It goes... Same things. To the letter. Doing better, but I still jump at your shadow like I'm mad, though I'm not. Well, maybe a little bit. Just because you left before we could fix this shit, and now I'm stuck here wondering. Like the slight pause lightning thunder brings, but the echo of your flash last blinded me to thinking like a blinking bloodied horse. My legs long since plowed a course through a solipsistic nightmare, where everyone was out for me like vultures. I sculptured masks to disguise the denial, and thrashed between blankets and top sheets. Casted you so discreetly as a monster that haunts early evening and ceilings above me. Stealing the light from the noon, fuck, I was so wrong about you. Am I mocking the dead, or just representing you as best I can? I don't know. I miss you, man. Lately I've been wishing on lamp posts more than stars, because the light from the cars keeps me small. Isn't it magnificent? We're all so insignificant. You make yourself and die with it. I missed your funeral. If anything, you taught me different ways to be. Made peace with an eternity I never saw. Sometimes, still, I choke it back. You went in sleep, already black. How you lay, I'll never know. Where do all our stories go?

You left my province readily, heading out embarrassed and setting me to courses plotted by knots before. My stomach tangled, and blood on the floor. But this time, you didn't smile. Dried by air and each despair that comes in pairs between legs you need to cross, so get away from me. I've lost you irreparably. Spoke to slow-smoked shame which swerves and dodges it's own damn lane. The pavement defines us as hard and immovable, the streets of your city now forever unreturnable. Because it wasn't real. I walked wonders of your regal curves--an ampersand of loving you and now we don't know what to do. Which was real? Breaking seals of where we've never gone before but lost the memories and glow and health and held the scraps and spat, "What else or more could we spill before the size of our pride" in the context of jeopardized fantasies and rants at leaks of our sanity. Our seas at ease and trees of peace where you're at home and I'm displaced. Your face can't make sense of spent arrays of attempts to not mitigate the fact we're not innocent, but belligerent instead. And blending illness in earnest. inevitably, it comes back to words like these with twice the sound of rustled clothes on floors we thought we'd never know inevitably, written into lines like these forget the sound of slipping clothes forget my name leave me alone

Consciousness flows like the names of most ghosts I know. Caught between the mystery and the fact they're right in front of me, glaringly reciting all the times I wasn't ready or so willingly unsteady on the path that I was heading down, or letting down my friends by ending things on terms like "settling". For something more than apple cores, all the body blown away with bites my greedy face had laid like fingers to an autolaithe. So... So I am always terrified of phrases like "you never tried", when pushed against the things I did are pictures of a star-eyed kid who waves a finger in between two open eyes and all the sheen... Which painted on the surface leans more towards hoarded magazines than paper-shredder better means that deconstruct society and stomp back from the balcony to suck water between the faucets. Who rope their ghosts like prairie tropes, stack skeletons in neighbor's closets. Escapist acts my brash attention seeking apparatus called a small and creaking throat provides won't hide the fact that I turned my back on everything and everyone in times of trying practiced slumps of bodies up against a wall or sense of self sighed "fuck-it-alls". Fix the meter; don't demean her, honest hands won't lift those boulders, shoulders strained with weight of good and shouldn't-do-it gifts of drifting senses that might not exist when next the crooked crucifix of what you miss is split between the ridge of your nose, planted deep. I know it means something now. Will it still in a year? I've been eating so well off of these chauvinistic fears. I want to sleep on different sheets in different beds each night. So after forty weeks I feel what my bed is like. If I can't keep you out, I might as well let you in. I write this mess of existence, and still miss your skin.

Plucking at angular thoughts that are scoffing hard at the palettes of greys that are knotted compared to the cool blue perpetually shared through your set to breathe veins and the game of your attitude glowing like fire scored backwards. Desire set us up to fail like the frail wings that carry me. A fireplace whispering sickly apologies for burning the photos collecting our history. The streetlights stand rigid and fidget with guilt for the alcohol fueled fumes of Fridays and drug abuse. Cue up an organ much larger than mine and you'll find maybe I haven't really described the scars that I've earned through the lessons not learned. The push to collapse, the friends that I've asked far too much far too often, and seeing their softening eyes as a sign that maybe it's better to hide in the written apologies that only a few people see but don't get. I scream and forget, I cut at my neck, I won't give her respect. I go off my pills for the thrill of insanity. They hand me their bodies, I break them and leave, but God, I believe it was not my disease but theirs. The care that they will still place in the folds of my face that will shake a the thought of their breaking my adamant dam of delusion. The paths that I'm choosing. The chaos that's home to me, but your arms under me pin me with reasons to take thoughts and seize them before their cohesion can justify slightly my legs thin and flighty, still fighting the need for some more scattered seeds of someone to be a key or acetylene torch. Sort of? Maybe? I don't know. I hate me. But you might not, right? I'm funny and trying to offer you something, and keep my mind barely contained so I don't lose the honest hearts like you or anyone else now or then to depression or panic attacking. The manic me stacking the stresses and fucking when no one is looking. I don't want to lose you, when I'm sane, I choose you. Accepting both halves of me, could you love insanity? (Why would you.) If you can't stay, then go. Just go.

(Still the same) No one waits to break their arms or cue their truths to wherefore's or flesh chutes. Fresh shoes click against tiling and tiring headlight spot lights of "fuck night on this spiraling platform of words my mouth funnels outwards. I never meant to speak like this, I wish I never scared her." But fruitless as always, my condo's two hallways haven't been ballrooms to draw plumes of smoke from Friday's blurs, and what's worse is the white flag my eyebrows raise cautiously. The joke my life wrote when it gave no apology. Why would you hold the cold bits and dampening mess of this freezer box ribcage with traces of ketamine sleepily treating me viciously, hissing three names that my family made for me. And the exact size and height that your downcast eyes want to see. I'M SORRY THIS BODY IS ALL THAT I'VE GOT, BUT NO ROCK OVERTURNED WITH INSECTS BENEATH IT WILL BE FIT TO ILLUSTRATE THE SICKNESS MY MIRROR PITS AGAINST EVERY PUSHUP AND DEADLIFT. Like, look. Parts of me are so fucking crooked she shook at the sight of them opening. Hoping things might fit like they do now, but more spread apart. Scars painted white on the canvas of what chances we splattered Pollock-like. Paddled tight currents of worrying thoughts, hot with density. Fences meant less to me than the fields of words did, yeah, I plant them for you. Sow what you will and the wind does the rest, it's true. This is me under prairie sky, words hot and exorcized. Colder yet warmed, keep my head off your shoulders. This strange weight between wants, needs, and apologies. Weak kneed and disordered. That's me.

Tantalizingly separate. Coffee-jerked knees and knotted Persian rug of nauseous nervous shrugs against the people drifting. Happy, hurt, but always living. What am I, then? Caught between the therapy and a past I'm not remembering? Why can't I accept a hand across my back without trackmarks showing the affect of loves fingers lacking the strength to break the shell I hate at lengths and need to keep your image clean. As not to distort the shorted lives that ran across mine as sharpened knives. The absent mother, the distanced lover. The parts of us that land like butterflies, leaving shudders of vultures hundreds of thousands of times their size, wracking me endlessly and leaving me empty. Or feeling that way with so much resenting. I'm jumping at corners and hardening masks. Painting them thicker with sicker demands. To pull from you a stranger fruit, acceptance through my twisted means, I've seen it done, though descended from whatever hell they made of broken glass that tapes itself again, reclaims my past. I'm healing and hurting at the same fucking pace. Writing with an eraser, placed her in the middle of circles and diagrams of what I am, but men of sand don't last in tides. The chemical rides of new strides in deciding an end. Of me, or her... Is this what I want my life to mean? If you let it go, you let it go. You let it go alone. You found me cut and drawn to lines, The product of some better time. We found our hearts in each other, We found our heart in one another. Shaky hands drawing lines in sand so crookedly, she only laughs at me. There's a reason for it, buried beneath the scores of crooked bows and dented horns I bore to microphones and splatter-speak. Seeking self acceptance in the folds of syllables describing the life of hers that mine is firing potshots into. Grinned through teeth and bent to fit lists of symptomologies. The subtle critique of culpability written into my life as prodigy. Of learning hands fulfilling roles that my heart still burns, it's fingers cold around the flesh that you know is warm, it's yours. But to me, of course, it's wires shorted and hoarded by columbine paradigms. Mine is mine. Reasons for trying lines against myself, a reason for hurting when lurking in memory is the stump of a tree sinking in mud it made with the tears shed in shade under monuments of being much less than I needed to be. To support these fantasies, wrapped in these syllables re-saying in numerous terms the problems that never were mine, but were hers. Is this what I want my life to mean? If you let it go, you let it go. You let it go alone. You found me cut and drawn to lines, The product of some better time. We found our hearts in each other, We found our heart in one another.

I woke today with fantastic thoughts of shaking off these locks of loss that turn the face of the safe I fought for lack of a better battle. My fists can only reach my face when shackled like lobsters claws or dogs with muzzles. In pots or hot water spots like sun-shocked puddles. No panting whisper in any sense. Silence. Tail trod on for reference of true panic vs. this manic verse. Does honest pain bear the same name as two times ten times too many times the things I'm not saying? Or what about the things I do bear to you? Why is it never honest enough? Why does at the end of every strain of thought my mind clot up like it forgot it ever had a meaning? Did it even? Does it now? Or does it play its game and bow low, nose right to the knees, and like an origami beast leave with a breeze of relief like my childhood's fuzzy memories of gurgling stomach to take away the hunger pangs. At least temporarily. I woke today with ribs like jaws that ached from loss of hands that once massaged the intercostal grooves. It's a strange and funny thing to lose when once it was my father's palm with long and calloused fingers strong. His interlocking hands once held the shell of man I am today. Or heart, as I was bloody raw in rags held by my mom. And saw whatever streets or seats of cards between that year and ninety-four when born was little Jaroslov. Weak and marked by shriveled body. The thought of what my mother first saw in him still haunts me like the still-born sister. I still can't know if my mom might miss her. I think about grade eight and how I'd fake a pain to bring about a feeling of deserving the starvation and the swerving razor blade I plated like games between a fake maturity and my mental insecurities. That was seven years ago. I was SUPPOSED to spit and shout, outgrowing all the shit I did, but no. I still don't know if what I think are things to keep up there as terrifying glasses. Magnifying past and present strain I blame for all the passes that I saw in ways to cover up the fact that, oh god, sometimes I want it back. The fact that some people live and give a shit for each other is a lover sentiment, just out of reach. This morning, I believe my ribs were struggling to contain me, just as min and body disobey like Judas kisses all around me. My ribs would break for every day I grew from what my dad could hold. My beating, fleshy little body, coddled once, now grows alone. I hate the fact it all made sense once, colors bright and family. The words I knew and used for years are not enough: Even I can't understand me.

Today has been the hardest in regards to the absence of you. It's true, I'm happy, and weighing enough for once, but suns don't set downtown like they did with you. Your smoke rings glazing over days I choose to represent the year or two I spent relentless being you. And losing me in soothing truths, and inharmonic philosophic proofs. Because my first writings, however sick and sloppy, tried to dictate the dropping in of eyes and skin. I sunk and called it polished when embedded was a dialogue between your tobacco fog and a girl I lost when pretention took me out to sea and left me there with a smile: You're happy. No, I'm not! I dropped ten pounds and blocked a lot of things out, got it? No, you don't. And I don't either. My best friend was diseased, or is that not reason quite enough to puff this chest and call it living? Giving everything I've got to keep it in and hide each bottle full of apathy behind the mask you want of me. (NEED A FUCKING GLASS OF WATER SHOT OR SOMETHING ANYTHING ANYTHING TO MAKE ME FEEL LIKE LOVE COULD HAPPEN TO A GUY LIKE ME) So call it bitter agonism. Risen through each reasoned crack that backs itself against a wall, it laughs at us, admits it's flaws. ow were you an eager dam that made me sick and stammering? Life is there to teach some truth, though impatiently enamoring. Fall in love to break it's waves against the rocky shore I raised. Like moses did, I part my scars and guide you through by light of stars. No ballad here at this fucking bar will let me know where the hell you are, inside of me or there, or simply in my vacant empty stares at pages. Rearranging all the sentiments. I meant it, but my heart's a book I'm keeping. Wetting pages, ink to keep them shut. Life was briefly a block of ice with no December light left far from it. The closest bit of heat would turn a knife it in to watch it drip so formless down from whatever shape that fate had pounded into that snow. That old season. Left out to melt like it needs a reason. I couldn't choose the shape, and no, I wouldn't try to show it, knowing all hard and scarred thing someday soften, but it's tough belief and I forget it often. So let's make excuses. Drudge them out of bedroom carpets, and know that thought is alive and well and dwelling in the parts of chests that pry us out of bed. And heads that can't and won't belong to time that we define.

Despite the words that I used to worship, and the way my hands found hope in the soft slope of your hips, I'm different. And not entirely sure of what that means. Have I vomited up enough excuses to just get over it an be happy? Or should I sing out songs of doubt and try to stretch out my misery? Is that me? Is that even worth your time? The fact I sit here trying to think up something to label mine? It's fine. And you know you tell you are you. It's coincidental the, to say the least, I meet a hundred people a day who say they're every bit as fine as you. And it took a while yes, but I feel some part of me has passed. The part that re-read the signatures not printed on the cast of some broken ego. And I write this now like we're two much older friends sharing a week to say that we know. We've all been here before and we've all seen how this goes. You know, it's not right to live like this. So self-obsessed with finding another monster to address under a face that isn't mine. Solipsistic tight knit rhymes and deadlines, like the pages of these journals, so self-imposed to feel so exposed for whose sake, I don't really know. And for all my claims of growing pains, it's safe to say I'm sure that not sure of anything between this year of nothing that seems to have occurred without me thinking. Shunning new city nights in spite of these spiteful nights of drinking deep toasts to the thoughts prevailing daily and so unfailingly of you. So thank you. For being something on my mind to buckle down like iron chains so I can say straight-faced, "I'm fine too".

This never used to happen, but I shake when I say this. When, for once, the fact is that I display some taped off ghost limb that listens to each distanced thought hoarder this life has afforded me. I've been under spotlight and under the feeling I didn't quite earn this. I'm just stealing the burn that our own subs are leaving. We stare to perpetual blindness... Hands outstretched like someone would find us so constantly niched when speech leaks our smiles like, "Fuck this, I like you. I don't know your story, but your bright hues do so much for these dark ones. And I swear the sun comes, just please, let the sharp lungs rip apart my ribcage like I did the pages I wrote for your fondness of ignoring me." I feel like I speak from my grandmothers disbelief of how big the world's peace can be, a fear she brought in from overseas, yet all these abundancies never did big surprise in me. Just the fact we all live here and share it so differently. I speak until the stiffness gives way to us warmer, but this isn't the same, I write myself into corners. Because what does this say on a day-to-day basis? My books hold down fears which conflate with me facing it? I don't honestly know. Though was so quick to point blame. Thinking others were monsters though doing the same thing. I mean, I know this has been spinning phrases for praise, sort of playing on lows that you already know. Because empathy face to face distresses assure. Our currents of "weren't you wondering yesterday whether grandma would see a day after delerium had taken her son from her?" My life needs an opener, so quick to find hope in her. You get what you pay for except when you want more. I pull at the scraps of artistic people, never sure if the laps through my room will quite equal the fingers my friends lend to woodwind and strings while I manage to make my family see me by saying things like "wonder" and "spirit". Yeah, I honestly fear it. Obsessing, yeah, but I'm addressing it, right? Despite what this year's said, I think I have time. And though that might be, I still speak with an urgency. I don't want to lose the dark in the searching. Because. Torn between a painted scene I painted through my later teens, a catered sheen of misery has led to me confusing streams of consciousness as meant to share or brush aside like errant hair. I'm smaller than that motion, blushing at the sight of smiles she bears in bowed reaction to an anecdote that broke my heart a year ago. I hold it all to show, but what I expect to hear back, I can't know.

How does one grow fingers. How does one open their hands when under three feet of undisclosable fully jeaned thighs - Friday night, studded, in another near-lover's downtown condo. How does one link arms on a downhill dusk-dusted walk talking endlessly bout reservation, ironically letting the moment end in non-disclosure. My specialty, I'd wager, is gauging her for aging spurs that turn her quick to hands I guess move sweeter than mine. How do my shoulders look so much like flame to moths while hot with discomfort and so brazenly ashamed of me. How does this throat hold every fundamental but fall faintly apart when like a drunken rose dips the ends of it's stalk to a bottle of vodka, drop each thing that made it open in the first place. How do I face me facing you? Or, rather, refusing to. The rest is restless and directionless. Lower hemispheres find time to peer through eyes they'll never know. A mess of me addressing less than honorary things. Tie twine and string to Picasso feet. I make a joke of entropy.

I hate you for listening, I hate me for thinking that there would ever be a time to write about these demons. When no amount of drinking can put to sleep this empty head, nonetheless buzzing with fuzzy thoughts of writing when-- I hate the fact I feel things to spit out as apologies, I mean, I know my life is fine, and I have many happy memories. But who am I alone when the slightest sigh is blown across the wick, my candlestick, the light that glowed is gone, it shone along the cracks like the Earth has, between the backbones I have to cast shadows like weeds in water. I remember the coastline with my father, every piece of driftwood dragged along the bottom of the foggy ripples would be followed by the need to be a better person just like him, but when you're kids, it always seems to pull itself together. "I am loved no matter what". In the summer picking feathers and dandelion weeds to braid tight into a weave for my grandmother to see. And my best friend would be laughing as our legs shot out like branches, and our hands knotted like roots, we started pulling out our pockets for change like the last hanging tooth, we stocked up every closet with the memories we lost and breathed so deep at three AM through sneaking windows to city streets and spoke so hard of love as if it would never come to us, but then our beards were growing. Slowly, fat pulled back to showing we're not as much the pasts that mask, but our parents lesser halves. But how to prove that youth meets anything but truthful heartbeats? I don't know what I'm feelings, and no one told me what that means, if anything. I'm twenty now and scared of living life like swapping air, for what its worth I breathed you, now I'll leave you less than when I addressed the parts of me and art a year ago that said to chart the sparking voices from my heart and now I'm scared to find that start because like Greeks and wisdom suffering, I'm just a kid whose bargaining. To swap the places with the kind of face I had before the stuttering charge of inspiration and neglect started to occupy my bed. What does it mean to end? What makes greatness? What makes greatness in great men? Could I understand it if a single person handed me the truth in writing, cursive slightly wrinkled at the edges, could I even feel the purpose said then? Or stubbornly pretend that in another twenty years I'll have grown more more sets of years and like magic, I'll be happy, married, wife and kids, and family. Or will my swimming misery form some team with other guilty beings? Prosecuted every night with the thought of love or Christ or time being separate of one. Where we sit dictates the sun to be a difference of degrees and simply a lot on the horizon, not a hundred thousand times the size of all the land we never saw because we sat right through it all. To hold your hand, it scares me. It tears me from running my family, or the thought of flight and traveling a glove to wake up another day alone debating the many meanings of a smile faint or fleeting. What are happiness and misery in the context of everything? What good is your forgiveness if I still live by my stiffness?

As if a whisper, I still hear your name. Though with my tired mouth, it just won't sound the same. The consonants harder, like two vibrant halves of a pill you take to keep your stomach unsettlingly filled with something other than "I wish I fought her". The future ghost who tried to take your bright and shining Icarus underwater. Your love was that, once proud, now drowning. A sputtering mouth capsized, only occasionally crowning to speak of pride. "Though my love lives on, at least I know I tried," he says, "And you were the one to teach me that, I guess." Like that tower window watched him pass a ghost, he dies with the sun, content that he came the closest. Like him, we're pushing wings from shoulders of upstart senses of either being too much or not enough. Wide in support, but so hopelessly rhetorical in boring holes for serotonin draining. Me straining up against your body, sweating bullets at the thoughts of "shouldn't do it" bits of breath beside my neck, reminding ceaselessly the indecency of you ever truly wanting me. Give it up, accept it all, your body built with guiltless flaws. Where we end is where we start, a gold star on a wish list only marked, "A little bit more than we are." (A little bit more than we are.)

Was there ever space beyond this validated pace of blatant care in spite of loveless nights of arms around you? Skewed with hugeness and metaphysics to lift them off and drift this lawless scoff at your rawness. Unvarnished and feeling, like your skin was pink and peeling. So indiscreet to these freezing feet these antenna thoughts are caught in moss and shaking wrists that pills dismiss, yet you expect the stillest kiss. Well, wish for other streets. Your sleep is mockery when solid you falls through the ghost of me. Is there a point where safety becomes a term earned through less beatings of self? Instead maybe given in arms soft as sounds I found under bridges and wreathes as a child with maps and shovels and muffled midnight whispers of there being no more than this space and this blanket and your curved shape for the next two years. Thinking of the dust in the corners of thousands of buildings and the hundreds of millions of unknown names spilling the sentiment of needing it back. The time when the brightness didn't give into black edges vignetting the sun setting fervently, fleeing the embarrassing starfish of me pulled in multiplicity. So what then of safety? Of screaming in showers? The filth washing off and my eyes pushing flowers between the graves of the people who played equal parts in equating the person with no self sitting alone and hating himself. Though coddled by bottles and sent to the island he hides in and has been. Since losing his grip on the ship docked on rocks where the tide could reach if empathy really ever existed in the speech and long seconds reserved for a different pen. One which writes in moments when the paper is unnecessary, and white noise holds back it's own lack of blaring meaning that I can't stop finding. This winding rhyme entwines time and sick kinds of reminders for a purpose maybe murdered in avalanches at the disadvantage of genetics. What can be expected of Faust in this body? Feeding it coffee and page bottoms, stopping the honesty? (Who are you? And what do you want from me? I can't hear the shape of you from here. Three years on. Do I remember you wrong? Do I remember you wrong?)

Was it my chromosomes or my childhood home that made me strive to be alone? I deal in only the dullest edges, safe on ledges overlooking my books and lack of reason to doubt them. But still shout when ellipses speak free instead of me, and pauses draw "dot-dot-dots" along chronicled mistakes I make. Admitting with tight lips I'm far better off than the tingling cough of all loss tossed aside in prideful denial of what it means to be stunted. Each short stride cut shorted and hunted by quarter rests alined to the speed of speech facing you and absence. They have since hints dropped concerning our talks meaning next to nothing, but fingers hot buzzing to your shut numbing the need in me, but again, in that head lies the need for some disguise so I say it's the weather. Not your laugh licking feathers on me or the sprouting of leaves lighting fire beneath me. When really, your sky eyes make mine trace lines twice the size of you into nights of sheets strewn sleepless, with deep rest the last thought fleeting with carelessness. Feeling it's way to another drink, sinking in careless ink, so please, never listen when wrists won't--These words simply splattered in quick stroke to make it a trick to not face it. The carcass of patience and hiss-spit of dumb shit re-saying it's ineptitude in shrewd loops of dark truth and attention seeking bereavements of people gone like seasons past. So please, just as means simply lead to an end, please don't forget that a friend won't just kiss in pretend. Was it my chromosomes or my childhood home that made me strive to be alone?

What if I were for once to speak with reality instead of idealized imagery I found as a child, leaving the ideas of friends and imposing an identity on the deep set assumption against a world that rejected me? I don't know. Ignoring the pedestal I built with solipsistic assertions of urgently speaking like I'm different, and acting out for the few laughs that pass uneasily. Appeasing me with the idea people wanted me, when realistically, it's simply hard to live with disagreeing constantly. Because pretension in any other voice than mine is wrong or arrogant. I'm sorry for ever judging anyone. I never meant to push my ideas of right or just or bend any means to justify the ends I never had. Like water poured across the backs of cars under branches, left to find a path and wind along like masks we place like fire in a living room. This smoke and ash I'm giving you. I see you waiting by the window, framing the glass like you always do. Because there's all of this inside of me. This guilt of living thoughtlessly. I want to make it clear to you that I'm never sure just what to do, because as far as hoping goes, I guess I chose to let it show far brighter than the lighter and bolder goals that hindsight holds against the pages written by the minds I still admire. Because they took a world burning and set it in their beds, returning every morning to the same ground I can't make shake with the same sad sound. There's so much breath inside I blew to try and take the breath from you. But heart isn't made for self-critique... despite each regret I'd speak.

Where do my hands start and end if living in their patent trends are causes for you fleeing scenes of indiscreet patterned mockeries of both our bodies, half the meaning, turned to doubt and without feeding any sense of our importance. Scratched to "lack of", pushed to backs of closets holding our parents scoldings, sold in memory to expansive reverie. Coloring you now in rosy hues, in choosy suitings to my selfish broodings. Contrasted with the pithiness of romantic ignorance. Each splattered hiss in in hedonistic explicit near-misses, invested so endlessly in the promise of you missing me. While never gone n space, but face to face, I'm lost and prone to chase this tail in a stale wind of no new sense to call my own, but droned on endlessly by those less tense than me. On the offense, to speak of love candidly. I can't see it otherwise, sadly, it's covered by moss over time and weight, but plated, nailed to walls that had failed me. Yeah, I admit it, I'd skipped all the basics. Of what makes a heart, and by whose strength you face it. I'd braced it once, steadily, arms set expectantly, but you never fell in. You'd never seen me. Prouder than thunder, louder than anything, though all in my head, and scattered to better seas. Numbered as all these apologies, though insincere, and hilariously unfair to the entity "we", if ever existing. Missing you endlessly, without a pulse or beat. Living in my shadow.

Like this molehill made a mountain, this counting down has since amounted to a weight between our shoulders, hearts now butting heads like boulders. Wooden words left out to smolder, this winter swears that it's been colder, my face now smashed to gravel, gratefully hidden, thought not unravelled. My coded face says that I'm joking, kidding, hoping you saw what's written. Because this stony crest between my body chest begs for legs to get away from the man my hands have painted. I'm sorry

There was dust once. Between the wind and skin I brace against the face of a city skyline from a highway miles away. I'd ride beside the ghost of times I could think without it forming rhymes and pointing to some purpose. Blown like bubbles towards the surface of the skin I now forget sometimes, though once each second on my worried mind. I cared so much but hated it, trying to grow up kept me a kid. I let the dust in when I could have hid, could have brushed it off, but never did. I watched wind push you like your lungs were sails, while the plaster stuck to me like scares and hides, just as stony and hard inside as out. I'd whisper while you'd show. Four seasons' suns spun above my head, but I chose to keep it November in me instead. And you never meant it, but I'd still pull daggers out of the words you smiled, stumbling awkwardly, staggered down to the highway where I sat, unmoving, though you walked. For every step you tried to make me take, I'd talk and drop another rock onto my legs to keep me here. Committed to a rising fear that might teach me how to live my life, even if it existed apart from restless nights. You wouldn't wait beside the road, though I begged you stay, still I knew you'd go. Everyone I loved and everyone I know watched me build a wall of precious stones over my legs, my chest, my heart, built back up when you'd tear it apart. The cynics excuses I once admired build the wall each second, wider and higher. And when you grew up on me, miles away, we grew yet older, and every time your eyes would stray, you'd see that wall of boulder visible down the narrowed road. Rock to you, but to me, still bitter gold. The shadow cast by the mast unwrapped by cloth made soft the casted plaster cracks we patched the path with. With prairie dust in our eyes, drip with answers in the hurting. Not the excuses I'd make, each smile skirting the questions by constructing walls now miles high. Obstructing the sun so unfailingly berating me. I built a wall between us both. I tried to make us into ghosts. I tried to bury you alive under a mind that wasn't mind. I tried to find for you a reason why I would always try to leave and when my hands would come back empty I tried to hard to just resent me. And pretend that it was you for not once ever coming through. I took excuses and "if only"s and tried to blame them for my loneliness. I was broken like a horse, standing out along a storm. My hands were throats shaking and coarse, my ankles shackled down and worn. But as the clouds crackled above me, eyelids shaking and un-lovely, kicked like spurs against my body were a thousand droplets shocking cold against my skin. Bold and crawling slowly in between the coats I put around me, dust and plaster, softened, melting. And as the clouds became a marble, my life encircled like a martyr's legacy exists in death. The wind took breath to say Ive left a thousand stories in a voice that I've been hiding behind walls and lies, a choice existing as an excuse to look for friends I'd lose by staying in instead of reaching out, by stuffing gravel in my mouth in swallowing the bitter truths instead of just forgiving you. The winds are shrieking, eyelids bleeding, where are all the friends I've needed? Written off as better off without me, oh my god, who is speaking? I miss you all, I'm climbing out. The rocks above me smirk and shout: "We're all you have! We're all you've got! You built us tall and wide and thick. The plaster, dust, and gravel, rocks, the wall is all you have in this!" Who am I in flooding storms? Washed as clean as being born again. What's left to hate when rain has washed this pain away? My shoulders strain against the weight, each rock still mocks my stony face, that hides the only sacred thought I hid so long I near forgot. That love exists. I know it must. Love exists in all of us. No matter how much stone and dust has rusted us, the dam will bust, it always does. It always does. Lightning cracked the sky in half, the wall still standing tall and fast... From East to West, I grew depressed by rocks I piled atop myself. I miss my friends, I miss the hands, I miss you wishing you'd understand. But I did this all so willingly. I pushed you all out, killing me. Each night in light of my selfishness, undressed to beat the drum, my chest, bright red beneath my fist. I miss you all, I'm stopping this. My fingers numb and clawing at my plaster prison's widened cracks. The wall now shouting louder than the storm in all it's power. It's screaming, "No! You're all alone! Your friends won't wait beside the road!" but there they were, steadfast as stone. They beat the wall, it's echoes groan with mistakes I can't forget, like a rose branch in my head. It took my whole heart's sickened cowering to force that rose to flowering. Our shouts became a hurricane, the storms inside us shake the same. I'm not the bones held down by stone. I am you. We're not alone.