Death is not your Color

Wake up at sunrise.
Drink your coffee with a shot of whiskey and remind yourself that death is not your color.
Stand naked beneath the sky and let her clothe your live oak veins with red sky warnings.
You’ve spent too much time on this ship throwing water overboard,
It’s about damn time you learn how to swim.
Replace your needle with a pen.
Replace your bottle with a body,
And spend your nights, drunk on the words that drip from the lips of your lovers.

Phantom Limb

I’m learning that wine can taste an awful lot like love

when all love left you is lonely.

We’ve scratched scars onto every inch of skin between us,

but the sutures just don’t seem to dissolve in the wake of our destruction.

Darling, tell me I am what you want

and I’ll tell you I’m wanting nothing more than what you’ve become.

Let us drink until the damage disappears

and

dance between the mines we’ve dug between us.

I’d lose a limb if it meant I could feel you again.

You’ve become a phantom pain that I can’t drink away

and believe me, darling,

I’ve tried.

Volcano

                                                               Cold rain on

                                                           colder shoulders, 

                                                   I’ve learned to turn away 

                                           when my gift of words is returned,

                                        opened by your silence. An ambivalent

                violence, this dizzy doorstep dance has left me drunk on indifference.

  Kiss me again, I swear you’ll see, this is no mountain. Darling, it’s the whole damn sea.

Warm rain on burnt shoulders, I’ll watch you run away when your hungry words

begin to bite back at my empty hands. I only dance when I’m drunk,

and darling, your desperation has left me dry.

Your dancing doesn’t make any difference

anymore. Mountains swell and

oceans die. I’ll only kiss you

if you cry.

 

Folded Flags

I’ve seen the spoils of a war with life splashed across the sheets of a bed,

as the man whose name I carry,

cleaned away the blood of the man who gave that name to him.

I’ve learned that my stomach isn’t as strong as the love I’d like to show,

because there is no dignity in death, even when you meet it with a bullet in the                                                  brain.

Folded flags can’t make sense of things for those who never sensed that things might’ve                        ended this way.

Folded flags can’t make the forgotten, forgive.

 

See You Next Tuesday

She let her best friend tattoo a four-letter word

On the same rib, she borrowed from a boy, named Adam.

It’s a promise not to see herself as a curse

Anymore.

She wears it like a badge

Tucked beneath the band of her bra.

She’s been the worst version of herself.

She wrapped herself in modest necklines and the rhythms of repentance,

Praying for the piety she was told paved the way to peace.

She drowned that bitch.

And she swears She’d do it again

She found the best version of herself,

She dug through years of misplaced perfectionism and forgotten poetry

Just to find her sitting there with a cigarette

What took you so long?

She has no apologies left to give.

She tossed them into a pile of torched timber and trivial testament

She took her scars and shined them up real nice,

She hung them from the ceilings in the house she painted black.

She stays up all night to watch them shine in the moonlight of the memories she carves into her mirrors.