Love was a cup of coffee, hot and bitter and pungent; it was excitement and relief; it was our tour guide, our savior. And we subsisted on it, happily succumbing to addiction, laughing when they called us addicts. Caffeine is but chemical; coffee is more. Then one day you set it atop the car and drove off without a thought, the mug teetering precarious on every careless corner. Our love is not waiting, my dear, though it cools within reach, every jolt and curve a cut close...

I used to believe love was a star, a radiating globe of energy; of cold blue light and red hot passion and every spectrum in between. --That when it expired, whether in a brilliant apocolype of destruction or a slow burn to irrelevance or a permanent implosion, there was nothing but to search the universe over for another; for a brighter. The sun is the brightest star in our sky. The sun is the closest star to our earth. The closest star is always the brightest. But love may ...

It came to me today that I have no idea how to be miserable. Most of the time, I feel just fine. When good things happen I am happy. When sad things happen I am sad. And the fact that I have loved and lost never seems to register; whatever inner tragedy I have suffered crashes futile against the rocks. I see no difference between my life with and my life without. Except that, at night, I am filled with a frantic energy that might be joy or rage or despair but not something in between-...

Her beauty is not mine and so it fades without protest; is sanded down to desert as I fain disinterest. She sleeps away her folly and in silence I agree, for my claim on her is lesser than the claim she has on me. If she wastes away in darkness who would dare assign me blame? It is not my place to shine though I feel guilty just the same.

what are tears to me I do not cry say cry me a river cry me an ocean but the ocean is here and it pounds into my head relentless the weakest point a hairline fracture a single salty drop to betray the hurricane.

I don't dare succumb to the allure of optimism. I would rather trust the wheel to fate as my spine tremors with want than pay tribute to consequence, but futures hurtle ignorant of my want or even my being. So I do "the right thing," except for a moment every night when I do what I must for sleep to come.

There is a dignity to the chopping block; a weight to the carriage of one whose life will end with the terrifying swiftness of birth. How I wish for once those broken hearts would watch me with such tearful intensity that a lifetime could be redeemed in a moment. How different is the sickening crack of decision as if life had broken a bone, and you are still laughing but now it hurts and then everything is tears. How different is the stuttering pause of the engine as you conti...

I never sent you the first letter I wrote I was young it was foolish I was foolish And the things it said weren't even true although they became true later. But I didn't have dreams I had holes and you weren't fulfilling you were filling me so yes I left but I was also broken again, but this time tragicly aware. So it was not that you weren't enough because you were the shape of my void but I didn't want a void anymore I'm sorry my healing has done you wrong. I know I am pre...

Is heaven is just the child of my human desparation a tiny gasping infant, blue veined with shaking fists eternally smothered by my guilt? I have to believe for the sore-eyed nights to pass; I have to believe to endure the bright tears and sad-eyed beauty as you turn away. I would trade in the hope of heaven for the certainty of peace; I would give up my soul, hand-written posters on lamp posts saying: "free to the right family." You can imagine how it felt to see the...

I think I'm finally sick of the heart being broken or maybe I've just realized that the "heart" is just a token (if it really was a heart, honey, there's no second breaking; if it happens twice that means that the first time you were faking) and I know it hurts (hell yeah it does) I know it blows (the hell you do) but hell, with broken organs that is, well, the way it goes so bite the bullet--bite it hard and close your eyes, we'll yank it quick (bit the bullet, bite it ...

I stood on the Northern tip of my continent; and you on the Souther tip of yours, as if they were rafts, floating apart just faster than we could swim. My subconscious mantra (begging all my life: please, please, please) lifted leaded feet and I dove, sinking like rotten wood. But the mind is simply the empty center of a matryoshka. So now my heart of gold is somewhere (please, please, please) and my empty mind is nowhere and just for a moment the futility of ...

You know (don't you, my friend?) that life is not the house down the street (with blueberry blue siding and a white wraparound porch) nor is it the threadbare condo with its whitewashed walls and linoleum floors. It is your attic, or your basement, bare wires poised to punish your careless groping. And it is your closet (but only in the dark) with the nails never pounded tbo lunt-head safety and the wire hangars twisted (because that's art these days). But scorn ...

Oh, you floundering fool, full of "shit happens" and full of shit in general-- your early-bird steps never wake me so adjacent nothing may always take me by surprise, just like the scurvy flight of fancy we turned out to be, alternately licking and scratching our wounds, dusty feathers gray with color scattered like wind-borne plumes in fleeting symphony spent quickly to ash. But we are all feathers, you and me and craven friends, all tossed into the ether to in beauty...

You are an infinite imprecision-- a caulk-consolation for my scabbed handful of needs. And the swelling bottle-reality is not "and" but "or" I suppose. (I accept booleans as they come.) You are a paper monument in my mind, but I never blanch, knowing somewhere the true granite rises impregnable. Or a shiny medal, hard and gold, cold against the glass-- a symbol of past joy, or a suggestion of future joy. You are the flagpole upon which I hang my spine-- wh...

A half dozen pairs of pinned-up dimples plotted graceful retreat, squandered every hoarded ounce of resolve. From ear to ear I drifted until I finally left griping behind, accustomed to the sudden slackness of muscle no longer braced with interest. Instead I obsessed silently as a plant might fixate on water. As a cadaver might long for the grave. The grave; as if crushes can kill-- as if this preamble to love was the whole bloody constitution. But my eyes lock with hers,...