She stays up way past midnight,
just checking on your breathing.
She keeps your terrible drawings
taped up like priceless art.
She lets you spill your mess,
your worries, your endless questions,
and somehow makes room for all of it in her small, tired heart.
She’s the one who holds you
when the world feels far too big,
the one who roots for you when nobody else shows up.
Even when you walk away to build a life of your own,
she’s still standing in the driveway, waving until you’re out of sight.
Calm down.
It's steady as she goes.
Shadows flutter in the curtains of the open windows of my heart.
Fall days crisp the edges of lips in incomplete connections.
Feelings play together with a butterfly in the panic room.
Clouds pass.
My heart races from phantom fears.
Sighs cherish light years of youth that is on the edge of these streets.
Fall down.
I move too fast.
The way I miss you is on the flutter of angels wings.
Just an undreamt state of mind.
The way we are stuck in moments of time.
Haunting the various passerbys.
Stuck in these dreams where you come back to me.
Sitting on the edge of sunsets summers fade, fall embrace.
You were my one wish, an arcade cocktail of hymnals that we cannot preach.
Find me where we let go.
Moments in spaces I cannot yet speak.
Homesteads echo, on the sunlight, and farewells.
Come down.
Because I can't forget.
Leather jacket bowties swoon in summer night
Eyes alight in soft somber roman candle smiles
Running starts into sky diving the coastline in her smile
Painted sky lines of dying suns swirled in amber spread across the embers of daytime
Hanging hopes like fairy light the music of fluttered heartbeats escape into heavy blue scene
Promises, hearted eyes dot the lines where she parked on the lawn
Disguised in possibilities the words so spoken and sweet
Abstract in my thinking the way her way of human has caused me to be
Fine art on the horizon, hair that dances with no invitations for me
Holding my breath for the moment as the dream calls out
Dreamers alight and spread out like birthday candles
All breath, all heights, feet dangle toes touching stars
Floating up, swelling in protest as the downside is all up
They aren't the key to anything
But they put the key in your hand
Nothing to unlock or access
You may wobble
But you'll still stand....
Could you stand it?
To be alright-
To be ok without being
When you plan it
You build a kite
Untethered to what you're seeing.
Shared atmosphere vapor trails in blank stares across a room so crowdedly desolate.
Always there, always filthy. Slideshows flicker like the magnavox eyes shuffle lid to lid, moment to moment as time fleets like dust shimmering in my heart. Always filthy.
Brought out of the infectiously swollen cardiac arrest, through the waters, so thick drowning with due care. Peeled back potential baking like hot glue amongst the weight of glory that was never there.
Love against the glass ceiling swimming above while the sharks swim below. Sinking into the black and blue that ensues carbonated lungs scream alone in the waves below a somber rock a bye into the phonetics, into the pride less afternoons wasted in silence.
Alone in the drink as all the hands let go awaiting always filthy waiting to sink out of mind and out of sight.
Daytime ghosts
Windows bring light that exhales a dead-end world
Softest intentions drown to sleep at the bottom of shallow wells
Neon memories bubble to life the static scores that bodies hide
Mouthed confessions of loveless intimacy that knows no swirls of radiance
Soft embrace of the life above from the cold souls that swim below
Hugless lovers reclining in the bleak blue edges of summer lights hung on horizons
That never knew the scores composed from names that never met
Fainted in pleasures unknown to sender as the tape decks click B-sides search for depth
Tears for two at an empty diner booth that is abandoned along travels to far off destinations
Reservations for taped confessions of vows never thought, as the food comes shared aloud
Relief by numbers in collections of good vibes, better company and lives well lived
High tides come and go as wells stagnate the fishtank below
The heaviest sound lays us to rest
Tied to the steak and eats our heart out
Composure fixed to the evening sky
Swivel the scenery then throw me away when I am colored dead
Let's all pose then fall down the well together
Understudies for the part we weren't meant to play
Courage for cowards in the rewriter's chair beating the around the rose bush
Sink thirty thousand feet into the shoes too narrow for human feats.
Back to factory settings until you can learn how to sing let alone speak our names
Caution tape leashes the struggle bus in gear on your best days
One step further than slipping up on a Monday, blue and battered
I wake up to the sight of the out of boundaries shred to pieces
Water for the pills stuck in swallowing fashion
Wings tied to the bed abstract as ever
We dreamt of the rise and fall of the house of us
Blueprints of further disappointment with marble inlays to hold onto this moment
Shock jocks of jealous siblings gnashing at ankles going home
Nostalgic for chaos and that bitter root
I didn't know that I was this obvious
Innocence donated with and without the will to live
Lover, Lover
The nighttime sings our names
Ballads of the figurative Juliet
Radios hiss hearts spilled the shadows hide naked ambition stilled
Neglected emotional hills wafts through valleys of past lives
Karmic backlogs review their closing percentages
Futures flood the floors hold the line between fate and tears
Shadow people alone in the twilight
Illuminated letters, walls woed to sleep
Dreams from the shoreline as phantom vessels waltz on the silver linings
Postures of stable footing, top of the line, kings and queens of value
Thumbs circle the knuckles, bone kisses bone, the familiar taste of home
Haunted hems lines explored in tribal pursuits
Please keep me waiting
The specter of tender frames evaporates
Morning ghosts caress the memory in travel
Neckties versus deadlines
Power brokered, breath that betrays the dream
Folded napkins
Cocktail napkin epitaphs
Check please
you live still
in the blurred polaroids of my mind—
your face dissolving into silver,
mine into someone i cannot quite find.
i loved you once
with the fervour of an unwritten psalm,
and though the wanting has gone quiet,
the love still lingers, warm.
perhaps i miss you;
perhaps i miss the girl who loved you—
the softer version of myself
that time, like winter, outgrew.
we both became strangers
to the people we once knew,
yet i keep your photographs
the way old libraries keep books
whose endings they already knew.
i do not wish to have you again,
nor become who i was before—
i only wish i could tell that girl
she was worth loving, even more.
so let the polaroids remain blurred;
some things are kinder without view—
for sometimes, loving what we lost
means learning to love
who we became too.
I still hear the loud noise
of your quiet footsteps,
marked across unpolished,
weathered wooden floors.
Childhood suppressed expectations,
starved for genuine praise,
dwarfed by the presence
of a silence never broken.
My inner struggles suffocate,
captivated by the hidden door
latched forever
by decaying, hardened paint.
Scars of turmoil refuse to yield,
mercilessly triggered by this prison,
locked by the one key
still held by you.
A stitched fabric of fortitude—
resembling a carved brand of honor—
is the silent hero I grasp for
in moments of aching defiance.
When the weight of unimportance,
and callous neglect,
rears its ugly head,
demanding more
than my essence can endure.
Still, here I am.
Not asking for forgiveness.
Not asking for explanations.
I am letting go,
just like you did.
"Note: AI image generated to complement the themes of my original poem."
After all that’s happened
I never sat down to think.
I always wanted to push forward
and never looked back.
Who wants to sit down with pain?
Especially when all it does is hurt you.
It showed me parts of me I don’t like
and I try not to blame you.
Some days I curse you under my breath.
I daydream about if things had worked?
Then I get nightmares about doing that.
I try to think past the what ifs and
Accept what happened between us.
If I had the power to either forget you,
Or make you love me like I love you.
I’d choose to forget you.
Gasoline doesn’t control a dying flame.
You cut me deeply where the wound
Still feels the sear of your burning knife
As it thrusts right into my back,
With smoke burning my throat as it escapes
Despite all the pain, I don’t hold onto it.
Where would there be room for love,
If I choose to keep hating you?
Maybe we could’ve been friends,
If things didn’t turn out this way.
I can’t say I’m glad or upset that
We met under these circumstances.
All I have to say is, thank you
And I wish you good luck with
Everything.
The New Favorite
She looks great in my clothes, atleast that's what everybody says,
Like I wasn't the reason they noticed them in the first place.
She laughs with all my friends like she's always belonged,
I hate that she fits in so fast where it took me so long.
She wears my sweater like she's discovered something rare,
And I spend the whole night pretending I don't care.
She says the same things I used to and somehow they sound brand new,
But maybe everything hits different when it's not coming from you.
And I hate the girl I become whenever she walks in,
Like confidence is something only one of us can win.
And maybe that's the difference that took me years to learn,
She's wearing what I wore, but she can't be the person that i am.
I've spent so long worrying that she's going to take everything from me, that I forgot the one thing she can never have: the person I became because of it.
We loved enough to build a
beautiful home.
We loved enough to let each other go.
May we both find peace in
the quiet after.
Today I came back to a hole
where a home had been
So I made a bed
of all the rubble
There is gravel
digging into my spine
ashes falling
into my eyes
They tell me to move
to go and build a home
somewhere new
as if they were telling me
it's a quarter past two..
Like it's obvious..
Like i'm a fool..
Like a hole is not a home...
But i can't forget when it was.
The things left unsaid
grow heavier through the years,
gathering below
like silt in a riverbed
fills in the refection pool.
Snowball, small at first,
gathers more snow as it rolls.
snowman's tiny nose,
becomes head, then a body,
then a roaring avalanche.
Regrets germinate
as roots grow into the soul
become embedded.
what was 'too few to mention'
is now 'too much to ignore'
Hand touches lightly
then tightens for better grip,
as the wanting grows.
the weight becomes the burden
that is so hard to let go.
Fingers on the ledge
numb and trembling from the strain,
grow inflexible
letting go is now so hard
after all the holding on.
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