I feel like handknotted lace
and freeze dried flowers
and burned cedar
rising into the air
praying to be taken
I am still trying to drink every last drop
still trying to sweat it all out
still trying to sleep it off
still
still
still
I want a “finally"
I want a finish line
I want arms outstretched
and reaching
like vines
like crawling ivy
to grow on this house with the ancient white paint chipped by hate
I am so thirsty
I am still so thirsty
Jul 15, 2013
Jul 15, 2013 at 2:56 PM UTC
It is 1:15 am.
I am sitting here and my *** is numb.
It is the only part of me, thankfully, that has lost feeling.
Everything else is loud, ringing, stinging, and singing.
My pants are unbuttoned.
I believe in small liberations.
In approximately, five minutes I won't be wearing pants.
I believe in big freedom.
My frontal lobe feels like warm tapioca pudding.
I would not be surprised if it oozed out my nose.
I am one who takes things as them come,
even brain pudding leaking from my nasal cavities.
I am also one who shouts a lot, cries a lot, and smiles wildly
and at every possible opportunity.
Settling is not on my schedule
and at this point, neither is sleep.
Jul 15, 2013
Jul 15, 2013 at 2:22 AM UTC
I will collapse into bed before my knees give out before me.
I will darken my bedside light like the moon when she eclipses the sun.
Blocking out his brightness.
Blackening his reach.
I am too much like the moon.
And I am trembling.
Jul 14, 2013
Jul 14, 2013 at 1:27 AM UTC
My love, I wonder if you liked looking at dark houses from the sidewalk in the middle of the night like I do, if you delighted in whispering lullabies to the people sleeping silently inside.
I wonder if you had ever felt your heart explode before that moment, overwhelmed with love or joy or hope.
I wonder if you smelled the musk of the dusk dewed grass before you took your last and gasping breath.
I hope you know your momma loved you.
I hope you know your daddy loved you.
I hope you know your brother loved you.
I hope you see all of the people crying,
all of the people who still only see skin as skin,
all of the people with voices like arrows.
I hope you are truly now tasting the rainbow, swimming in the rainbow, swallowing the rainbow whole.
I hope you lay up in the sky,
in rest,
in peace.
Jul 14, 2013
Jul 14, 2013 at 12:43 AM UTC
I am imploding.
The paint drips off the walls.
Every part of me folds onto itself.
The ground is a rumble strip.
I am fractaling inward.
The skin of the earth crystallizes.
I am eternities splayed forcefully.
The rain continues to fall up.
Jul 13, 2013
Jul 13, 2013 at 4:14 AM UTC
We were ledge-sitters.
We understood why birds perch themselves on penthouse patio rails
And why airplanes sigh with breaths of relief when they are defying gravity.
We would hold the crooked hems of our dresses while we climbed metal stairs like mountains.
The urge for heightened perception of depths, distances, and the disarranged built in us like skyscrapers we hung ourselves over.
Jul 12, 2013
Jul 12, 2013 at 8:14 PM UTC
1. I decided to brew myself tonight.
Let the essence of my soul steep into the scalding water of the ceramic tub.
2. Unpacked boxes remind me of unfulfilled promises.
3. I leave my underwear on the floor for days at a time because my knees have been locked since the last time I spoke to you and I have never been able to bend and touch my toes.
4. My skin still smells like bleach and the pine wood that splintered into my hand.
5. She said that hurricanes are beautiful. I asked if she understood destruction.
6. The amount of dusty and empty flower vases I have directly correlates to the amount of missed opportunities have been blooming and hand delivered to my door step.
7. I am still trying to unknot you.
Jul 12, 2013
Jul 12, 2013 at 7:47 PM UTC
“You look so sullen today,” he would tease.
He would try to iron the wrinkles
on my forehead with the palm of his hand.
The worry lines that I have had from before I understood
trembling breaths and foggy thoughts,
the creases that are not so easily pressed away
with soft words and even softer touches.
Daddy, I have loved melancholy
since I broke my wrists the first time
and learned the name of every bone
in the human body
because I realized I liked the unknown,
but I liked knowing it better.
Jul 12, 2013
Jul 12, 2013 at 7:37 PM UTC
I curled up in the curve of your pelvic bone. It felt like soot-filled chimneys and water-warped floorboards.
I compared our fingers. They both resembled willow branches as they brushed together.
I climbed to your ear and I caved inwards so you could hear the ocean in my frame singing to you.
Jul 11, 2013
Jul 11, 2013 at 11:37 PM UTC
“I am sorry I called you a fat assed ***** in seventh grade. You were smarter than me and you had your life bundled up and handed to you. I was…jealous.” Is what I imagine Keisha would say in her apology letter to on her deathbed. The white blonde hairs falling out of her head as she shriveled up like raisin.
When I knew her, her skin was always ***** She wore fluorescent clothes with spaghetti straps and she had a stick and poke tattoo of butterfly behind her ear.
Before I met her, I was scared of her because I accidentally confused her for the 6’6 ball slaying giant who could dunk it faster than you could say “we’re running sprints next practice” was also named Keisha, but then I found out Keisha didn’t play basketball (well) and was white.
Keisha rolled with her crew of other fourteen year olds. They wore matching hi-tops and hoop earrings. They were tsunamis scaring the innocence out of the other pre-teen kids. They spewed sewage on any slide-rider or sea saw-sitter that set their sights on.
She would scream obscenities at me from the sidewalk. Too proud to let her toes touch the sand that I stood on.
In my ignorance of the consequences, I said “stop” and she shouted, “say it again” and defiantly I did.
Her jaw would come unhinged like a snake as she lunged fangs first. She laid her hands on my shoulders by the swing set shoving slurs into my face in a way that said “I didn’t fall far from the tree; I was dropped by hostile hands the first time I tried to say ‘no’.”
I stepped back from her fury and I wiped the verbal ***** from my eyes. I walked away, understanding at that vulnerable age that there was nothing I could do to quell the rage of someone with venom in their veins.
The tables always turn, but I would have stopped that Lazy Susan with my grubby fingers the instant I fully swallowed the fact that her front door was a mouth of its own. From the moment she walked in, she was chewed up and chewed out. Drowning in stomach acid, to be spit up back on to the street. The child of chaos covered in caustic burns they said she “earned.” Mutilated by their incisors, canines, and molars. They drained the very life they had expelled into her bones, digesting the marrow of her wire hanging. As a result she was starving. She was bare ribbed and hollowed out. She lived with her hands stretched out before here, blind, breaking her wrists from trying to twist her way out of the straight jacket of her situation. Slashing the souls and skin of anyone she came in contact with because she was scared of the monsters that birthed her, that sang her to sleep in the next room with livid lullabies.
Hate germinates hate. It is an airborne infection eating away at the soft tissue beneath your skull, overtaking any capability to function lovingly.
So to Keisha, as you hang in holy suspension between here and somewhere else, you were corrupted by a corroding covenant and lived in absence. You lacked self-control and displaced your damagedness on anyone more available than the wolves that raised you, but you are not a laughable collection of Mr. Vultura’s failed general science quizzes, forged parental signatures, and blue bruised knuckles. You are just as human and bursting forth as me and every other person on this planet. You are vines and branches yearning for the sun, for the brightness of hope and peace. Now rest, because you are forgiven and now infinite.
Jul 11, 2013
Jul 11, 2013 at 11:05 PM UTC