Blaesar

 There are bruises on my legs again. Maybe I tried too hard for the stars - struck hemispheres of dreaming too big - while I count one, two, three, four, five shiners on my legs,  ten lookers on each arm (your jointed peals of rage) and, probably, forty-four on my heart – though it’s not like I ever counted the number of times you beat me down, before. It never did matter if I was enough for the 16 years - or for the Escitalopram - because I was never a star jumper that could  trade in comets for the cratered, disfigured life of meteors. There are bruises on my legs again, and I think I should stop dreaming.

Look. I'll tell it like it was. black. cold. wretched. Static clung to the air like ornaments on a Christmas tree and we were graced with the odd arced lightning. Oh, it was cold. so cold. I remember not seeing, my fingers frozen off as feeling receded from them like waves on a beach. how could I even be sure they were. still. there? the forgotten memory of a sunset lay imprinted on my brain, and its absence made the night emptier than ever. we waited. we waited for the moon to rise, for the clouds to shift, for the e-lec-tri-ci-ty to stop (like lost travelers stumbling in the desert waiting for an oasis mir

We’d make a beautiful constellation, You and I – shivering galaxies that may implode but who keep expanding, still hiding in gravitational lenses of sheer splendor - a thousand and one stars; we could wish for personals or company or maskless parades without crippling facades- not nameless but known. You and I, we could be brighter than the sun.

It's louder still but you don't hear it (and that has to be okay). Darkness holds me close again - so safe like warmth and death. I am hypothermia shivering within hallow catacombs; hurtling towards asphyxiation. Then it gets louder. My ribs overflow with moths and bone; they devour all my light. It is the fearful thunder shooting down my arms, too uncertain for one place. It vibrates blood and scars until my fingertips are earthquakes cracking open famine soil, and I curl them tightly - control the fear. Then it gets louder. It starts small - the little things - amateur acupuncturists stabbing away at the vitals of what ifs and could

A diamond queen and seventeen, smoking pack-a-day dreams for 95 cents more than zirconium-falls in slim nicotine (but the cancer in ashtrays never stops anyone from trying.) There’s truth in gusts of sleep, while I struggle in the security of windbreaking as heaven opens up to scream.

he reads to her, tells her what it was like to be a sailor of the seas on the moon. "don't stop talking," she tells him, dozing off, imagining the seas of zephyr. spyglass on the moon a million miles away, the ether shatters by a little girl on her toes, standing on her mattress, clinging to her window above. stain glass eyes in the wake of moon and she breathes as the sea slamming onto the pane, receding and reaching; clouding and clearing. her breaths reach the moon and the moon reaches back with her hands pressed to the girl's eyes. "one day," she tells the moon, the boy still at her bedside, "you and i will be together."

Angels eat her alive, the way she deserves: molting downy feathers in a hermetic esophagus— like her lungs, pooled with words untouched in stillness. She is choked by halos, and expecting expansions spanning clouds and Niles of rosemary tears; ( yet no ocean cried, and no tsunami felt, will rid the torture justified in each holy touch upon soiled cheeks: wet Liar’s runoff. It falls so easily down her throat, to drown more words. ) and she almost warns them to stay away: She is filth. but they lovingly caress and they carefully sink their glittering pearls into her calling husk… just the way she deserves.

I miss the wind chimes, the way they'd tenderly collide like contrasting colors in a watercolor, spreading music with each avid kiss of silver. We used to sit and listen, for endless hours, in a silence only wind chimes dared to crack. Now it's just me, in silence— no company of clinking chimes, sideways glances, or upturned lips; nothing. and I despise this nothing, this torture of my own thoughts, left completely within the core. Everything I hesitantly feel, everything I reluctantly am, has been rearranged—reassembled and shuffled, like a puzzle left to a child; carelessly, senselessly. The time spent on wood

Devour me, moonlight, within your luminosity. Tuck me safely within shady craters, so my eyes may then halt their steady gaze of longing, so focused that you sometimes smear with dribbled darkness. Let me fly from the inside, my toes burying themselves in light and lunar dust, twirling as you spin your radiance below. Grant me absentmindedness, towards my worries—myself. Just rip me from my soul, so I, too, may know the sensation of silent suspension.

Yearning for birds – the reminder of anchors in each half-moon cresent so lovingly carved into my soles. And you play hopscotch in my veins - the ones forbidden now to bleed - until I am beaten blue and flat but there are sparrows in my brain among cerebral cortex clouds, and that should be enough... only it isn’t.