November Is For Sleeping

i wish that i believed in fate
i wish i didn't sleep so late

Oh darling I think that all of the answers
went south on the backs of those grey winged birds
or slipped through our fingers
while we were sleeping

Now comes, a river runs through the rafters down, down, down
Does it leave me sleeping? Dreaming only of spring

did you really think you could just put it in the safe behind the painting?

i’m stuck in a room full of half-thought thoughts; they stack up like boxes that need sorted and my room just gets smaller.

you know that feeling? being trapped by quiet? it’s not a good silence, it’s an empty kind, but one that feels distinctly solid in some way. you can’t trust it. the density weighs down on you and you can’t understand why. everywhere else you run, you’re bursting against the sky. but now, in this room, they’ve got you shut in.

i’ll list all the reasons. i’m figuring out why and how and when, so can’t you let go? girl, you’ve got to find some grey or you’ll alienate them all. this drama is tiring, and i can’t deal with the exhaustion; i’m ready to rest.

i wonder what went so wrong. we’ve all done so much damage to each other in games of unfeeling and isolation. we’re dancing around tension, doing anything we can to avoid honest conflict; in its absence, the strain festers and warps until the friction becomes too agonizing to handle. so we give in. we’re doing things we’re not supposed to; willing our sweetness to fade.

right now, i’m so far away from anything close to home, but you’ve got two, maybe three.

my whole world is in black and white; you know what i’m saying. that was one of my favorite things, when you turned ugly things into pretty words. like "grave gardens." you have this way with candy-coated heartbreak, but do you feel it? i’m wearing stitches to show what’s missing, but you? you’re jumping around so your feet won’t get burned. look how easy that makes it to escape; how convenient, then, to have a ready-to-wear apology. are you afraid to admit to it or are you just scared of being the one to lose?

loss is so natural, so common, but it scares me more than anything. when i love things, i want all of them. it's like eating ice cream; even though it makes your teeth too cold and your stomach hurt, you keep eating. it's a horrible and fantastic kind of want because you know that it’ll eventually be gone, but you keep eating because it's the only way to even taste it at all.

instead of loving you less, i’m learning to love you differently. it’s not an active love, or a love of you with me, it’s a love for the pieces i took. somedays, i’ll walk past shades of you, like someone screaming or the sidewalk to your old apartment. and i’m still crying to iron and wine, buried in my bed on cold nights. i’m trying to be calm in the wake of your happiness, but it’s hard when you look through me.

i want out of my head and into the world. i need more noise and less space or something to make my eyes start taking in the color again.

the earth is not a cold dead place

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in the beginning, sometimes i left messages in the street

but you wanted her to look through your memories and feel like she owned a part of them simply because you were hers. you wanted her to wish she possessed some old part of you. you wanted her to love your family and your bed and the streets you drove on and not want to leave ever. with her, you weren't okay with rain, you wanted a storm--an unstoppable, torrential downpour. instead, you had clouds and clouds, threatening to let everything pour out but she gave up before even the littlest one could break. she likes possibility but she won't give herself over to it and she can't be happy.

give it time and it'll fix itself, but right now you're not sure if you want it to. you have this obsession with feeling and you can't shake it.

in the beginning it was uninviting, but it's quickly becoming devastating. you're continually doing maintenance when all you need is something new but you can't give up because you're too attached to memories. and your nostalgia is this particular kind, a kind that belongs to experiences that haven't been lived yet and things that you want to wake up tangled in and then woven into the sheets of. your shoes are always the same and don't travel very far.

lately, your life has faded to black and white and your dreams, once fantastic, play out the small things you crave when you're awake. you're distracted and worried that you're losing your imagination and innocence and everything else that you gave away so easily and so willingly because you thought you would never run out of things to give. what you once thought was tying you down has turned into your safety net for when you walk on tightropes [which seems like every day now] and it's moving farther and father away, making you fall longer every time. you wake up with bruises you can't explain and a longing you can't articulate.

it's almost winter and you want to be warm. you miss the familiar and think about how strange it is that everything you used to recognize has become foreign. telephone lines are too thin to travel. the static is too loud and your words move too fast to span the distance.

so how will you handle the discontent? this aggravation is hostile to your nature, which is overly sensitive but impassive. you'll look for brilliance in your ordinary background, like the inviting coolness of your pillow, and lay away at night hoping they don't run out of good songs. you could wait for it to come, but instead you'll be after it all night. you've got time to make.