines compete with your heartbeat. (Who knows which is actually keeping me alive?) Meet me in the end, so I can offer you all the lifetimes I've collected for you.

Slick

Your mouth tells me no but your eyes tell me nothing short of volumes, too high for my fingers to reach. Bend down a little and I'll  try again but the last time I stretched I tripped on my own arrogance.

Did it hurt? When you fell off your father's lap and snagged your eyelid on his father's funeral and you finally realized what the Circle of Life had in store for its tenants?

You know, you must be Jamaican. Because I reached back into your past lives, six generations previous to this conversation and your skin is six shades darker and your smile six inches wider than right now. As if I'm counting. But I'm counting.

Roses are red, and I've never seen a violet because my vision was always much too blurred by the bottle to write decent poetry. What a shame. I could have been something worth toasting.

You've got more curves than a racetrack and a better bust than a T.V cop but I was never one for entertainment anyway so put your sweater back on.

Whore.

Given

The city moves her as she moves through it. She peers out of her window and wonders if the symphony below strikes everyone the way it strikes her. On the outside we both know how much is destroyed in the city every night. We both know how many children sleep in between the cracks in the sidewalk and how many stray dogs will never see the sun again.  But as morning rears its face, the city sings nothing but life, life, life. The first bus horn is a rooster's crow, hurling the contents of the city into the sunrise. Her living, breathing presence sits comfortably inside the city's own living, breathing presence. The city saves her. It disables the clock-like barrage of poisonous thoughts which are so often wedging themselves into the lobes of her brain. The days can turn on a dime. Her emotional output is a like cat - perfectly content and relaxed right up until the moment it bolts from the room in a panic.

This is a stupid joke at best, a caricature, a satire, a condom unrolling over a banana in sex ed. This is the slow, dawning realization that this is not love, or even a cousin. Not infatuation, or lust, or even extended respect. This was something... else. Something I did not fully understand but would carry me in its arms just the same. What a beautiful loophole I'm living.

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.