Hello, I'm not doing very well,
I think to myself.
I'd like to tell
You but my every apple, every cell,
Has been gutted and cored and you look so whole,
So pretty, such glow.
Hello? You're so nice on the eyes that
I never want you to know
The way I bleed through a shattered heart because these shards
Would poke holes
Through your sweet, sugar-glass wings,
Wings that could be delightfully clipped and pinned in a glass box
But I'd like to see you fly
Because it’d peal my dying, gutted mind from
All the empty apples inside
This holed up soul.

She says,
"You should know, dear
"The world doesn't stutter when it walks,
"Not the way you
"Stumble through your thoughts." And
I wish I could untie
The spool of my mind
But I
Keep feeding it thread,
Hoping it will spill out my mouth in
A rainbow scarf

Momma what’s a life in shadows?
She asks the moon, because momma’s long gone.
Are they pretty, all faceless and shifting?
Or are they h a z y ?
Does the running woman in the rain believe herself a bird?
Where’s her flock momma?
Is she l o n e l y ?
Lost about the stone’s pure grain and glory?
I’m sorry you’ve got
To share yours with the sun.
Does he know, momma?
Does the sun know
About the shadows?
Maybe if he’d come down
He could keep them c o m p a n y.
I would
If I could.
Momma what’s a life in shadows?

I
Cannot cry on my own.
Sadness will pour through my pores but
My eyes stay dry which is why
I keep a list of songs,
3 pages long,
To which I pretend to relate,
To which I scream and let dry sobs ricochet
In my chest.
It's much like permission, because I've told myself--
I have been told
--That I am not sad.
That I do not cry, there is nothing to cry about.
Not the empty wounds in my soul, not the hole in my heart.
Compared to the rest, I don't have it too bad.
See I cannot cry on my own.
So I weep through another, and I know it hurts
The both of us
But without the outlet, I feel I might die so, so horribly.
And I've got to survive
To tell a story, my empty story, that will awe the rest.

The manic pixie dream girl wouldn't fall for you
So you fell for the poisonous girl in the red dress instead,
Thinking they were the same.
And they're quite similar, really, all mad and free.
But the difference between pixie dream girl and me
Is that she is sweet.
She'll do what she wants: She might love you, she might leave you.
Gently. Softly.
I am not so sweet, not so gentle, not so soft.
I will leave you, I won't love you, and you will come crawling back.
I want you to love me until you cry
And I want you to cry for me like a dying man for breath,
A starving man for a meal,
A soaked man for the sun,
And a deserted man for rain and
Even then
I'll leave you again, crawling through the sand.
All that, just because I can.

Dandelion
Seeds
Flock through the sky like
Silky little faeries and he knows he’s
Looking out a window when he longs
To be out
Side-- lying side by side with the flower beds that he wished existed out
Side of his mind There’s a
A little pecking that tells him the clock is
Going tick
Tock
Tick
Tock tick ticktick
Like the patter of rain against a mound of
Wet
Dirt
On which he’d
Like to sing his song---
His Haywire Song,
When the drizzle cast
Rainbows on the chipped auburn wood
Through the gold that pooled
In the pocket
Of shining sky, and he’d write without
Worry of the breeze that might run its fingers through the pages
Of his book and he’d smile through the sweat for
Three months if only he
Weren’t
So anxious of its end.

Honey, I hope
You never know
How I long to love you
Back.