Through television static,
I watched a heart made of summer clouds
become heavy and burned
as the season changed
to a shivering grave.

My outstretched hand
shriveled into a million excuses
and the letters in your name
scrambled into pornography
for the apathetic.

You deserved better
than the resuscitation I gave
from the thin air in my lungs.

The sun wears your name,
a badge of heroism
brighter than your baptized smile.

I hope you bask in it
every millisecond of every day

and know that life is better
than the arrogance of the miscalculated.

How many days will the inside of my veins feel like the blood that flows through an emotional sun?

How many years will I gaze at the flies that fill the empty eye sockets of a world I once respected, still craving its acknowledgement?

My fragile ghost fissures
despite therapy, hospitalizations
and the chemicals
that frolic in my guts.

I grieve the life
that everyone promised me 
and curse the fences
my frail hands erected
in fear.

The malady shrugs,
eclipsing the universe.
It looks just like me.

Your throat screeches for peace
but will rip itself apart
in selectively deaf rooms.

Some encase their hearts
in molten midnight 
and think it will protect them
from the dawn.

You deserve more
than the laryngeal bloodshed
that's been foisted on you
by a circle drawn 
with a frightened hand. 

There is love out there
beyond the hot takes,
beyond the cold shoulders

and one day
it will be shared
between them, 
yourself,

and every puddle
that turns from mud
to spring water.

The third eye scrambles
from an acidic drop
of strep communication
and an ache
for resurrected pixels.

Some share the same face
of a forgotten television channel;
they spit their own teeth
in a baptismal creek
and force each other to smile.

These lips don't rise or fall
but they're able to open themselves
to a laughter that returns
from years at war
in a place with a thousand names.

The soul is healing
from a million chain marks 
and in their stead
will be flowers,
blooming grey and beautiful.

May the joy of atoms
weigh down the fear of planets. 

I breathe in smoke
from a burning shanty
and exhale the aroma
of a Sunday meal.

My chapped lips bless
every water drop
that has fallen on them 

and though the sky
sometimes becomes fluorescent,

I try to admire the blue
that always returns

so in those moments
when steel floods my brain, 

I am still victorious.

The nectar
that once lubricated time
eventually hardened 
into cement
around my skeleton.

Biomes would gossip
of other biomes
while claiming to thrive

and emotions 
would spit flames
onto the wooden walls 
I kept building from love.

Today, I am not healed

but the chain
that shackled me 
to a god I never worshipped
has shattered in my grip

and I can move 
in liberation,

to try to find the sunrise
above the slurred chatter.

Her hair is a whisper
that can overpower armageddon,
her eyes are lullabies

and I'm drifting
into a sleep 
deeper than the well
from which I drank
when my thirst was faceless.

There is a fragrance
in every word she speaks
and I can only place it
in old, teenage daydreams.

I glance at her
and in that moment,
the wounds feel savable

and life 
goes from dark matter
to a cloud
that never rains.

We communicate
like discarded syringes
with the maturity
of mayflies.

We perceive our loved ones
revolving around us
as if they were crumbs
instead of galaxies

when the truth is 
we all drift
towards an ending
we must create; 

will it be an ambrosiac feast
or will it be a mass burial
where we question if our hands
are holding whistles or shovels?

Accountability and growth
are replaced with shattered mirrors 
that are force fed into our skulls
from voices who can't care about us

and we scream at the broken glass
"God, I'm so lonely!"
while the world
throws pebbles at our windows.

I'm trying to leave 
my dead kingdom behind

but this locomotive
on which I progress
through spirits and wood
reminds me of the fresh wounds

I share with friends,
I share with no one. 

Everyone I once protected
with my sharpened honor
are now departed ones,
poisoned and drifting,
that chant for my disconnect.

Though I may watch this train
slam into the earth,

I will always miss them

yet the love I receive
in spite of this circular war
will fit in these shapeless holes,

hearts
that replace despotic technology.

I shake an inflamed hand
with one that trembles
in a question mark pattern.

I will live with this shadow
to spite the sun
that enables it.

Life is the moments
between hourly deaths

but the dirt on my grave
is just the pinpricks
that try to let the pallidity in

when the world
is more vibrant
than what I can perceive
from this throne of cracked plastic.

I've been dragging my antipathy
behind a rudderless life
like a coffin chained to my spine.

I want to scream
but I'm self-conscious
and my throat
is bursting with fleas.

I am not a square peg
trying to fit into a round hole,

I am an asteroid
forced into a clogged pore.

My jagged fingernails
dig at the hands that house them

and the ensuing bleeding
reminds me
that I'm not alone

for it is in these veins
that the ghosts
of my childhood home
roam and whisper
about the city's cry

into a shorted connection
to a crisis line.

There are bullets between us
and voices inside us
that count upward forever.

You could be angry
when you read my words
in the eyes of lost adults,

I could seethe with grief
when I see your face
nailed onto everyone's blink

but there are better places
for our blood to flow
than inside an aging sun.

We need not apologize
to the satellites
that hold our rotted fruit

but we need to coexist
between the jagged lines
of the circles we draw in darkness

lest our hearts weigh down
this tired world
beneath their scarred age.