The way her eyeballs pinball around her sockets tells you she's anxious

She seems lost in a continuous loop

She feels like her life is the haunted house that people only want to visit once a year

Lonely and forgotten

Like that one pair of stilettos she keeps in her closet

Ask her about her day

Make her feel safe

Tell her that her demons can go play with the skeletons in your closet

Her eyes then match yours

She sees her image in your mirrors

And she realizes that she isn't alone

I remember the rain that flooded Margerie. Drenched in sadness and distress. The same type of rain that left the gutters in her arms destroyed. Battered and bruised in a watercolor of emotions that stained black and blue on the walls of her skin. Silent treatments spoke volumes, so often I'd find her inaudible. When she spoke, there was this vacancy in the tail of her words. As if her heart was no longer parked alongside the curb of her lungs or held tight against the monkey bars of her ribs. She seemed empty. She was empty. She longed for love. Love never returned her call. To her, love became a myth. Engraved like hieroglyphs on those stone beds of eyelids...

Can't breathe. Lost in an ozone of horrors

There was this air of melancholy surrounding her

Bitter tastes that stained the tongue yellow

From flavors of the past

A heavy air

With a light breeze of grief

That kind of carried a stench of regret

Like how the air is stained

with the smell of asphalt when it rains

A cloud of emotions above her head

She was needing an umbrella

I have a spare

A shot glass full of tears

followed by lemon juice and a pinch of salt

This is how I start my mornings

Accompanied by Elliot Smith's "Between The Bars"

His words climb into the empty seats next to me

Filling the cup I drink with songs of addiction and pain

I remember

The curve of her lips

The satin smooth skin

And the dangerous blade of her piercing brown eyes

Eyes that turned men into statues

I see tragedy clinging to the black curtains that surround the two windows to my soul

Knowing that everytime I open my eyes

I risk seeing a beautiful monster capable of hurting me more than intended

I sit here

Spending precious minutes devising a Trojan horse

I sit here

Spending hours trying to convince my shadow that I'm worth following

A book of blank pages and a pen full of sorrows

This is how I continue my afternoons

Handshakes and hellos from friendly faces

And conversations filled with repetitive topics

I remember

The words that left her dictionary mouth

The movements of her conductive hands

And the orchestral emotions

behind the words and movements

I see the shows she puts on

For the crowds that flutter to see her spectacle

An encore of emotions playing back in my head

Like reverbs of sounds that bounce off the walls of my acoustic heart

I sit here

Strumming the strings of my being to see if I'm able to create a song of longing

I sit here

Strumming rhythms of hope to fuel the lapsing beat of my heart

I serve ovenbaked memories to feed my saddened stomach

Followed by a dish of melancholy

This is how I end my evenings

Dim lights and candles to illuminate the day

Bed sheets and comforters to shield my body from anymore harm

I remember

The bundles of hair

The little breaths she took

And the "goodnight love" before I fell into eternity

I lay here

Counting the broken pieces I am now left with

I lay here

Contemplating how good I once had it

Goodnight

Last day on air

A great sitcom that filled the hearts of we

Not three

but two

Us

Now one

Just me

A blank static-filled heart

Ivory colored pixels paired with black matter of old memories

It was a great show

But it was only a show

Time to browse other channels

The constable of my mind

Deals heavily with corruption

An office buried in paperwork that my brain piles

He sees exactly how corrupt life is

Through a stain glass iris

I am not afraid of death

I'm scared of living

He feels the horrors that are to be set in

His view grows dark

Red covers his window

Dear son,

As I sit here scribbling away with a troubled pen, I stutter letters retracing the troubled sounds that i wish you have no part in learning. I hope that inevitability grants you a break from its hold. I'm sorry that the world you have entered is nothing but trials and tribulations of a nature too great for you to understand. I'm sorry that you'll have to learn love as a concept. I hope you learn quicker than I ever did that there is no concept at all. There will be times in your life where you feel as if you're being choked at the neck when trying to figure out what being stable is for the one(s) you love. The density of that matter has eaten at many and I hope you are strong enough to break its plate. There will be times where you will feel surrounded by complete darkness. But in every shade of black that is painted within those walls just know that farther down are the lanterns I set out for you. I have enough apologies to make you a house and enough grief to insulate the walls. I have enough hope to pave your steps and enough love to riddle the garden with. Son, this world has eaten away at my core and corrupted my seeds of sanity. But for you i plan to be the compass in your journeys.

Here I stand depositing feelings of favored emotions

Into a vault that wasn't mine

Sometimes it feels as if these emotions were quarters loaned by other people

Gathered when I was swimming in your pool of fountain wishes

A huge pot of pleasures in a poker game of misread faces

I couldn't read you

When the cards were dealt

I tried to call your bluff

Only to lose the hand

Your hands

I headed to your self owned casino to play slots

Moved on to love roulette only to lose

I lost all my earnings

thinking I had a chance of upping my chances to your wealth

Now here I stand depositing myself into my fiscal problems in order to avoid my bankruptcy

Now the only thing my wallet holds are blank pictures of faded pasts.

Greenbacks of a love lost.

Yet in this trench of fiscal problems I can't help but to feel wealthy. Wealth is subjective. My wealth comes from knowledge and my trials of becoming the greatest man. So who is anyone to call me poor. Because I am still wealthy.

Here i am

Everyone calls me J.

My favorite color is blue.

I love coffee and music because the two are therapeutic.

I'm a dog lover.

I've never been to Disneyland.

I hated the whole idea of school.

Which is why I was a habitual truant.

Absent like my parents from my life grade.

I am not religious.

My belief in religion died when my grandmother did.

But a few months ago I reconnected with someone I've grown to have a strong affinity towards.

I started thinking that maybe heaven wasn't a place,

But instead just moments held in good conscious.

I'm only 5 foot 7...

On a good day.

But being scribed like a short story is a journey to becoming the tallest tale in the book of life.

My grandparents raised me to be a good man.

Yet I feel like I'm still that troubled boy struggling to find his happiness.

I give great advice but I don't listen to any of it.

Often I'm told that I'm a hopeless romantic.

I found that it may be true.

Grandma always said that the ultimate measure of a man is not whether his love is true but if it's unconditional

A righteous heart inside man is the same as a gun with the safety left on.

Sometimes I feel my heart is the size of a closed fist

That takes constant emotional abuse to keep it beating.

I feel like my love is a 9millimeter pistol with black roses in its barrel

Signifying the beauty within the pain.

I am the son of a man who knows nothing about family and

The son of a woman who knows nothing but a needle.

I'm sick and tired of seeing "men" patronize women

Sick of seeing "men" as guns with hollow tips aiming at the women and staining the heart's full metal jacket blood red.

I'm sick and tired of seeing women disowning their worth and letting "man" stay unholstered.

I'm an old soul living in a young body.

I'm a soul that has wandered endlessly to feel whole.

I am a soul that is bound to dreaming.

Because in dreams...I have it all.

I think the scars that people have depict the battles they've won; physically and emotionally.

I think the best thing I can ever do is lather up the baby oil and showcase all of mine.

I firmly believe the world has a lot to offer.

I believe everything should coexist peacefully.

I believe that when the sun starts to set,

the moon rises to continue her partner's shine.

I believe the stars are reflections of promises I tend to keep.

There to help illuminate my darkened path;

To get me back on track for my long journey of reaching entirety.

I am a simple man with complex visions and

I am also a blind man that sees the world for what is not seen.

This is me.

So here i am.

"I remember that it hurt. Looking at her hurt."

Father Time could not count the seconds that were lost

When held in her gaze

Mother Nature could not have made a force more destructive

Than those final words she uttered towards me

"I no longer feel the same"

Earth's orbit ceased to exist

And the only thing that made any sense now

Was death itself

Depression in all sense held no place for what I felt

So he called his cousin Despair

To see if he could fish me out of his well

And when Despair had no luck catching a bite from me

They pulled out the big guns and notified the twins

Sorrow and Distress

And to their surprise rose my fractured shell from the pit of sadness

Into the now colorless word

With both eyes in hand