Birds were the first -
to become less tangible,
as my perception fades.
I incessantly remind myself -

they are real.

A new conceptualization of wings, presents autonomy,
for only an instant,
sealed within myself.

I have grown sick,
caged by pinioned silhouettes, scrutinizing depictions to recall - myself, trapped.

What is the difference -
between imagination and delusions? To believe your dreams are real.
But even I can fly.

Tattered, flimsy arms barely stuffed full of decaying exuberance, flattened out from long nights –
a heavy head turned inward, grinding glossy eyes into the pitted, lopsided casing of the stuffed animal shaped into a once unsullied Bear.

Dilated ebony pupils brimmed with mucky beige irises stare vacantly, set into a figure covered with sparse graying snippets of cotton fabricated to appear like pelage tarnished by her firmly seized hands, straining your material body into a distorted posture against her warm flesh, encasing an inflexible caged guardian bent like a clawed hand, the tips pointing inward towards the accelerated pulse; thud, thump, thud, thump, thud, thump 
rhythm motivates the muscular organ’s tremors toward the epidermis wrapper, in an anxious embrace around the stuffed, compressed Bear.

You sense the squeeze of her longing fingers, the salty liquid seeping from her left caruncle, then the right, saturating your blotchy cotton pelt with a continuous stream of convulsive gasps that being to settle into a rhythmic circulation, her thumb and pointer fingers massaging your withered fabric ears in a perpetual tempo; twiddle, twirl, twiddle, twirl, twiddle, twirl
until her saline droplets convert into brittle sighs, ending your private routine.

Tossing you aside, along the tawdry comforter adjacent to a momentarily vacant bed frame identical to the one she recently abandoned, her fleeting mortal warmth receding as you being to assume room temperature,
she arrives with the final summon,
the inky box to join the great majority, entombed underneath the strident box spring counting the seconds sealed in an eternity; tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock

until she reappears to eagerly disinter your remains.

I walk to the edge,

a body lingering -

past instinctual hesitation.

Move toward the indefinite.

The final wave submerges my eyes - are always closed.

Will it be easier this way?

Can you hear my heart?

A tiny ripple traveling 6,345 kilometers into your cup.

I slides down your throat, swirling into your stomach, past the small bowel, where I am processed into the bloodstream and filtered within your urinary system.

Without a second thought, I am flushed by your hand, down an entanglement of rust-stained pipes, back into my swelling lungs.

If I consume enough salt water, can I change my chemical composition and join our bodies into one?

My ripple disappears.

“...so peaceful.”

“...in a better place.”

Do they know I don’t believe in God?

I am a prisoner afraid to leave an unlocked cell.

4 minutes, 39 seconds until animalistic instinct pulls my head to the surface,

forcing in another day.

Where is the space between not wanting to die and forgetting how to live?

Remove the parietal lobe.

Perform a lobotomy on our memories.

Stop pretending I don’t -

exist deep inside the medial temporal lobe, in a region known as the limbic system.

I am a chemical signal transmitted between interneurons.

A flash of color momentarily caught on the screen of an MRI.

Only if you think of me.

It’s almost comical -

how perfectly my life aligns with a drama-romance movie.

The guy and the girl -

In each other’s lives,

but never cross paths

The tantalizingly slow buildup,

with the inevitable conclusion – passionately engrossed in each other’s mouths in the middle of a baseball field.

This should never be viewed as a good thing

It’s a creeping nightmare that you can’t wake from

(Perhaps I only feel this way because I was robbed of my conclusion).

He inadvertently follows me everywhere

I moved back to my parent’s house, he moved five minutes away

He has the same generic first name as the three-year-old child that I nanny

and love.

I’ve deleted his number out of my phone 25 times

Now I have it memorized.

He tells me he loves me (over the phone)

Then disappears from my life for 2 months.

What makes me feel worse, more than my continual wish for him to evaporate out of existence, is that I want him to stay.

I never want him to leave,

but accept his absence when he’s gone

There are periods of long silence – virtually no communication between us

I only hear his name through friends, and random girls basking in the gossip of being a part of his long line of sexual partners

I pretend not to care.

Use protection

I usually tell them

He gave me HPV.

I wasn’t mad when I received the embarrassingly degrading phone call from my doctor

I love him

So it’s easy to forgive how much he hurts me.