The eternally dry patch of skin
Right above your elbow

The creased duvet
A sea of olive silk

The toughest pill to swallow
Better taken by mouth

Bright plum lips
Bitter to the taste
Soured and untouched
Sweetheart angel baby divine
Salvaged by time

A little bit of sugar
A little bit of salt
A little sip of red wine

Sweetheart angel baby you're so fine
Come on
Pucker up
Let's see you shine

Do you want her on a stake? A skewer? A fig tree?
See?
She can be yours and yours and yours and even mine

And she wants you so bad it hurts to breathe
And she wants you so bad it hurts to breathe
And she wants you so bad
It hurts
To breathe
Religiously, religiously, religiously

6 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms
Ants, in all of them

New sofa, new perfume
Still, I see the holes in the walls

Tall ceilings, silver spoon
Mildewy, a faucet that only runs warm

A carton of milk in the fridge,
Spilt over,
drip drip dripping into a sour puddle
it soaks through the floorboards
pungent, cutting through the air
I hear it as you hold the door open

Come again
But please,
Leave soon

Legs blown off
Your reflection stands in the corner
Growing heavy
Growing tired
Bursting out of your ratty car
Running through that barren field with bombs dropping out of your mouth
Cheeks swollen

I drive the screwdriver through my own heart and
Stuff the open wound with my fist and
Swaddle myself in threadbare cloth and
Get to work,
Gathering up the pins to
Try and stitch my skin back together again.

Looking up at me with dandelion glass baubles for eyes,
Say, "What about tomorrow?"
I shake my head down at you from my magnificent children's playset
My neck cracks when I **** it to the side
I whisper in singsong,
"I think we should stop."

Six children and a suburban home
Don't it hurt you to see me like this?
One of yours, and still so alone?

First daughter assigned third wife
I've done it all wrong again,
Haven't I?

Sprawled all across this spiky green turf
Drinking up the merciless sunshine
Trying to keep it down

Weeping about my friend's father
Watching for a hint of remorse in your stern frown
I wait for you to ask for my forgiveness
Go on, ask
Let me for once be the one to deny

In this drafty bedside cavern
I lay with my feet up against the wall
tap tap tap
Held up over my hard head
Resting against the hard ground
Back here, where my pillow is my headstone
This palace is a burden,
Utterly insufferably forgiving.

Fantasy hits the ceiling
A dream shot from my mind
CRACK
Moonlight shines through the cave's newborn fissures
Useless to me
Uselessly groveling under shadowy sheets of sky  
I need this sterile fluorescent light.

It dances across my face
pitter patter pitter patter
It drops into my eyes,
Falls into the chasm between my lips
Cold and reeking of rot
Cold and tasting of an invasive species of mildew
I swallow, choking back tears
I eat it
It eats back.

The realizations smarts me in the chest
The horrifying transparency falls out from under my teeth
Without the clash, I am lifeless
Left crippled
Watching it crawl away
Untouched
Through blackened eyes
Grizzly and ugly and growling
I have never been beautiful enough to be art
I have never been gifted enough
To make an art of it,
My circumstance
Curled up in my work clothes on soundproof sheets
Preparing for The Slumber

I wake up without you
Lying away from me won't solve your problems
Not even on your cold asphalt bed
Your mechanical graveyard covers twisted tight around you

Rain rinses your wounds
The blood is washed away
A river flowing into my room
I don't recognize you, sitting in the corner

Watch my chest heave with silent sobs
Picturing your gnarled face
I don't sleep
I go to bed with you still gone

Lowlife
I crept out from under your ventricles
Cut out
From your glucosamine thoughts
Dripping with mucus, dripping with sap
Sugary sweet
Let me ease your pain
Let me rinse off your feet

You never did manage to see
The final nail on the casket nor
The 9 years it has taken me
To unweave it from my crown of thorns

You say you shout you scream
You could not have foretold
The bullet I held clenched between my teeth
Heavy to the touch, heavy and unbearably cold
Not as I my mouth became a steal barrel,
Not as it came racing out
Not as it came to meet your creased forehead's third fold

I shake with loss
I shiver with relief
My silver armor melts away and evaporates into flesh
The life you had left ahead of you was anyway brief
Unlike the fruits you stole from my long life that once lay ahead of me
An ugly, loud, rampant, hobbling thief

I leave my pills to you
For all the times I failed
Trying bleed your blood out from my wrists
Bullet blown, skeletons thrown, casket nailed
I walk back up the stairs light as a feather
A crested crow, my wings unfurled, a crested crow unveiled

You glare into the lens with smoldering eyes
Your ghost
A fiery whisp of your soul
Hungry and straining to yank itself out from under your clenched jaw
Bite down hard
Watch the blood spill from your stone tongue
Into my plastic solo cup
Your tooth floats to the top
Quickly swarmed by genial bubbles
Mocking our leaden embrace
Pop pop pop
We fall to the floor
Breaking our bones in a fit of giggles

Screaming baby on your end of the line
My static is your lullaby
The telephone is cradled against my chin
The cord is wrapped taut around my neck
I wait to rest my head against your phantom shoulder
Press my lips against the mouthpiece
Begging you to pull the trigger

Rocking myself to sleep slumped on the sticky linoleum floor,
The plug pulls off its socket with a pop
My vision grows dark
My song bellows through the air, it
Swallows the walls that keep us apart

Take me out
onto the roller rink,
where, under the neon disco ball, everything turns
pink and hazy

Make me out
to be your in-line princess,
your ribbon-bred baby

Spin me 'round and 'round
drivin' me crazy crazy crazy

Bring me to my knees
sorry, you whispered to me
"oopsie-daisy"

Drop me to the floor
my crustacean legs
fold crooked underneath me like a crab
i skip back onto the tips of my toes
i cover up quick like a lady

Still, I wait patiently for more
Still, spinning under these hazy neon lights
looking for someone new again,
looking for somewhere else to score.

I watched you turn young again
Lost in the supermarket
Searching for a place to be
Searching for my hand to hold

I watched my skin turn old and pale against the steering wheel
The way back home is long and
quiet and
all dirt road

Wise girl turned wiser
Wise girl turned free
Perhaps too gone to be my girl
Still, she returns to me

What did you want me to do with your empty casket after I clawed through the cold cemetery dirt in search of you?
A mad rabbit on its hind legs. I was a rabbit gone mad with inanity;

In the dark, I am massive; a crouched heap.

Twitch twitch twitch,
Shudder shudder shudder.

I scrape the weeds out from under my fingernails with my teeth.
Sweet chloroform tainted by a sick, chemical sheen.
The hole looms between my shadow and me. The hole sticks out from underneath.

Will you whisper to me while I weep?
Your words carried by sheets of sleet,
Bite the tip of my nose, caress the apples of my cheeks.
Cradle me in your barren arms, lull me to sleep.

Burrow burrow burrow,
Reap reap reap.

Trees bleed crimson in protest
Before the wind drowns out their last, dying breath.
I walk through the barren orchard,
Marveling at their grand, glimmering display of defeat;
Their bodies torn apart by the sky's frosty breath.
I am but a lone red blade dancing out
stamping out
my frail stem.
A fiery ballerina on ecstasy.

You are the diseased soil in which these doomed seeds were sown,

You are the poison tree from which these evil apples dropped,

And you are the acid rain that raises the earthworms from their
underground abodes
and eats

eats

eats away.

You planted and preened the seed you destroyed.
Your midday whispers running up my legs;
You left behind a trail of innocent tickles that,
In the empty evening air,
Curdled into a sinister, aching itch.
You left my ankles and the insides of my knees abandoned to snap down on a mosquito
In one swift, final bark.

My thighs still sting.

step once
sit down
stand up
spin around

blink twice
tap thrice
turn that frown upside down!

cross your fingers
cross your legs
curl up
shut down

look left
                                                                                                    look right
run fast faster fast as your little legs will fly you
through the night

throw up
break down
blow up
find it fright it flight it fight it fist it twist it pop it smash it burn it **** it
stomp it out

scream

now go to sleep

Every morning I wake up blind.
Bask in my reflection, I feel like hot **** I feel like fresh hell
I feel fine.
I want to strip my skin clean;
Tear off tissue like toilet paper spill blood red like wine
I want to stop this beating heart every
Every night but ohh
I just haven't got the ******* time.
Instead, I smother myself in your covers,
And you watch as I try and pick ants,
One by one
by one by one
Out my spine
And there are none to be found nothing to find.
I could've sworn I put them there myself, but who knows?
Every morning
I wake up blind.

You aren't as good of a person as you think
And I am not as bad of a person
as you have made me think

High on acid with steam-filled lungs;
I call my poor mother and tell her I'm fine,
I fetch my good brother and tell him to bring me the gun.

Pepper runs deep in my veins.
I am speed,
Salty, light, and ever so gent-
-ly freckled.
Slip through your fingers like time and
Twist myself around some others like twine
Climb inside,
Spill a bottle of cheap wine,
**** yourself dry
Day and day again
Down till you die

I'm going to trace you through your IP address
She tells us
I'm going to fine you for a terrorist action,
A threat.
She might have gotten away with it
Because I'm of the Islamic faith
And we get that
All the time
But hey,
I don't think she checked my age,
Don't think
She knows I have never flown on a plane.
I'm not sure she
Speaks English,
Actually.
Despite fascist points of view.
Because Suzy Belinky, dear
What you pulled up is a tweet
And ******,
Your condition,
Is an STD,
Not my fault.

Suzanne Berlinsky has ******.
That's right, you heard it all
Here.

She hasn't got any friends
Because she smells so bad
But if she did,
We'd ask her how Suzy smells
And her friends would tell us
How bad Suzy smells.

Suzanne Berlinsky has ******.
A fright, I'm sure
For the ghosts around her.

If you smelt Suzy you too,
Would perish.
That's why Suzy's got no friends
Because she smells so,
So sickening.
And she has ******.

Suzanna Berlinsky has ******.
And that's all for tonight, I'm
Afraid.

Haven't seen him smile right in
Quite the while but I know
He's a smart boy, so he must know
How to escape his little slump.

Peter does not know
The true size of his slump.
Only that She's got
A soft, pooling belly under
Plumes of purple smoke
Floating over her wax *******;
Perfect for forgetting.

He's trying to breathe through cold drizzle
Photosynthesize through linen tarp
I say he chooses not to leave the rain
And he nods.

His lover has the saddest eyes
A misty grey under a heavy blue
And he’ll see her again at sunrise.

Their love some seem to despise
Thinking of it as a ****** taboo
His lover has the saddest eyes

Though no one seems to empathize
No one’s aware of their little rendezvous
And he’ll see her again at sunrise.

He knows she’ll be hidden under a clever disguise
But he won’t confuse her with just another heart’s statue
His lover has the saddest eyes.

You couldn't convince him of your lies
Of his leman his desire you could not subdue
And he’ll see her again at sunrise.

Love her until their hellos become goodbyes
From the moment he’d set eyes on her to his final adieu
His lover has the saddest eyes
And see her again at sunrise

You cannot blame me
For when your stomach folds
If you keep coming
To my forlorn tree,
Starving.
Not when the poor man's fruit-bearing bush
Is just the other way
Within the same, short walking distance

I'm going to
Throw our whole book
Into the river
And drown it with my screams

I am going to
Hope
It floats away
With nothing more than ****** streams

I am going to
Jump into the water myself then,
I am going to plummet and pray
That the waves are struck by lightning,
Setting fire to my body, our book,
Both of our dreams.

Have another drink,
Why don't you?
Take another sip?
The bartender's watching us closely but
If I give him a hearty enough tip
He'll leave us be
And we can slip
Down to the train tracks
Like our slurred words.

We won't make love but we'll
Lay on the mercury speckled rails
Singing our heads off,
Drinking some more ail till
The horn blares and
The insides of our eyes pool with gaudy lights from
Heaven above

And we're rolled to bits,
Leaving nothing behind but a trail
Of blood and
The heavenly light of tails.

1 am 06 and
My mother's just called the police on my
Daddy for hitting her in the face
'Cause he didn't like the food today.

1t
Doesn't come as too much of a surprise
They've been yelling all-day
They've been yelling every day.

1 am jotting it
All down in a little notebook, without
Lines because 1 want to practice my
Straight hand.

No one else in
My little 1st-grade class has a mother
Calling the police on their daddy
For hitting their mother in the face.

That is why 1 am special.

My Dearest Molly Anne,
I hope you are now satisfied
With the sinking bags under my eyes and
The empty gap between my thighs, I hope
You know I can no longer sleep
Without you to rock me through the slow-rolling lake,
And sing your song of a thousand sheep.
You've started throwing
Thick red waves into my sink and
Messed with my ability to think and
Darling, you pull me
Under miles and miles of freezing sea
And you take and you take,
Never satisfied.

Why is the music industry showered in riches while
Doctors and nurses are left in ditches though
They save lives and music, you--
Well, I suppose music saves lives too but
Oh, not mine.
No, no, no, see I
'm
On a stage but they've all got their eyes shut and
Their heads are swaying side to side but Oh!
Oh, oh oh no I see a
Nother gay man hanging by the church's steeple and I
Don't think I've ever seen this many angry white people
And I'm not sure why no one's being called,
Maybe it's as it always is, the rich are bored and
The poor are just another board game to them but I yell:
"People! Look over there there's a
Man in need, look close and you can see they've even killed
The crown of flowers in his hair" But
No one looks, no one gives a single care.
Not when they're all dying, no,
Not when there's no cure, only distraction
Dialing the speed back on a train destined to tumble off a cliff see
Nothing matters
When everyone's dying.