sweet apple cider

All I'm thinking about is them, and you, and spices that smell like Christmas Eve in Germany. My senses are imprisoned and all I can think about is that sweet apple cider, sitting, steaming in a mug, waiting, wanting me to sip until every ounce of me is drenched in Johnny Appleseed goodness. Pour it over my worries, refill until my anger is emptied and my sadness is dissolved away into a solvent of apple cinnamon. It warms my stomach, and heart, and head, and I'm happy. I'm happier than you were on the day your dad bought you your first piece of piano music, and I'm even calmer than your mother when she knows you are sleeping safely at home. Puncture my heart, bleed my veins, enslave me with your scent, all can be undone in one simple sip. The image of your face no longer ripples my memories and I've almost completely forgotten (except some days when I'm leaving the house without a key and want to tell you how much I love a certain morbid poem). All I'm really trying to tell you is that I'm drinking hot, sweet apple cider without shame and hoping against nothing that tomorrow it will snow glory from the skies and delay the long weeks before Christmas. All I'm saying is that if you could dance outside right now, I would dance with you, and I might even leave my apple cider behind for you, unless you might want some, because you like it as much as I do.

filth

I'm swimming through the filth of disgrace,
                                                  disappointment,
                                                  degrading
filth that clouds my vision and penetrates my skin,
                                                                   flesh,
                                                                   veins,
eating away every bit of sustaining meat that surrounds my
                                                                                  your
                                                                                  their
faces and I cringe when I see the skeletons of their thoughts, sleeping away their time in a corner and eating their cake like it just came out of a warm oven and laughing when it burns away their tastebuds. The acid that once scalded their membranes is seeping out of the soil and they've learned to live and breathe every bit of it while whistling endless tunes such as "Blow the Man Down" and "London Bridges." And every once in a while they look over at their companions in the public tomb of humiliation and remind each other that "It gets a little dark down here, mate, but you'll adjust." After all, they are missing their eyes,
                                                                                                                      hair,
                                                                                                                      hearts.
Sleeping away every minute of their mindless, dead existence and waiting for new rotting flesh to join their crypt of faith. If only they could hear the world only seven feet above them, whirring,
                                                                                                                  spinning,
                                                                                                                  racing
ahead, past morals and past technology and past every imagination they could have ever imagined in their lifetime. If perhaps they could glimpse the present, they might understand and be grateful for early death.

StarZ

He stared into perplexity as her eyelashes closed over the orbs of her eyes.

"This isn't it," he whispered thoughtlessly, "this isn't what we ever thought."
A feathered willow branch kissed her cheek as she drifted into dreams and 

while he talked she thought of the sound of his voice. 

Within his barrier there was a wall that covered more than his desires and 

all of his love. Somehow she could tear it down, with pleas or lies or

kisses planted atop his unbelief. Her fingernails grazed his rough knuckles

and he shivered with some unknown emotion that she wished with all her

heart that she could discover and capture within her, keep it forever in a

jar like an innocent firefly prisoner in an old, used plastic cup that she 

drank out of before it became a useful trap. His eyes were less than a river

and more of a black, all-seeing vortex that sucked in her thoughts without

a consent form to control her emotions and read her ideas to everyone in

the room before she could stop him. So she closed her eyes and he stared

at her transparent eyelids, waiting, wishing, hoping to glance that part of her

that he only could see and violate.

I keep looking for things

Where is the shock?

A flash of lightning, a spark of light and hope, a lingering feeling of tingles.

White light spreading through consciousness, erasing all doubt, fear, hopes, 

Doing spring-cleaning on your imagination and tap-dancing on your creativity.

It stops to stir your mind into a stew of mystery meats and lost words while

running ovals around the index of your memories. 

Leaving nothing but the mush which we call 

a brain.

Where is the excitement?

Racing faster than adrenaline through every muscle, tightening your grip,

leaving sweat on under your eyes and in every crack of your palm.

Your eyes search for something reasonable, but can only digest

COLOR
COLOR 

COLOR

Colors of flushed faces and crowded bodies, colors of sweat and 

anxiety and love.

Where is the expectation?

The hope of a butterfly hatching or the standards of every Mormon girl.

The yellow-gray muck of failure mixed with the navy-blue-brown of 

disappointment. Its nothing you thought it would be and everything you 

hoped it wouldn't. It finds the space between your heart and those

hairs in your nose that grant you smell and it cuts it into pieces so 

you are left with nothing but a nose and cold, wet veins.

You can find it here if you look hard enough, tucked beneath the 

lukewarm of my coat pocket, next to the old gum and bobby pins.

It's here, though silent, haunting a silent girl with nothing but reddish 

hair and a knack for the unusual. It's friends with the lice and fleas and 

likes to pester at one's skin and becomes a tapeworm digging into 

the flesh of you. 

Where is the cure?