Chasing Red Balloons.

Look at you.
All smiles and doe-eyed, looking at Ellis Island from a pretty Jersey shoreline.
Heart-bubbling with love and holding red balloons.
Sipping Tequila-lemonades and laughing.
Chewing chocolate turtles.
A heart in your hand that reads like a psalm.

Look at me.
Teary-eyed and silent, riding the commuter rail back to Manhattan from a pretty Jersey “sure”-line.
Heart-breaking with love and chasing red balloons.
Drowning in PBR’s and longing.
Chewing my mouth up.
Tracing hearts in your palms.

Look at the space between us.
No smiles, and holes where our eyes should be.
Heart-blistering with love and popping red balloons.
No liquor but still longing daily.
Mouths sewn shut.
Holes where our hearts should be.

In Response To...

We could talk about the endless gump,
oh sure, oh sure, but today there are simply no words for that.
No single word, it only comes out as poems
for my beautiful, dark haired belle.
She is dancing now, somewhere,
long past the reaches of my mind.
I am drunk and learning how to write.
But I know how to write, so I'm just drunk.
But it still feels beautiful to know that there is life out there
for a girl like her.
Filled with enough food & warmth to make even the loneliest feel at home.
She doesn't even try.
She doesn't need to.

The tunnels are flooding, fuck.
Teachers are slipping notes to students, "fuck?"
and I am drunk and starving.
I have .50 cents in my pocket, but it is nice to know now that she is well.
That even in the shitty process of being awoken
that there is whistling outside my door.
So when you think of me, fetal on the dorm floor,
know I'm thinking of you, safe and warm.

Even Bandini would be sick
"Please man, she's just one girl!"
Yes, but she's a tangerine, John.
She is every favorite memory from your childhood wrapped in orange.
She is tangible, yes I felt it once.
I felt more than that.
I felt HEARTBEATS and I felt madly in love.
I felt it all and then I let it go.
My 2 quarters on a postage just so she could know.

But Arturo, does it ever get better? Dogs die in hot cars all the time
so is that where I should sleep?
And does Buckley's version of "Hallelujah" apply to a kid like me?
I don't feel I'm alone when I get nervous with trains approaching,
and it's the same with how I feel walking towards the edge of a building.
Not scared that anything will happen, but knowing something could.
I could so easily jump in front of, or off of it all.
And maybe we all feel that way sometimes.
There is a tightness in the chest as the wind blows past.
But she is dancing & smiling still,
and today that is enough.