I want to press your kisses between the pages of a book
     Like dried flowers from a June day
Your lips flutter over my cheeks, my nose
     the throbbing valley of my throat
And I'm convinced you must be a hummingbird

Each kiss feels like a bouquet
     You must have drank from the foxglove and yarrow before you
     flew to me
Your heart stutters under my palm
      Throbbing fast and full of sweetness

Tell me
     Do you understand how delightful you are?
Come
Drink the sugar water from my garden
The cottage is always a little sunnier with you around.

Being a star-crossed lover isn't all it's cracked up to be.
It's a lot of hurt.
But God,
I'd rather be hurting for him than not have him at all.

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.

Sometimes there's something jarringly disparate About the fresh sea salt fog and the beauty queen moon of the Monterey wharf.

Sometimes you need the painfully cold sludge of a Cleveland street with no sidewalks and the crying skeletons of trees to match your black coffee soul.

That first night, I pulled out all the pulp of my swollen, pumpkin heart and showed it to you.
All full and wet and messy
You cupped in your hands the filling from your own heart
Much the same as mine

And we shared a likeness
Two souls born real and rich
Out of garden patch dirt
Full of gourds and crickets

I trusted your blossoms and your stems and your weeds
But you stowed it all away as suddenly as you came
And I'm still standing here
With all my stringy
Sopping soul
Exposed.

If I could,
I'd blow away on my magic wishing ****,
But there are no dandelions near me.
There's no shooting stars
No guardian angels
and equally enigmatic and mystical,
No one who loves me.
I wish I could go back to tell the little girl I used to be that everything gets better.
That her wishes came true and her hope in those magic sunshine flowers well placed
But I hate a liar.
I couldn't do that to myself.

We'll wash our hearts with coffee until they become the color of the swirling liquid earth.

They'll breathe in the aroma and anoint  themselves with the curls of richness
     Dancing an escape from the brim of the mugs.

We'll pray to the weathered hands that harvested the beans that even in the biting briskness and cowardly violence of this world
     We may become warm and hearty and nurturing      
          like that with which we fill our cups.

How gently the rains of your face fall upon me. How sweet the dew of each kiss. How nourishing your body. Your chest and torso, broken bread. Your scent coils and creeps from you and I, buried in your crevices, drink it in. The intimacy of kissing your curls and the delicacy of meeting your lips. They all fill me. Sustain me.

I feel as though
I've been letting red wine pass through my lips
Tasting only it's bitterness and none of it's beautiful numb

I've been crunching on cardboard that I've mistaken for holy
communion
And everyone else is too ashamed for my sake to call me a fool

I've been in a fevered, drugged up half dream, unable to escape the waking world and never having touched a pill

My whole perception is teetering and careening
Seasick between inability to escape, and everything feeling unnervingly too real

But nothing is beautiful in this fairy land.

Art might be beautiful as long as it's true.
I might hope I'm Sylvia Plath.
But at the end of the day I'm just an emotional wreck hoping my neurosis sounds like poems.

I swallowed a pebble in a garden today. It was hard and thick and the graininess of it scraped against my teeth. I ***** the stones back up, shiny with bile. Perhaps I'm just tired.

I retch on cue and he smiles

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.

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.

Calling burns.
Sunset leaks from my lips at the touch of your name.
Orange sky fills my throat and belly and soft wisps of clouds puff beside my Cupid's bow.
You are the glow brimming along the edges of a dark world.
The precipice of peace and fire, tickling the jagged upcroppings on the horizon.
Melted sunshine, you overflow.
Liquid wax and flowers.
Drips.
Passes between our lips.
You are treacherously beautiful
My tragic aubade.

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

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

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