Want to wrap me up real tight?
Under all the winding veins of mine?
Don’t you shake my miseries away,
closer to the midnights before us?

Because I recall the bow you drew,
to spin around my vacant virtues.
That I often packaged all too well,
only to become undone.

the grass is a trap for us both here
keeping us apart by sheer centimetres
each blade guarding our arms lightly
trusting our legs lying there quiet

you play me your favourite soft rock bands
i pretend to listen and to care more than myself
but all i know is your soft smirk lines
and that you can’t keep your blues off me

tell me about your “super” computers
and how all my poetry is just 1, 0, and maybes
and i’ve never believed in the binaries
or doing work for someone else

so when i take off your cut off jeans
and you ride your hands up my black cherry dress
do you feel like your operating machinery
or is it just another maybe?

To wake up as your twirled self,
not a single fragrance wrong,
making silence of your closed world.
Never questioning clarity.
To me that is most scary,
because I have never fit in skin,
I ate the feedings in one sitting.
Lived to tell my fractured beginnings.
To sing love ballads at a Wake,
wearing the ripped tights from the third date,
and you are what you take,
but I’m just learning to ask.

I was born in the northern lakes,
in a small winding wave
of unpleasant emotions.

To dream of me was a myth,
conceiving me an accident.

Yet they confide in me for comfort,
they drill me for being raw,
and take my goodness for grave abandon.

Their love is sensationalized,
asking for new leaves to shade them.

But growing up had never meant growth
and I keep on getting chopped up,
to light their dying embers.

When will I be held so deeply,
that I lose sight of my own two arms?
Sipping up my seems and loss ends,
burning last words on my hard shoulders.
Heavy that you are passive to me,
but I pull you in on each breath.

I take you in with my long strides too,
and double shot pink lemonades.
I’m sorry that I am not gentle for you,
but I’m mostly sorry that I know better.
Because if there was a way to make you love deeply,
I’d have sent you the deposit by now.

I wish I didn't care so profoundly for people,
for the hair curls and the leftover Crest Strips.
Or the unnoticeable stack of old Metro Passes
piling over your Hilary Clinton autobiography.

I wish I could tell myself to be more numb,
like I had been for the past year and a half.
Listening to my own advice and shaking voice,
instead of making time I don't have left.

I wish I could be more sure of my rocking self.
Tell you my sweet limited edition offerings,
things I didn't have three years ago.
Version one me, smaller and idealistic.

I wish I didn't come with so much precaution tape,
all the needs of someone too ****** up.
A series of trauma responses and consequential ideation,
more tickets on the dash than the cost of the car.

Why bother paying?

How my morals and ethics lay at night,
soundly waiting on the day’s break.
I do not shake for desire, or
knocking on woods for a stranger like you.

A tender birch, stiff and rounded sharply,
I’m a whaling dog to the moons closing.
The world was one before me,
and the world will be won after.