About Him:
The Boy Who Loves to Love

About Him: The Boy Who Loves to Love

He loves to feel like he’s in love. He loves to feel fingertips brush his bones and every lip lock an “I do.” He loves, and that’s the problem. He never likes, he loves. He never fancies, he loves. He’s fallen in love with the moments that feel like mini eternities. A hotel room rendezvous is a honeymoon and drunk eskimo kisses are wedding vows rubbing against his skin. The dark is her soul and he lies in it, he drowns in it, he holds his breath and gets dizzy in it. The sun is no longer a star, it’s his star and its rays honeyed in her hair are a lyric in his song, forever threaded between a bass line and a heavy drum beat. It’s a smile he’s never seen before that launches him like a lovesick cannon into oblivion. And his lungs are no longer filling for just himself, and the sweater she leaves in his hotel room is a lingering promise in his eyes. Until the glass figurine he has carefully carved her out to be breaks on the floor at his feet, and the shards are licking his flesh deeper than she ever did. And the wounds are festering from the inside out rather than from the outside in. The infection derives from the core of his being, as if he did this to himself. And the fire he burned deep for her is melting his ribcage like sad, slow candle wax down the inside of his chest. And all the love he loved to feel is masked by all the love she never did.

Color Wheel of Summer

The shadows chase our taillights and taunt us with nightfall. The shadows that try to silence the classic rock booming from the speakers of your car, belting from our lungs, threading separate summers into one, cohesive sensation. Slick summer rain coating the pavement reflects the moonlight. The moonlight that makes milk of your complexion, a youthful, pale cotton, framing green eyes of quiet hypnotism. It’s a minute, it’s ten. It’s an hour, it’s a night. It’s the next.

It’s cyclical but not the same, like a circle that changes colors with every spin. A color wheel of our moments: the carnation rose of your bottom lip and my paper white enamel. Together they make pink lemonade. The air-superiority blue of your rough, denim jacket that drapes my cold thighs. The lucid colorlessness of my vodka. A transparency you repeat in teardrops, wet circles your Irish-moss eyes whisper on my olive-fair thumbs. The scarlet burn in our stomachs in the backseat. It’s cyclical but not the same, like a circle that changes colors with every spin until the leaves learn to change colors, too.

Because fall, winter, and spring age your face only the way five years should. And your hair is long enough again to form curls against the back of your neck. Your neck, where paper white enamel painted plum clouds. The chin I cup in my hand is rougher than last year because you don’t shave as often as you used to. It’s rugged, it’s man. It’s everything I’ve waited for you to be. There are licks of timelessness in the lyrics we sing. Charcoal concrete is too dry to mirror the color wheel that spins our eternity on the rims of your tires.

Falling on Deaf Ears

A day ago I was able to say I have never hated you. The chemistry of malicious words paired with your name on my tongue was a taste bitter beyond comprehension. But now, every thought of you provokes vulgarity rolling off my lips and dangling in my breath like poisonous gas. Any sweetness that once coated your name is masked by the vile sting of stomach acid climbing my throat. I spit all I can but the venom lingers of every time I promised myself I would forgive you. Such words now lie dead in my mouth, polluting the distance between my lips and your deaf ears. I’m numb of the ability to caress you with sympathetic words any longer. I think I have forgiven all I can.

Previous column: A 21st Century Ode to Music

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A 21st Century Ode:
An Open Letter to Music and What It’s Made Me

This is an expression of gratitude to the phenomenon we frequently take for granted. The part of our lives we do not even recognize as a phenomenon. But how else do you explain the entity that is music?

There’s a realm that exists as a bridge between mankind and mind, and that realm is music. An integral chemistry of words with the sounds that words could never be used to fully encompass.
There is emotional engagement,
there is spiritual embodiment,
there is a mental reach
that comes with any body of music.

In order for music to exist, there must be a root of its growth. This starting point is not an instrument, nor is it the human voice. It is a voice of the soul — or more plainly stated, an emotion.

You do not pick up a guitar by means of its strings, but instead by the means of an internal urge. This is the urge to make what you feel within become an entity outside of yourself.
It is the grueling stomachache of loss
that wants to manifest within a groaning bass line.
It is the airiness of first kisses
that are dying to be whipped across a drum kit.

I deeply respect this process – of giving life to something that harvests from somewhere we cannot touch, and making it available to others. And, more importantly, to ourselves. A process that reaches people.

As humans with intricate lives, we carry heavy burdens. We are taunted by our own degree of demons every day.

The amazing thing about music: artists can use the weight of a song, an album, a lyric, to lessen those burdens and diminish those demons.

You hear a song on the radio
in which every lyric has a place in your heart.
And you turn up the volume.

You’re standing in a crowd at the foot of a stage,
bellowing the words with a stranger you’ve never met.
Their eyes are closed,
and they sing it with similar fervor.
And that makes you sing a little prouder.

You are perched at the edge of the stage,
and the lights are blinding,
making the individual faces of a crowd into one shadowed sea.
But they deliver your song in one unified voice.
And you smile.

And that is just the beginning.

I feel privileged to live in a world where music exists—something with the complexity and carrying capacity of a thousand internal dimensions. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to investigate and interpret it as intimately as possible in relation to the artist and myself. Every person owes it to themselves to let their emotions and mental spirits engage in something that matters to them. In many ways, that is what music is all about.

It’s honest,
it’s pure,
it’s an intangible bridge between
what we can access
and what we haven’t quite figured out yet.
It’s a way of discovering parts of yourself
that are genuinely and authentically you.
And it’s worth every ounce of energy it takes to bring that out of yourself.

Last month’s column: Poetry straight from the journal. Read “The Entries” here.

The post Diary of a Wallflower: A 21st Century Ode to Music appeared first on KRUI Radio.

The Entries 

October 6, 2015
11:32 PM

My pillow collects my dreams. And sometimes at the end of a long day, I drop my head on my bed, and they puff up into the air like fairy dust, floating over my eyelids. Some seep into my hair, making my brain smell like vanilla orchids. Or the nightmares that taste like blood in the back of my throat, my eyes scrunching tighter. I turn, facedown into the feathers, and scream.

November 12, 2015
4:43 AM

In Which 36 MPH Winds Are Insomnia

You’re the high winds crashing against my bedroom windows. Rattling the branches of trees, and dominating the air at speeds that unsettle me. I know it’s hard for you to be tame, for sweeping things off their feet is all you’ve ever known. I know you are no match for my windows, nor my walls, and yet it is hard to breathe. But I’m trying to sleep. I’m trying to sleep. And yet it is hard to breathe.

I think much differently when I can’t sleep. My mind bends in ways that create melodies—only these are not lullabies. These are not songs I want to fall asleep to. They resemble broken sheet music that wedges you between every bar. You’re just a space heater for the cold spots, manifesting in places that are usual warmth when I’m fully awake. That’s the only reason you exist in the wind.

November 24, 2015
4:50 AM

I no longer communicate with people directly, because everything is filtered through this warped mass of dark rain. The cold shatters the inside of my skin, and pierces my inner walls like acid. It’s erupted in size—a tropical depression building and building into a roaring storm that tells me everything I need to know about love. What I deserve. What I don’t. And it’s scary, the way I find this stuff out. Something I may never know is how to start over, how to keep these warm waters calm, and from collecting in a war against me. Where do I start? How do I make up for lost time? The chemicals that are charged like lightning between our chests are hard to ignore.

But all the mistakes run through my veins like blood, and there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m not allowed to interpret for myself how your hand feels on my cheek, when there’s a storm brewing in my own eyes. But I’m also afraid you can see the dense clouds circling within me. And you will stand far enough away to watch the hurricane take siege over my body, as it’s already done to my mind. There’s nothing harder than trying to mingle with another’s soul while your own is tangled up in the winds.

Last month’s column: Love poems that includes every season. Read “Love Like the Seasons, Love Like the Colors” here.

The post Diary Of A Wallflower: The Entries appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Love Like the Seasons, Love Like the Colors

June and July: A Letter

Dear Summer Nights,

If I am brave, I will leave this letter on your bedside table before I leave in the morning. I will put on a fresh set of red lips just to seal it with a kiss.

If I am brave, I will wait until you wake up, and instead place a kiss to your lips instead of to my words folded within this page. And I will watch the morning light flood the shimmer in your features. You might call me a cab.

If I am brave, I will tuck this letter beneath my pillow, and sigh into your neck. The warm body beneath my touch will squirm into a new dream. The murmur of crickets outside your bedroom window will echo through the haze of your subconscious. They will grow loud and pulsate against your skull. The whispers of my lungs against your skin will become a nightmare.

If I am brave, I will put down my pen. I will wake you up in the still, brisk of the night. The warmth of your hand will find my knee and the depth of your eyes will hollow to receive my soft words. Our thoughts will mingle in the dark air between us, as the cotton sheets absorb your wishes, my dreams, and our stories. Until day breaks, and the black room becomes gold and we have yet to let our minds sleep. I will rest my head on your chest, and my mind will rest in the creases of your palms. And the bed will be thick with the physicality of our midnight and the mentality of our 4 a.m. I will leave my sweater at the end of your bed and you will remember to invite me back for it. And this letter will never be finished.

Alas. I am not as brave as I used to be.

Sincerely,

Me

Color-coded

My skin is pink. It flushes a deep scarlet in your arms, the nerves running thick against my pulse. Your breath is indigo in your lungs, but comes out colorless in your words. Your words… I cannot distinguish one shade of gray from the next. The fingerprints I leave upon your chest are a grassy hue, like new spring, with a rich caution of evergreen bristles.

I have always wondered why the music you listen to is so much bluer than mine when I hum to all the same bands. I write my lyrics in the sky and you tie yours to rocks that you throw into the ocean after dusk. Sunsets my lipstick stains leave on your cheeks, as your lips trail tar down my back.

I want you to see the same rainbow as me, but I know this to be something that nobody can teach anybody. Both the rain and I can tell you when spring is here, but we can only wait for you to run your fingers through the grass for yourself and say, hey, everything’s not dead anymore. Last year, we waited until fall. But it was better than waiting for snowfall.

winter heat waves

your kiss is like ice against my teeth,
an enamel eruption of winter’s peak
visible breath and invisible words
that say I love you now
but maybe not tomorrow.
balmy sighs that mingle with lies
on honest lips of mine, be mine.
show me love that isn’t temporary
or a seasonal shift between want and need
that dies like wet January grass.
we corrode slow into one another
with dependent desire that heats
the space between hand and hip.
how tragic it is
that it’s summer on our skin
and winter in our bones.

Last month’s column: Poems driven by epigraphs of song lyrics. Read “The Lyrical Epigraph” here.

The post Diary of a Wallflower: Seasonal Love Poetics appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Epigraph (noun): a short quotation or saying at the beginning of a book or chapter, intended to suggest its theme

Ubiquity

“There’s a menace in my bed. Can you see its silhouette…?”

                                                            Trouble (Stripped) – Halsey

I’m catching glimpses of your silhouette in trees,

and the air their leaves breathe is hot with your company.

Like fiery, foggy breaths on the back of my neck and

melting into the crease of my lips.

You dance around my shadow

until they blend together as one, slow-dancing

in the dark patches that hide from the sun.

I ask of you to try to mimic your displaced silhouette

with mine—feel me ghosting across the streets you walk,

as a menacing soul of your troubled past, of our

troubled mutual existence. I hope you see me in the trees.

I hope you carry me like the gravel in your boots,

as a constant prod at your (sole). And I hope you are haunted

with the fact that your ghost

comforts the menace in me.

Can you see its silhouette?

                        Can you see my silhouette?

Split Second

“We’re the alley cats. And they can throw their stones…”

                                                            Empty Gold – Halsey

There was something about the alley walls behind the bar

that called us home, as though they sheltered future secrets

we did not yet know. That night we discovered its potential,

I thought you would offer me a smoke off your calloused fingers

but you offered to take on the world with me.

For you, it was more than having someone

to brush the dirt off your knees. It was about

having someone behind you to catch the back of your collar

before you ever hit the ground.

When feudal parents became too much, it was someone

to seek refuge with in the timelessness of the bricks. The nights

we spend with our knees pressed to our chests, throwing

rocks at our shoes and kissing between guitar solos

that shred scars in the air behind the wall against our backs.

The place where your rough whispers snake through my ears

with the softest of intentions. The place where the blood

splattered on the concrete is not ours, but we pretend we know

the beaten, because it makes our cold brick house of secrecy a home

to the golden moments of teenage escape.

The Release

“Did you know that I can lift a car up all by myself?”

                                                            I Can Lift A Car – Walk The Moon

I left a part of myself at the barricade that night, where

the sounds washed over my skin and absorbed into the

cloth of my dress. It sounds like a careless mistake to say

I left it there. I won’t lose it, I won’t lose it, I won’t lose it,

I won’t lose it… but I promise it was a purposed loss.

We lift our hands to the sky, palms up

to the stage lights and the stars. The combined rawness

of our negative energies mingle in the air above us. I watch

our invisible demons fight one another behind my closed eyelids

until they dissolve into a smoke. My chest presses tightly

to the gate, suddenly numb to anything in the physical world.

Everything but the voices soar into space.

I can lift a car up. I can lift a car up all by myself.

We are committed in this moment to the strength we possess,

to no one but ourselves and the power in our veins.

The cars above our heads dust our palms with rust

that blows away in the wind. I press higher, the tips

of my toes barely touching the ground now, my body

a feathery hover between the smoky remains of my demons

and the clouds that were built for me to stand on.

I finally open my eyes. A thousand other voices scream

the same song as me. A hundred thousand other demons,

who do not and will not know me, dissipate to nothingness.

I remember that I am not alone. That night,

I left a part of who I was at the barricade.

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