christmas presense

one more christmas.
one more present received,
that i don't remember asking for.

i am only a stranger staring into a backdrop
comprised
of all of them.

and here i am,
under another roof,
with one more girl
i decided to live with.

she loves me
and i love her,
and i know that one day
we will compete to see
whose heart we can char the quickest.

inhalation

i miss smoking.
i miss feeling smoke enter and
leave my body like it's some stranger
you bring home after a bar.

i miss the comfort of being alone,
when i pretended i was the only ship
left at sea on that particular night.

i miss the noise that stranded streetlights and stoplights made
at 3 o'clock in the morning
where ever i had lived alone.

i wish i could exhale my sentiments
into the nothingness of a vacuum.

learned behaviour

we come from spunk,
those five minutes your daddy paid attention
to your mommy.

we live here
in the now,
just a collection of images
passing through one another on the street
like
it's only air,

a blur.

you go this way.
i'll go that way,
and maybe we'll meet up
one day
if we both slow down.

i'll light your cigarette.
we sit down where the curb meets
the street.

and by this time,
i swear to god,
one of us will have something to say
like grown ups,
just how we used to imagine.

the confusion of a gathering

i'm pretty sure i draw awesome birds,
but none of this matters right now.

what really matters is that everybody
drinks too much,
and at the same time not enough
at all.

i even saw my dad drunk this weekend,
more hammered than i can ever remember.
the sad thing,
or funny thing,
is that i was too drunk
to even remember.

then chris was kicked out
for flinging meatballs at the ceiling.
this made lauren cry.

i never witnessed a thing
because
i was somewhere on the backporch
smoking cigarettes with steve.

and whats really weird
is that i haven't smoked a cigarette
with anyone
in six months
and twentyone days.

postpartum

you just don't know where to begin,
each thought is stronger than metal
and these thoughts are threaded
into larger chains of being.

most of the time
we sit here,
stunned,
waiting for the daze to end,

unable to think,
unable to vacuum the fuzz
from our brains,

we are nothing more than microbial intentions
lost
in a wilderness of eventual endings.

a ship in a bottle

there's too much plum
in
the four dollar bottle
of malbec
i bought tonight.

and at this point,
i just don't care anymore.

lately,
we have had the conistency
of strangers.
where everything just drips
until one of us goes to bed,
with
neither one of us
saying our prayers.

but the only difference is,
is that i am here
and
you are there,
and
this bottle we sit in
is certainly not a church.

before it gets louder

in the deepest part of the night,
when you think
that everybody in this entire city
is asleep,

you just know better.
the quiet
leads to thinking
and the thinking leads
to a tiny siren roaming
far enough off in the distance
where you categorize it
as just another example of background noise.

it's not cool anymore

the puerto ricans
have been lighting fireworks
since
a little before
the first of the month.

tomorrow
will be the fourth of july,
the 7th straight day
of 90 degree plus heat.

someone opened the firehydrant
behind the elementary school
on kedzie,
and now
children wade in gutters.

you try to cut the sky
just to relieve the haze

but the knife melts,
and
nobody thinks any of this
is funny.

post haste

hi.

i want to fuck you.

i love you.
let's move in together.

i have dreams
that could fit the size
of
one of your hands.

and just before i give you the first one,
you will have decided upon a wall
in which you want to slap.

moving day

you win.
you have burnt
an image of your face
on the right side of my chest,
just below my crow and heart
tattoo.

it's now
that i decide to pack some scabs,
a white flag,
all of my belongings,
and a piece of rope
in a few plastic containters
and bring them home.

another definition

i've sat here before,
more
than a million times.

i believe in everything
when this room is quiet.

i trust the dark,
just as long as there is some type of
light
that i can hold,

and sometimes that light pulls me
to places that shine
on the alphabet
of the letters
that form
the meat
and bones
of something
that i am trying
to describe.

the first saturday without a cigarette

the entire city of chicago
could be on fire again,
and the only thing
that i'd want
would be a fucking cigarette.

my cousin had a birthday party
for his one year old
today
so i decided not to show,

and inbetween the miles of procrastination
that this produced,
i still decided not to tell anyone
that i wasn't attending.

i'm odd.
i know i'm odd,
and i'm fairly certain
that my girlfriend
and everyone else i know
has
caught on to this fact.

everything,
the birthday party,
the odds
that everybody thinks
that i'm some giant weirdo
from the planet Zeetron,
and all i ever wanted
was
a fucking cigarette
to save me today.

scabs mostly heal

you witness
the trigger
or you don't,

either way
some bullets find a shelter
right in the middle
of your gut
better
than most.

out on the range
you stand there
clutching
a larger than life target
on your chest.

christ,
you will even clean
the barrell
of their gun
every single time.

and whether you see them
or you don't,
they will always measure you
and take aim.

on the seventh day, since the last time we had sex

it was somewhere on fullerton,
just off the kennedy,
as i picked you up from work
that i saw you
in five years.

you looked the same,
just a little bit better.

you must had either been coming
or
going to work.

we were talking like familiar strangers.
you were dressed
just a little bit better.

and the heavy skyscrapers made me feel
just a little bit smaller.

and you never showed yourself to me.
it was like i was just some familiar client
or a colleague
you worked with at one time.

you looked good.

and then we came upon
a stoplight
and we were still
swimming in that silence.

and just in case you were wondering
why
i placed my hand in your lap
at that stoplight.

photography

i always look so wasted in my pictures
even when i'm sober.

i never smile

because the top
of my front teeth
have been knocked the fuck
out,
twice,

and the nicotine
and the coffee
and the red wine
have just shaped the porceline
even worse.

i swear to some god
that when my girlfriend
plays with my mouth,
it's like some slab of clay
that she's been molding
for some statue
in the remembrance of cancer,

and it's then,
that i'm just a little less bright.

and everytime
it's only a flash,

when i'm here,
trying to hide something
like i'm in control
of the lense,
like the distortion
is constructed of
a real face,

and it's here
that i've always been a lie.

the myth of logistics

we reach
for the gravity of these needs
with the same hands
that pin us
to this ground.

we aim for stars

and during the loading,
something undoutbtedly
gets lodged
into
the barrel of our chests.

we deem this
in terms of explosions,
the heat
boring its way into our hearts
and minds.

and in
the last act of desperation
we will breath for something
like a feral prayer.

she makes me dinner, i pour drano down the sink

each
and everytime
i reach
for a hand
and pull it into
that cave
that is my chest.

they find me
right at that very moment
when my eyes
and that clock attached to me
drop
in that toilet.

you love me
and i love you
and once again
we sleep inside
some holy grail
until our weight either cracks
or
solidifies the skin

and the only thing that we know
is that we will dwell
in this darkness
until we recognize
that hand
that feeds us
orbs of light.

sound proof

i pour another glass of wine
guided
by nothing more
than the porch light leaking through
the bars
on the kitchen window.

everything is quiet
right now.

everything sounds like
the blue light peaking out the window
from the top story
across the alley,

and if the train heading towards forest park wants to be heard,
someone else must be listening
nearer
farther stops down the line.

lauren is sleeping
in a room
about 20 steps away.
i count the steps
in my head like wood planks
leading
to a beach.

and besides this silence
and the sound of wine
pissing
into a glass cup,
this is my only comfort.

the duration of a bottle

it was easy.

i uncorked
and sprang
this bottle of wine
that i drank tonight.

it escorted me through
a plate of tortilini,
a game of scrabble,
and a conversation of
the various shades of blue
to paint the bedroom.

half way through
i laid in bed with her.
she wore a long shirt,
i wore the same clothes i
was covered in
this morning,
even the wrinkled shirt,

nothing was finished,
but she went to sleep. 

and before i was done,
seth and i messaged back
and forth
on why catherine should be
in chicago this weekend,
but nothing was resolved.

and now,
with the entire world's hands
folded in silence
i imagine what's left
as i absorb the last drop
of this bottle.

january patterns

the days
add up like snowflakes
that land
on a sidewalk
leading to
an abandoned home.

here,
there is no shovel,
no footprint,
not even a hand
scratching
for a snowball,

but there is always some sound
in some distance
yelling
at us,
tickling
us,
poking at a center
that we hardly remember
even being there.

at some point
even the those gods
must believe in this.

everything
that we are
is either ice
or
that one hour of a sun ray
that melts everything
into something
a little more fluid.