"What is real?... Does it hurt?"

Loving and losing are nothing more than a letter apart. I've got hundreds of broken halos just like the one you wear. Don't be so sure that I don't have my head in the clouds to keep you from noticing that my mind is running around behind your back. I've weighed the odds long enough... time to beat them. I'm not the sinking ship in the harbor.

I'm the darkness disrupted by a whisper. The splinter in my paw that you told me to ignore became infected. This tiger is tired of waking up with last nights tears in his eyes

The scars on my September wrists look more like smiles now. Settled for second best in the public's heart just so I could be there at all. Hopefully stuck in your ribcage on the way out of an exhale.

If we're still being honest with each other, I can't take it all in sometimes... the breath and the confusion. There are times when my clean conscience is only a blank stare with palms towards the sky.

"The way her knees grimaced at the wind..."

From the front porch of a dimly lit brownstone on Gramercy Park.... I found myself coughing up directions into my phone. A constant reminder that these lungs are losing their fight with the anxious heart above.

I faked shyness on the stoop mostly because I thought that was what she wanted from me, and because it's what a guy like me does when he's holding the better hand.

Our features became soft under that burst of dim lit orange, and we surrendered to the fading light in what would be our final embrace. I kissed her cheek goodbye (although she wasn't the one leaving). It was merely a formality... similar to the way she crossed herself before she kneeled in church.

She covered her eyes, as I drifted away from the streaks that watered down. She drew the shades with knots I swore to never untie, and we went our separate ways.

My good intentions somehow have never been good enough.

I know there was something before you. I just can't remember what it was. I'm just breaking hearts in the meantime.