Go to sleep
pretend to sleep
stare at a wall and call it sleep
Turn on the ipod
and turn out the light
look at the curtains:
a sliver of night.
The street light's glow
on the week-old ice sheet
looks orange and lurid,
a sun with no heat.
Bang on a pillow
scream at the pillow
wishing for the release of crying in said pillow
Be still
it is late
phantoms glare from the ceiling
demons: memories, sadness, hate.
Close the curtains
and sail away from here
the floorboards are icebergs
on an ocean of fear.
The figures are back
the misery is back
the desire to run very far and very fast
                                                                  is back

I know everything about
tobacco.
Cancer stats,
asthma stats,
usage rates among teens
tweens
and young adults.
Give me five minutes
and you can have a list of the taxes on tobacco
arranged by state
(alphabetical or by rank?)
and a dozen studies that all say
"smoke up, Johnny, it's good for you!"

Data is my nicotine and I am hooked.

We're surrounded by
Smoke, Lies, and the Nanny State
and no one gives a ****.
Follow the rules
and hide your smoke,
your *****,
and keep away
from the kids.
Carcinogens in hot dogs
are all well and good
because there's
"nutritional value"
but you can't eat a cigarette.

Eat your lies and **** your e-cigarette like a lollipop because that's the cool thing these days.

My shirt today is a hand-me-down
from my grandmother
on my mother's side
who likely wore it better that I.

I can so easily picture her,
in the giant house on the coast of Maine with
flowerbeds and
the ocean and
seagulls hopping over the ashtray
that she and Grandpa share.
I can see her,
standing on the fluffy sheepskin rug
before a mirror (twice as tall as she and half the breadth of the room)
and reaching down
to the antique drawers below,
wincing at an ache not yet forgotten in the morning's pills
as she retrieves the shirt at random.

It's a pretty enough shirt-
white with thin black stripes
running horizontal most of the way up.
Sleeves hang to the elbows-
and hang they would off her palsied, wrinkled frame-
and the whole thing is thin,
light,
screaming "old lady."

I bet,
as she sat down alone at her dining room table,
eating her marmalade on an English muffin,
that she didn't slave over
the fact that she was wearing sweatpants
or the fact that she was wearing the same pink slippers
that she's had for twenty years.
I bet
that when her husband came down
for his toast with butter and raspberry jam,
they didn't speak a word,
that he didn't notice her shirt
(which is much like any other of her garments).

Was that the moment?
The moment she decided
that with her next letter she would send this shirt,
with a sticky note on it,
"For Abby."
Or was it later,
as she sat with a book she'd read a dozen times
(and was too old to see the print besides),
smoking a cigarette
and watching the tide recede?
Did this shirt walk
through the grocery store parking lot
in search of
laundry soap and 2% milk
when she chanced upon the dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets
and thought of me?

I guess we'll never know.

"Nvm"
are three
                                                               3
little
         l
          e
           t
            t
             e
              r
               s

that
never cease
to ****
me
                      o
                    f
                  f

Take me up to Maine, up to Nanny and Grandpa's house.  Take me out to their dock at the bottom of their sloping back yard with its perfectly manicured glass, down the aluminum walkway that's too steep for Grandpa to walk down anymore at high tide.  Take me to the dark-stained, thickly varnished wooden planks that we fished off of at dawn and went boating from at lunch and here we dangled our toes in the salty ocean before dinner.  Take me there to die.
                But not yet.
Wait till the summer, when monarch butterflies alight upon the hollow railings that you always tell me not to hang off of.  Wait till the end of June, when the heat of summer is such that garden snakes sun themselves on the rocks that lazy waves sidle up to in the gentlest of breezes.
                And when we get there, wait for me to be ready.
Let me undress and show you the bones that will, by then, stick out from me at every angle.  Let me show you the lines that you thought were from the cats in the fading light of a Thursday sunset (because Thursday is my night) and let me show you that you were wrong about me.
                  Tie a heave chain 'round my waist.  I promise that I will be thin so it doesn't take much length, and you'll want to cinch it tight like the belt you say I wear wrong so it doesn't slip off.  Weigh me down with the skillets that are never clean enough.  Padlock to the metal links the books that were my escape till you took them; I won't care now if they get ruined.
                 There we will stand, eye to eye, as orange sunlight contrasts with the elegant starlight as the night is revealed to us.
I will set my glasses down far away from the water's edge lest they fall off and be lost forever in the tangles of seaweed swaying softly beneath our feet.  Then, for the last time, pick me up.  You will see, then, how I've faded to nothing against your ever-critical gaze.  For the last time throw me off the dock and for the first time I do not struggle to stay dry.
                   The night I made this jump thirty-seven times on a dare and a whim, the arctic water never ceased to sting as bare skin met briny sea.  On this one occasion, this one last occasion, I will feel instead the welcoming warmth of summer that is my last season, taking me in with a comforting finality.
Collect my clothes; in a heap too untidy for you to look at will be a grimy green t-shirt and dusty old shorts.  Take my glasses too, and go home.
I'll be fine.

It's being told to go to bed at three in the morning.
It's a stained mug of coffee,
refilled again as you wonder,
"When did I last eat?"
and then carried into your room,
sat next to a bag of chips and a used-up pen.
It's walking into school the week before and slipping into a haze of equations and dates.
It's a binder full of papers that you swear you just cleaned out,
notes on topics you've forgotten,
memos from the principal about events long gone
which you read because they're a distraction.
It's sprinting home because a second spent away from your books is a second wasted.
It's finally getting home and crying out,
"Who gives a ****!"
as you stare at an equation
for the flight path of a spherical chicken,
for the synthesis of some chemical from some other chemicals.
It's missed club meetings and missed socialization.
It's misery in it's purest form.
It *****.