like how your hair smelled
that day I broke your heart.

I wasn’t always this
confused, you know.
There was a point where
I found comfort
in black
and white,
solace in right
and wrong. But it doesn’t
always work that way,
does it darling?
    I’m in the grey.
Different shade each
day,
and my actions?
All I know is that
I keep swaying back
and forth between
what the devil whispers
into my ears
and what lies inside
my skull, but I’m reaching a point
where both entities are starting
to agree with one another.

And I will beg of you to go
the more I need you to stay,
because I’m trying not
to need so much.

-    and go.

I realize

I’ve been dipped in
your ocean for far too long,

I’ve been swimming around
inside you
I’ve been swaying my hips
back and forth
with the movement of your
majestic waves,
that I’ve forgotten how it feels
to be at the surface; to fly,
to light up the world
in red and orange,
to fill up the sky
with self-ignited
blaze.

I’ll rise like the sun,
declaring independence,
singing solidarity
and self-love.
The more I burn,
the more of myself
I throw into the fire,
the more beautiful my flame,

and I’ll shine this blinding light
to wipe out

the darkness,     me and my luminous heat
soaring high

above all else.

Please, don’t make me.

I’ve killed you off so many times
in my head, I wouldn’t know
what to do with you
should you face me.

Walk the other way.
For someone who’s so imperfect,
you sure know how to
make me feel small -
but won’t you have a little mercy, baby? January
is when you lost me,
and every year
around this time

I strip myself bare,     like clockwork,

but maybe you just don’t want this debt paid back.

I guess
I’ll just try to bury the knife a little deeper.
And maybe this time,
I wouldn’t be
so inclined to kiss you back to life.

It sinks in,

drip drops,

music,
rehearsed lines and all;
perfect acting. Surreal.
It’s not murder if you’re
still fucking alive.

I know,
I know,
you’ve heard it all before.
I’ve seen it a million times.

I’m just recycling old dreams
because I’m running out of new ones.

But the angel in you and
the rebel in me
took the reigns
and lashed our horses
into a world where we
were strangers
and nothing you and I
could say or do
could determine
the color of our future.

With eyes so red with toxic desire,
I contemplated freedom in the form
of loss.
And I gave it up.

  You.

Had you stayed, I would have
continued to build forts
all over and around me,
walls so high, and so thick,
even the devil himself
would give up on me
and walk away.

But you didn’t really need that much motivation.

And maybe I remember far more
than you ever would. And maybe
I’ll forever be preoccupied by the intention
of forgetting.

I Didn’t Know This Would Happen by John Steffler

Above Cabot Strait, the props
of the Dash-8 shake and grumble,
screwing us deeper
into the pure Newfoundland
cloud, north, farther
north where I live, the whole
cabin jiggling
loudly, the children
straining their feverish
voices- and it already feels
like home, the few people
aboard talking in groups
in the aisle, ordering
one another drinks- and I
wouldn’t change where I’m going,
into my awkwardness, my broken
marriage, troubles richer
than Voisey’s Bay, my
unexpected life off
all the maps I’d ever imagined,
the unfamiliar heart,
of where we all live.

Here you are, facing
the mirror that never
quite gave you clarity.
You are anything
but true to yourself.

You spend your days
in a violent haze,
drowning in
your merciless thoughts. In your
head, they’re
boundless as the sea
but they end up condensed
to a single insignificant drop
that lingers unspoken
at the tip of your tongue
until you find yourself
swallowing,
defeated.
If this feeling were a
part of human anatomy,
you think
it would definitely be
a rib cage, for it holds you
hostage;
quietly asphyxiated,
effectively suffocated,
promising eternal safety
to the seemingly undying
ache it harbors – to
the inhales and exhales
of a hopeless entity,
to a Stockholm Syndrome
victim who never
knew any better.
If this feeling were a
part of human anatomy,
you think
it would never be a hand,
for hands always give,
and hands always caress,
and hands always comfort,
and all it does is take
away more and more
of your livelihood,
as it robs you
of your will to breathe.
These can’t be fingers,
you think,
because fingers
are graceful,
and fingers
hold,
and all you ever
seem to be doing is
falling
ever so gracelessly.

Here you are,
chalking your pain
up to destiny.
You are anything
but safe in your skin.

You lie in an
unfathomable mess
of adult urges
and childish fears.
You think your future’s
all written out
for you like a script
you can’t ever change:
Act one;
you are forever
defined
by the shifting of
your eyes, by the
hesitation of your
lips, by the worrisome
longing of your skin.
Act two;
you will always be
waiting for the chaos
in your head
to settle, for the
whispering in your
ears to speak
in a different
language,
a language you know
you’re allowed
to listen to.
The final act;
you will spend
the rest of your
mortality
wishing for a time
and place where
these words
could slide right off
your taste buds without
a life sentence.
And then you will die.

And yet, here you are,
entrapping yourself
in your own version of
black and white stripes.

You are anything,
but you are nothing
until
you admit
that this is who you are,
until you hold your head
up high -     not in pride,
but in recognition,
and appreciation of the
parts of you
that refuse to wilt
away, of the side of you
that refuses to
break at the bending
of your surroundings.
You are anything,
but you are nothing
because you keep
yourself imprisoned
in this shameful prism.
You’ve gone and
confined your own light
inside these hateful walls,
unaware that
all you ever had to do
to feel alive is to
just let it flow right out of you,
so it could pass through
and seep to the other side;
so your rainbows
could set the universe
into color, could set
their depressing grey
into an understanding
shade of
everything
between red and violet.
You are anything,
but you are nothing
until you tear off the skin
sewn forcefully onto your body
for the skin you were born in.

This is who you are.

And better aeons late
than never,
make peace with it.

But you’ve got that look in your eye;
the one that says you’re not
telling the truth. You’ve got that
look that’s telling me not to trust
what you’re saying, that same
damn look that intoxicated me
that day you told me
nothing would go wrong
and I was just a little “maybe”,
rolled in flesh and bones, so
unsure of whether you
would kill me or save me. And you
sang me serenades of “sure”
and “absolutely”
and you stood beautifully on my
world with your flag in hand,
and that was the day I became
your absolute Indian.
You stormed in on me,
and I loved the rain, loved the way
your hurricane spun me around because
I was a dancer and you knew exactly how
to hold me; arms up and feet off the
ground – you turned me over and over until I
forgot
how stability felt like.

“Fly me up into your seventh heaven
and promise me
I’ll never learn how it feels to fall”,

until I fall for you.
Until I fall for forever.
Until every step I take is another shard
stuck in the soles of my feet.

This is not about you.

This is about me
all parts of me
burnt-out and broken,
perfect and tainted as I am. This is
about the blood
on our hands and the heaviness
in our chests, about the the scars on
our eyes and the stains on
our flesh. This is about
the past that’s been on repeat,
this is about being stuck in a
fantasy. This is about that
broken record
you and I are sick of listening to,
of feeling to, this is about
the desperate need for an unattainable
fix. You say sorry,
but sorry is just another word
I can no longer hear from all the
goodbyes echoing
in my ears; give me sorries in
rays of light because
my eyes have adjusted to darkness
and I’m terrified of how
they don’t miss the sunshine. But you’re
fading and we’re hopeless, and
my fingers are tired of clutching on to things
that are no longer theirs.
We’re fucking beautiful,
but we’re doomed,
and you say
we were meant
to be, but I think
you’ve misunderstood.
You and I were meant to break
one another, meant
to shatter each other’s souls
until there was nothing left
of us that was fragile,
until we were both loose powder roaming
high above the seven seas and the
wild universes.

“It’ll be because
it’s meant to be”,

and I would have agreed
with you before. But you were my sun
and now
it’s night-time, and it’s no longer
you
I long for; it’s the tips of
my fingers
I left buried in your skin.
You say we can get past it,
you say
it’s water under the bridge,
but I can see you sinking
from miles away;
can see your arms
helplessly
trying
to fight the current, can see
your lungs filling up
with water, can still see
that flicker of hope
in your drowning eyes.

Take a second to listen to the words I’m saying,
that’s all I ask.
If you’d just hear me out,
if you’d just please concentrate for once,
you’d hear that ticking begin to slow, and
you’d see that last speck of sand
rushing into the other half of the hourglass
to find its final resting place.

This, dropping unguarded
and uninhibited,
falling with only maybe-nots in mind
this is the hope I had for us.

This, my love,
my lost love,
this is the end of our time.

It’s true, I’ve seen it myself. I’ve tread this road and I’ve ended up in more coffins than I can count.

Insincere? Never. I say it like it is.

They told me not to jump but I’m tired of sitting still and my legs really need to get some air.

Take a walk. Find a map and draw a line.

It’s too civilized, too conventional; too human for me to consider.

I’m drawing my own maps. My lines are crooked, but they’ll get me places. My hands will make music as I run and my lips will shout out what they’ve always wanted to sing.

I’m jumping into six feet of torn-out Earth, but I’m flying out of it with more life than I’ve ever known.

Believe me, mistakes are more beautiful than you’ve been led to believe.

She was a magnet, and the whole world was made of metal.

So, him standing there in front of her was simple physics. As were the items of clothing hitting the floor, but he doesn’t even know that they are. He’s so hypnotized by the grey in her eyes that he can only tell she’s moved when her fingers begin to tickle his shoulder. Goosebumps like mountains dress his limbs in pure desire. He wants to drop to the floor and beg for forgiveness for things he never felt apologetic about. He wants to cry rivers of repentance; he wants to confess all his wrongdoings. He wants to declare his undying belief in her holiness.

A cold breeze enters through the cracks in his windows and hisses softly onto his back, but he’s too fixated on her to notice the change in temperature. She glows in this kind of darkness, he thinks. No, she glows all the time, he decides, but fabric interferes. Her pupils are microscopes picking apart and harshly inspecting every inch of his mundane skin. He stands erect, unable to move without superior command.

He doesn’t know enough, but he knows that when her tongue meets her lips; she tastes Eden. He doesn’t know enough, but he knows that when she arches her back; the heavens balance themselves on the curve of her spine, and he knows that when she curls her toes; angels kiss her feet. He doesn’t know enough, but he knows that the most expensive silk sheets will never compare to the softness of her skin, and that the sound of her voice is comparable only to the most moving musical notes. But he doesn’t know enough.

Even after all those months, he doesn’t know enough.

He’s spent a hundred and thirty-three days watching her, and he still doesn’t know enough. He knows her favorite brand of milk (Flora), her preferred type of cheese (Gouda), her favorite chocolate bar (Snickers), her favorite place to shop (Gucci), her favorite perfume (Armani Code), and her bra size (32 D). He knows she has five clients a week and that she spends her weekends in bed. He knows she has no family. He knows her favorite color is red and her nails never stay unpainted in a bloody shade for too long. He knows she’s got a standing order of ten garter belts and fishnets from La Perla per month. He knows she gets more and more friendly with the delivery man each time and he knows she’d pleased him pro-bono in September then kicked him out at three in the morning because he snored.

But he doesn’t snore. And if he did, he’d happily cut off his own nose so as to not displease her. Matter of fact, he’d brought a knife just in case.

But right now, her velvet hands are whispering profanities into the contours of his largest organ. Like an earthquake; her touch rattles him from the inside out and he’s shuddering with the realization that he’s finally where he knows he’s been heading his whole existence.

Here, the pieces of the puzzle called his life are falling into place. Here, the windows of hope are allowing him a peak into paradise. Herein lies the answer to every question he’s ever asked himself in the twenty-four years he’s walked this sorry Earth.

Her. This. Here. Now. Please.

Please, he finds himself saying. Take me, just take me. And he’s on his back, eyes full of tears and hands and feet immobilized. She places her ruby lips on his and he breathes immortality for the first time. Her tongue tastes of sin, and he’d gladly burn in hell for eternity for just another taste.

Now it’s just them and the moon that serves as the only cover to his cloth-forsaken body. She’s taunting him with miscalculated touches and misguiding glances. She’s mocking him with irregular patterns of kissing. Her hands are on his neck and he finds himself throwing his head back in submission.

You’re mine, she sings and his abundant hair looks up towards the heavens to declare it as the truth.

All yours, he pleads, and she presses harder against his neck in approval.

She’s looking down at him and he feels so small – so imperfect; so petty and human, so damn inglorious. He’s swallowed by the greedy lips of her lust and his life is flashing before his eyes.

He swears he can almost see divinity emanating from every pore in her body.

He’s out of breath, but she’d sucked it out of him the first time he saw her, so it was nothing new.

A little tighter around the neck and he’s giving in. A little tighter and he’s fading.

He doesn’t know enough, but he knows that she believes she is a Goddess; and so she is.

He doesn’t know enough so he doesn’t know where he’s going.

But he knows he’s leaving with a smile on his face.

Remember how you swore you’d never let anyone take that feeling away from you?

Where did you go?

You say; it’s gone, the planets and their rings and their stars have all vanished.

And the moons?

You say; they’re all stuck in new moons these days. Too tired to shift to waxing crescents; there’s no light for them to feed off.

But they’re not the only ones that have lost their shine.

The light in your eyes has been dimmed from blinding to nul and you’ve been living in the dark since the sun set inside your pupils. You’ve been storming cloudy weather, but it’s always just cloudy; never rainy. That suffocating humidity that leaves you reeling for breath but never comes down as rain to finally get you out of your misery.

Put your hand on your heart. Press hard.

This is how you know the walls you’ve built over it were too thick. You can’t feel it beating – you can barely feel it pumping blood into your veins; and you’re turning blue at the tips to go with the blue in your soul.

I say “love”, and you hold your head over the toilet with a finger down your throat trying to forget how it tastes.

“Love”. You’re face down on the floor with a needle in your hand trying to push it out of the thick walls of your vessels.

“Love”. You’re drowning yourself in a glass of whiskey trying – just trying – to wash the memories off the walls inside your head.

But you’re failing and you can’t forgive yourself for it. The more you run, the more you order your brain to erase all the images of those times you felt like royalty; the more you hurt.

You’re vanishing along with your stars.

The mere mention of the word emotion has you running to the other side of the world like it’s a gun whose poisonous bullets you’re trying desperately to avoid. Can’t you see that they’re the same bullets that used to shoot out of you not so long ago – the same ones that brought life to the death around you many times before?

You’re wasted. You say your good intentions have all been shot to hell.

Can’t you see it’s the same hell you’re choosing to live in?

But you’re blind to all logic.

Do you remember? Do you remember when you opened your palms and you found fingers – just lines and creases – where heaven used to stand?

Remember that Earth-shattering realization that you let it all slip away?

You say; I tried to hold on with all my might.

But it’s all gone and I can’t seem to get it back.

Are you trying?

You don’t hear me.

It’s just that one word echoing inside your skull.

“Love”;

You’re pulling at the strings that keep you standing because love is a play and you’re done being dragged around by hands that aren’t your own. All you want is the final act – the one where you fall to the ground and kiss the scissors that cut you up.

All you want is to sit here. Motionless.

All you want is to sit and reminisce.

All you want is your heaven.

And if you can’t have it you’d rather not exist.