poetry of the frozen dirt

once when i was younger and smarter i stumbled throughout the night, dancing into the streets of fuckheads, two bricks in my hands and a razor in my teeth. snow bled from the crunching clouds, splattering like mud onto concrete freezing and hardening into the distorted

dream in my head. i burned all the buildings with the cold of fire while they were burning all the bibles there was alcohol in my mouth and there was song there wasn’t much grace but there was hope. there was always plenty of hope, hope oozing from the walls like a sticky black substance. there was always fear diluted in ecstasy. there was always love melted into all the tragedy, contaminating all the melancholy with its beautiful sirens of wonder and hearts and alcohol and death.

there was magic

but it wasn’t like

the magic in the movies.

the magic was thick

heavy and stagnant,

you couldn’t really

see it but you could

feel it when you pressed a finger

on the ice on a rusty street lamp or reached into the pocket of your

thick leather coat.

it tasted like warm winter,

you could feel it on your tongue. even as the shadows swallow my bones, that taste is still there. the magic isn’t dead. and through the magic of these city streets and boundless entropy, i always dreamed of cowboys and movies, i dreamed of a thousand wonders melted with golden skies, every thump of the heart

the perfect sound

i dreamed of starlight. starlight without pain.

 a world screaming with purpose. i dreamed of running away with you

through these rattling clouds and frozen roads, but you were wired up to a cell phone a computer and a bunch of concepts that were foreign to me abstract in language but lovely to you and that cut us apart like a switchblade to the thinnest piece of rope

now the kitchen’s empty yet i’m still here

trying not to

fall

fall

fall apart

the magic isn’t dead but it’s a magic i can’t have. i can feel it but i can’t reach it. i don’t deserve it. i’m not in love with you i’m in love with the idea of being in love. if you were someone else i would love them all the same and i’m selfish and i’m terrified.

twenty four years

gone without reason.

           flesh and wet dirt.      shadows and silence.

the night is truly terrible.

what i understand now that i didn’t know in those dreams was that nobody really chooses to be put in this world. you sort of just wake up one day and  realize you’ve been here for four or five years. sometimes there’s a mother, sometimes there’s a father, oftentimes there’s neither but there’s always wind, and there’s always sunlight, and there’s always something about a moon.

and when the world is so incredibly vast, and stable, and you’re a mess, and you’re so incredibly tiny, a tiny mess with tiny fingers and tiny toes, tiny chest protecting a tiny heart making tiny noises,

how can you fit in everywhere at once? how can every last piece of the puzzle make perfect sense?

you don’t choose your body.

you don’t choose your mind.

it would be fantastic if God approached you before you were born and asked if you want to be gay               straight or neither

       tall         ugly or loathsome       brave or a bird or maybe a mexican

or if you even wanted to be born at all but He doesn’t do that, this world is something we’re all just forced to try, try, and try again,

try until we die,

try until we

         fall fall fall apart

we’re all going to die so we might as well write about it and laugh about it as we

fall fall fall apart, we’re broken and we’re vague, we’re monsters but we’re mages, floating and flickering around with the magic of this broken and beautiful day.