Taxi-Cab

I am not the dull sadness
of a cream colored room
at nine thirty on a friday night.

      A room identical to yours.

I am the crisp sway
of the evening fog,
as it blankets it's creations
with a remote kindness.

I am human,
and the poison that seeps
through my brain
is not my master.

It does not control me.

I am happy.

You

You are the chattering in my head.
            Stop. Stop. Stop.
You are my nerves in the morning,
or the waves,
as they flood my chest
while I stand barefoot in the kitchen.

You are what I wish to remember,
and what I wish to forget.

Strength

Sound mutes and captivates,
the forgotten parts of my weary soul:
renders me silent when I have considered myself defiant,
engulfs my broken limbs and
notches me to the concrete that describes my
grave.
The words that tip from the precipice of sanity and
hold together the frostbitten fingers of my courage.

Use of Force

His hands were anchors tied to the sea,
and his eyes were promises he could never keep.
His smile was the ocean as it consumed the shore,
and his heart was the landscape I'd been promised to explore.
His knees were the buckles looped around my hips,
and his whistle was the secret that never reached my lips.
His footprints were the memories I'd scrawled across my skin,
and his breath was my heartache as it sighed along my chin.

Before You Start Your Day

She puts her hand,
on the place where he left.
On the cavity that contained
her heart,
where he carved his name
on her like a possession.
And no matter how hard
she rubs,
or how hard she pulls,
she can't forget the words
he'd published on her chest
for everyone to see.

Being Human

Broken hipbones and twisted spines make your brain bleed a certain kind of crimson -- a fragility so centered in the apex of your thinking cavity that you almost forget that words can create noise when there is none and replace silence when it becomes so heavy you can't breathe. You've been force fed lies and phrases and given excuses for being who you are: which is human. You build walls of steel around your withering heart in the hopes that it will make you impervious to pain and make you a creature who can't be destroyed by hurtful words or nursery rhymes or flying fists. But no one ever told you that it's alright to have feelings -- that it's alright to feel pain as it bleeds through your fingertips and it's alright to feel that your brain has been stifled and your heart has been stolen.

It's alright to not be okay.

We seek imperfections in the grooves of our skin and create folds where there are none in the hopes that it will make us human. But you have forgotten that you are human. And that you are perfectly imperfect. Creation is what replenished us but nobody ever speaks of destruction -- of the decrepit buildings furrowing under weight they can't withstand, or humans tumbling under the cavities of normality and destroying themselves so that they can be rid of the distance they had created between themselves and humanity.

Destruction can be beautiful too.

Abolished factories and crumbling arcades are only an exemplification of human morality and for those of us that have reached the dingy corners of our frostbitten minds and dusted away the cobwebs, it can be normal. Sometimes we have to destroy: we have to clamber with violent fingers and tear apart the structures that had built us upward because they have made us whole and human -- and it's alright to be a segregated part of a puzzle, or the missing piece. Because one day someone will pick you up with tender fingers and slide you in your place and show you that the road to recovery is brutal and vehement, but also that it is kind. 

So it's alright to crawl to the recess of your mind and protect yourself from humanity: because humanity can be cruel. Humanity can be inhuman and immoral, and it can be aggressive, and it can crack your spine and leave you disabled. But it can be brilliant and wonderful -- and if you forget the good then you will be absorbed by the bad until you can't remember the light as it creeps through the blinds on a Sunday morning, or his breath on your skin to let you know that he is there and that he won't leave. 

You will forget the beauty of being human.

Blue

It was the color of his eyes in the morning. It was the color of the waves as they lapped the shore, and the color of the sky as they walked beneath it. It was the detail of his shirt as it settled against golden, bright and brilliant. It was the color of the storm as it thrashed against the windowpane as they found warmth beneath the coals. It was the color of his smile when he said "Goodbye, for now", and it was the color of the ocean as it mumbled beside the train. It was the color she felt flooding her chest, and the color that reminded her of him. It was the color of the bedsheets she'd betrayed him on, and the color of her guilt when she had said "yes". It was the color of her dress when she returned to his arms. And it was the color of his lips when he'd whispered, "But I loved you". It was the last color that reminded her of him. It was the color of his eyes when he'd murmured "goodbye".

Obscurity

She withered in his broad arms.

The creature had never been one to grieve over loss. He had lost so much in his life that it had sprung forth a torturous cycle; over and over and over again he watched the ones he held dear dissipate. With wisdom, he found that he could teach his bodice, his mentality, to adapt. And adapted he had. He'd adapted to walking the cluttered hallways of his small apartment alone, and he'd adapted to forgetting their faces where they lingered in his cranial membrane. But as he adapted to forget them, he had adapted to remember her. He cared for her precariously, watching as violent tears shredded the porcelain of her plump, rosy cheeks. He would whisper to her in the late night, soothing her back to slumber, and held her thick tendrils, completing circular movements methodically until it made him weary. He thought finally he could have something that would stay, something that would be his.

His howls pierced the evening air with a distinct clarity.

Aesthetic, white gloves gripped the golden areas of his flourished skin; whether to balance him, calm him, or attack him, he was unsure. As their tendrils drifted over the smooth of his skin, they left porcelain imprints that dissolved silently into his skin, absorbed much too easily. The ghosts lingered towards her, hovering hesitantly over her faded cranium, reluctant to interrupt the wolf as he sank toward the tiles.

One of them was brave enough to act, and the prying tendrils gently lifted the carcass from the ghoul's tendons. Away from that which she knew. He howled, a guttural sound manifesting from the crook of his hollowed chest, bursting mournfully from the thick of his throat and pushing through the slip of his parted, pink lips, piercing the air, crystallized in time. Air escaped him, and as the sobs racketed his lithe bodice, he found that he suffered through the desparity of his emotions. He released her, eventually, his reluctant tendrils unwrapping gingerly from her porcelain skin, pressing his gentle lips to the curve of her forehead, imagining that it was into slumber she dissipated, not death.

They left him to mourn, and mourn he did. He settled into a sprawled position on the iced tiles, tendrils curled to his chest. They pierced his ethereal skin, and what was once beautiful, was stained maroon. Veins, delicate patterns traced into his paling skin. Vehement tears streaked the rose of his flustered cheeks, and as he curled, his carcass shaking violently from the audible sobs, he dissipated. And as he lingered, he recognized himself less and less. It was at this point that he lost himself.

It was at this point that he lost his humanity.

War In My Mind

It engulfs as it dances,
innocent in origin.
It calls from forgotten window panes,
and rushes to join decrepit creeks.

It longs for a companion,
velveteen skin drenches hair and eyes
blurs vision until it is beautiful.

It finds solitude with wandering souls,
whispers coaxing poems into deaf ears
with the singular hope that it will be heard.

It will be forgotten.

Cannons

Traipses through the afternoon air,
fingers curved to the texture of bark.

Her silhouette begs him forward,
offers him shelter from the storm.

She pirouettes through flowers,
finding crevices in which to hide.

He knows her name like it's carved on his skin,
and he sings it like a lullaby.

But she ignores his plights.

And soon he finds himself
discarded among the waste of nature.

For once he finds no beauty there
and drowns in the chains

that concave his thinning ankles
and tether him to the reality

that she is not his.