Oh! the glorious sails rising on the breeze
I’ve come this time to watch
and not be seen

They want me to be soft.
They want me to bend under the strength on their hands, under the pressure of my curated thoughts. I feel like I am dying under the weight of it all. Every day I wake up and wish I were dead, but then I accept that I am not and realize there is nothing else to do but go on and so I go on, shuffling my feet along the same roads of everyone before. Along the same roads they have paved for me, entrenched me in.
I want me to be soft, too, but it seems to come at a price. The others tell me that hard women get **** done. The others keep saying that I can be the same and more, that I carry the armpit of the women before me, that I can be just as strong as THEM.
I want to be soft and safe.
I have been so hard, so calcified for so long, that my knees are forever creaking and my wrists are always sore. I know that I am hard. I know the power it brings.
I want to be soft.
I want to feel the things I’ve been deprived of for so ******* long. These pretty blondes around me are so thin you’d think the wind would break them. I want to be like them. Happy? Soft? Cashmere. Let me experience the luxury of living in a padded world.

Shatter me? do it and you’ll suffocate under the pieces of me, under the pieces of me that you wish you could eradicate. You do not like me tall you do not like me standing you do not like me in your way when I’m walking my own line. Shatter ME? you’ll die trying.  I’ve been torn apart before, I know how this goes. Flexibility has kept me alive while we sit in your stagnant world. Shatter me. I’ll only become a greater beast.

The mundane has become the new strange while the old strange is just a page ripped out of a journal burned years ago;
The ashes of which trace lines in a face it's taken years of one-sided mirror conversations to come to recognize as your own.
The past is a blanket that's been ripped off its clothespins by winds that blow across some place you can't remember living in.

It was never all that comfortable to begin with anyway.

you sunburn like antarctic summer.  eyesglazed inside

+plastic
+basins  

catch it like big pores casting texture from raking angles
you glacier
spark white against cobalt glass

silver ring
oil skin
metal pen
[dishes in the sink/everything]

we skitter mouse-long into clanking radiator breaths,
tongue// wrapt around those teeth
                                    like the wet sweater sleeves heavy at your side.
sinking into  auditorium :  my warm blanket full of eyes,
the floorboards chewing on our soles.(as) i scuff your mute fingers
against my cathedral face  
"home" is quaking like stones w/o oceans,
cereal boxes with no prize inside,
like a sudden impulse to buzz your head
.
we cough up a wish, like a cat's superstition:
proto - prayer :
a mammal recognizing its own thoughts as a distinct
operation,
i correct the errors in your dividing cells like [tearing japanese paper.]
ourreligion is the opposite of problem solving.we disprove
ourselves/in order to   grow.
[and stagnate on faith alone]

i'd rather worship myself for knowing i could

we give thanks : for the grip that tears you away from my
handhold

he, white slice of fingernail
he, like  splinters

the way the light reaches

the free jazz of other peoples' suns colliding out there-
freezing against
                         my low cheeked
                         face

standing cold and dumb in
      december's hairline    _
(the )moon, as thin as skin   .
and i, thinner