i got scared.
i burnt my tongue just to taste-
the hymn of an elixir with no destination,
a tear with a purposeful procreation and a
meaningless infatuation.

you were on my mind like a wired, chided alpine of lovesick honeybees,
and i've felt nothing but ancestral pain in this echoless house of mirrors.

i am a laundry basket hanging from translucent puppet strings.

this flora bellows,
so engulfed in Western culture that it forgot about sheltered lieutenants-
the deafening tenants singing of
"just one more,
just one more,
just
one
more
.
"

i am no more worthy of the stratosphere than my raven-shaped nightmares,
but i'm orchestrating a perpetual plea
for my fingers to bend
into a less misshapen crescent.

white coat covering solemn ground,
my palms are both cracking and mending,
my eyes both rapidly cycling and softly meditating,
my mythical equilibrium both scratching at the surface,
and tucking itself in for the night.

--

somewhere distant
but not far,

your lungs are the lantern in my attic-shaped heart,
maintaining a hushed illumination
and a delicate snowfall,
euphoniously humming a reliable tune,
foreshadowing cozier winters
of hope and comfort.

often in days where the sun,
in its highest hierarchy,
still refuses to warm my feet
(stubborn
&
engulfed in charcoal
),

the colorless kaleidoscope behind my eyes will become a photo album of the purple-red hue of waterfront nimbocumulus,
jade scrubs not yet bloodied,
and the tea kettle sweetly whistling,
a collective hymn only conjured by your
ambitious,
bashful
cheekbones-
an antidote comprised of scarlet tablecloth and ballroom reverie within the smallest bones of my wrist.

in this auspicious daydream inexplicably affixed to reality,
i watched a cackling crown absorb the ultraviolet in a stale, forgotten parking lot

--

as rainbow plumage replaced black,
i thought of your modest palms on my vacant chest,
immersing the colorless into the radiance,
adrift
and unafraid.

in previously dining with sultry, elegant fire*,
i was a gazelle with its neck bit to the bone-
breathing,
but not alive-
a fractured coffee table melted into a morbid pool of cheap, liquidized steel,
decimated via hazel iris communication and spilled wine.

my skin,
ablaze,
took the shape of your hip-bones,
outlined with red lace and childhood scurry-
a grey ghost changing weightless piano symphonies into expired canned goods,
dented to the severity of hairline fracture.

--

band aids eventually peel like browned, dampened leaves in the sorrowful days of autumn;
scar-ridden skin does not dance into the fading sun to never return,
but rather sits on skin like
wet newspaper
and whiskey breath;
it creeks a screech of attrition in your throat like an unhinged screen door,
the splinters down-pouring into esophageal tissue like ash.

re-dressing the wounds must not be a death sentence,
as the gauze is the clock-tower,
perched in the center of town,
striking noon.

it took far too many rotations around the axis to realize that a wounded, passionately bursting ***** behind a protruded rib-cage was not an expiring hourglass,
but that third degree burns could be the infinite list of ambiguous maps i've yet to navigate.

--

with the passage of ambivalent and nebulous suns,
i can now unravel the bloodied, endlessly flawed fabric to the newly optimistic idea of
her favorite peppermint tea,
her January habits of leaning on the sizzling pellet stove with sweatpants slightly too thin,
her perseverance of the books like a Nobel Prize winner.

but so help me,
if your are one more to pour gasoline on my dinner plate,
i will light the match myself before i allow you to complete the unfinished canvas of my curious skin.

the world is not a stopwatch.

-

yet,
my gaudy lenses consists of entrapment between two copper hands,
one slightly more deprecating,
one slightly more omnipresent-

but we're surrounded by curious skies,
not a dome comprised of the middle school locker room and the sundress that rainy Sundays begged you to twirl aimlessly in.

in these crevices of half life when I can undress the assembly line to its barren tremors,
i breathe in a light spanning counties worth of mountains and mom's chicken enchiladas.

here,
there are no stifling, expendable hands.

there is the first sip of snowy December espresso.
there is my favorite fleece blanket resting on your ambivalent shoulders.
there are endless timelines of the homeless finding shelter and your roof softening the unyielding razors on my skin.

the copper will always find new ways to imbue itself,
but for now,
my breath will carry on for several spring meadows
and remember all of my forgotten names.

voluminous birdie,
color in the forgotten gray of my hand-me-down ventricles.

sing to me like mom after my wisdom teeth,
and sweetie after my knees forget how to meaningfully breathe.

your flight cannot guarantee a destination filled with rhythmic syllables of your brown-eyed reverie,
but the wind itself fuels thoughts of days colored rainbow when my eyelids grey the trees like losing jackets in the snow-covered weeks.

you cannot fill an upside-down jar.
you cannot crack a polymer designed to turn its back to the lukewarm winds.
you cannot convince the grounded child to climb mountains in light of fatter wallets and brighter pale ales.
for the only mechanism of my flight is a unreachable cove-

an unquestioned, unbreakable, unconditional love.

---

fly North,
fly North,
fly North
--
it is too cold here for your feathers to shine.

--

--

-