my world of ghosts, fingertips run along cracked lips, the soft song and the tree, quietly, words for colder feet.

her birthday

when i lose the pattern, I slip away, and am the string missing the needle through lost eyes. I can't keep the headphones close enough, can't have friends in furthest reaches. there's no light in the—garbage—paper bill—cold metal tongues—clippings.

and speak: Reclaim the beauty!, but unmoving, swallowing the hours, stealing bathroom tiles, monsters behind my violent ache, the clear corpse of things, and her birthday.

fifty-three minutes until you fight for another, until colour upon colour, the beauty of blood, and scar of ages.

what would the page number, paragraph—my stomach rising up to, visions of death.

(I am lost, in hiding here, the brackets, of safe wood.)

beat out the darkness

With eternal thanks to Vino for this.

you'd sell any limb, wearing your photos like skin.

if your love for the world is louder than your fear then you will hold to so little hate.

waiting for your heart to crawl back into your chest: a harpoon from me to you, or wailing at cathedral walls.

these are my feelings, they don't exist to be pretty: i never write to be pretty. i write my feelings. beneath it all, i get scared of sharing feelings, because you are not allowed to feel so intensely, without being judged: that people don't understand how you could derive so much from so little? so, yes, like the scared kids spilling elipsises——the black and red and violent——this is just another slow moment, cold moment, clean moment, quiet moment. this is another crow catching in my breath.

though i don't think i want you back, i don't ever let you go. so i struggle with my strongest belief: that everyone deserves happiness. it's not all about that, but it's there, and so i will continue to write it. it couldn't be any other way. not till a yellow bird descends.

just, the endless cycle of growth crushed underfoot. too much duality, and belief for the good in that: i am learning——we have learned.

so it feels, my true feelings can't fill a page. they curdle, crawl back inwards, obeying alliteration, losing their limbs.

there are so many secrets, and we only hold a photograph, or a word.

i tend to think that if i am only the writer, there is someone out there who is only the reader. they've read photographs and tasted sentences, whole landscapes made of stories, pieces of brilliance, prose. their nights punctuated by dreams, quotes worn on their sleeve, they have waited. they end world after world, tucked a bookmark beneath their tongue, finding the thought: Is there anyone who can, write me a truth? Just one sentence to believe in.

what we don't have, we have given, even if but the memory of a smile.

you'd need to tear the sun down, to bring me down.

your descent into beauty, your boiled skin, your broken soul.

scrapsong

I saw you hang yourself upon an end of a quote

some small fate that your books fall by my feet

and I'm owed to one bank, to lend you both these hands

and that smile before we spoke, almost always whispered:

I swore that the stars no longer rule.

you hold my world here, have seen you writing yours

could I tell, your greatest fear is that all of love is only borrowed

carved between stone and the length of sorrow

the dreamers stand casting weight to move the water

or not sure that I would follow, mistaken for the restless

secrets you won't know:

slow bird, brilliant suns, my last light of fear of none.

—Ian William L.