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.
The warm mug at every coffee shop. How many lips have stained this ceramic? The sidewalks strung along miniature cities, and the steps they’ve strayed. How many lives went one block too far, how many missed connections lingering by the street lights. First last kisses hung up overnight in cold breath. Each of us left standing, stirring, gagged in the gutter and wasted on the words we never spoke. Each corner screams its stories, and the signposts sing to sleep. All of this a secret only we would know, looking through the windows lined along the road.
The winter sun through a window
paints the room warm
I've cut the cold in parts,
and it means more
felt between the panes and the past
something happens in a week across the country 75 miles an hour and the windows up. city after city with the illusion of sleep, in the same hotel bed coast to coast. rest stop routines, dark circle eyes on horizon we're only chasing. that old dream of On The Road a little distant daily, maybe it only was a dream. maybe its the midwest. maybe all these years have burned the fortune. maybe I'm just tired.
The shelf with the hourglass where the sands ran out. A small self portrait where life stood still. In the room where I sleep with suspense overhead. A cloud below the roof, and a story of lives in bed.
Old anxieties are worn, like denim aged and faded.
Crossed fingers to the bottom of our pockets in hopes
the wrinkled war subsides.
Just this once, for the rest of your life. You start and stop and start again. Greet the world at 21, the girl, the job, the starry sights. Before you know, you're 25, you blinked it by. You sleep tonight, just like them, and then, again, again you're 21. Forget the end. Forget the wife. You lived it then, you will til when. It's coming back, it comes around, you're 25, it's over now. Younger days are bound to bend, this sleepless cycle just pretends. You cannot die, you cannot end, young until you're young again. Never born but never dead.
The air around me contracts to the bottom of my lungs.
One hundred thoughts, one hundred battles.
Those beaten breaths left hanging stale, dispersed.
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.
I have a hard time with waiting. As if every single act has an ideal instance of action, and they all land on the back burner until the moment shows itself. In subsequent truth, I now own a vast shelf of ignored ideas and trials, passed their prime, missed out on, lost in their own space just to fill a corner of future conversation where I once had a thought and lost it to a whim. Each moment itself a ghost of my former face in a former time and former place, left and left forever; only for me to visit in regret and faded contemplation of glory days that never quite made it. I get so lost in my mind, the last to pull a thread, the anxious awe my name, I've lived in vivid waves.
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.