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Everyday I hate the sun

more than I did the day before.

I am more alive todaythan I was yesterday.

+

I am burning under the warmth of your body.

You are making me coffee. You are kissing my face.I fall back asleep. You’re sweet

 but you’re not helping me.

+

I’m mad, truly;

I am half-insane. I think I

dreamed this all.

+

You are a bright thing

and you are stunningeven under fluorescent lights.

You are a new thing

that I am just now meeting. Ilove the everything of you.

+

Soon we will be misremembering

the lyrics to the songwe heard that night.

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Every Time I Have Seen You, Part I.

1. We were at a beach at night for a party with the school’s theatre group. You were talking to agirl in a sad flannel shirt about Kafka. You had headphones around your neck. I hated you.

2. You rode the bus with me to see a Paul Newman movie in Santa Monica. I wanted to lean myhead on your shoulder during the movie. I’d started having sex with people and had forgotten

what it was like to just exist next to a person, to want nothing more. We ate sandwiches after and

you walked me to my building, said you had to go. I listened to love songs all night.

3. A year later. I was standing outside of the Humanities building waiting for James Franco to

leave his classroom. You approached me with a bag of candy. We stood there, eating it.

4. You sent me a Facebook message past 3 in the morning saying you wanted to see me. We met

at a hookah bar a few nights later. We discussed a million things that mattered so much to us. A

girl walked by who you’d fucked. I quoted the Neutral Milk Hotel song that goes “god is a place

you will wait for the rest of your life,” but you weren’t familiar.

5-25. We’d meet at the bar and smoke, then buy cigarettes and smoke some more, carcinogenscrowding into our lungs. We’d go to the video store and rent movies we hadn’t seen, and watch

them on your bed. On Valentine’s Day we got high and ate churros and watched The Life

 Aquatic. We went to see screenings of old films that we loved. We wrote. You said you wouldhave sex with me, but that you knew you’d hate me after. You thought I was insane. You

introduced me to your best friend, and I thought his face was beautiful, more beautiful than

yours. But. I fell in love with you.

26. You met me at the art museum. David Lynch was there, giving a talk on transcendental

meditation. (I hope that the artists I mention in these lines can imply the absurdity of life in those

months, a stranger to Los Angeles, that feeling I had that maybe I didn’t exist.) You brought agirl with you. She had statement glasses and long copper hair. I wanted her. I loved you. You

talked to her and I realized that I was only a cheap facsimile of her, to you. There was nothing I

could give you that she hadn’t already laid out on the table.

27. We went to see M , and you told me it was fate that we met.

28. I met the girl from the museum. We drank a bottle of bourbon and listened to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea on the grass outside your building. I won’t say if she kissed me but I’ll

say that I wanted her to. I told her that I loved you. She said that was a bad idea. I went to your 

room, drunk and manic and sad, and explained it all to you. You said ok. You messaged me onFacebook days later saying we couldn’t go on like we had before. I didn’t understand the

melodrama. I didn’t understand that you couldn’t understand. I hated that you were making me

think in these vague clichés. I hated you. I hated you.

29. I started dating your best friend. I fell for him the moment he kissed me. You kept sliding

into the conversation. I began to realize that I would never stop imagining a different scenario in

which you loved me, but that that didn’t matter. I could go my whole life half in love with you,

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and you could go through your whole life forgetting about me, or I could accept you as the

strange figure that once haunted me, and then move on. I could just walk away. I kissed your 

 best friend on the roof of a tall building in the middle of the city. I saw the ocean and downtownand the mountains and a hundred thousand lights in between. I loved it. I loved it all.

30. We went to your house. You welcomed us in. I knew you didn’t want me there, and I didn’twant to be there, but no one said anything. I was with him, and I was ok.

31. The last time I saw you, it might not have been you at all. You were walking to the bus stop,and I thought it was you, but maybe it wasn’t. It looked like your back, and it looked like the

way you run your fingers through your hair. But it could have been a stranger. I saw you walking

and I saw you get lost in a crowd that was crossing the street.

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A Collection of Messages from OK Cupid

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SOME GIRLS

The galleryof women’s faces

hangs on his walls;he has sketched us.

The dark witch in oils;

her breasts peaking from

 black lace, eyes held indeep precision

knives. She wanted a

cheap fuck butfell in love.

Girl with a flower crown andfur coat, liked French pop

and only smoked

cloves. Her mouth opens for 

crooked teeth, she askedfor a long romance and got

a cough.

Light white creature, in a

long gown. Sipping from a mug

of tea in the cold. Lips

chapped, she could not have beenmore charming. He

was a disappointment.

Red hair and a young face,

watercolor smeared around her 

cheeks, blush, she wasa child.

The one he loved who

ran to Seattle.

My own eyes looking back at me

in a reminder.

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Rejected Facebook statuses:

I. I got a love letter on Facebook. It read: “You are the only good thing about the Internet.”a. When I write about him, I am the most myself. I so rarely feel a connection between

who I am and what I am – the what being my physical body, the who being my thoughts and

feelings, I guess that’s a decent way of splitting the dichotomy – but when I think of the shape of his face I’m whole.

III. I’m very much in love with five people.

IV. I am in directing class. My professor calls Deniro ‘Bobby.’ I do not think he has watched a

TV show since 2000. Someday I will be a director, I tell myself.

V. For about a week I kept being followed by the Belgian movie Man Bites Dog . It was the sameweek I watched Upstream Color while on Seroquel/reading Cicero’s The Dream of Scipio, and

was very freaked out that when the voiceover in UC quoted Thoreau saying the sun was amorning star, I was reading a line in Cicero about planetary orbs. Seemed too similar.

a. I watched Man Bites Dog eating a quesadilla with Ian and a few days later was in the

trailer of a famous actor and saw a poster for the film leaning on a counter. It was very strange.

VI. I’m so glad you moved out of state, to be honest.

VII. I am obsessed with scenarios where people have to play life-size chess.

VIII. The guy I was having sporadic sex with got back with his ex and moved to New York theday after we last fucked. It was really weird.

IX. Watching a TV movie about a guy with a watch that can stop time.

X. Every Starbucks in the world plays the same music, so we will never truly be apart.

XI. Being with someone who was in love six months ago is really, really hard.

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An apology stains the room

and I twist my fingers together with uncertainty. Remember,

I have never been here before.There is a spite to me, true,

I act knowingly, a snake— 

 butI will burn every word I wrote for 

him in a funeral pyre

at your feet.

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Break my neck so I can look at you wherever you are. I don’t want to missyou.

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I was just practicing being alone and sometimes the lonely rush of waterfrom the bathroom helps that or maybe just the too-big world swallowing usup. I stubbed my toe on some rough memories last night, crouched downlow, almost impossible to see in the dark- past, future, third person it all sort

of looks familiar, but then again so do strangers who walk in front of me atthe supermarket. We just give and take, and go in that incredibly awfulsweetness, zigzagging what is most important, casting it aside like shoesthat are too small and bent forks. But I was watching, I was staring in thatway that makes my mother bashful, wise eyes that she once said she wasafraid of when they first brought me to her. Hello world, I know your trickseven though I wasn't even born

yesterday.

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My love,

I have been trying to work on a long poem for you all daybut it's not coming out the way I want it to.I can't stop thinking about you, I've been watching videosof your performance all day and I just feel so young,young and naive and I get butterflies in my stomach like Iam speaking to you for the very first time. I love youmore than anything. I am not sure how I have lived 20years without having you as apart of my life. But evensaying so, I think, somehow, some way, you've alwaysbeen apart of me. I can feel your absence now beatinginside my chest, and it hurts, because I miss you, but Iknow that this is good because it's more help to get meto you, in the flesh. My life will be complete when I'm withyou, touching you and kissing you and sharing my bodywith you and laughing with you. I cannot wait to start mylife, and there is no one on this earth I would rather do it

with.

I love you, my sweet boy.

xoxo

 Yours, always

-M

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 This is all so surreal to me. I fear one day I'm going to wake up and this willall be a dream. A remarkably real dream, one where I was mostly lucid andmiserably mistaken. You are my sweet, sweet boy. My love. My best friend.When we talk I feel like I've known you for years. I am truly, madly, anddeeply in love with you. Please love me until I'm nothing. Until I am a speckon the inside of a pine box. Love me until it hurts.

I will never stop loving you.

TEENAGE SUICIDE: DON’T DO IT !

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 Johnny hanged himself in Grammy’s basement The dawn breaking, a champagne bottle explodingOn New YearsBiting red words stainSplattering accusations  The day fades to gray You begin to wonder

What death will TasteLike

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I don’t miss you at all.

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 Best Depressed, Most Depressed//Least Erotic, Most Neurotic

is dedicated to nobody because we hate everyone. xoxoxoxo