I've been living... tirelessly, vicariously through a pen, looking on behind a viewfinder at the realities I write when I'm alone, and it scares me to think that maybe no one will ever know what I've never said in front of anyone before... Like the things I think of when I'm standing in front of a mirror. But sometimes it catches me off guard so I'll sit there gazing back into the abyss of who I'm afraid of becoming,  just hoping the abyss would leave me alone. But that isn't just there when I'm awake, staring into the overstated thought that I let myself peer into. It's not just there, (as) every time I shut my eyes I see myself the way I would be in an alternate reality, riding bareback on a typewriter, typing out photographed depression onto 35mm film that I'm feeding through my teeth to you, listener.   Listen, this isn't a confession, it's the story I breathe.  So listen to my nervous footsteps as I pace back and forth and watch my own eyes dance across the backs of my eyelids because I'm scared, listener. And I've been that way since the day I stepped away from the pain I penned into the borders of the photos...   Listener you, have become the subject of the photo for my now, and the first time I took up my pen is the moment I shot you in the frame of who I am becoming with every word I type out of my mouth. You, listener, are the wake in my sleep, because I wake up to escape my dreams, and the words on this film strip are why I stay that way.  It's hard to stay that way... I'm sorry…   I've got a broken story absorbing all the memories that define me. I've tried to put it all behind me, but it's still broken when I'm whole. I fear the monsters I make up in my mind, and I've fed my story so much loneliness over the years that – purely by fate, it's become the monster I'm afraid of, from my acetate-cut throat down to the film canister in the stomach of who I have let myself become.

I've been writing in cursive these days, like tidal waves, And I like to watch the ink roll onto the shore, And where the sky meets the sea at the horizon is where I spell out every single ripple of my life, Well the broken pieces and the stunted shine of the sunlight over the skyline paints the evening, A different shade of red for every letter that I spill into the ocean, But in front of the background is where I'm still trying to force this knife across my throat, And even though the sunset hasn't yet spilled out of my throat, I'm still bleeding from the words alive inside my pages, Just as the worlds alive inside my head, I bleed color-burned ink onto pages I keep in my dread, "drop dead–" underlined,  While I'm still trying to kill the butterflies in my stomach. But the words on the pages and the cursive wires that make up this portrait are as dead as I'll ever be, Inside these fires of self deceiving ritualistic perceptions of misinterpreted rhythms, They're cursive, So I forfeit my distortion for a prism, Where I can look out over the ocean and see every single color of my fragmented poem, And notice all the separation the way I see the cursive, I'm cursed, Without any sort of proportion, Just like the way my hand shakes with the knife, I never wanted to take my life, I only wanted to write myself into a sunset, Because I'm sick and tired of waking up inside my dreams,  Sweating words onto a canvass that I'm painting with the burnt end of a cigarette, I'm fed up with the block letters inside my head that tell me that I'm broken - I'm cursive - And I've been talking to a blank canvass for hours on end, Just trying to find the meaning of the force behind the pen, I see every seam, fold, and every wrinkle on the page, And I let them mold and sink into the edges of my shadow as it's cast onto the canvass, Inside my dreams,  I color in my silhouette words with that cigarette in my free hand - shaking,  Like the hand tracing smiles across my throat, Well with a knife in my hand and blood on the blade, I'm singing every note as I write the letters of my shadow, but I've been trying to see color using everything I can think of, and no matter how much I look through kaleidoscopes or refracting prisms, or stare into waterfalls just hoping to see a rainbow like I did as a kid, I can never find the color in the cold that I call home. It's cold in my home. Cold is where my heart is, and I don't know if it's ever been enough to be in that place. I've got rainbows dripping from the scars I keep on my wrists, but I still can't see the color the way I want to. All I see is black and white bloodstains on my life. But that doesn't stop me from picking up the knife. I'm still numb to the fact that I've got colored ink in my pen. If only I could see it... It kills to think that the beauty of what was once tragic is now only broken - that the melodies I sing are as monotone as these poems I scream at the top of my lungs. And I just want to wake up to a sunset,  A beautiful ending, Because an ending in the end is all I'll ever have, I want to live - and God, I just want it to be cursive.

You are a nicotine brushfire  burning out the smoke in my lungs until all that's left is a rain cloud, threatening to quench your flames  but that spark jumped up to the tip of my tongue and caught fire to the roof of my mouth,  so I breathed my flames into the knuckle-bruised fist clap that made your stomach bleed butterflies, drowned by the lies that your heart set over the railways leading home, no one wants to go that way.  I coughed up smoke into earthquake plumes, shaking like shotgunned Jack.  your burning touch sent shivers down my throat and tried to put that fire out, but no matter how hard they tried, baby...  that fire burned.  I felt the coals carving away at my pride,  throwing out the nails that led me back to the way I longed for a home inside.   you became home for me,  as you burned through my entirety,  while my knuckles bruised and bloody from scouring along my teeth, fought to open to the overcast forethought of surrender.    And it's been years since I've known myself the way you do, I always feel warmer with you on my mind and it doesn't get any worse than when the cold in your eyes extinguish your flames And I wish that I could take with me your name To the end of everything, and carry your flame within me until I am nothing but a word – a name.   If you would confide in me, I would divide within you the memories keeping me away from you.   But your eyes told me just how far you withdrew from the scars left healing painfully beneath watermarked skin–claimed–a work of art.   So ever since then I've began feeling comfortable in your cold. But I wasn't quite sold on healing, despite my quiet contentment. It's not like I told myself everything is alright, And I believed it, It’s that I told myself that nothing will ever be the way that it's supposed to; that we are all just reminiscent of someone else's past, so man, be content with the future. It's all as grand and as vast as we make it out to be, so I let myself get lost in the mystery of making myself believe it. At least I tried. But it still feels like I've got an anvil on my chest, and my heart flutters bleed red for you.   There are fistfuls of railroad ties from the back of your throat to the tip of your tongue so that transit never turned up. I was going to ride it out of this town with you up and move somewhere colder than the warmth left lonely–dancing in your eyes.   But your eyes continued to burn. And I longed to feel the warmth of your flames.   And that fire kept on burning until my teeth absorbed the black soot from the tar in my lungs, until carbon fumes pulsed through my veins, until you are no longer the flame but a raindrop among the butterflies left to die. 

I used to build forts out of junkyard parts and rummage through the ruins of someone else's wreckage. I've had more fistfuls of sawdust and shards of mirrored glass as a kid – metaphorically fragmenting my spirit, tormenting the bottleneck of feeling I still have left in my hard-fisted knuckles after beating them skinless – than anyone should ever have to carry. And I carried it. I wrote for hours behind my eyes, of all the names of all the demons I'd killed in the time I spent drowning beneath the thoughts that kept me trapped back in time. And every time I wondered about the way that my clouded lungs breathe names–exhale yours and inhale mine– and then when I die, and I no longer carry the weight or the names that carried me through the breath in my lungs, cold-eyed and breathless to decay by the touch of the sun, will you bury me, will you be my undertaker and carry the weight of the breath of what was once in mine and pour me into the ground, when I am not, anymore, But until then these knuckles skinned from self-inflicted wounds, Scabbed and scarred from self-created wars, Mirroring the way my mind plays out every detail of every distorted memory from the way my future runs in, Headfirst through every open door, And all I have is the memory of “could have been.” Like you could have been better, Better than you ever were, Because you were never the man that you should have been, Not for her, not for Him, not for anyone. And since then, the way my knuckles bleed and the way my hands shake tell me that “what’s done is done,” And isn’t ever going to be different, And it’s difficult not to be indifferent. To be inconsistent is not the same as ambivalence, but I carry both, Because of the way I’m intimate with the ghosts I keep present. But I like to think that reluctance is a virtue, and design equivalent, But here there be monsters, like age and growth, I swore an oath to keep them both at bay, but with life still comes death, so what’s the point of avoiding it anyway… So I’ll find myself alone from time to time, Telling myself that to be, is not to be present with what was or what could have been, That to scabbed skin, to say that I tried, would be an understatement to say the least, And it’s times like these that I try to convince myself to be released, Like I’m convinced that to heal is to die, and I’m running out of time. And those ghosts keep me up at night, It’s hard to shut out something as ill-defined as a ghost, So I’ll breathe, at least listen to the names that I keep, and at most, I’ll say them aloud to try to choke out the sound, Of every word of “what could have been,” on repeat, Side-by-side with La Dispute at night to remind myself that things could be worse... And every time I hear those words I wish that it was you that I would’ve found. And if you can hear me through the sounds of my ghosts, And see me through the scars that keep me there, Would you be, and carry me

I spent a night all alone looking for a light and I found hope in a flattened matchbook, lying on the ground. So I sat down on the bench put the cigarette in my mouth and thought about all the emptiness that drowned out any thoughts of forgiving myself. So I opened up the matchbook, and with a streak of irony, found it just as empty as I felt that night. And that emptiness consumed me, until I no longer could feel but I felt that emptiness personified within me. When I mean empty, I think of the universe I think of the ocean: as deep and wide as the number of mysteries they hold within the confines of their eternity; my empty: as the ocean is deep and the skies are wide– fear, insecurity and brokenness and apathy, like a prelude to cruelty, screaming beneath the solace that the ocean assigns to me. And those waves rise within me until I can no longer breathe. And the waves threaten to drown me inside. I spent that night using buckets with holes in the sides to try and purge this human vessel of ocean water and sea salt. Taking the broken end of a question mark to the side of my head to keep from drowning. I’ve always been afraid of drowning. Too afraid to accept the inevitability of the waves, but spineless to splinter the question that holds all of my fears captive, resounding through my lonely mind like a pack of hungry dogs, barking to the sounds of whispers in the night time, keeping me awake until I can no longer hear the sounds of my sanity leaving me, beneath the beauty of a sunset. And as the darkness forced the light away, I was stained red far more than the sky was that night. Stained. Stained like depressive tendencies drawn and quartered to the rhythm of a drum beat played to the whispers of a prayer. Stained like bleeding skin stretched over knuckle bones. Stained like homesick rust beneath counterfeit sun – burnt down to the way you look at me – left town, gone but outrun by the sound of my future's footsteps like the way your gravity pulls me toward you and into your eyes. Those eyes would satisfy the strain in mine even when I couldn't satisfy myself to the point of breaking my gaze. That cold sweat in my shaking hands ambivalent to the warmth in your own. "And even if you're prone to doubt," she said, "I'll be your promise, but I won't be your drought. And when the waves come crashing in, I'll keep the flooding out." And those words sent me forward toward finality where the sunset sinks into me, where the colors of that celestial sadness run solid through my veins and spill through the seams as I become the narrative that I’ve sewn between the sinews and the skin to cover up the sins that lead me back to my silence, expanding toward the sounds left remnant–like background radiation–that pace back and forth between the silence and the ends of my humanity, like the way ocean waves crash so violently at the beginning of their endings. Your words fell calloused on my open eardrums whispering brush fires into the way you sparked me into your name, Clenching jaws rumbling to your thunderclap close-fisted heart beats steadily alongside mine if I would be, wouldn't survive otherwise, but your eyes your eyes. And my blood-(shot) keeping to your gaze; If I promise to be, (would you be?:) my warmth, my waves, my flood.

You are a loaded revolver playing love letter roulette, making small talk with the barrel, making love to your mutilated mindset that has you dead set on being dead. you've got empty chambers labeled "love her" and "love God" and the rest are loaded and labeled "hate", so that when you pull the trigger, you'll know there's at least one reason to be alive.  And no matter how hard you tried, to put and end to the paradigm of life — I tried so hard to die; dying; died; the thought of death suiciding through my mind like the blood in my veins until it stained my arms more times than the time it took me to realize that no matter how hard I tried, the barrel liked the small talk.  So I stuck around long enough to realize that righteous anger isn't satisfied when you're judged by the judge, and that judge, is you.  And I sat by my bedside every night praying that God would take away my life. And I sat petrified in time searching on hands and knees for the reply; and my mind turned like the cylinder turned in the revolver just trying to find a solution to appease that judge.  Well, that thorn in my side has given me a lot of shame, because my story is stained by the wounds, and I'm torn, wondering whether to give Him the glory.    "…and you will bear My Name before all of humanity - and I will show you how much you must suffer for My Name!"   I fought so hard to find the joy of the Lord, and for it to be the one strength that I had, but that joy was forced and I don't know how not to be sad. It's the only constant that I've had that's been consistent enough for me to believe that consistency is one in the same with substance. that the constant within me is the only thing in which my identity can truly – lie.  And I believed it.   But I stuck around long enough to realize that my pain, doesn't belong to me.  And even though i hold that thorn of depression close, like a child with their favorite stuffed animal all snuggled up at night. but even though i hold depression close, Jesus holds me closer. And after six years of waiting for something to fix my problems to put an end to the solitude inside my mind, and end my life; well, I got my reply.  "You were never meant to die." "You were never meant to bleed in order to be clean."  "You're meant to be free."   Six years later and I'm still learning what it means to be free–that my identity doesn't lie within the scars on my wrists but in the stripes on His back in order to take back what was rightfully His. 

I've tried to make myself smile the way I used to, in a dream full of unknowns with remnants of a grin, brushed on sideways with a broken jawbone, stumbling wet canvas footsteps until the painting knows more about my grim past than my future ever will. So lock-jawed and tone deaf, singing into the bone like a microphone, amplifying broken memories as if to abominate the past until the truth sets in, and I am no longer a memory, but my own reality set before me, and I'll accept every ounce of mistrust, sketched into my skin by the riddles drafted by damned camaraderie. And I am no longer whole, but holy. Set ablaze by the anger toward the bitterness in my family, righteous until the day they die, singing, "I am nothing short of who I am," and what I am: is a brick-by-brick frame built out of nothing in-particular, until that stone–carved marionette stretches out his hand and says, "Nice to meet you, I can sympathize with the worst of you, because it's a part of me and I swear, on my grave, that you, you… you are nothing short of the same. You and I, are categorized by our worst memories to the parts we keep inside, but you and me, have the same locked safe set within the lumps in our throats when we try to tell ourselves, 'I forgive you.'"   I was stone–dead silent, listening to him speak of me in effigy. He was preaching to the choir, And I had to make sure he wasn't a liar… So I replied,   "When you look at me, do you see how badly I wish that I could be free? Because there's a weight that I feel like the pressures felt in the depths of the sea, but it's all the result of a mind that thinks things through so thoroughly that feeling anything has become so hard for me. I feel love like love at first sight, I feel pain like that love was lost, and I feel anger like that love was real, and I feel hatred because I can't love myself enough to admit that I need saving. Like I deserve the sentence for the punishment that that hatred's been craving. And I sink like stones into fragments of my best memories, and I separate from myself in reverie, to reconnect the pieces and piece the splinters back together, and reassemble in regression so that my soul looks more like the remnants of a broken jar than immortality, put back together the wrong way until it's almost human - like a Van Goghesque figurine except I am both the sculptor and the sculpture, joining hands as the hard clay solidifies my fears and forms the best portrait of all that I wish that I could be. And I shook hands with my own devil as I played the duality of humanity. Mind and matter. And I found the reclaimed and reformed remnants of that broken vessel represents the collection of all of my deepest insecurities. And those insecurities are the thoughts that I think late at night when sleep doesn't come to me; things that take the whole of my entirety to fight and forget, but no matter how hard I try to defend my finite mind with thoughts that transcends the shallow depths of that kind, that jar breaks. and reforms, and awakens; moving through time and space as a projection against this clockwork, a relative paradigm in the cool clear blue of watered ink between night and dawn and I am drawn up into the sky. Resentment swelled in the darkness and I close my eyes, and breathe myself slowly to sleep, molded by unknown hands, composed like a sheep for the slaughter. Within that reverie between wake and sleep I stood gazing face to face with a part of myself that knows more about me and that insecurity than anyone and I will ever know."     And realization dawned and I realized that the strings that hold him together are the same that hold me to him, stone-cold against the frame that I am, bridled to the breach; Am I able to stand unaided, like "use your head!" You are only as weak as you pretend to be. And he didn't need to reply. Because we both knew what he would've said. But he said it anyway.   "I know."   Holding a conversation with yourself, personified by a broken clay marionette makes for an interesting duet, but I guess hearing me out for the sake of progress is the best basis to give the benefit of the doubt. So humor me.   So that stone imposter looked at me one last time before dissolving into something new, and said, "You can feel stained all you want, but Christ alive… I know, you swear by Him, and so do I, in a similar sense. But so long as you're listening, look me in the eyes, and as a mirror tells you what you feel, let me tell you what I know: You're better alive than dead. You're not the cuts on your wrists, or the voices in your head. So here, unclench your fists, and get rid of your dread–please don't ever settle for dead. Although my hands are unsteady, and the lines are skewed, my heart is steady, and my words are true. All I ever want these words to do is heal you… So watch with me as the sun ascends above the horizon, while the butterflies resurrect and rise and move to the melody of time passing by."   And I said, with a hint of regret, "I'll think about it."