PoetryForHumans

are we ever really                  awake?or just caught in the fever of dreams       blurred vision and        pounding hearts. nothing is real. cry and touch the water on your face it's just the last tears of a summer rain.hide your eyes, they're all ghosts . your fingers slide through them soft smoke      wrapping around your hands. what is your name? don't show your insides on the outside keep them locked away, visceral and raw where they were always meant to stay.lost fragile... smile and let the lies                       fall                            from                                 your                                     ...

got caught up talking balked through the window and fell through the back door umbrella still in bloomleft rings of condensation as footsteps and also frostbite in 60 degree weather and also footsteps for nobodies to follow freaked out by stale nature valley-cracked teeth translucent petals poking through nag champa cloudslost spider solitaire twenty-one times in a rowlost all the gaba napping in classrooms and spinning circles around itself untuned cerebellum in atrophy against the spinslost it won an advil liqui-gel and quickly quit: jumped off the peak of its dose-response curve into the pool of a hallucinogenic julydoesn’t matter: komo...

today was no indecision iceblockno placid sadness reaching deep into the coreit was the sun.it was a taste of honeybalm whiskeywarmtha little caress it wasthe sun

today is an oil spill—ugly, fluorescent, beautiful for just a moment in passing down some suburban street earthquaked by tragedy. i think i still believe there is always a rainbow pressing through concrete, some technicolor lining the graves laid neatly for each of ustoday i look for home in the faces of strangers, because i know that even if everything i love is stolen from me i will still have kindness to give, some color to press into someone's handstoday i spend whole hours getting to know my words before i speak them. i lay them down like new lovers— ask them what their intentions are, if they are ripe with kindness & ready to be pick...

Under foreign sheets, I am a tourist with an arm circling your waist, my lips flush against your back. This country is far too quiet, the only sound the symphony of crickets. Not even the wind whistles here, but in time, I am lulled to sleep by the heat of your breath tickling my palm.I wake alone in unknown quarters, your scent sticking to my fingers, your hairs so delicately decorating the pillow, and when you leave to forage in the wild, the room of hard bound spines holds my waiting hands, an awe struck child, until the rainbows and the roses steal my voice.Warm pastry kisses my mouth with butter and sugar. Icing meets tabletop, shakin...

deliberate, slow strokes we pen the story of our moments on our chest beneath the skinan epistolary exchange between fragments

I imagined constellations in the whorls of your thumb; they spark star-dust, embers low in my chest.I write songs in your voice, a baritone prayer, sentiment caught on the corner of your lips, catching mine.Out of your dust, your amber-honey laughter, I am led by the chin into worlds, words, that open my soul like a clementine.Every word I breathe is a net cast wide, attempts to cage canyons full of the way I shiver when you say my name.

Love takes practice and you are not your monsters. I see strangers on the sidewalks and where I used to smile like I was tired from battle I smile now like I have won wars for my fellow human beings and I return from grocery stores with baskets full of sunflowers that blossom in an instant— tired, sad, and angry faces soon become the memories of gazes that reflect our inner light back at me when I tell them with my eyes what I see in theirs.You are not over— you have just begun. It does not always get better, but you learn how to get stronger, more creative, more insightful, more brilliant radiating like sunlight even on days you still mig...

She wants to gently peel herself back, fade like Venice in May - rose and azure, saffron in the water that only laps when spoken to; that lingers rich on the tongue - sweet like too much wine or the sun cresting, early summer.She wants to feel the pale grief that comes from knowing too many secrets or sensing too much magic trembling in the clustering vines, the wanton whispers lingering just above the horizon. That glistering web setting over her limbs like September on fire.

it is morning rain and magpie laughs and i am back in last Septembertreading lily pads        and freezing when the ripples       stir the serpents       underneathi am feather-light and wastinghearing my own voice and all it asks is “why”i am looking hard into his upturned eyes without understanding that love doesn’t leave you in the cold doesn’t speak in empty words that always shatter instead of coming truei am in last September begging myself into the groundpleading my way into my own grave