maybe we are a sinking thing
some white cliff eats itself until
we stand at its edge where it
kisses our feet good morning
and i open under you, another
young rose you’re gentle with
in bed we confuse tomorrow
with heaven sometimes you
ask me about the beginning
of the world when there was
nothing and i tell you what i
know, what i sometimes dream
about: you came from my
left lung. you grew out of the
mud and you kissed me as
soon as you could. we named
each other and the inside of
you always tasted like wine. we
slept every night in star shatter
we were alone in a world that
loved us.
Jun 21, 2015
Jun 21, 2015 at 7:17 PM UTC
I kissed you like
A million left hooks
I kicked our sheets
From the foot
Of the bed
Come back to the
Sunny side up Eggs
The Plastic light
of a Summer sky
I promise the love
will be better
I promise The Love
will Crust Over
May 12, 2015
May 12, 2015 at 7:19 PM UTC
the last blue summer i dripped
sulfur from a bottom lip
you found an eyelash
in your cheerios
and we danced
all winter
into the next blue summer
then it was rhubarb and honey
The First Man came to stab
his tongue in my mouth
i,
the very silk sheet of femininity
let him puncture inside with the chewed
embittered nails
this is a girl in holy conversion
she convulses at the right times
for dramatic effect
the blood on the bed is as christ
a symbol of sacrifice
back when men played gods
and i let them
The Second Men
are numerous skin lesions
diseases from stepping in the wrong
swamplands
they smell always of
peppercorn or gin&tonic;
their ***** sense a tenderness inside
like dogs they sniff it out
to bury it with the one large hand
that wraps around the throat every
time
that same ******* line
*you like it rough you little **** like it rough*
i am on my back on the bed
that rocks from him ******* into
my girlhood
i think of what my mother said when she found
the box of condoms i keep with me
"i would just hope these men care about you."
she doesn't understand
these delicate men look for women to care
about them
in the lily morning
they want to get breakfast
text me their problems
i'm the man on the sidewalk
curling my lips into each other at their texts
"what are you doing tonight?"
"hey haven't heard from you for a while"
"hi :)"
I am on my back in bed
wondering if I can hail a cab from delancey St
while he licks and ***** at my **** and I feel nothing
but I play the parts
I know my lines
and the Second Men could have done well in the spotlight
only they wanted a girl and by then I was decidely
not human
The Men
can smell it
when you've been taken before
a goodbye kiss on the cheek i grant
in a moment of kindness
and it becomes his tongue in my mouth
i am paralyzed in honesty
in the remaining threads of the docile sweetness
mom says it is feminine to be kind
that it is not a weakness
I think of this again when I am on all fours
hair pulled back by his hands
I think of it when the door closes and the other he
wouldn't take no for an answer
how many times did I tell myself
I wanted this?
every time
The Dream Men
take me in my bed
in the house with grapevines and white shutters
they stuff their hands down my throat
they **** me from all sides
I spend the dream trying to scream
and when I wake it is always sunny outside so I never feel
good about crying
Moms at the foot of my sadness
brush my hair braid it
we are in flower fields with magnets
painted lilac and baby pink
im stomping around in the garden they hush me
quiet
we are born into these love traps
these delicate sentiments
tricked to think we are heiress to sloppy emotion
but the women ring the rags
pluck the tomatos off the plants
the men see ghosts and weep
into their coffee
weep on the shoulders of their women
who lie on their backs in bed
wait for it to be over
It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts
I don't like it I don't like this
Did you come? Yes I came
Yes it's all taken care of
Is that blood? Are you okay?
Sorry I forgot I'm on the last day
You sure? Yeah It was great
I want to go again
Ok Baby
The Women
taste different
feel safer
their histories and mine are reflective
they know what it means to be taken
but their hands
do not hurt enough
don't leave behind blisters
i begin to come into someone else
never satisfied enough
to settle
to build a home
Men and their history of abusing women
Me and my history of being abused
We'll never understand each other
We'll never love each other either
The Men have taken
everything from my Women
my Grandmother barren
my Mother so close to death
I was born into the locked
door
The history of Women who stayed
tender and delicate
I am tired of being taken
May 5, 2015
May 5, 2015 at 8:41 AM UTC
Here we are, now, who are we this time?
The sentiments are still the same, aren't
they always? We listen to the radio top
20 and we sing along, brazen like the
best of them. Today I'll be Achilles and
you can be Odysseus. No, not Patroclus,
this isn't like that and neither are we,
there's no room for speculation on what
we could be because that was last time,
last time I sat on your white bed and
you pinned my wrists down, I was ten
and you were twenty and god told you
to **** me and it ate you alive, when I
left you to go to the countryside, pregnant
with someone else's baby, was I ever your
baby? Maybe a few other, separate, parallel
lifetimes ago. If I'm Achilles then you have
to tell me when to go to war, you'll know
that I'll fight you every step of the way and
no, we don't love each other, but this is the
role you play this time and you'll do it for
me, won't you? Yes, and the next life, I'll be
a nice jazz tune that you turn on the radio
to and find yourself crying and aren't sure
why. we're still connected, even metal covered
in copper covered in your skin and sweat.
The next I can taste it, because you'll be the
****** drip as soon as it kicks in, but you have
to be the one that gets me dead at twenty-five,
so make sure you wait for my signal, my white
flag, like before when you watched me in the
garden, like before when you dragged me off
the dead body of my wartime lover, or when
we met in the rain in the romance novel yet
to be written and kissed and kissed and kissed
and, kissed. you are my friend. we will never
be separate. you are the love of all my lifetimes,
even the ones where we will never touch or
laugh or look each other in the eye, and even
especially then, because I'll still feel your atoms
and my atoms, the only home that can ever have
a name: the touch of something familiar. Siken
was right, I won't be waiting forever, there are
a hundred other me's to match you's and if this
ends all bright-white nuclear i'll still be standing
with the skin melted all off, poised and ready to
receive the next generation, and that's what i
thought of when you asked me if we were ever
sky giants, if we ever met before this moment,
and you thought because i was silent that i didn't
feel the same but baby, i do, and here is all of it,
our mythology, don't you feel it? the constant
reaching of me to you? the small hands covering
every inch of our mouths even when we don't
touch? Next time, I'll be a small hand and you'll
be a small hand, maybe then we can love properly.
Mar 14, 2015
Mar 14, 2015 at 3:32 PM UTC
You stay
a stray, angel-whisper
in all my blackened
afternoons. I know
where your dead
laughter hides. I
know we love suicide
more than ourselves.
But we can still do
something for each
other, can’t we? If
I go without telling
you first, I’m
sorry, darling. I wanted
to. There’s a bitterness
to the in-between of my
legs. There’s a name
now for the thing under
our bed.
Feb 27, 2015
Feb 27, 2015 at 11:51 AM UTC
you won’t find me here. wrapped
in the wool of violent, vomit-soaked
******* we’ve made a mess on the
tables, with mulled red wine, beside
cockroaches. every inch of skin
pink and trembling beneath other skin.
you can expect this: one perfect little
throat sliced clean. cleaner than your
moans. for every finger pried inside
me, there are a hundred more
pushing up into you, until your moans
soften into screams.
the squelch of your **** as it pulls
apart, the pulp of your parts so
pleasant. we bathe in you. love, our
sequined slaughterhouse: we wanted it.
you can find me here: drawn up
tight in my taxidermy, among
ten dozen dead doves. their wire
bones crunch beneath your sneaker
when you approach the front of
that forest. the black iris of my sold
soul, now an eternity for us both;
you approach draped in morning
breath, content to bite the bugs
from my lips. we always kiss with
teeth, because we are always high.
here, where i live, you are shivering.
we are god’s golden children,
untouchable with fuzzy, white mouths
that click in hollowed-out howls,
imitating wolves, waiting for who falls
fast in love first. suspended there,
we sigh against the flies, how they
**** our skin with grease-slicked
tongues. our guts blackened by the
gun, shoved all the way inside, are
now dusted with sickness.
there is a smile against a smile. my
skin stretching as your skin. love
wrapped severe, twine around a finger,
where the blood swells and gathers.
there should be trumpets for our
sallow suicides. a banner in an office,
frosted chocolate cake. instead there
is a kindness: rain carves a ravine
out of the earth. we tumble down like
leaves into the cockroaches and left-
over wine. two black mouths in another
black mouth. nothing grows over where
we rot, but it doesn’t matter. they won’t
find us here. not a single foot will
fall into our worm-warped skulls. this
is, for you, some small comfort. but again,
it doesn’t matter. years will pass, and there
will never be enough teeth to claim for all
the small, mutual murders; nor for the way
we became our disease.
Feb 5, 2015
Feb 5, 2015 at 6:29 PM UTC
there has been enough capped blue pens, half-chewed/.then
parisian grey mists--open windows, & markets, have you come
along in the cufflinks to take my hands? no, it's nothing
some days,i;d like to be kissed lonely, to sit at the preening
jut of your hips and **** songbird sketches into your neck,
thick swells. as rain comes within, just a teaspoon of salt to the water
and i hope it boils over. because i want to be burned, now
i want to be loved,; like silver lipped queens dipping ring
fingers into cyanide;. like the tumbling of lucifer from heaven
where he was the first shooting star--remarkable, god's favorite
there have been so many coffee rings on paper place mats,
and chances to go dancing when instead i cut to see myself bleed--
i dont want to be the lonely wing that tears against the wind,
the pale, wailing woman waiting on the side of the highway
to be taken home and put to bed. just grant me the white lighter,
or else let me step into the warm marshes with the wheatgrass.
let me turn to hay in the wintertime; ill hold you when you come
inside to sleep here. we just keep corking the bottles and putting
them in the fridge;when's the last time you wove flowers inyour
hair?, were you just a boy then who could afford to make those
mistakes? i swear i'd like to know those ways the welts twisted
your gut hotly--because they did for mine too, only in the ways i'd
never been touched at all. they write books on the women who
refuse to be loved. we stand against walls with our champagne
throats curved back, waiting/for a man to get his hands on it
but it won;'t do, it won't do. if you come closer, see, i'll make you
laugh to that pretty throat-bobbing way, while you're looking at
the mouth that leans forward to **** a quiet songbird;then tear
up the flesh of your neck. i want to be blood-soaked like that, a
white boat, a marsh field with the blue herons, their lonely wings.
where is the legend of lilith on the bookshelves of the innocent?,
don't tell me you can't find her. she;s here--in my mouth, look inside
i bite down on the pen cap. the water moans and spills over. they want
to be loved where love is ****** & the crime scene is the first
sunday of forever: this death more beautiful than winter; my surrender
the smallest collapse of the star--in your arms,yes,that's an alright
place--the black hole love a blank space, a long sunday. now that's
what i want, with you: fold the blanket, let's take a drive, let's go
to the field where god kissed lucifer to the ground. i want to be loved
like you know how the story goes: we become who we always were,
and then it kills us both.
Dec 7, 2014
Dec 7, 2014 at 5:18 PM UTC
*** a couple times with your hand that
has one vein popped up over the knuckle. sheets crinkle
laundry sits in the small humid room.
smells like roadkill and peppermint,
like christmas eve with dinner down the toilet.
you've *** four times in an hour,
rubbing at yourself through your underwear.
don't touch skin. it's off limits today.
getting raw means you can feel
how it stings when you cross your legs.
it's not about pleasure. it's the reminder:
you want to know what you look like,
what you feel like.
next time you're ******* down some boy you ask him
"how does that feel?" he says "good."
quick kiss, his ****** is archaic and copper.
you like how it tastes. now it's your turn:
but of course he won't make you *** unless
you take your hand and rub while he *****
your hand a barrier between his body and yours.
"please be quiet," you say out loud
the boy furrows his eyebrows, "i didn't say anything."
you laugh, "no, my stomach."
pretend to *** for a faster exit.
give him a tiny maternal kiss.
let it linger out the room where it's cold but he's still warm.
you don't want a warmth you have to love because it's too much.
the scab on your neck is now a scar
and you have no make-up for the ones on your forearms, but
really, most of you by now is star dust and tobacco leaves.
the sun is in our eyes. i want to know
what makes a circle go on forever.
i think about ****** a lot.
dreamt two nights ago chris sold me some,
it was in that tiny wax bag with a "king ****** stamp .
when i texted him the next day said "i dreamt
we did some together," he said
"that's funny. i've been doing some definitely
but not really selling."
the Chicago cold does something odd enough to you.
it always seemed like you were alive as a kid. well,
were you?
where is your body? out in the storm.
are you a ghost? no, it would be nice though:
the lack of responsibility of life,
a state of impermanence.
it would be nice.
Oct 21, 2014
Oct 21, 2014 at 9:13 PM UTC
YOU HAVE
TO WANT IT
MAN
“go outside,” the doctor says,
“stand on the grass for fifteen minutes a day.”
you’re here because today you want to get better.
“tell me how you’re feeling.”
“I’m scared.”
“I mean physically.”
“so do I.”
ANGEL
an angel can come in a burst of a blister,
on the tip of a finger.
he always starts small
with the whispers,
“i know about love,”
like you asked for it.
he prefers to come at the end of the month,
amid deadlines, another set of blood-soaked, ruined *******
some traces
of the relationship with your father and failure.
but you like that: having an excuse that sends you
scrambling for car keys.
at first it’s forests, their fires,
the flowers that follow once the ash and skin and soil
are mixed. at first it’s earth and rubbing it in,
seeing god behind your eyelids.
so you clean the pipes, keep washing sheets.
the voices they stop coming; once in a while you
read online how many kids this week have overdosed
on ****** and it’s foreign. kids with dirt
under their fingernails, kids in basements, kids
with ***** canvas shoes and overgrown cuticles.
they don’t look like you. you still look like
you.
MAN
mike sparks a j in the basement.
we chew on xanax and no one’s paying attention to the TV.
some white static and early afternoon rain. it’s made me gone
ghost, sitting on a leather recliner, silent with a cigarette.
it’s a right of initation to carve your name in mike’s
coffee table and sign on the back wall. this summer I added
mine alongside the kids I used to get nervous around in high school.
his mom comes downstairs with a joint of her own rolled
and a French manicure. her lip liner is too dark for her
lipstick, and phil’s warmly lit and ivan leans so far into the
couch he isn’t human.
mike sits up, “ma,
you know you owe me some money?” he changes the channel.
she laughs throaty, her insides a swamp. she’s
prettier when she’s high like this.
“I got your money,” she promises. it gets soft
from there and phil smiles over his body and ivan moves
further into the couch. she touches mike’s hair.
“good kid,” she tells me and I smile up at her. I wish I had
a body but I left it wandering through
the thunderstorm outside. ivan nods his hazy head.
mike hands her a diet coke and she hands him a fifty and she goes—through the walls—
phil digs his hand into the couch cushions to find papers. I go
ghost in the seconds it takes him to spark his lighter.
the ghost lights herself a cigarette.
the ghost lights herself another cigarette.
the ghost lights herself a cigarette. “are you chain
smoking now,” phil slurs playfully. “yes,” the ghost agrees.
“are you having fun,” ivan turns to her.
“yes.”
HUMAN
i don't want to know what love is like i want
air that
tastes like apples and
i want real raw
brown sugar
i want to shoot up every
grey second for two weeks— get frantic then
take benzodiazepine until i shred my
stomach lining, singing
i want bud light and
a backyard. bed time stories and
white furniture and ritz crackers
with fancy party cheeses
i want to complain about the drinking age,
new york’s black-dusty wind charm. complain like the
moon is still lonely and not a destination
i want to wake up in the sun spot
i want to wake up to a baby crying
soft like mothers do, going to
that dear one to quiet them down,
i can be here to kiss you calm
i want to get out of bed
i want to call friends back
so winter can come and i can still
go home.
WANT
throwing on the rag&bone; jeans,
neither rag nor bone more milky skeleton-ized, eyes
pin headed. faces struck yellow all tops of the heads
with umbrellas and sorry throats. "here take mine" no
"you'll get sick" it's fine
the gothic church with social strangers
tweakers and nodders all smiley side-
eye-Y
i know the gimme gimme
i know the routine
and blondie (they think) here she comin she twenty years clean
blondies a baby she weak as **** she dont know what she got
but i know the "i want" "i want"
and the ok baby,
Got U
HUMAN
i dont want to know what love is like,
i want to walk the manhattan bridge at sunrise
i want
grass wisps and capers
chicken noodle soup
a night at the new york city ballet
and pauses in sentences, in breath
the breath before a kiss or the breath
after it. i want instant hot chocolate
and reality television, ugg slippers with
faux trim. a bicycle painted lilac with a
basket, and clear skin. i want pier 63 on
a 70 degree day, the weepies playing
i want to be a ghost
where ghosts are white sheets with two button eyes
and make jokes about halloween and their past lives
i want to go there
to street fairs
and watch fireworks and write out names
in fresh concrete patches
i want to eat blackberries in the bathtub
i want skin to make me feel safe again
i want to want to live
but i know the "i want" "i want" and the ok baby,
Got U
WANT
they were right,
they were all
going (right
they were righjt
they were right
air hanging eyes to dry
blood pull in push out brown golden push IN
they were right they were all right
nothing could ever make me as happy again
WANT
it’s a hold on something so quiet and soft in your hands and no one knows what it is and you dont know what it is. it’s the pin drop in a hospital room and so lemonade refreshing. im in a snowstorm and i cant see the city, cant see past my own two feet. im on a long highway drive and it’s rain that comes in sheets so hard i cant move. i walk and the world writhes underneath me and we put needles in our arms. and we wait for the blood push. and i watch my life go away in warm ******* and i watch it go this way like it’s not me. and i’m going home to ****** and i’m scared, i say outloud to maggie, “i’m scared i’m going to do something stupid,” and she is so quick to say “like what” that i know she knows what it is. and i’m so scared.
WANT
give up on me , I Know where im going. don’t follow. don’t even look for me. keep
Counting sugar cubes and stirring your coffee , it is my wish for you that it always tastes sweet.
I love you
WANT
i just wanted to be kept warm by something that looked like love
MAN
i walk slower on the streets of manhattan; stop at
the strand, look for the man with eyebrow rings
asking "do you know where a girl in this city could get some relief?"
he laughs, says he just looks like someone who would know
that. he asks, "is that Monster Blood?”
 
Oct 4, 2014
Oct 4, 2014 at 1:30 PM UTC
wondering about swallowing lysol in cute plastic shot
this morning i saw a gum print handbag, finger ***** tease,
so those are the prayers you save for your knees.
i know, it's terrifying; and the thought of ******* makes
you tired. it makes me tired.
we pretended to love
for protection from this. head against the seat
closer next to kiss. you smiled but i thought about so much time
les vacances and the dirtier brooklyn romps
through teeth, "no, i don't know the nyc scene"
and then, off! we were headed for each word of love.
everything went out as day, we remained in there. the tall
glasses of milk and the shaky hands. how nice the breeze
to slap my cheek in a summer pop **** the one where i'm
already on fours while the elevator door, closing; down in his head as though walking on madison. i pick off the beauty marks from the
mouths of mean angels (/ the angle of your body makes me soaked through and warm.
duck and stay with me, even if you promise to wait.
you were smiling at "sounds like you," the screen and the taxi horn
scraping in the ****** of a thunderstorm. and me and you and jesus,
all pries of lips and teeth.
solemnly striking mary as he pleased, crawling surprised through
the egyptian's dreams like he was made for it. like ancient honey centipedes. like you and like me
god got sure he made you angry. moving about his eyes he wrapped you up in that redwood chest and you crawled right through
it. look at the hole you left! sound comes as well to thank you,
in scopes of soft, strangled moans. the ones where i have
my tiny hand around your throat, and god rings his hands
in defeat because we ****** so ***** we made the world clean,
the **** finds its home where bacteria grows.
bite 'til there's blood, if that's
what you want. our friends always tried to make martyrs
of us. "i want to know you," he says, but the mountains moan loud
on the ear hairs, those baby ones, that get tickled in the chicago wind
or when you stick your tongue in and i like it.
when a girl says get gone she means it; now rip off
your pretty pink lips i want them to bruise my **** i want
you to get off from it. but you want love
fifth and twenty-second, legs less fervent less eager to bend
over the sink, in the shower, in your bed. so again with the play:
read something about warmth .some thing warm like a body
like your body. some/thing like a brown powder
and now it’s warm all over
here i dip my pinky finger, here spread that on your
gums. baby, you look so good with a finger in your mouth.
i can take the coke drips and the starchy pain of paper cuts,
the first taste of blood and missing the last step, "just dope sick,
alright, **** off/"
but the silence is so
it's so
when i wild and bare teeth, it's dreaming
because i can handle the coke drips, the softer butter
shards, real fine i can keep steady all handlebars
a little hype for ketamine like crazy eyes, hear you
repeat to me for two hours one night, "your face! your face!"
and the men they apologize because "it's not mine" but the elbow
won't tear from the socket i'm eating my eyeball i'm shooting the
*** rockets all over manhattan. so what's it to hustle, when the
scene can't even bump it. i'm waiting to nod out to miles davis'
trumpet. tell me how the drug girl can find some one to keep
up/ can one-up the crazy and puff the exhaust. i'm only looking
for a partner in my disgust; so you and me and jesus should talk
laugh over )a real one) "yes i love tequila,
darling you're a ***** meet me at the
bar, ill **** you at your own game ;)"
"oh you'll **** me ? ;)"
"yea i'd **** you, so what, i'd **** a lot of
people,"
Read 2:43 am
"..."
"what are you typing"
Read 3:24 am
Sep 8, 2014
Sep 8, 2014 at 11:38 PM UTC