…keep this page bright white and blank
as the whites of your eyes; tell me stories and
lie with me or to my face,
at least give me something to replace
the blood that once warmed my face.
because now, it’s my skin that’s bleak and blank;
white and broken
as the hearts that we stomped on
just so we could swim in our velvety fucking bliss.

Misery loves it’s company
so I’ll let you have your way with me.
If we can’t avoid death’s generosity,
we should at least reap the benefits of this calamity.

Because I’ve tried and I’ve failed
and I can’t see the shoreline anymore.
Just sinking in this bottomless sea
with little hope of you to rescue me.

My fractures have torn and my ruptures adorned
with words suppressed and hung up to dry.
We’ve lost every last syllable that once
strung together each thought of you and I.
So when you awake to feel
that the nights of sleep that you steal
are starting to wear on you-
I hope you notice when I fall asleep at the wheel.

Because my eyes won’t rest
until this mess of a dream is corrected and
you have found the courage
to be honest with me.

The coffee steamed before her.

The heat of the coffee caused stark contrast to the cool air.

Her mouth felt liquid fire as she put the porcelain to her lips.

Hell poured down her throat while her tongue tasted a bitter pain.

She said the coffee was hot.

We’ve been fishing a well that has no longer any water
One that’s been empty for years with no sign of
Replenishment; just resentment
Filling it’s bucket
With words we use to break hearts and re-open scars
We only attempt to refill with intentions ill

I once fished you from that well
That’s when we fell in love

We dance around it every night
Searching for a way to relieve the sting
Waiting for our love to swell
But our bucket only pulls up lies and
Broken compromise from the bottom of that well-
We used to swim in the same water that we drank
We used to love hard no matter the pain

I once baited you from that well
That’s when I fell into your arms
But now look what we’ve done-
We’ve dried up the pool and never
Replaced the love that we stole
Now our hearts are just as empty as
That fishing vessel

I touched the clouds that day. They sank down deep and weaved themselves within me. In, around and throughout my arms, circling my neck and cradling my head, and for a second, I could have sworn that I was floating. Securely wrapped in a blanket of dreariness, I closed my eyes and felt the pain seep out of my pores and into the thick fog that encompassed my body. I knew the clouds would leave me soon - weightless and vulnerable to a world ungracious, but I was fine. Because as soon as they lifted back up into the sky, they’d leak, like one hundred faucets, all of the grief that I had lent them. 

And so they did. As I raised my hands back up to meet them, they wept all of the tears that my heart had buried inside. In fact, it poured for weeks as I stood there and all around me, the buds on the trees bloomed fervently. My eyes grew wide as the weeds that we sowed sprouted into Titan Arums, giant in size. 

Then I remembered, as I stared in wonder at the beauty that surrounded my blundering feet, the simple phrase that the clouds gently whispered to me that day they came down to meet my face:

“She who embraces sadness and pain will someday appreciate the healing of spring rain.”

…to the girl who could write stanzas and clauses for days and still have something left to say when the pen hit the ground?

What happened to the girl with a head weighted enough, it would actually sink into the pages throughout and at the end of every inanimate day?

The clouds may have been lifeless and resting heavy on her eyelids with regret, but the drama ran vehement on paper. With every loop and dot, her hand made love to the journal pages and she could literally feel her chest stretch as her heart grew fonder of the love she chased after.

I used to be that girl, and perhaps I still am, but I have found that the shifting of the tectonic plates have created crevices for my insanity to escape. Or maybe I am not actually more stable emotionally than I used to be and it’s a great possibility that the conveyor belt beneath our feet has little to do with my inconsistencies, but I can say, with confidence, that I’ve never seen more scribbles and mistakes made on a page of my own.

Nothing seems to fit. Words don’t have a place and puncuation creates only frustration when I can’t find. Just the right…way; to say [how]?? What!

My mind is fucked.

Or not fucked up enough.

One day.

How far could this go?
Illusionist pacify your need for
Substance,
Morality conquests.
You need a steady hand,
So you grasp for God but clutch
Straws instead.

The veil on your eyes show
White on your side but
Shade black for the rest of us.
Failure to adjust
To the misconceptions.
Failure to conceptualize
Scriptures misguided.
We taste the bullshit but
You still believe.

How far could this go?
Illusionist give you a chance to
Rectify magic-
Redirect madness-
Based on fiction, a fashioned
Story book.
But you still take their words
In a literal context
And build your life upon
Imaginary content.

That book is of liars; fiction writers.

That book is of liars; fiction writers.

Grand Rapids has my body;
the road has my heart.

Spread my wings just to see what becomes of me.
How is it that my hands can feel the clouds
When my feet still drag on the ground?
Kicking up soil of sweet nostalgia,
Reaching to my lips, a confectionery’s bitterness.
The truth is, I’m not sure how I’ve come to this.
When your head can feel the breeze that
The soles of your feet cannot,
The mid-space; the commonplace
Becomes shallow and vast. Too difficult to get past.
It’s where our bodies get stuck when our
Souls refuse to meet our hearts-
Or the other way around-
We cannot commit to the skies or
The sturdiness of solid ground.
So we float in this
Mid-space; commonplace.
For eternity, we may never leave
When our dreams are misplaced
in a world too colossal for our eyes to seek.

The truth is…
The truth is…

Some do exist who fly beyond this midway abyss.
And if you can catch them in flight
And pay attention to the astonishing sight,
You’ll see their struggle to lift above is not
Robust enough to crush their undying love for
The skies,
And their wings only pulse harder with
Fervent drive
In attempts to see their dreams materialize.

The truth is
(And I’ll whisper softly, this)
If you learn of these rarities,
You must latch tight and listen closely.
For these song birds sing to share melodies
Of hope and major chords so bright
To strengthen your own wings and
Prepare to lift you in your own flight.

Grand Rapids has my body;
The road has my heart.
Grand Rapids has my body;
The road has my heart.
The mid-space has my body;
The clouds have my heart.
Spread my wings and watch
As my world falls apart.

I need to dive into this paper. Open up a porthole into this notebook, peel off my ten layers of clothing and apprehension, place my hands above my head and shoot myself off this common plain. 

What would a world of written word look like? Would it only display raw emotion through literal text or would our wordplay manifest into linguistic sex? Would we wrap eachother in chocolate covered euphemisms to sweeten our transgressions? Or maybe we’d create a new progression; a vocabulary vessel with verses vernacular just to show how verbose our verbatim has vecome. Perhaps we would just create our own language. Make up our own words. Use the most uncommon letters in the English articulation zust vor xee vun of vit.

My written world might resemble a little bit of what we call Hell. Where there are seventy-two versions of me and no one else. I could argue with my past while mapping out my future; stitching up new seams just to tear old sutures. All seventy-two of me would climb aboard playground structures - but instead of slides and swings, they’d be late night offerings of confessions and pleas to a God that thirty-three of me doesn’t believe. Another twenty-four would be interchanging doublespeak, rhyming to a rhythm that could never speak eloquently.   Fourteen might be heavily sedated on wine or even whiskey, singing heavy-hearted lyrics and reading politically-loaded poetry in the middle of deserted Wall Street.

But one of me would be still be seated with thirty cups of coffee…writing tales of love and heartbreak to an elevated heartbeat. 

So tell me, what would happen in your written world reality?

Took myself out of the running.
Not that I was up for election
but I should at least be paying attention
to our future as American Citizens.
But in the midst of my seasonal depression,
I don’t give a damn about office infiltration.
I could care less about political demolition.

Took myself out of the running,
because right now, I can’t focus on anything
that might be remotely socially satisfying.
I can’t find the will to give a shit about
candidates or trying to decipher their ability
to bullshit an already numb society.

I can’t even find enough fucks to give
to elaborate on something so fruitless.

So what do people write about at 9am? Do they jot down notes about the morning paper or do they make up shopping lists to work off of later? Do they reflect on late night dreaming or early sunrise glistening? Do they write down prayers to get them through the day or plan out what they’ll say when they are asked to pray at dinner?

Do they start their autobiography or map out a timeline to figure out when their death will be?

Maybe bucket lists of hopes and dreams and wishes for endless possibilities. Perhaps a different kind of list-one that reeks of sadness and grief; reads of regrets and speaks volumes of past mistakes and dreadful pain.

Maybe 9am is different for some. Instead of a new dawn, a new way; it’s the end of a graveyard shifter’s work day. I then wonder, if that’s the case, does dusk and dawn get switched around for the midnight slaves? Does the sunlight bring retrospect while the moonlight breathes life against the night owl’s neck? Does daylight bring a sense of sadness as the night often does for the sunlight goddess?

If so, what do they write about in the dead of the morning? Would they moarn the dark skies that left them high and dry? And if they can’t fall asleep in the sun’s warming reach, what becomes of their mental stability? If Mother Nature created humans to work around the sun’s time rotation, what happens to the deviants who follow the moon’s whispered vibration? Can we adapt to a future of darkness if we’re not nocturnal in essence?

Or does the Mother of mothers put her foot down in our attempt to defy her rules on ground?

Would the night owls one day wake up and realize that the stems of their brains have become confused in their pursuit to fool their need for the radiance of the almighty sun’s heat?

I know that at 9am, in the coldness and bleakness of the winter’s prowess, there is nothing that my skin begs for more than the fervor of summer’s bliss. My toes turn inward, my muscles stiffen, my teeth clench and my circulation slows in preparation for hibernation. 

But we’re not bears, we have work that needs to be done, so it would just be nice if Mother Nature would have equipped us with thicker blood.

…all of my questions at 9am. My mind running rampant before properly caffeinated.

All that glitters is gold.
At least that’s what they tell us
and so by default, it’s what we know.
When the clouds hang low
and grace our presence with the threat of snow,
we close our eyes to spite the sun -
now hiding behind storms misunderstood.
We wait for winter to pass
and hope it doesn’t last past March.
Because we know that there is greener scenery
in the next season’s grass.
Grab tightly. Think lightly.
Imagine that we’ve jumped ahead to
the dusk of June;
and even warmer still: July’s moon.
Michigan lakes
glisten in August.
Michigan hearts
swell in harvest.
Michigan hands turn black and
freeze in refrigeration
in the first month’s
wintry blast.

Michigan hearts…

beat slower…

with frigid lovers.

All that glitters is gold
unless those sparkling hearts turn cold,
then we’re just…

…say the skies turn black and everyone we know turn their backs.
As the rain crashes down to the sideways,
the ones who promised they’d love us walked away in disdain.
Say the puddles drown the streets and all that’s left are
the shoes on our feet,
soaking in ice cold desperation and we
can’t find our way back to salvation.

Say that rain makes it up to our waists,
bringing horror to our face when we realize
that we’ll have to swim to stay alive.
Knowing that the town is now in the
midst of a drown-out,
we paddle and paddle until we reach solid ground.

Say it doesn’t exist.
Say that we lose all fearlessness.
Say we panic as the water rises to our necks,
our legs cramp and we have no love left to grasp.

Say our immersed bodies now have
lost any sign of hope and all that’s left
is for us to say goodbye.
If we’re underwater, would we still cry?
If we did, would our teardrops carry the water over
to another city and drown out the next town?

Hypothetically speaking-
let’s just say the storm demolished us this way.
Who then? Who then would we blame?

I am immovable.
I am immortal.
I am elevated by love
and destroyed by silence.
I am focused.
I am in flight
but I am sorrowed by the sight
of our hearts crumbling.
I question everything
but I am certain of my purpose.
We breathe for a reason and I will not
accept that my breathing is fruitless.
I have found weightlessness
in the demolition of resistance.
My soul is a vessel to carry my voice.
My body, a creation to make that possible.
The only choice I have ever had
was to enlist my talents and
give my destiny a heartbeat,
or to sell out to a disillusioned mass
and join a fear-stricken middle class
and let my soul die of irony.
But I choose to be free
and that choice is mine to keep.
With my pen and paper,
microphone and speaker,
I am a vehicle
for this visionary.
I am everything that they feared in me.

To Whom This May Concern:

Perhaps there is sound reason for our slow motion,
lost in translation in the curves of our rotation.
I missed the best part when I bowed over in frustration
and we lost ourselves in the colors of our infatuation.

Please push me a little further;
if you’re real God, I need you here.
Remind me that when we’ve reached the bottom,
it’s only fear that we should fear.

I suppose there is a plan to perpetuate
the innocence of our father’s faith.
Well, I’m begging and pleading for one unlikely sign
to prove the merit of waiting alone in this line.

Please grant me a little patience;
if you’re true, God, I need your hand
to help me build the courage to bridge my apprehension.

There is no mystery in my struggle to find
a definitive answer in the pages bound to your follower’s hands,
but the crisp autumn breeze and a canine’s pure loyalty
speak truth more coherently than any book can.
If it’s fact that there are more stars in the universe
than grains of sand on this earth,
it’s despairing that as small as our problem’s are,
we still manage to put ourselves first.
But our equations are consistently lacking one variable
that instinctively guides our feet away from catastrophe.
If your presence is intrinsic to this, God, please
level with me, and I’ll be honest when I say:
despite my tendency to question your possibility
I’ll keep my eyes open in probability.

Just please be fair with me, I need the atheist to rest in peace.