Cold nose,
Cold hands,
Cold lips,
I can’t help if my
fingertips
want to
grab onto your hips;


Don’t think
I don’t know
How much you
want me,
baby...
just me and you
and all this cold
is surely worth the waiting.

I know my kisses feel
like ice, or snow; and maybe
you’d find out that
I want your love
and find out what
we can be.

They say your past lovers
shape your future tastes,
and I'd be fraught with a dilemma
if it were true,
because I cannot afford to love
another man like the last two.

A bad man's running his mouth,
talking of God and all sorts of things,
saying justice comes to tear down
all the sins and evils of this world,
claims he knows it,
oh, he knows it,
he claims he'd bring down
all those wretched souls
and hand them some accountability;
ah yes, a bad man's running,
running away,
jumping through hoops
trying so **** hard to hide
from justice,
mmhm,
cause a bad man's running his mouth,
running away from the wrongs he condemned
mere hours ago,
talking about how much he hates
a man like that,
a man like him,
and how much he'd love to show them,
show them,
show them how to be a bad man like him
and masquerade as equity and virtue,
talk a load of croc and take the plunge
with a face so unlike
these marauders,
or so he says,
he always says,
always littering the world with his voice,
his mumbled, garbled,
running mouth;
he wants to tell you
that he'd take his knife to a man
who dared to try you,
feel you,
oh, he says,
as he takes what he wants on his own.

A bad man's running,
running amock in this silent town,
disregarding good deeds,
taking it upon himself
to play the Janus.

If you lied
and he lied
and everyone's lying
then what am I doing here
listening to everything
when I could be damaging my ear hairs
another way?

Dear Diary:
A daunting opening,
and a lost, red leather journal later,
leaves the pen ink sweating
down the page
reminding me how temporary
all my thoughts are
and how every smudge of my fingers
is really just a desperate attempt
to forget what we've become.

Emptiness
echoes but does not return
the same lifeless message.
Only the stillness of the room reflects
such dreary gasps for color
and that still desire of the moth
longing to surpass its dull greys
for the wings of a fluttering butterfly
in its glory days.

I wish I could kiss the memory of you,
and travel back just once
to when I was naive enough
to hold you close
and feel my anxiety burn and frazzle out
in your arms;
when I was meek enough to nuzzle in
to your soft neck, your lying throat,
and whisper that I loved you
with warm breath I wasted
for two years,
or to finally remember
how unfit our bodies were
pressed together in the dark,
despite our cheery smiles
hidden in hot sheets,
because I want to kiss
something too good to be true
and pretend I don't know it.

The man I loved is dead and gone
and rest before me, a carcass;
his shaky hands and shaky breaths
are almost fully silenced.

I don't recognize that sound of his,
unusual and discordant,
those mumbled songs and deepened voice
have surely lost its purpose.

Say it's you one last time,
suspend all disbeliefs;
with open arms and inviting eyes,
tell me all that you've repented.

Yes, does the mother bird sing
to her sleeping young.
Yes, does she wake them
each morning, with a full heart,
aware they may not make it,
and yet she sings with gusto.

She opens herself fully to her loved ones
because even if they pass,
even if they fly too short or plummet
from the well-kept nest,
it was always worth the morning song
and always were her children worthy of her love.

I walked into your life an actress,
putting on a show for you,
miming who I thought I was
with lifeless limbs exerting so much effort,
nearly hollow did I feel,
typecast, merely trying to not collapse in front of you
like a miserable cutscene signaled too quick;
yes, it is most unfortunate
you fell in love with an actress
playing a role she didn’t know how to keep.

Sometimes I think I see it in your eyes;
you want to devour me,
to have me, solely,
all to yourself.

Do you see it in my eyes too?
That I would give myself so willingly to you,
that you could have me at your feet in a single, sharp snap of your fingers.

Pulled into a trance like that,
I'd almost say 'yes'
each time we lock eyes.
I could relinquish myself to follow every suggestion that flows from your soft lips,
but would you believe that?

I've got to hand it to you,
the curvature of your palms
are so impeccable,
that they easily slip into
the palm of another,
with skin smooth or roughed
by work, and yet even those fingertips,
slender, stubby, even some missing or bent,
can delicately intertwine
as if all gestures could be made together
and your skin and fingerprints could merge
with each touch like a puzzle piece
offered in twos,
designed to craft and to hold on
forever.

Memory loss;
I know you're serious,
but every time you try to speak to me
I'm dropping words and sounds
like an imaginary hot potato,
thrown to me by a very rude child
who thinks making me lunge a thought
away from me counts as being safe.

I know you said something,
sounded like white noise,
sounded like the conversation
I think we're having right now,
I'm behind five sentences,
or maybe five minutes,
something there sounds about right.

Keep speaking, I can only hope to catch up,
this constant amnesia is aching
and my head is in a fog,
but I know you're serious
and you said something, something...
memory loss.

My whole body feels weak,
and I can’t help but imagine
this would have been the perfect time
for you to use me,
if you hadn’t already.

Cradle me like a child
crying
locked in a cranium she never wanted
lose control
where’s my pacifier?
Take me to a place
force me to **behave.

Ask me to fall in love?
Love is a sickness,
and should it leave such scars
as it had the last time I was afflicted,
I might shrivel up and die.

Dare it to leave wounds without sutures?
Skin without scratches?
Bodies without bruises?

Two afflictions of the mind are unbearable:
Both of two in love
And the sadness that sullies it.

Distance has become my new lover,
and I cower behind her,
I beg her not to let me get hurt like before,
Lest I fall sick again.

The thought of being in love with anything else feels
Intense,
Like fingers digging much too far
Into my skin,
Drawing the deep oxygenated blood to the surface.

We can never love again
without combustion,
a self-destruction,
if our lips were to meet
again;
we were never meant to be.

Loosened tie,
loosened dirt,
one's gonna **** you
one's gonna hurt,
what's it gonna be boy,
when everything's turned,
suffocated misery
or the underground resort?

"Is it all you dreamed of?"


She wished to be rich, famous;
to prance round with her name in
bright lights, flashing; a star all her own.
God, was she was happy-

She had a great debut, immediately a sensation;
people galore, a sea of pens, paper,
cameras swarming, flash after flash,
each one crowding her every movement,
enclosing her.

Where was her escape? Where were the exits?

Her face on every newspaper, magazine, like a microscope image;
her faults hand-picked, like ripe fruit, a grape carefully picked off the vine and crushed slowly between the fingers.

What a dream she had thought long ago.

Never did sacrifice drift through an ear,
the day she walked onto the stage.
She sighed as she covered her panicked face,
yet more paparazzi engulfed her.

Soon her cheering fans ceased to exist,
her ideas merely trivial, a mistake;
scandals, fights, tears, she took a deep breath,
she couldn’t keep up with the spiral much longer,
Her name was known.

“Is this what you dreamed of?”
One drink after another, glass after glass,
she watched her career drown with.


Are all dreams worth living?

Salted, flimsy orange rinds,
bittered instead of sweetened:
these are all I eat nowadays.

Crystalline textures coat my insides,
my blood pressure’s at an all-time high,
and my tensions are shooting through the roof.
By god, I’m so naïve,
So untouched by anything other than this,
it seems unlikely
that I would taste such saccharine things,
I’d be much more inclined to shrivel up my insides,
dehydrate all my limbs and pack them
like raw meat in a harsh winter.

I feel useless again.

I have worked so hard
To rid my mind of this phrase,
I wish I were happy,
And I've tried to accept my life as it is,
But hearing that phrase
Come from a friend's mouth
Solidifies how impossible
It is.

I must admit
The part of that phrase that taunts me the most
Is that I say it in the past tense,
I wish I were,
Because heaven forbid
I said a wish for my future.

The flesh, the flesh,
it's always the flesh.

I sometimes wish I would have
given up
just to see how much
you'd try to take.

I can't shake the idea
that given the opportunity
to mend all that is wrong
about us....about you,
that I'd drop so much of me to do it;
but I'm no time traveler,
no sorcerer or magician,
nor an oracle who can tell you
it'll be alright,
no, buddy,
you and I?
We're verboten,
and I'd consign all of my soul
just to relive "us".

I think you'd always known
that I was sacrificial
and I'd lay down all of me
for you,
and neither of us wanted to believe it,
yet now I have to swallow my words,
my tears, my tormenting silence,
and admit I'd loved you so much
that I would have risked it all;
I would have broken the space-time continuum
to have you.

...Whose voice is that?

She likes to ask me this
when I finally lift my fingers up,
and sometimes I have to tell myself
I'm not quite sure anymore
but at least she's honest.

I despise how abuse is always
littering my airspace,
always tainting
the water I drink,
and always rupturing what's left of me.

I had this preconceived notion,
unfortunately,
that once you've been abused,
you'd be wise enough to escape
another abuser,
but boy, how he showed me,
how they all showed me,
how stupid I am
to have believed that.

I want to imagine,
though how useless it would be to do so,
what it would have been like
to love someone
and to be loved by someone
genuine, for once.

I must confess,
I don't think I would know
how to accept a love
that isn't corrupted,
or perhaps,
nonexistent,
and that pains me more
than my delusion that
I could stop them from hurting me.

Haven't you heard
that breaking and entering is an offense
and that maybe every attempt
you make to barge into me,
every door you bust open,
every single step forward
into my soul, my energy,
against my will, is trespassing,
and I'll be ******
if you think I won't
take care of a wiley trespasser
like you.

Parts of him,
Everything
Was broken into parts
Of him.

I was told the story
Of when his boy lungs
Couldn't hold another gasp,
And his father found him
Five
Or was it ten? Minutes later
And they had to bring
A dead boy back to life.

They were told a story
Of how his mother drank
A bit too much, often
But they musn't, he musn't
Speak another word of it,
There are parts of stories left untold.

There are parts of him
So many parts
But never enough parts
To make a man whole.

You mean to tell me
That every letter typed out
with grubby,
Grease-covered fingertips,
Should be laid out in truth?
"What’s that?" Never heard of it.

I cut my heels with a shell,
her concave, smooth white surface
slicing open my body to the world.

I thought I'd see the ocean,
with all of the water in my body flooding out,
hearing every salty breath,
and smelling the frothy turquoise, foamy mess;
I thought I'd finally become one with her,
and it'd fill in the rest of my thirty percent frame.

I wanted to be like water,
but I had forgotten all the pollution,
and so through my wounds came bottles of nothing, plastic rash strings, shattered glass,
an allergic, asthmatic shutdown,
my body flopping and deflating
like a dying fish.

I didn't realize how much
comes with being like the water.

Crinkling, sizzling
grey, listful energy
always
waiting for the collapse,
perhaps it can hear the discordance
in your voice
when you tell me
it's over.

It’s a trigger, I think.

I’ve had a talk like that one
a million times
in three voices, two men, one woman,
in my many nightmares,
in my day to day living,
I’ve heard that one too many times.

A swirling tunnel,
a downcast drain, flushing
twisting impressions
of time and space, corrupted
in their voices
in my ears
and I think, surely,
that had to be a trigger.

These weighed down bundles
of my tumbled dried insides
collapse into heavy stacks of cotton
linen sheets, tangled;
memories of cold pressed touches
and warm suds wash over me,
while my seams come undone
in my hands.

Why do you think these threads
can be untangled?
I've looked at your patchwork heart
and oh, how I wish mine could be mended like that,
but I hope you can understand,
I've broken many needles in the process
and I'm not sure I can afford to start again.

I know that face used to light up,
and I recognize that face here,
but I don’t know what to say,
cause I feel that face in my expressions
and I really thought it’d go away.

I am delighted and also frightened,
and I feel most ashamed
that after all this time,
our faces, some faces, these faces
look the same.

Please do not ask me
about why I cannot give,
or in what ways I feel unable
to start over.

I've told you before,
I've told you so many countless times,
that I cannot feel anymore,
and when I do,
it rests in a porous place in my head,
not my soul,
and I refuse
to pretend I could love another
fully,
so please,
do not ask me again.

I've told you before,
I cannot bring my heart to a pulse,
much less trust
anyone, not even myself,
with that responsibility.

I know better than to pretend
I am capable of romance,
and no sorts of pressures
will allow me to breathe easy at night;
I already have so much trouble
letting things go.

Honored to be the one
who brings love to the confused
and deranged,
to those who use
more than they give,
and to the ones
who scare everyone away;
honored to be the one they loved the most
before one of us must move on.

Soft lips, the absence,
cold hands touching a boiling ***,
all of it overwhelming.

Lisps, nothing but blurred
s's and slurred whispers
of reassurance and love.
So much blind love, so much
lying, so much forgetting,
so much resting in the
space between the absence.

I loved you once, then I
forgot, and loved you again,
and forgot, and loved you
again in memory, I have forgotten.

The absences are wavering;
they teeter like a fresh vase on the edge
near an unruly cat,
nothing tethering the events
of the slurred words from
soft LIsPS, but the
love almost did.

So I think.

I've been limping because of them,
but I've seen others paralyzed,
tortured,
or burned alive by them,
and I'm so scared
that next time,
I'll be torn apart,
and then no one will be left
to protect the next victim.

It’s quite a sight
to see my machinations
dance before me,
and I’m not sure how to feel
when they call me to declare
how I’ve been dreaming.

I try so hard to forget my forgetting
and that maybe when I feel this way,
I can coexist with my desires,
but something tells me when I hear
a man pining,
that it wouldn’t be fair to project myself onto him,
no way.

They keep calling.

I haven’t the ability to trust a phone call
from a fleeting notion I shouldn’t keep.
Please forgive me, sir,
but I think it’s been too much to see
these characters dance to the images in my head,
knowing that reality
is much too far out of reach.

These doors are shut,
can't you see that?

I've got half a mind to let you hear
my screaming rattled insides,
but I know better.

I know better than to subject you
to the ever compressing, binding,
and oppressive part of my existence
just so you can play pretend
with who you think I am.

Stop acting as though one of you can
hold a key to the door,
taunt my demons out to prowl,
and make love to the idea of me;
you are no knights in shining armor,
and surely, you can see
I'm not open to visitors.

You must be starving,
your beastly belly never satisfied,
never satiated by the image
of a woman’s *******;
not her neck nor her thighs
could quench your burning,
relentless, shameful tastes
for flesh.

Of course, you're starving,
where could you run
when nothing would stop her desires,
her blood boiling, heart aching desires,
for the body, you so brazenly touched,
to be the one thing to light you on fire;
her voice, amplified by all the innocents you touched,
calls out to the hunters who
stare into your loveless, ravenous eyes,
knowing that you will always be starving.

Remove all my senses
turn me a husk
leave all the remnants
into the dust
with the pebbles
before you
ask yourself this
was I all you wanted
or was there something else I missed?

Every time I think of you,
I hear his name instead
and it’s almost as if
every abuser is the same,
and it wouldn’t matter whose name
I were to speak out to the world
because both deal the same damage.

There I was.
Resting.
You remember, don't you?

Me; nuzzled into the crook of your neck,
my hands gripping at your shirt...
you fancied it, you know.

The embrace was warm,
and our heartbeats may have synchronized
in hopes of lulling us to sleep.

You remember all of this,
I'm certain,
but there are some things
you don't.

At approximately five or so minutes
before I buried my swollen, dark, brown eyes
into your chest,
I was choking back tears.

Every time I hugged you,
it dulled my depression just enough
for me to pretend my heart
didn't live like someone was having
a boxing match with both atriums and the aorta;
no, it was a searing pain that dulled
in moments like these,
replaced with a suffocating tension.

I knew as soon as I left you,
I would be shaking,
on the ground in panic
or digging my nails into the utmost layers
of my body;
you didn't know that this moment we shared
was more about me
masking how much pain I regularly endured,
and about using you to soothe my psyche enough
to pretend I was alright.

Take me through the motions
one last time,
let me trail along
with my drifting eyes,
and let me hear those songs
I never could remember
or show me pictures of mountains
I would never climb,
let my feet shift slowly behind you,
tell me stories I've heard a million times,
and let me realize if I miss you or not.

This is a disaster;
My my, what a wreckage you make
Of everything and everyone you touch,
Leaving them gasping for closure,
Hoping someday the answers
Will fall from the sky, or
From your towering mouth
And slimy breath,
Then maybe the pieces you’ve tangled
Between us can be placed ever so precisely,
Floating from the air in your lungs,
Into something more concise.

Who are you
To leave this world so deflated and disillusioned?
Go ahead, learn nothing of your barbarism,
Soon you will collapse into obscurity
By your own feeble hands
And all that you alleged to stand for
Will bite you in the ***.

My mouth is burned
By the acidic tastes
Of the orange rinds
And mistakes
Of the toxic paste
Driveled from my head
And out my throat
With haste,
And yet,
I never let go
Of the next bite.