Precipitation

He felt the rain.

Felt each individual droplet hit his skin like a personal insult. 

He walked the streets for hours, in spite or because of it,

perhaps a bit of both. 

He played misanthrope and savior,

but only inside of his own head. 

Mostly

He was alone, and lonely with it,

hearing the slide and squeak of his sneakers on the pavement,

feeling the dampness seep through his hooded sweatshirt

and into his solar plexus.

An eternal cloudy day. 

He thought deep thoughts and mused great muses,

wrote a song and kicked a beer bottle into the lake

But mostly

He felt the rain

and reveled in it. 

April showers

I, I am not alive anymore

I hit rock bottom somewhere along the east coast

across the ocean and swam back on my hands and knees

I’ll make it to the moon if I have to crawl

And you, you have been screening my calls

I know because I heard “shit” right before

I got sent to voicemail

Wasn’t it just last week you said 

you’d love me forever

I swear I’m not usually this pathetic

I’m usually pretty adept at not feeling a thing

even when I know the doctor’s lying 

but you can only bite your tongue for so many shots

before the damn thing starts bleeding

And we, we bought this bottle of wine together

when I moved into this new apartment

to celebrate and

I am learning that drinking while you’re feeling and bleeding

is a lot like drowning

there’s not enough damn oxygen

and not 

a shore 

in sight

the endlessness

Oh, oh, oh, I am weary

of affectation and postulation and the prostitution 

of smiling when I don’t want to. 

Even whiskey doesn’t help it. 

And good lord god am I tired

of cynicism and chimaerism and the copper penny taste

of aesthetic discontent.

Come and rest your bones awhile? 

Shuck your Levi’s and that lodestone you carry around your neck-

it gathers more weight every year. 

Honestly, honey, I am exhausted

of avarice and emptiness and the necessity of 

pushing when it comes to shove. 

Won’t you let me

put my head on your chest and

we’ll listen to our atoms knock and vibrate

against the silence

together?

Ashes and Exoskeletons

There's a blanket of heat over the south this week
humidity thick and stifling, a down comforter over your head too long
so heavy you can't move for the weight of yourself,
still we sip hot tea on the balcony in defiance.
You sit across from me, smoking cigarettes in black and looking so ennui,
but break the image with a sudden laugh
as a beetle lands on my thigh and a butterfly perches on the balcony
to watch a spider slide slowly down the drainpipe,
our lives always were something of a cliche.
You say something about how we're communing with nature and shit,
how that beetle and I are so similar,
how we're a way for the cosmos to know itself,
and I scoff because
while Carl Sagan is a genius and all,
I'd rather
there were a way for me to know myself.

It's a lovely thing

To smile at a stranger-
And be thanked for it.

Have you ever noticed

That around 5am
everything starts to look like a graveyard.
How the world is daily forsaken by it’s human companions.
How those who remain seem but the breath of themselves,
remnants of the daylight preserved by the peculiarity of the night,
they do not belong.
And neither do you.
The cacaphony of birdsong
announces it,
they gossip about your death
as though it were a certain thing,
as though you lay already in ground slicked with rain or dew or teardrops,
wondering over whether your mother will wear grey or black.
The very ground you tread shimmers
into broken headstones beneath your weary feet
and the shrill of the crickets, to your aching head,
seems the very cry of the damned.
Your first sip of coffee tastes like poison.

July 3rd

It’s nights like these I wish I smoked.
Summer nights in southern Maryland, dark and cooled from the heat of the day, leave too much quiet. You can get lost in them.
The cicadas are mocking me.
So I reach for my roommate’s cigarette and end up with a pen, but I figure one vice is as good as another.
I watch the lovers in the apartment across from mine as they move in silhouette behind closed blinds.
Sometimes loneliness crawls up inside of you without warning, sneaking up through your nostrils as you take a breath to congratulate the newly engaged.
It drags anxiety along with it to jam deep into the pit of your gut, just for fun.
I don’t mind the ache half as much as I used to, but I mind missing things I’ve never even had.
I mind missing the man I’ve never even met.
Because he, you know, has decided not to exist.
I mind praying to meet him anyway, even while knowing that if I ever did meet him,
I’d be running the hell away.
It’s nights like these I wish I smoked.

Ti voglio perché la tua bocca sa gridare ribellione

This is the way the world ends
Have you ever been so hollow you echo?
Felt the reverberations down deep
in the pit of you,
Known the exact dimensions of your failings
by the height and width and breadth
of the sound
of a rap at the door of your heart.
This is the way the world ends
Have you ever filled it with the sands of time?
Watched the tiny grains exfoliate the sharp edges
until the inside of you
is as smooth and round as a beach pebble
and perhaps
like the pebble
you have forgotten you were once a boulder.
This is the way the world ends:
 Have you ever crushed the hole inside of you?
Risen up from your knees and crashed
through the smooth walls
Overwhelmed the emptiness with an avalanche of yourself,
with the hefty weight
of all that is of the good
Felt the stillness and peace left in it's wake.
With a bang and a yell of rebellion.