Acid rain turns to syrup and drips from your teeth
Your hot breath smears down my Vegas nerve
A brackish, deja vu smile
"Why, what steely eyes you have, My Love"
         "All the better to slice with, My Dear
          Not You, of course. Never You."
You grab a sloppy hanful of me and I yelp

Greedy sand inhales my feet
          Hoping to **** the calf meat straight from the bone
An idyllic honeymoon retreat
          Turns to sun-bleached quicksand

Smile! Smile!
Put your arms around one another
A child's reprimand for my bad acting
          For my grimace-smile of bared teeth
"No need for you to act like some defensive, scared animal" You hiss
          With a *****-heavy arm around my neck

Your body becomes a foreign creature
          Of heavy paws and lumbering
Queer stench previewing intentions
My body has never seemed softer or smaller or more desired
Except that night that it was stolen by another oversized man monster

A self-martyrized poet
A possibly imagined volume
The ugly fear ghost pulling faces on an impressionable mind
          Imprisoned by itself
Your words force the horror to sit in a chair
Tachycardia symptomatic of nothing
Your lost whiskey lips search for my ******

No need to act like some defensive, scared animal

Sew me a slip of thundercloud sky and I'll nestle the loneliness into my throat
Pen to pulse, dragging through lymph and blood
Starvation flutters can be soothed with a warm compress
          If only you can find one

Insomnia doesn't strike so much as rescue
          Against far more fearful alternatives
The mind screeches
The day commits suicide and the martyr falls on his sword

Pressing flowers and lips to poison
It oozes sweet within a skull
One day
          Someday
                    It will be too late

Trading Communion bread laughter
Pudding cups of trauma
And the shameful
          Beautiful
                    Time capsule Polaroids

Bless the Restless
Thunder for the Sleepless
For the ****** need storm clouds
          Not nightingales, you see

You are made up of your thoughts
If all my thoughts are my past and my trauma
I am nothing but my past
I am nothing but my trauma
I am swept away by what has happened to me
I become secondary
I become unimportant
I become non-existant

I do not exist

I was with a man who would bake glass shards into strawberry shortcake

I would thank him while biting into the frosting and the fragments

It became our routine

Sugar and sutures went hand in hand

Sometimes I think I craved the pain. Perhaps I earned the shredded esophagus and internal bleeding.I never had to part my lips.

He was the one who walked away after all I swallowed. I begged him to come back. Wrote poems about my hurt. He was my home.

But even I found others.

Other ways to get the glass fix.

It was never my intention to keep swallowing shards

But with a spoonful of sugar...

I still cry from all the ugly damage that's been done, by myself and by the others. With my soft tissue shredded, I see so much ugly. Sometimes I can feel my vessels thumping underneath the spidery scar tissue. Phantom pains stab and hot panic puddles in my chest like a pool of blood.

It's moments like this that I wonder if I'll ever heal.

Sometimes it takes distance to bring fury.
The way my mother boils thinking back to what my father said to his children
     When we still were children
     And she hid behind a glass of wine and solemnity.
There's a quavering fire in her voice now when we talk about his ugly fits
     replacing her quavering smallness from then.

When a lanky café singer
     who loved Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds
Stole my breath
     … and something small and soft and white from me in a Monterey
     Monterey parking lot
I cried
I hid
I scrubbed
But you had better believe
     Now?
I burn.
It wasn't my fault his hands were warped and crusted with filth.
His touching me
     did NOT make me filthy.

When the curly haired beauty
     with his biting, crinkling, smiling eyes
     that flash above his mischief mouth
Poured all his sweetness onto me
     Just to have me shocked at the bruises
     Purple and green and sudden on the heels of his softness ,
I was lost and confused
     and blamed myself for his
     swaddle-****** blows
But
I found my brimstone, hours later
     Lapping at my lips after a cardboard confrontation
Just because you have a vulnerable heart
     doesn't mean you have to be a coward.
Clearly.

     Just look at me.

I'm trying not to think about him, but I know his eyes, his mouth, his energy is there in the back of my mind.
Like a finger scraping down my spine
Like ignoring the lyrics of a song when you can feel the bass reverberating in your stomach
It's that nervous tossing and turning exhaustion after a *** of black coffee has left you buzzing
I can pretend
But who's going to buy that when you can see the mosquitoes prickling and buzzing about my cerebellum?

Sometimes I miss the abusive men in my life.
It's like the difference between having a bouquet of flowers and a broken heart... Or just a broken heart.
I miss having a sweet-faced boy sing to me, even if he assaulted me.
I miss being told I'm beautiful by the farmer's son even if he forced blow jobs on me through tears.
I miss coffee and books in the park with the boy who made me search for him in a nightgown in a snowstorm.
I miss the sweet dreams because even if they were just dreams, all I have now is nightmares.