i used to live below this couple
who didn’t know that i could 
hear them through the air vents,
and if they had known they maybe 
would have left some things unspoken,
or maybe they would have seen reason
to speak more,
but their tongues flew and their mouths 
spat sounds that i may not know if
it weren’t for his drinking and her 
nights out on the town, and if it weren’t
for both of their
running around.

my grandmother used to tell me that
one who eavesdrops will likely hear nothing
good about himself, but nobody ever talks about
me or my four-door sedan or the change
rattling in my pockets or the band i still wear
around my finger though my wife died two years
and three months ago.


but from my couch, instead, i listened to a hair dryer
hit the drywall, or an oven door slam shut, and 
i would have never called my wife those things
even if i thought that’s what she was.

my cat would sleep through all of this,
and probably he even slept through the 
fire that caused me to evacuate my apartment
late one night in october,
but i like to think he ran out and found a ladycat
in the city and they live in an alley that the 
homeless haven’t found yet, so they can be alone,
and i imagine he and his new little family is doing 
pretty well for itself.

and i imagine that man and that woman would be
doing pretty well for themselves, too,
but i know that she started that fire with a flick
of her wrist, and i know that he watched her
the whole damn time, and i think if they’d lived i’d
still be sitting on my couch listening to
him ask who richard is, and her pour his gin down
the sink, and wishing to myself they would not
go to bed angry,
but i know they did because i never heard them 
make up once,


and i think that would have been so nice that 
i might have closed my side of the air vent
just to let them have something
all to themselves.

Our chances are slim-

Not like milk but more as in meager.

Life is a constant wager against death and whose betting black or even in the game of life?

Raise your hand.

You. Yes, you! The one with your eyes in a daze hoping to find an answer to the ultimate truth! But what's the given question and whose askin, "Where do you belong?"

Because you simply cannot read between these lines, my friend.

You cannot pick apart these letters and form a figment of thought big enough to sustain your ethos, your egos, your millennial standards of live and let die.

Where do any of us belong rather than right here. Right now. Accept us. All of us.

Spin the wheel. Your bet is as good as mine. It's only a matter of time before your luck runs out.

Don't ask, Where do you belong?

But instead, Who are you when you get there..

There are many things

I could say

To you.

But as you wished,

I will not let my lips part.

To speak the language

We both know

Yet our words

Could never be more foreign.

There is a pain

That has unevenly split

My heart into two

And the broken beats

Create wavelengths that

Travel through my body

That make the vibrations

Of my voice.

And the thoughts

That slowly

Take away my

Sanity,

Are these words.

there’s no point in 
pretending; 
i was made of glass once,
i’ve been burned in porcelain. 
undisturbed across the mantle,
full of loose buttons and 
pocket change,
and memories, the coming age,
and only grazed once in a while
by your knuckles,
though never anything more, now,
than an absent-minded
dusting.

It's not really our fault that we don’t do things when we are supposed to or try harder.

It's that sometimes we look for something to hold on to, to help us get to where we can make that difference.

It's not always your fault when something you try so hard to make happen just doesn't work.

Letting his hand go wasn’t on you.

He let go.

The question for you is that;

will you accept why he let go.

Or will you keep awake until its 3 maybe 4 in the morning thinking

of all the outcomes that you could have done to make it different,

and wonder what if i did this.

But there is no what if.

There will never be, no matter how hard you might wish

it will always have happened this way and

you are the one who has to accept that.

Or you will have wasted all that time thinking about the

What if's.

I wrote about him
because I could catch him,
I could put my finger on him,
trap him under my thumb,
and it was easy,
there was nothing I couldn’t 
capture with clips
and phrases of words,
the way he moved across the floor
in the morning,
how his teeth slanted to the left 
a little bit,
that punch-drunk feeling I used to get 
every time 
he’d disappoint me.

I cannot write about you.
I have tried, and you have asked 
me, but the words are stuck inside 
my fingertips,
or the letters are jumbled 
somewhere underneath 
my lungs, and the more you 
hold your chin in your fist 
and watch as I dry off 
from getting out of the shower,
the more confused they become.

You are intangible,
something that escapes me most
when you are right here,
and if I were fluent in every human
language, my vocabulary would 
still fall short
of the sounds you make 
when you’re finally sleeping,
or the way your hands
don’t have to promise 
they’ll hold me
tomorrow.

I fell in love with you

in the middle of nowhere

A day's paddle at most from

the outskirts of everywhere

Which is well within

the borders of anywhere

As long as there is a somewhere,

there is a whenever

And all the means of measuring the passage of time

are only hapless little habits we harken back to

Pressing thumbtacks into bulletin boards

as we hope and fail to triangulate

the epicenter of this new forever

we found in each other

The heavy emptiness weighing

On my heart.

Pulling the strings of the piano

That are my mind.

I will never forget this feeling.

The despair and resignation

Of forgiving of being forgotten.

Because the hurt was

Too much.

I will never forget this feeling.

The heart beat that is broken

That makes up two and a half

Beats.

That were our favorite song.

I will never forget this feeling.

The restlessness of being lost,

In the place I knew so,

Well.

I will never forget this feeling.

The sound waves that echo,

In the space between my thoughts,

The echos of the words,

That were once yours.

I will never forget this feeling.

Of hearing myself say,

"What if I didn't have the courage that day?"

Or

"What if we didn't go so fast?"

I will never forget this feeling.

Of not being able to tell you,

Everything I didn’t say,

When I had the chance.

I will never forget the feeling,

Of loving you with my whole heart.