...on this Saturday afternoon there is a street fair in Greenwich,
You step off the 1 train at Christopher Street station and all along 7th Avenue,
the little sidestreets, Bowery, Commerce, give me that old Dutch sensibility
Street vendors and street people eating, laughing, trying on five dollar leather clogs
On a day that is slightly drizzling, we pause to consider the trees

In a flash I understand the world you come from when you say you normally stay on the East side of Lower Manhattan, you start counting the colors on the street and ask where all the Spanish people at?

there is this reversal, a turnaround, a recognition in me that binds me to you, when I realize you can teach me how to be young and dance with my hips, when I know that you can give me what I've craved for so long, freedom-the opportunity to face all my fears- and the chance to be a wild thing. I am nineteen, for the love of God, and I never got the chance to rage and abandon all cerebral intelligence and just live in the realm of the senses! But for now, I'll settle for to know myself better and to live without apology-but of course, there is a certain fear with taking that step and giving all of myself to you.

Yet I find myself considering it as we walked with your arm around my shoulders and my hands on an eight dollar bag of Swedish candy. I know you know the effect you have on people, other women especially, I see the way they eat you up with their eyes. But then again I'm only beginning to notice the same kind of attention from men as I walk down the street-though I owe that to you too, giving me enough confidence in my body-to sway a little bit more.

And the fact that you repeat thoughts and ideas that have been constantly looping in my own mind makes me believe we are on the same wavelength. Like when the lights suddenly flickered off on the train and you glanced up at me and said how much you love it when that happens? Goddamn, it sent my head spinning.

And now we are together, supposedly. But of course I always keep in the back of my mind the possibility that everything you are is a lie and you could wake up one day and say I don't want you anymore and just walk out my life with both hands in your pockets.

If that happened now, I could say fuck you and move on.

But if I love you the way I want to love you and the way I long to be loved, all of that mind body spirit crap, a piece of me would just break and float away forever.

I guess that's a risk I might have to take one day, and I find myself considering it as we race each other to get burritos and later on I flick some water in your face and you just stare at me with a faint smile on your lips. So, at this moment, I am too much with you. It scares me when I think of what I might feel for you, and so I am on the edge of a precipice here-wondering whether or not to run with you.

Electric Wonder.
Exciting Beauty.
The girl with the smile.
The perfect storm.
Wonderful. Just. Wonderful.
Skinny Love.

Aren't we a shy pair? The names
you use to describe me to others are cute indeed
but I'd like them better if you used them with me.

I'm more than Lauren, your friend from school.
I'm the electric wonder who you deemed "too cool"
to pursue back in eighth grade. So you sat back like a
fool and let me get my heart broken by a boy who didn't care.
I forgive you though,
my friend,
because you were there when he let me down.
And it was your hug that I'd wished had been his all along.

And back in tenth grade when another stood me up,
it was you, skinny love, who picked me up. From a
lonely cold night outside the movies. It was you,
my friend,
who took me out for ice cream and it was you,
my friend,
who told me he wasn't worth the trouble.
In tenth grade you deemed me an exciting beauty who
could never fall for a man like you. But all along it was
your hand I wished had been holding mine.

And my senior year when we parted ways,
and we reminisced about the days we had
you had a look on your face. Like there was something
you just had to say. But instead,
my friend,
you told me you'd miss me when I was at college
and nothing more. You made me the girl with the smile
that ignited the light in your heart but you did not tell me.
You let me go. And I never let you know that I wish it had
been you in school who I called my own.

Summer after I came home from my first year away,
you said I had changed. I had purple in my hair
and the care I once had of the opinions of others was
gone. We spent weeks together, like nothing had changed.
And when I cried because I had to leave you again you
were the one,
my friend,
who calmed my fears and promised to visit
once you'd moved in.
I was your perfect storm of grace and tragedy.
And it was you,
my friend,
who I wanted to share every moment with
during those warm summer nights.

Sophomore year you brought me to a party. I
didn't know anyone and your friends were rude.
And when I wanted to leave and never come back it was you,
my friend,
who stood up for me and told them I was perfect.
You said I was Wonderful. Just. Wonderful. And after all
the times I let the truth stay bottled up inside I finally
let it out. That kiss on the porch was not the wine, nor the
weed. It was me. It was you. It was us. It was all the times
you were there for me and all the times I'd secretly wished
you were those boys who'd let me down.

So why? Skinny Love? Why continue on this way?
No need for another heart break. Let's admit the
way we feel, my friend,
the way we've always felt.

For tenth grade me.
For senior year you.
For the times we cried together.
And hid our feelings for each other.

Come now, skinny love, tell me how you feel.

Where the sky is as blue as CG special tinting reality to a sharpened point.

The seas are. As warm as the womb.AMNIOTIC shock when I dive in.
I can smell beauty in the cool trade winds. My god made paradise here
Carried it away to parts unknown.
My god.

My lover set me free many years ago but I never returned to her tender
Arms. I had forgotten her charms even while laying in her four post bed and running my hands slowly over silken skin. The thrill was gone.

She is forgiving
                       She looks at me with eyes that glisten.
In the starlight. But time is not my ally.
Soon I think she will deny me.
A lover scorned.

old makeup spilled on my floor
dirty clothes strewn on my floor

You can hardly see the carpet for all the clothes carelessly being trodden on. Blue holiday lights are strung around the mirror. I am watching Andy Warhol eating a hamburger on a new, thousand dollar laptop, slick-as-a-whistle, paid with a swipe. For the past six months, I have had less than four hundred combined checking and savings, and that number dwindles by the day. I have no groceries, but I've got fistfuls of orange prescription bottles, and I was handing pills out like candy (but they are needed, much and every day).

Where did all these bills come from?
Suddenly, it costs money to breathe.

Eating? Oh pshaw, that costs money, and the store's six blocks away.

I pout on my throne of dirty cotton, thinking I get what I ask for, when I ask, and it always comes--at a price! It's always over a hundred dollars more than I could spare and brings bad luck, moreso than a couple broken mirrors would, even if they were smashed over a the back of your mother's black cat.

"Quick! Let's do designer drugs with the paltry change given by our parents! I wouldn't feel like I wasn't nothing, nothing at all," I say, batting my eyelashes, "Wouldn't they feel proud of our feelings of entitlement to the greater things in life and consciously responsible adult-like decisions?"

I crack open my father's checking account with the swipe of a magnetic strip,
it makes me seem responsible when he sees I just use it for pills and foodstuff.

(I prove I love him and he loves me this way)

Now, together, we will buy strawberries with his money,
they must be four dollars, at the very least, then we eat like the bourgeoisie (!)

I kiss the cheeks of my reflection in the bathroom
tousling my hair, tipsy, as I touch up my face by
licking the tips of eyeliner up like a cat's little tail,
the ends of eyes, coated with eyeliner as black as
my tightest velvet pants and dark, dark heart.

We go together.

You should move to a big city
and I'll come call, prepaid, with
a voice that is thick and ripped,
chattering of sugar-white beaches
as I cross the seas all on a plane,
all the while drunk on red wine,
twirling my fingers around, with
bags under eyes, a little anemic

(I think it adds to the glamour)

We will go out to a dimly lit place
We will go out dancing then after

I will put on dab perfume under my ears and on my wrists,
I will wear black tights for pants, but first, do a little cocaine
and you will fasten the clasp on my silver necklace tonight,
while I smoke, before helping me put on my favorite fur

And we will go see Andy, at the factory
I hear he's doing something
with that Basquiat fellow (!)

I will go follow false luxuries, come with me.
I will gamble with you in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas,
just as long as you pay my rent at $695 per month,
until I die, or something else.

I am waiting for a twenty two.
Two eleven's have past but they will not do
from Piccadilly to Putney
home in time for ham,cheese and chutney
and here it comes.

Humming along brum brum brum
get on the bus
swipe the card
not too hard
taking a seat take the weight of my feet
and in the air from up the stairs the smell of food
someone is chewing on chicken
sucking on bones
the women in front are gabbling in phones
and the child behind cries
I've dropped my fries
then an old lady slips on these crispy fried chips
and the bus comes to a halt.
The driver jumps up
screaming this isn't my fault.

Not my day at all
just wanted to get home with no smell of chicken
no phones in my face
but now I'm stuck in the bus
face to face
with the realisation that Putney and ham with cheese and Chutney
is slipping away.
No
not my day at all.

Music.

One of the things
That makes all this

Bearable

Be it listening to
Or making
It’s one thing
That takes all this

Away

Lose yourself
In its lyrics
Dreaming up
Another story

The heavy bass
Beating in time
With your heart

Pour everything
All your energy
All your thoughts
All your pain
All your unspoken words
Into the chords

Feel it flow into the keys
Weave them into the musical phrases
Transforming them into a symphony
Giving life to the notes on the page
Just feeling everything

Gush out

Just for those six pages
Or so
Just for those four minutes
Or so

Music magically
Takes
Everything

Away

Turning them into something

Beautiful

And then, as soon as it had started,
It stops.

And that
Silence

Resonates through you
Through that

Emptiness

And that’s when you can
Get up
Smile
Bow
And walk off
Carrying on
As if nothing happened

Thank you, music
For making this possible
You’ve brought me this far
And you’re still keeping me going.

You are

My savior

Raining
Clouds cry away the sins
Of the desolate city.

Is it a love story, or just a tragedy?
Is the tragedy how completely incompetent you are?
How sad a story for someone to be so broken,
that they are no longer a person.
A person would never hurt another like that.
A true human being would never treat someone like that.
I am mean, because you are cruel.
I am finished, because you were too weak and gave up too many times.
Do not blame me for your mistakes,
do not blame me for walking.
Too much of a coward to read what you have done.

Giving up your humanity was your choice,

it was never mine.
My choice is to let you, the heartless soul that I tried to help so many times.
Who left me alone, left me and ignored me at every turn.
My choice is to live while you die.
My choice is to smile,
You just want me to remain in the hell you created for me.
While you smile,
I refuse to give anymore of myself for someone
who never once saw my life for how horrendous you have made it.
Never tried to fix it
Never gave up the things that broke it.

You were my everything,
and you took yourself away and made yourself nothing.
You ignored everything and expected me to ruin myself,
while you carried on.
I am done,
I am finished.
You are not who I loved in the first place,
you are no longer you.
I am not holding onto to who you were,
when you never would.

it's funny how comfortalble i am with not sleeping
and surely i know it's healthy to be eating but,

i havent eaten a really meal in months
my mom never noticed, in fact, nobody does
this worlds full of some that make weird decisions,
then they mess up and we're just supposed to listen

i got alot of simple probblems, from scribbles to songs from bills to concerts,
but there's one problem , that always gets me
its how at the end of the day kids go hungry

and what abot how nobody listens to those who speak softly?
I wish most days I didnt drink my coffee but my problems never come off me, infact

theyre stained,
least with glue you just pick at it and usualy it goes away
i want to stay ...in a safe place,  I wish the world wasnt a paperchase, I wish I was bass, I wish I had no taste, to just hide and hide inside some days that will be my escape

Tourist, who gave her eyes
to the fishes and the sharks.
Ingenue queen of the lingering darkness.
Tourista, chain smoking in the rain.
Perfumed winds blow from her mouth
dizzying the Phoenician sailors with longing for her shores.
And the moths circle,
searching for her cable knit heart.
And I will go back to my darling,
my darling tourista,
when you my darling are gones.
Us being strangers of the night
and enemies in hollow places.
Tourista prays to ooze juicily
at last round the bearded lips of God.
Tourista swallows sleep
and swallows deep.
Tourista lost in translation
between valley girl slang and punk rock idols.
Pushing pushing pushing, push em.
Tourista of the long white neck, neglected.
Free of love nibbles and nicotine kisses.
Though she longs for their ghosts
and strokes the scars of their cousins.
Her screaming, rolling head full of tinder and ready to ignite.
Like the loveliest of hand grenades.
Tourista who's heart swells and empties with the tides,
all Jackson Pollucked up inside.
The punch line of every joke. The object of every desire.
And tourista rattles with wheezing.
Tourista vacant. Accepting reservations.
Calling dimply she prays to the highway dogs
and hound dogs and squealing pups.
Tourista of the pure soul, sprinkling virgin lamplight
like vestal seeds.
Though she implores every living thing to dampen the flame.
Hold tight, says tourista, happiness is surely near.
But she hides it away in her bedside table and hopes she will forget.