Dear Life,

Give me the mountains in all their regality, and the moon in its mystery, and the stars that nudge me ever forward into the void. Give me tattooed skin and wild hair, a blood stained wall in my inner sanctuary. Give me vodka sodas, give me Camel Whites, give me something to hold in my hands as I die to myself. Give me lawlessness, and give me liberty, and please, for the love of God, give me hope that the roof will someday pop off this dusty house.

Give me a beacon of insanity in a world gone grey.

Give me back my light, and give me all your love, and give me all the bravery that one small body can hold inside. Give me cowardice and fear and avarice. Give me vices, give me virtues, give me my humanity. Give me sunshine to nurture, rain to ponder, and snow to seethe inwardly, that I may remember it’s not all roses. Give me roses. Give me thorns. Give me practical gardening tools.

Hold me close to your center. Love me and nourish me and make it all too complicated to comprehend. Allow me to sit here on my fence. Allow me to sit here in my head. Allow me to be seated in awe of you, my teacher.

Give me all of it. Everything that’s meant for me. I’m ready now.

The Unholy Trinity

I. Ambivalence 

With white knuckled hands, you ripped my body apart, piece by piece. You put my blood on your doorpost, scattered my ashes in the fields where no rain would come, made a peace offering with what little was left of me. You tortured me into silence, now expecting me to speak? You press your lips to mine with a hum in your cavernous mouth, with a scorched elation buzzing through your veins, a fire just behind your irises. Oh my love, my love! My frustrating love. You of the sunshine, you of the bitter blizzards, you bipolar movement of my pen and my noose, how do I go about it - wrapping my arms around the corpse of our ecstasy?

II. Admiration

A shaman, a muse, a traveler through my mind, a couch surfing maniac abounding in the thoughts I think, a socket to plug my nonsense into - you serve so many purposes in my land of make believe.

In the matrix, you are separate from me. In our egos, we dance on opposite sides of the sticky gym floor. In our separation, we forget what we once were. You taught me how to love. How could I cease to know the rhythm of the song you spoke into being for me? How could I forget the face of my dearest friend? 

In reality, we are one. Everything is one. There is no duality, there are no faces, no voices to argue, no space in between. In the void, it's you and me, two drops in one sea, and we are a we, and I'm perfectly happy.

III. Adoration

I did not clean the kitchen quite as often as I should have. It took me a week just to finish folding the laundry. I expected much of you and sometimes gave the lesser offering at the altar - Cain slaying his brother in a fit of rage. My heart couldn't take the sheer volume of love that you brought to the table.

And the hell I put you through at times, well that was undeserved. You were flawless to me, a celestial being, pure light surpassing all time and space. Your presence was the antidote to all things. Your heart was the color of my every day. 

Now I have to bring my own hues to the picture, paint with my own brushes. It's so hard not to miss you. 

Now I breathe the night air in deep, and beg the stars to say hello to you for me. (Are we staring, together, at the same one?) 

My Wretched Friend

I watch your complacency like one would watch a dying animal. I watch you from afar, most times, with sympathy and a vague disgust. Heart full of useless love, wasted love, I watch your eyes grow emptier, your smile turn to plastic. I told you, my wretched friend, that I don't think you're happy, and you nearly agreed, but hesitated, and tripped over yourself, memories of our drunk nights filling your head, but the forefront overtaken by the way things appear to be. So concerned with the shoulds, the musts and must nots, you never seem to see your own misery, until I appear to remind you. Collapsing into each other like stars, we only create voids and questions, the answers never appearing, at least not with clarity, nothing solid and real beneath our feet. We only dare to dream of what is possible to build in the space between us, and then turn our backs on it swiftly, remembering, as it were, that the stone you're made of is not the kind that can truly love. No, the stone you're made of is not the kind that could ever love me. 

Still

And still, you exist, somewhere up north, and of course, in the confines of every breath in my lungs. Still, you visit me, in dreams and in dreams of dreams, to the sound of country music and an opening front door and wedding bells. Still, you haunt my eyes in shadows, coloring my face with your wraith-like presence, my cheeks flushing with a warmth untrue. You ring in my ears like a lie, keep my bed cold like a blankety mist, and hold me in sleep, ever so restless. My essence is made up of words you have spoken. In places I cannot separate you from me, cannot untangle your deeds from my perception; my glasses are tinted the color of your eyes. Your body may be miles away, your voice carrying to ears not mine, your time eaten away by the exterior void, but a piece of you follows me, and a piece of me lays in the dark with you, holding out hope for the maybes and the could bes, grasping for straws in a desolate room that we once inhabited together, now vacant. You echo through and fill the space with confidence, still, the marks on your arms still a nightmare that I live in, over and over, just whispering prayers for you and watching the horizon, hoping to see your figure, looming, to swallow my life again. 

He's a Fire

His words go down like whiskey

Drunk on a street-side monologue

He spoke perfectly from Shakespeare

He speaks perfectly every time

The dramatics in his movements

Deter a little from his honesty

But I'd rather have his painted stones

Than nothing from him at all

He's a fire running after demise

A shaman frantically recalling a chant

In the wrong place at the wrong time

I watch him incinerate my despair

But he didn't mean to get involved

Didn't assign meaning to each word

The way I did, and do, and shall

And I watch his hollow eyes watch me

 

Same Eyes, Same Teeth - The Similarities End There

I'm in love with a girl that I see only in memories - a wild little rebel child who visits me in dreams of dreams. She was often barefoot, frequently late, forever falling in love with someone new. Her voice was melodic and husky with emotion - she used it to serenade the city in the summer days, nearly empty parking lots in the summer nights. She was flighty, yes, but not completely insane. She rode a tamer roller coaster than I; she had some semblance of control, the reigns of her life held slack in tiny hands. She read voraciously, wrote of transcendence, communicated with the sky. She seduced. She conquered. She was victorious. She was ALIVE.

I tremble in the dark now, where she would have been brave. I have given way to the swallowing of loss, where she would have felt the solid rock of possibility beneath her feet. I have screamed into the void where she would have embraced it. I try to sing like she did, but my vocal cords have been ravaged by illness. I want to read like she did, but my books sit dusty and unattended to. I want to write like she did, but the pen shakes heavy in my hand, unnatural and awkward. I want to feel as beautiful as she was, but I look in the mirror and see a very fortunate corpse who barely escaped death's clutches.

I still see her, sometimes, in flashes in my eyes. That same green on a background of earth. But when I smile, the similarities fade away. Her cigarette teeth looked much like mine, but so real and light was the curve of her lips that I can't stand to look at my own - a facade. 

What Happened Before You Disappeared

We stood in the middle of the woods, surrounded by weirdos and burnouts in bandanas, dancing, crazed, to the beat of drum music. You shuffled uncomfortably, your movements not in time with the rhythm, your face contorted into a sour glare.

"I'm leaving," you said, and you handed me a piece of paper. A flight itinerary. Fuck. I couldn't make out the words on the page, it's like they were in another language, and my throat started closing up in a panic.

"Leaving to where?" I asked.
"There's this field," you said, "this field in the middle of nowhere that I need to stand in the center of."
I stared at you.
"There's a portal there," you said. "To the next dimension. I finally found it."
I swallowed hard.
"Will you come back?"
"Don't try to stop me, okay?" Your only reply.
"Please hold me." My response. So you did. You held me there, in the middle of a dance party, suspended between time and space, your heart beating against the side of my face, louder and louder like a broken washing machine, until I was swallowed whole by it, eaten by the void and spit out again. I stood there with you as the lights grew dim, being recycled over and over again by the pumping of your breath and blood, hurtled to a point of light in the distance that spoke to me, and said, "Dust turns to dust, and ashes to ashes."
"I fucking love you," I said.
Your silence spoke the rest.

SPRING TIME!!!

The spring time DOES things to me, man. It makes me VOLATILE and CRAZY and ALIVE. There's a WIND blowing THROUGH me that's taking away all the DEBRIS of WINTER, all the LIES of my FORMER, all the HATRED I've been BOTTLING. I want to SCREAM and be LOUD and never stop TALKING. I want to make NOISE and make CHANGES and LOTS OF THEM. I want to go to BOULDER and drink TEA, I want to get in the CAR and just DRIVE, I want to just LOOK at someone and already know how to LOVE them. And I DO. My intuition is on POINT, and I am one with the EARTH, in all its CONFUSION and COLLISION and TOM-FUCKERY. I feel like I'm SPINNING in constant ORBIT around everything that MATTERS, like I'm HURTLING THROUGH SPACE at A MILLION MILES AN HOUR, toward the POINT I'm supposed to INHABIT, wherever that may be. And I can't wait for SUMMER, but at the same time I'm LOVING this INSANITY that comes from the sun TEASING me, the cold fronts BOMBARDING me, the Colorado weather KILLING MY INSIDES. But it's a BEAUTIFUL death.
(You just WAIT and SEE what raises from the grave.)

Some Things

I. 

The head can be persuaded, but the heart is made of both flesh and stone. Stubborn and raw, a wound begging to be stitched. 

II.

I wander brightly lit hallways in clothes made of blue paper. I dream of a time when I awoke to your alarm clock, the beautiful beats of soulful music, the sounds of your rustles as you left before the sun rose. I spent the days dancing through the smallest of kitchens. I spent the days smiling with my hand on my belly. Life was bursting forth, love pulsating through the very plaster of our walls. Hatred coexisted comfortably there, muted and grey in the background. 

III.

I was never very good at leaving you alone. Still can't do it. I guess some things never change. 

Golden Boy

You have a mask to fit every occasion, a full costume to convince them all you're made of gold. You lick your lips just to taste your own lies, the fruit of your labor a pretty facade. Your white picket fence is your prison. Your face tells no stories, your mouth speaks no truths. You white-knuckle the wheel, swerving through my disaster, knocking over trash cans and leaving a wake of casualties, with your could haves and should haves, your memories of a half-empty Boulder apartment, where you took what you wanted from me, and then left to the sound of wedding bells. Your paint is chipping, and I see that underneath, you're as ugly as the rest of the world, and maybe more sinister still, because everyone still looks at you and sees what you want them to see. 

Kansas

I.

Sorting through the rubble of the latest tornado, I think, I should really move out of Kansas. I always find myself this way, picking up the pieces, limbs that were scattered by the wind, my head rolling drunk on the bathroom floor. I sew myself back together, dilapidated, a mess, always more deformed than the last time. The mirror, as broken as I, still speaks the truth. "How is this working out for you?" it asks. I don't give it the satisfaction of an answer.

II.

I stay because the love comes cheap here. I stay because my name sounds sweet here, on the tongues of beggars and liars (they come out of the deep here). It's almost comical, the way I'm caught up in the volatile, the eye of the storm eluded me again.

III.

My demons look like angels in lighted windows, but the dust is honest dust. I'm the one that builds my house here. I'm the real fool.

Lux, part 2

I have felt God in the unexpected, in the mundane, in the darkest places. Somehow He has followed me, tracked me down and laid His heavy hand on my sky, compressing me into a magnetic field of confusion, and simultaneously expanding me into the highest heights of elation. I have felt God in the back of a dingy car, driving home from the club with raucous acquaintances, my thighs sticking to the leather seat and Chris Brown blasting from the stereo. I have felt God surging through the air of my favorite coffee shop, looking straight into the caverns of my mind from a fishbowl starry sky, holding my atoms together as I sat in a classroom, randomly interrupting my thought maps with a warm and wide-open feeling, reminding me of the everywhere-ness of the Divine. God has found me in a Catholic Mass in Spain, on the floor of a Buddhist temple in Thailand, in the blue morning light of my decaying apartment patio, never mind all the times He showed up in my own church. Somehow He manages to wrap His hands around a simple moment and bring forth in that moment vivid color and a lush warmth. Somehow He manages to remind me when I most need it that He is everywhere, with no exceptions or limitations, and I need only to look up just a little higher to see that the Light breaking through every window is His.

Lux, part 1

Omnipresent. Omnipotent. Omniscient. People describe God in such clinical terms. They see Him off in the cold distance, perceiving His remoteness as bitterness, percieving the walk to His house as treacherous light years, imagining their quiet entreaties never reaching His deaf ears. They wonder at the darkness, or do not feel its reach at all, but either way, they cannot see God through the thick of it, and so they disregard Him, and walk about blindly, forever running head-long into walls.

Talent on Fire

"Talent is a cruel mistress," a wise man once told me, and he was right in every regard. Crueler still is the talent you cannot keep. To have a talent that you cannot share is a burden, a curse. To have a talent that you keep locked in a cage is haunting, unnerving, unsettling at best. 

My talent was always my ability to make chaos out of nothing, on the paper and in my twisted little world. To smoke cigarettes, leaning out the fourth story window, the screen popped out by a helping hand, disregarding the crack under the door. To jump from passion to passion, to drink the cup of pure oblivion, to feel the bliss of change coursing through my tentacled veins. This was my talent. 

To apply red lipstick at an angle in the mirror, to appear as an apparatus in one life and then the next, to feel the depth and the breadth of my self and to swim in my own ocean with no fear of drowning, no matter how many times I went beneath the waves, to look constantly toward the shoreline for a savior. This was my talent.

To be the flighty favorite of offices and coffee shops, to have a story to tell, a new one at every turn, and to hold your interest with the details of new intrigues, to keep you coming back for more with new characters and new tragedies. This was my life. 

I incinerated it all, set it all aflame, with the gasoline of loyalty and the struck match of normalcy, the heat reminiscent of motherhood, the smoke of a promising future, but nevertheless a painful blaze where everything had to die. 

And still it comes back to haunt me, a ghost in many dreams and daymares, the thing that I destroyed, the chaos that I put an end to, the ocean that I dried up, the poetry that is gone. Talent is a cruel mistress, and I killed her in a shady Broomfield apartment and never even went back to pay my respects. And I keep killing her every day, renewed, with a vigor and a misplaced hatred, trying to hurt what once always seemed to hurt me, but in the process losing everything that made my face my face. 

The Grey Sky Opens

The grey sky opens

no sun to speak of here

only a filter of fog over a photograph 

of the cavern in my heart

A little fire inside,

gunpowder thrown into the flame,

destructive hands with no regard for my plans,

the Old Me has arrived. 

Wraith-like, a pale-lipped muse, 

her explosions rock me to sleep, 

her wounds keep me locked in dreams, 

chaos reigning 

when the grey sky opens

And the grey sky opens

to a moon unlit,

just a hunk of rock

in the ocean-floor sky 

And the Old Me mumbles

something about a wolf

as one yelps off in the distance,

as my bones feel that chill,

of memory holding me

as the grey sky opens

And The Old screams out

"Baby, you need to stay alive.

Take your car and just start driving

until you see the light

Take your car and just keep driving

until you can sleep at night"

And she weaves her fingers into my future

as the grey sky opens

And there's nothing I can do

nothing at all that can be done

The Old is here to stay

There's still a cavern in my heart to this day

A little sliver of my mind

Where I talk to myself 

back and forth 

all the time

And there's a place in my soul

where the mountain man feels at home

But I can't open up its doors,

until the grey sky opens