6am: dawn fog folds me over and i slide into my skin again.
Sleep hangs on the apartment, 70 degrees. on my eyes in confusion.
Graceless stumble in full effect, I’ve been here before.
Quick history sets in and my senses register one by one, a smooth relation.
607am: Breathe.
Swaying in the silent morning
to this high-tone scramble.
Tuned out in the background
with the window’s early glow.
only ever lived in retrospect. only ever gave a little. only ever loved in waves, and washed ashore too soon. only lived a couple lives only learned from what I've lost all along, I've only lost the things that I've let out
I didn't speak a word all day,
and every one rehearsed.
Conversations all thought out.
I'm cut along a line that only I can see.
Strung alone from side to side to brush the things I love.
If we could talk forever I would sit in silence hanging on the line.
Every word all yours. I'm stuck again barely breathing, fault internalized.
Here, with a habit of looking only at the lives I've failed at living, and I've trapped you there. Between my walls, an easy infatuation and my tired anxious draw. Now I climb steady inward from worlds where I'm complete.
Days like this, I come to places like this and just to sit, just to watch. Take a seat a seat at the strangest table and watch the strangest lives surround. Strange enough to love, but only as an observer. Strange enough to still-life in a frame that isn't mine. Leave a seat here open, pulled aside a bit. A lasting invitation, and a friendliest decline. These days all play like B-sides...an after thought, post-everything and undefined.
Sit with me where the sky and the streetlights meet. Two lines intersect in the moment our stories speak. Tangled fingers in our tangled space, hanging, freely in all the times we'd wait.
Where are you now, but tinder and smoke. Forty floors of orange, and the ash of the earth. Love lost in a fire, long beneath the crust.
All my life we've kept our lives in small concealed compartments, in hiding spots in little rooms, our little home in separate boxes. We stole our eyes and left the rest, and small talk now survives. Please forgive my faulted faith, I've lived so long alone outside.
no matter how many times you tell yourself "everything is ok" the unsettling edges of overthinking parade and with every worst-case scenario, your breath has run away
Make the same mistakes in finite steps to breaking your own heart. Break. Reprise. Break. Repeat. And only break until you're no longer left, and all you had to give is lost to lust and wasted in fleeting fucking smiles and double taps until that lurking fear you like to think can't happen does and the only thing thats left is lonely. The only one to share it with is you, and any brief encounter in whatever hour your life brings home. Your quiet house, your silent home will fill with lyrics of only your favorite sad songs in reminiscence of all the lives you crossed and times you couldn't commit and all the second chances you had and left for loss, always believing they were better off, better faired, when all along you were always scared.
I see all in dim light and dreaming lately. Looking for a place I left behind. A home in the Dakotas, a home that's hardly such. A place of temporary taste, as always, another in my transient tapestry of always onward under a false flag of duty and prize. I'm held together by unsettled breaths and reflection; and in reflection of strides assumed in the right direction I'm finding myself short on time, or perceived as such, in part, in strung out times I'm strung along on caffeine and another dream of leaving. A bigger dream this time, a bigger feeling. For something here will be left behind, and the driven life that most admire will burn for preservation.
i remember those days and the party cups, it was all too fun, we would never split up. we could never get hurt, we were all too young. in the days and nights with the boards out back, with the beers and girls, when we never looked back. when we toasted the moon and mourned with the sun, before we all grew up, before we'd ever get hurt, we were all too young. days and weeks where the streetlights swayed down the same old streets we were born and free, with the suburb sweethearts and American dreams.
it’s a life less frightening from the back of the room. foot on a wall. foot on the cool.