Suitcase

The suitcase is sitting across the room beneath a strand of Christmas lights
It seems as much as I try to build a home I'm always just a visitor
Maybe a lifetime of rented houses taught me to never take anything as permanence
But distance forces attachment from my hands like it's a glory I will never taste
Passing through folded clothes like the places in my heart left untouched
It's better this way
I tell myself and half believe it but all I want is somewhere warm to call home
I'm done with planes and staring out moving windows and feeling half empty
And mostly the goodbyes
Because even hellos are tainted by their bitterness and I can't arrive without a return ticket
And all I want to do is unpack this suitcase
And unravel all the tightly wound clothes like those parts of me but I'm not done
There's too much to see and I can't see it all
So I'll be a nomadic lonely satellite until this suitcase bursts and my heart overflows and I fall back into you
Until I figure out where home is supposed to be

futon

Best friends dead ends leaving in the morning nine hour flight across the world from you
In your eyes green like deep forest trees sun hitting leaves like leaving you
Fingers touching futon covers spread across fold up mattresses compact like suitcase on the carpet
Across the room distance separated like a split screen between us

Three a.m. alone and breaking darkness crushing barely breathing missing you
And everything futon beneath aching bones I wrap myself up in mattress sadness
Covers stretched beneath empty palms sitting up clock ticks by pipes groan empty blackness

Nervous flutter she's like you were on my futon in my eyes a begging need
Awkward tension I'm a child and she's separated fingers meet knees brush butterflies but is it just
Needing someone across from me
After all emptiness is bearable when shared with somebody and she'll never be you

Visitors

I sit here and I'm watching the sun set over Montmarte in the way that it does 

Shaking its head 

At the depicableness of those below 

The ones it has risen above again and again day after day and it continues this way 

Shaking its head as it slowly 

Bleeds into the buildings that are bonafide postcards ripped from the shaking hands 

Of beggars 

Postcards that coat the walls of us, 

The visitors

We are not permanent, none of as are, we are simply visitors 

And we pass through in and out in and out 

Through the doors to this place where dreams come to live and die with each 

Breath of the sunset 

We are beggars with postcards in our shaking hands pleading can someone show me where this place is because it sure isn't here. 

It is and it isn't because this is a funhouse mirror and what you see is never what you get 

I got lonely and I know that it's because there are lonely places deep inside of me 

And my mirror will always reflect lonely wherever I go 

And my lonely is framed by beauty but that doesn't decrease its gut wrenching singularity 

And none of this is permanent

We are scuffed 

Leather boots and cigarettes 

Burned down to fingertips and 

We are frozen hands and wine-stained lips and 

We are empty kisses and cold apartments. 

We are searching for that scene in that postcard that we will never find 

Because the directions they give us are all wrong 

Because they don't see it the way we do

The way you do, 

The way I do

We live in pockets, 

The hotels of the city nestled safely away 

In slate grey attics as the dusk descends upon us 

And we slip down creaking staircases 

We are buried

In the hidden parts and we pass through silently but you 

And your vastness and your leather and fur 

You and your champagne and 

Saint Laurent you are just as temporary as we are 

You just can't see it yet

And maybe 

When temporarity is staring you straight in the face, 

Maybe then you will see it but

I don't care because I see it now

I see the dying in us 

And I see the heartbreak and the lonely and 

I see joy in emptiness and peace in melancholy 

I see the way her eyes shine bright 

And youthful in an ancient way 

I see fire in the depleting tobacco 

Between your fingers

And maybe we're all just passing through

 But I would rather be a fleeting sunset 

Than an ever present winter moon

Remember

Try to remember
Knitted sweaters so big they drown you and your terrified heart
Red wine stains on the living room floor and the pile of corks that remind you of her
Webbing words together through the throes of midnight
Try to remember
The aching beauty of discovery and the way the rain sounds on your window pane
The feeling as a new train pulls into the station
Or the first sip of tea after a too-long day
Your own bed beneath your tired bones
And having someone next to you
Please try to remember
When your irises close against the day and every inch of skin is hurting
Remember music threading its way through your psyche
When you think nothing can touch you
Remember how it feels to be touched
Remember roaring fires and crackling record players
Remember christmas lights and happy days
Remember the slant of light just before the sun says goodnight
Remember chocolate and giddiness
Remember butterflies and feeling safe
And above all remember
We're all under the same sky and distance is always relative
Please remember this too shall pass

Aching

There is a certain and definitive helplessness in the dull ache of aloneness, that shadow that caresses the isolation of my skin, fibres reaching, always reaching. There is a pain, consistent and unavoidable, in the weight of miles pressed like bricks on the walls of my chest. There is a dishonesty in the brightness, lies embellishing the truth with crinkly wrapping and bright lights. There is a stripped down truth telling on nights like these, just me and the sky. There is an inability to communicate with the stars when they are wrapped in cotton clouds, opaque and unforgiving, uncaring towards the ache I feel. There is a distance up here, nestled in my pocket six floors above the street. There is an abandonment in the waiting, in the half-living. And it’s not permanent, I know that. It makes the helplessness all the heavier, the temporariness. Because amid the chaos, amid the empty-feeling and the aching is the guilt. The invalidity of the ache resulting from the beauty of the burning. There is a beauty here, between the layers of painfulness. There is an aching beauty, a startling glory which makes the hurting all the more unlivable. I’m here in all this grandeur and all this beauty and it still hurts. It hurts despite the beauty and despite the carpe diem and despite the glory. Because some nights I feel I’m just a shell up here, a shell unworthy of its ocean. And sometimes I resent it, the surrounding dishonesty of forced perfection. Sometimes I fall in love, but some nights I just fall. I’m still falling.