i must be dreaming

I shouldn’t be here but you’ve got me figured out, so that should mean something, shouldn’t it? there is a hole in my heart, shaped like all the glimmering stars I’ve found in your brain. you are a blinking audacity, somedays with the power to hold me close and still, and other days not so. love, you’ve got complete power to ask me to stay, but I don’t think you will. it isn’t your fault, but I’ve been feeling too lifted to let the burden bring me down. I think you forgot how fragile my heart truly is, or you just don’t care at all. I don’t know when the sun disappeared from your words, but once in a while, I catch a glimpse of that fiery, winter warm being and feel the light of your heart all over my skin. maybe it’s true, I only breathe when you’re around, and I only feel something genuine when I look at you. or maybe it’s not and I can still feel the same security from feeling too opiated to care about everything else, from something else. he says I’ve let your past words wrap themselves around my head so tightly, only you could undo these knots and help me air my head. that’s the blessing and curse of keeping all your feelings to yourself, until they become ghosts of all the people you used to love, and stay buried in your chest, draining the life out of you. he says I’ve locked my heart in your ribcage and left it to die. it’s true, I can still feel my head but I’ve lost my heart. I know I’ve become a half child again, dreaming of stepping stones across raging rivers to a dystopian far away kingdom. he is persistent in convincing me I’ve had too much to dream. after all, Simon Says, right? my lungs are cut up and wrecked with the stink of death today. I can feel the burn from your memory sinking into my bones, shattering my ribs into smithereens and freeing the death in my lungs. there are blackened stars spilling out, a reminder of the dullness in my head. how do I save myself? how do I save you from me? how violent can these cataclysmic waves of sadness get, that all the lions are battered up and dying on the streets, that all the floorboards are splintered with anger and brokenness, that all that’s left of my heart is nothing? could true love ever be violent? hungry angels are swarming all around me, fencing me up like a house that could only ever be abandoned, over and over again. Hell can only be ours to face. maybe it’s true, I trapped myself onto a haunted carousel that will never stop spinning. this carousel is a ghostly entity that has spun everything out of my heart and head, voiding me of every piercing feeling. hey, love, all the carnival lights and music have been screaming murder lately. do I stay to watch the grand finale, when even my head gives up and falls apart, or do I go and bandage my head in the cold hands of another with moons for eyes and a heart of metal? that would be so me, so me, wouldn’t it? do I really have the colossal strength to pick myself up and leave without crawling back?

walk with me to the glaring water
the sun high up and down at our backs
you’re holding my hands again
playing with the smoke in between
and pushing past the joints
boy, don’t hurt your brain
thinking what you’re gonna say
I can see your skull peeking through
the flames eating up whatever’s left
of that crying brain of yours
can’t you see that you’ve been killing yourself?
should we have a do over?
maybe I could have put that fire out
with holy water that’ll wolf it down
I know the memory seemed innocuous then
without the taints of jolting epiphanies
but we are all an unfinished attic that will remain so maddeningly unknowable”
and even the newest of memories will hurt I can see the sun sleeping in your eyes
how you stayed up til 3, blistering your skin
to become the sun I was in love with
but I can still tell your heart isn’t in this
you’re tracing the white streaks again
and this time, I cannot tell if you’re marking out
the places you’d love for us to go together,
or the days it’ll take until your flight
when you forget the forever that has morphed itself
into the dark brushed sunset behind us
before you go, remember to turn the big light off
don’t stay, stay, stay, stay, stay

I will wait, with the flaking stars above,
their lips bleeding rose gold holy water
onto dented canvas shoes and peeling roses
suddenly, the traffic dies down
and the sleeping cars dream of God
He is creating universes in our heads
that create the utmost collisions
do you feel the sun in your broken heart?
a cataclysmic wave of sadness
that glitters too brightly like unwanted gold,
as if the pain can’t even be fixed by light
you have such an indelible face,
cut out straight from a magazine
it would take Herculean will to forget it
to leave behind the extra-mundaneness
alike to shimmering lakes crowned by
colossal walls of seamless pink behind
the tips disappearing into a cosmical sky
if you’re pretending from the start,
like this, with a tight grip,
then forget me
like I will forget you,
as I wait
and wait
and wait
forever
until the pain goes
and we’ve no words left

the air in your cheeks is in full bloom and you have all the stars in the world crowded at your throat. our hand grabbing is spidery and fleeting, supernovas bursting out every time they part. I can hear her laughter in yours, eyes drawn further apart but glittering all the same. I know your mother raised you to believe in a god and love him, a first love bound to happen. you drew divinity on my palms in sign and taught me how to air my head and love the sky again. it was love until I saw the sun retreating in your eyes, and everything we were holding onto fell apart. our hands are dry but you believe in god so you give me a thousand more excuses. 5 full moons pass and we’ve become half-children again, with half-hearts and half-mouths, meaning less and less of what we say. and every time we do, Neverland dies a little more. the sun has faded from your eyes and I see it spilled all over your wrists. you say it is god’s will that this is happening, but I can hear the shaking in your graying voice. we’re becoming quarters of your promises now and the restless nights have nestled themselves into your eyes. you say god can’t possibly be your first love because I exist and I think I feel the stars dying out, bleeding until all their blood drowns every white rose in the universe in wine red. you say god must be real, because you’ve found heaven in my hands but you can feel the hell in my heart. you say that’s only the case because I’ve set my heart on fire to save my head. the beds have overturned and the sun has become a beast, clawing and biting at your nails. I’ve blooming blisters from looking at you. this must be it, this must be a dream. everything is slipping through our fingers now, but they’ve always been too spidery for reality anyway. I can feel the white in your voice and the soft baby blue that blankets you at night. we are 29 colours today, talking mad fast in a language we don’t quite understand. we are talking over each other, hoping love will find a way to mend our brokenness. there is no light in our heads anymore. I see you off and for the last time, you say god isn’t what you think he was. you say god is in me, but you’ve found a way to love me even still. we are a single colour today, and it is pink. the feeling of dreams taking flight and pain leaving our heads. the feeling of prettiness enveloping our skin and seeing sunsets when we look into the mirror. it is the warmth in your heart despite the edges. it is reconciliation and settlement, because love never meant to stay. it is, but now it was.

if voices had colours,
yours sounded grayer today
thinner, as if all that weariness
has beaten you down
and all those downpours
have sunken deep into those eyes
if anyone was larger than life itself
it would be you (it always will)
if anyone could threaten
the once well kept equilibrium
of my life, it would be you
you used to have
a pretty kind of dirty face
now you’ve a 3 month dent
right down your paling lips
if you just take off your mask
you’ll find out everything’s gone
and I’ve had my change of heart

last night, you went off about some sort of spliff and how much further away it took you. you’re rolling your knuckles on the plated roof we’re on and rolling your eyes listening to my stories about the the sun falling in love with someone else glimmering light like god. you’re saying love isn’t meant to break and maybe that’s true but tonight, we are drunken in the moonlight and feeling the wind in our joints (both the ones in our knees and in between our lips). you’re flipping cards over and re shuffling them, hoping for a different read but they hurt all the same. I’m shuffling our playlist trying to forget the gold stains I saw on those wrists and how you still smear honey on those old wounds, picking at them trying to find more common gold. we’re running out of time and money, aren’t we? I’m telephoning someone else with coffee stained poetry. it isn’t gold but maybe I haven’t had the best taste in the world. we almost fall over, but I’m the only one that picks myself up while you cling on crying for me to spare you the common gold I love so much. I watch you break your fingers apart trying to give me gold but you are not her and there is no sun in your eyes tonight. tonight, we are both all jointed up, eyes hazy and opiated with the feeling of loving someone more than ourselves. you say love doesn’t break but love is exactly what has broken us and made us fall apart, pieces rolling down this rooftop and falling over. everyday, it gets harder to stay. does the moon have many phases or faces? don’t forget about the boy on the moon crying, for his soul had been torn apart by raging wolves, eager for a bite of hope. calm down love, sure, he couldn’t change my heart, but tonight tells me you can’t either.

it is spidery fingers rubbing the soft, sunset hues off the soles of dirt stained feet. it is the sound of god in the background and our voices hollering at the stars, as if we were each bigger than god could ever be. it is lying to the cleaners about being homeless, watching the cars rushing pass like fallen angels eager to head home. it is singing empty lyrics to chase the ghosts of the people who broke us out of our empty heads. it is crying until the end of the song just to prove a point and win the argument. it is sleeping on trash bags under the streetlights with broken joints and bruised palms. it is “see you again” kisses until the sun sleeps again. it is talking about the world as if we owned it, as if we were gods and it is having Beethoven cover his ears because our playing would send us to the lowest floors of Hell. it is slipping into the rain soaked grass for the laughs. it is lighting joints only to have the sky pour its heart out to us just when the smoke passes by our eyes. it is falling in love with the sun with our eyes closed and our hearts opened. it is burying roses only to wash our hands with the water you say is holy because god is crying at how broken we are. it is every pointless story that serves only the purpose to entertain. it is trying to clean out our wrists and blood with dainty flowery yellow and harsh blue strokes. it is pretending to be Picasso only to swallow back the pain of the sun, and becoming Van Gogh. it is pretending to love the moon because the sun fell apart in our heads and disappeared from our mouths. it is closing your eyes and escaping the prison this town has become. it is leaving only to find out you miss everything but we are now a million states apart and a million stars drifted. we’ve run out of space on the map, wasting time talking in old font and broken song lyrics. we are only as close as strangers can get. it is what it is, until it isn’t.

for someone who doesn’t know what goodbye is, when all the birds stop singing, when the sun stops falling and the moon stops sleeping, when the ghosts that live inside our chests finally die, will you still break your hands to give me the sun? when everything falls to pieces, will you still sing with the wind for me and learn how to bleed the ghosts of the people we used to love, out of our minds? if your heart grows tired of dancing in the eye of these thunderstorms, will you still stay until the grand finale, when both our hearts fall apart and your bones are broken and bent? will you last with me until the last dying star and burnt out sun? if not, apply for someone else’s heart.

can we talk about the dreams we have before we fall asleep? and the horror from sleep, that follows us into the day? we’ll become who we’ll become, and I’ll love you if I’ll love you. I’ve drank so much smoke today pretending it’s made of gold. I can taste the sunset again, listening to the sound of your dying breath over the phone. where do we go, now that our story is almost over? it feels like the stars are slipping out of our story and God is closing our book. flip the pages until we’re out of states, until we’re out of our minds and until we’re fallen from our graces. I dream of meeting God. I would shout my lungs out at him, asking why we each couldn’t be our own gods. He will tell me that if I were ever a god, no one would believe in me because I can’t even believe in myself. I dreamt of us again last night. we are half-screaming into the night and bending our fingers trying to intertwine them with each other’s, hoping they wouldn’t snap. we are soaked in the traffic light, wishing on sleeping cars and the feeling in our chests. you are whispering into my ears, that if it all went wrong, we would be the perfect kind of misery. we are until we were. broken angels scream bloody murder into my ears until I run out of air. what do you want them to say about us tomorrow? think, think for me. close your eyes and open your brain until they’re scattered out in the streets. close your eyes and you will see that the blur of the traffic can only be ghosts fighting to go home. regret weaves itself into my hair every day, and it gets so stuck my hair has become a maze for the unwanted. I’ve come to realize, love can never set ourselves free from our brains. love is just love, and that’s all it really can be. I will read about you on the road tomorrow. you will look up to the sun and see the way my eyes shine, because you can only reforget until you remember. we will never see each other again, no, not in the same way.