#rest;

[igaers]

Despite everything, despite myself, I am not a confrontational person. I'd actually rather choke on my own vomit than subject myself to looking at you in the eye for more than a second. I'm actually exactly that which I hate. I numb myself to the lacerations; I take and take and take the poison until it's all I can spit, all I can breathe. 

That's me. That's all there ever will be of me. 

[igaers]

"There's nothing to apologize for but either ways you're forgiven."

Two lies make a truth.

[igaers]

System overload. Allow me to malfunction all over your bedroom floor.

[igaers]

Hello, yes, my name is Stephen Wagner and my only regret in life is the fact my name only has two different vowels. I’d like to know why my meal smells so weird. I’d like to know why this entire room smells so weird. I’m standing atop of a Mexican pink tiled floor with greenish stains every two tiles and I’m not sure why I agreed to eat here in the first place. I’m on the seventh floor of hell? Well that’s a new one. Thank you.

[igaers]

A set of eyes clicks with mine, a new story unfolds, leaving lines scattered all over the place. It’s a cold night, and our breaths make clouds just once, or twice. Listen, I don’t like whispering dark secrets at 2 AM, and flowers are no more than pretty fantasies coloring outside the frame. It’s not love. This could be another branch of jealousy, crashing against the shores, during summer, or it could be something deeper. It could be a feeling deeper than all wounds I’ve ever gotten. It could be the time in the middle where you just don’t know what it is, and you drink yourself to death in the middle of the heat longing for trick-or-treats. Work grows bigger, you no longer have time to figure out, but you still write little things. You still breathe. The ease with which you pour stories, like blood from papercuts, like leaves during the fall, to the paper, puzzles me seamlessly all year.

Seamless Seasons, A.J.

[igaers]

    The years have all melded within you, and you have nothing but a tender whisper against your ears to unlace need. 

A sublime murmur dissipates from a pierced desire  to a blister, still fogging up your glossy eyes; frost dispersed,  then concentrated in one single want. It is heating your  blood so it turns to languid waves of flare. 

  It’s aching a little fear and pouring it  as shiny drops of icy nothingness, as poor wanderers discover, craving a little death of the senses, drowning more messy sloppy kisses and shaky hands because it’s too cold and too warm—

  —that you don’t have a name for it just yet; let’s call it somebody, somebody altering the cores of your eyes  darker, somebody wrong, tall, and mean. This person kisses like the world’s ending, but proves it to be the mere beginning.

       Dissipates from a fragmented desire, turns to mist, and so dies  a beating heart longing for a short staccato of change.

Life’s taste lingers on your flustered face.

[igaers]

I want to be many things for you—the kind of things people have written poems about, over and over oversaturated subjects of love and affection and stars. Sometimes, these words can actually achieve hitting what I mean, and I inhale them like oxygen for my heart. These words are those I’ve never tried to say—or tried to, and failed, because I’m not good, sweetheart. I’m not the one who’s bleeding, I’m the one that pulled the trigger, shot the bullet and pretended to have given you something better than what I actually am. I’m not good, and even the clichés are better than me, because at least they try to be truthful through collective, second-hand thoughts. But I don’t try, and I will never, because I’ve settled for this little lie. 

I’m not good, but sometimes those words actually hit home. And I’d like to filter them and make them mine, just for you. Just for the many things I want to be for you. I want to write love poems and my heartbeat to guide me on how like it never has before. I want not to give a damn if it sucks, because at least it gets to make you smile. I don’t understand the metaphors of being your morning coffee or your car keys—I do to a certain level, but—I don’t want to be things. I want to be somebody. I want to be your somebody, and not anybody else’s. 

It actually doesn’t matter lately if I’m good or bad because the line in between keeps blurrying. I want the confidence to write—and voice—my thoughts. That’s the truest thing I can ever do. I want my heart to fuel itself with blood and fervor, in a way no one else’s words can.

Many things, yet I still can’t write love poems.