Handshake

If I believed in the devil
I'd tell you I've met him

He's a silver tongued liar

And the world's best salesman

I met the devil and he lives in my head

He tells me he's got answers

And he'll sell them to me for free

I met the devil and he shows me the truth

Distorted and bent like me

The solution's permanent and less than ideal

But he'll sell it to me for free

Stuck

Bitter, crushed, and frantic, here I go
Fastened to you like a moored ship
When there's an open ocean under an infinite sky
I just can't seem to ride it out, I still find myself here
Starting over in another decade as your love for me wanes
Delirious, madly licking my own tears
I am as powerless as the storm is to hold back its downpour
Hungover on the honey mead of memory
I'll never sing the sweet symphony of what we had again
On all fours, mouth open wide, trying to expel
The sadness you poured into me when you said goodbye

Exquisite

Purified the only way you can be
By the loss of your other half
Now you are one, only one, just al-one
This is the finest pain ever experienced
A closer look reveals exquisite insight
Into the origin of your humanity
There is no forgery

River

You were probably a river
Babbling with mirth, bubbling with clarity.
You were probably a tree
Grounded and strong, drinking in the rain.
You were probably a star
Eyes twinkling when you smile as you divinate.
You were probably an ocean
I felt you buoy my soul as you held me.
I think you might be the wind
Stealing my breath and carrying dandelion seeds.
Were you that mountain
Immortal, immense, immovably sturdy?
Did you live as that sand dune
Just as transient as you were in this one?
You were probably a river
Moving steadily through every form.

Barbarism

Laughed at by the gods
Our losses just an elaborate prank
To entertain something more
If freedom and abandonment
Were not loud enough
To put a force in me
To search for my own exculpation
The way a dog subsidizes
Its household's decisions
In a world that is abjectly unfair
Imbued with free will
But forbidden from philosophy
To bring us into this world
Only to discharge us again
Inhuman and hence divine
This is how I know
God is a terrorist

Mangroves

My fear, baited like a fishook,
Places the fruit of anxiety with a pit of trepidations
Into the soil of my abdomen to nourish and grow
Fed by insecurities and self-directed cruelties
Whose roots will wend their way tortuously deep
Into my own egregore, twisting through foundational ontologies
And cracking the bedrock of my confidence.

Uncertainty

I grow forests of worries saturated by my tears
They bloom anxieties whose fruit
Is always overripe and so often bitter
I chop them down with my ax of reason
Sharpened on the stone rationale and wet with deliberation
Their trunks fall haphazardly tearing at
My faith on the way down, shattering my ease on impact
But no matter how many I burn
To sustain the warmth of self-compassion
There is still a forest of doubt before me.

Loss

Mediated by the unforgetful soma
It's too hard to convey
The devastation we weathered
That is your latest transmutation

Arroyo

Your love is a dry arroyo that for years sustained me 

And quenched my parched heart with your flashflood adoration

But now crumbles under the footsteps of my words

Greedy for traces of you.

Grief

I wasn’t ready for this trip.
It was unexpected, and I was unprepared.
And now this journey will color the months of my 30^th year
As I navigate how to undo what has been undone.

Pangaea

The people I've loved the most
Have turned me into the vastest ocean
And the ache seeps through my teeth
And numbs my lips and fingertips
Now all I have left is to take when I'm denied
So I drown those who can't give me what I need

Call Me Frank

You burnt the mercy out of me
With your poisonous energy
And for years you haunted me
Hunting me in the night like an enemy
But now I've died and risen, I'm a zombie.

Life with you was absolute mayhem
And I'd kill you before I'd do it again
You always acted like you had some plan
Until I had the bright idea to time your attention span
And I realized I had to become a self-made man

Contrition

I have so many things to say
All the shame I've been entrusted fills my mouth instead
And I am smothered when I try to deliver
This depravation is mutilation
And I am still languishing alone

Counterfeit

You can sustain the body
But when the soul flickers
When the soul is homesick for its nest
Away from this sensory coil
Our only consistency here is change and decay
I don't know where to find restoration
When I can't find rest, least of all in sleep where
My past will always find me
The fog and shadows played tricks
And outwitted my better judgment
Somehow I'm left with the counterfeit

Charged

You left me to figure out it all 

I was just a kid and I didn't know how to make sense of my body betraying me 

And everyone insisting my sex came with expectations

And that my gender came with consequences

Close your legs. Pull up your shirt. You're going out in that?

You made me feel like my body

Was a crime and I was guilty

So I felt ashamed.

Dybbuk

Seems like my grief and insecurities
Like to rest in the shadows
And creep out at night like hungry ghosts
I've been feeding them so long
Scraps of me like the sadness when
He chipped me into pieces to feed his own
Or sometimes big chunks of festering anger
For repeated abuses from someone
Who's've gone hungry too long
There are weeks here and there
When mine go hungry too
But then they feed on the ampleness in me
And I am diminished and they, replenished
And I am a hungry ghost too.

Empty

I woke up that morning
And rolled over onto you
And I remember feeling
Absolutely nothing for you
When three years before
I felt too much and
Could only beg to feel less

Miss Me?

You missed me
Or maybe you missed her
And I was the ersatz replacement
Or maybe you missed something
You'd never even had before
And we were the vessels of your journey
Maybe you missed yourself
The person you closeted away inside
And we were false idols to be worshiped
In order to distract you from You

An Urgent Truth

My propensity for self deceit has always been adept
So how can I trust my feelings in the past
Or even the ones I have now
Who's to say that I'm not deceiving myself again
How long this time will I force myself to wait
When I can see the truth
That I am struggling in the same ways I always have
And I find myself wondering
Did the caterpillar yearn so hard as I
When they saw a butterfly gliding and unshy
Because I find myself obsessed with a fantasy
And opportunity for it to become reality
And now each day is filled with activity
Frantically trying to find my way out
Of this constrictive cocoon

How do you know?

My body, notoriously disloyal
But how could I possible return with an act of betrayal
And am I wrong for internalizing like this
Perhaps this is my ticket to long awaited freedom
I smile when I imagine myself differently
How long do I have to wait
Before I say this is more than a passing thought
I wake up thinking about it
Fall asleep thinking about it
Dream all night about it
So how do I know?
How do I know?
How do I know?
How do I know myself?