how many times have I been born? 

red overgrowth
a dying sun 
setting on the pruning 
of how it was
hidden in the glow
under aging stars
finding humor 
in galaxial simmering 
an unnamed color
living on the green border

I whispered to myself “I could live here” believing here was a place to accept which was a starved hardened reciprocity

show me how it is
shaped where we hide
what keeps searching for a name
I only remembered months ago
where something was grotesquely
growing into and out of each other
again and over again 
consuming

I can’t eat, I don’t want to feel full, to feel energy, to feel living in a world that has changed so much for me, how did you have this effect on me, I tell me it’s addiction, an infatuation, but you’re everywhere, I want to see you everywhere. The world became so cold you used loved in past tense, is it impossible for me to know I’ll always love you, but the ways I do must change so I can live. I rewrote your history, the words, the touches, I made them bearable now I’m bearing down into the weight, I gave myself up would move to the smallest town become the most nothing of beings if that meant you were mine. But I should have never thought you of as mine, mine and yours are separated, in detaching and releasing, restoring and reconciliation. You told me I am an angry person but where is it now, where did we go, the midnight raids and drunken words

where is it now
where did we go
the midnight raids
and drunken words

a crack that grew following its own ways finding a path from my toes up into my knees across my torso through my neck until my head crumbled and I broke in several ways knowing that I have not felt a shatter like this and some logic asked me how to put it together again while I was still falling down 

then words came and a new voice reassembled

there were too many drunken words
and the prettiness faded with my patience
it’s not hard to crush something you love
just painful

and the words keep coming 

a new poetry book
black ink to write my name
it’s changed since 
I’ve last been here 

which actually means I’ve stopped trying to rhyme anything at all, I swear to god I’ve tried, now I let them be as they see themselves

crushed paper cups and coffee stains
reaching of chips at the back of the party
mouth full of gin
a pile of wasted feelings misplaced
popping words like balloons
nothing seems vintage anymore

I’ll find myself again but now someone new is coming to me, it’s a type of meaning and finding a way to care

do I string pretty words
around my neck
designer belief
and bedazzled rubies
mythical elixir too bitter
beauty is not so rare
just a paper bag

I take to walking and I’ll survey the landscape left for me and find the pieces along the way because they were me then and they are me now but there are still so many missing and in what ways can I put this back together while creating from scratch the pieces needed to fill the gaps and then to make it function all over again 

I counted the stars then collected the signs
it’s hard to admit when I get it wrong
or maybe they told me something 
that I forced into my own meanings
a warning or a temporary type of lesson
it’s hard to move on then love on 
while rewriting the connections
to let go of a life I foresaw
only to see in glimpses how I might have 
dodged a destiny that wasn’t for me
a place in the world not meant for me
that I had fallen off the side of the road
where I needed to breakdown at
to try again and begin again 
on a path that is better
what I have lost is nothing 
compared to what I have now

little hopes are still with me
and I believe what is here and gone
is meant to be both
that I am no creator 
that I cannot make everything mine

I say that to myself a lot these days if only my brain could catch up with my mouth

but some things are mine
and those things coming are mine
and what I had is mine
now missing
but mine is no possession
a stewardship and a stamp
an unchained potential
the coming and going

I listen more these days and look out windows trying to fill the place inside and reform

double sun
convergence in rising and setting
split second
then bliss
supernova radiance
but still no sound

Is there beauty in this world?
I think so I whispered to myself

in the blue haze 
dusky orange
in the movement of grass
in our sincerest apology
in the dissecting of the mind
then shifts

I see beauty to be changing and we are still salvageable 

we are still salvageable
I am still salvageable

and what am I to do with all this love, feeling wasted and unused, no shift no fade, a catapulted onslaught of

a long night 
a head full of stars
I don’t wanna feel feelings
but simply 
I’m just the elements 
with a pulse

I’m done saying prayers for you
I got the answers I needed
all in my head, the memories
the missing pieces
the absence of what I needed most
the lies, the deadly lies
to warm me up and gut me out
my bleeding heart ran out
and I’m done hurting myself
how hollow is a promise
if there is no matter underneath
that moving at the speed of light
means nothing if we only exist in space
where light travels unimpeded
never to find a place to land
solid ground with a foundation

but I did find it
solid ground
a place to land
delayed cultivation 
the visions came to me
I saw clearly
no longer split

I see now what I want, what I need, and how I can be there, I will take my time and grow love

the right way
the only way 

leaving behind the days of diving head first into a pool only to soon enough realize it was too shallow

the floor too hard
an impenetrable barrier

I’ll return my missing rib back into my side, rename my home far from the Euphrates, plant the resilient seeds and grow love in an Eden to thrive beyond a season, work like a gardener and tend to the genuine, erase and imagine my own holy names

my heart is not a seed 
no more imagined germination
it is the tangible outcome
it is the roots the trunk the leaves
it is the life that I have
in every moment it is here
never to be buried

I am growing

roots penetrate the haunted earth, bringing to the surface the corpses that brought us here, revitalizing through ancient nutrients, past voices that recalibrate, clinging to our centers, excavating the obsidian cornerstones

I see myself

through the negatives, through everything I’m not, through the ways I should be, a stack of processing Polaroids, bring to light the pieces still missing, the voids half full, places left unnamed, past lives coming into view

I join with others

and we move, collect ourselves, manifest what was never given to us, extracting the rarest metals, synthesize our own jewels, place them on our heads, predestined timeless regalia imagined in our own eyes, for our own eyes

I listen more

I tempered the beats and analyzed the rhythms, a thousand kindnesses without faces, but they make the sounds, tap into them, find them again like a first time, it’s all we can do

I see more

when I come back into view, I’ll be dressed in blue and gutted, an armful of bleeding hearts, each regret etched into the temporal lobe, erasing, then renaming, giving names to them I only know, 5 oracles with infinite faces

I am imagining

I’ll pray a thousand prayers, darts on the wall, cryptic words then candor, a deadly hope dismantling, giving something more than I can know. but I want to, sliced ribbons, bedazzled diamond rings, unmuted glimmers, a field of violets, it would be kind of hateful to kill it right, all these are for me, and so is the most distant sun coming back out of the darkness