The Stars Will Not Judge Me. They Knew Me Before I Was An Atom Of An Idea, And They Brought Me Here To

His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, in love with the way his own ideas tasted.

Life asked Death:

Have you ever been loved?

She responded:

Unfortunately. Flickering moments of love for me in forlorn men are common. Though they always end the same. In my arms, thinking only of you.

I’m like a child, the way my mind works. I want us to look at each other, but I keep covering my eyes.

The Dog’s Way

I do wish I could be gentle with myself. I really do. But my way is the dog’s way, anything I don’t like on me I chew up and swallow. I carry everything I hate in my gut because it is all I have to take. And I cannot bear to live hungry.

I was his worry stone.

he couldn’t pick my face out of a crowd,

Or name a single interest of mine;

he couldn’t bother to wash his mug in the sink,

Or put the coffee on in the first place;

he couldn’t braid my hair while he spoke,

Or untangle the nest he made.

All he could do was rub his hands together,

And wonder where I’d gone,

after eroding me away.

There is an understanding in burning high rises that only it’s occupants can gather—that the rapid footsteps and baited breath do little for longevity if the staircase is ash and the elevator an oven.

No, the hurried panic is not for survival of the body, but a hunt for another. A body heat almost indiscernible undulating between the flap like flames—like pop ups out of a picture book. You may think it madness to seek heat in a fire, but this is a heat of the soul, a desire to die in embrace. To know a heart beat’s breath against your own.

An understanding that if life must be unkind, you must never let it be alone.

Something bent so far in me, but never broke. I kept thinking if I went far enough in the wrong direction something would pull me back. That’s what they don’t tell you about abandonment. When you do it to yourself you don’t even feel it. You don’t feel anything anymore.

Before she swims to me, I catch her scent in the water. Like bath pearls popping in the laps of purple water against the yellow sand, I inhale euphoria, and I am intoxicated, immovable from the shoreline. I melt into the mud, and I am eaten alive, transfixed, infatuated with the shape of teeth boring holes in my skin.

-Diary of a Siren

The philosopher in my life, who speaks in thoughts and sits in inaction which he poses as an intellectual buffer. It is far easier to sit in living rooms and bore holes in the minds of grandparents with perpetual conversations than enact a plan. Set the bird free from the cage, and see if it flies, I say. But no, he sits and prunes the feathers of his ideas, endlessly and all the days on. For if he never sets his pondering in motion, he will never have to face that his bird is not living, and that which never lives never flies.

Life is happening, life is happening all the time. I can’t seem to catch it in between my fingers, elusive as rays of light. I cannot keep it high in my lungs, it leaves me like a breath. I am a meager stone in a fast coursing river and I watch what erodes me away. Life is cold. Invigorating. I wish I could hold its hand and study its face before it escapes me again.