One day, I will leave this world.
The energy that pumps through me will dissipate;
The body I know will begin to rot and decay;
The thoughts and emotions I feel now,
with great urgency and severity,
gone.

The people I love will put me in the ground,
to cover the stench of my rotting corpse;
They will visit 'me' once a year with obligatory tears in their eyes.
They will auction off all of my personal belongings,
All the things I cherished and valued;
To look upon them will be 'too much'.

Slowly I will fade from their memories:
My personality;
My laugh;
My smile;
The way I held my face when I was concentrating really hard.
All the little things that make me me, forgotten;
Like I never existed at all.

In their loneliest moments, perhaps, they will remember me.
Not the real me, of course;
Just my name attached to a sort of vague concept of death,
An idea of what it is to no longer exist;
My memory will serve to give them a sense of their own mortality;
An occasionally present reminder that they too, one day, will die.

Editing my thoughts;
A spoonful of porridge in one hand,
a pen in the other

My two main forms of sustenance;
One for the body,
The other the mind

A bite turns into a meal,
A written word into an expression of 'soul'.
The primordial biological urge is constant

Without the food I would not have the strength to pick up the pen;
Without the pen I would have no desire to eat.
Their unison might be the only thing keeping me in motion

Long may it go on.

She's deluded to see what's within.
The lies she mirrored to what she believed.
Truth conceit in ways to bleed,
The fire that ignites the dark that breathes.
Moulded for greatness, to honour the heir to the throne.
But the kingdom has been long gone and doomed.
She hummed the lullaby that father said will never die,
"As long you keep humming in the darkest of nights,
Hope will light and brazen through"
Her eyes mimics emerald stones that bejewelled men that gazed.
They faze only to feast their heart's content
"Greed and power will only consume deranged men"
Her amity will shine through.
Refracting rays of hope to those in need
Rooted to her veins, her mettle heart
Will protect her through any storm.
The evil that lurks from within will perish.
**Once again,
She will triumph through
The kingdom will once again rise to greatness
And relinquish every darkness that resides

you never liked the sun touching your face.
you wanted the night. its dark hiding your flaws.
you wanted to cry
but you were flaccid, like a wilted flower.
you wanted to love
but your blood tasted of running,
running, running.
because he told you to lie down,
and for a second you were hesitant.
you felt him hard between your legs,
but he still stopped when the alarm*
went off.

lightly child. lightly.
move your feet lightly. touch your memories gently.
because he told you how he and his mother never talked,
and you closed your eyes when he said
men should not hurt their wives.
lightly child, lightly.
you never liked the sun.
the way the rays exposed your skin to the world.
you wanted to sway.
you wanted to burn.
he never bothered to keep in touch
but you still think of him now and then.

you thought you would burst
from all these ugly feelings
but you held the explosion so tight
it melted inside your bog of depression.
in the midst of your sadness,
you cannot help but think about  
him,
her,
about the night that concealed all your flaws.
and you know that you are young
and you have so much time
to make things better.

you know,
and you are trying
just to leave your bed,
just to hold your legs back from running into the roads,
just to keep your head above the sea.

so love, draw back the curtains and
close your eyes.
*you never liked the sun touching your face.

This feels like coming home from the moon
the way ghosts do. Do not tell me you love me
on the days that you don’t. Winters here are
far too heavy with snow, make me feel sick
inside. I will always remember sleeping with
you beneath your comforter, and I will always
hate it. We stick our fingers into slices of lemon.
When we pull them out, we see blood. This belongs
to us. I am sorry, but I am not small enough to faint.
I am sorry, but I am terrified of the boys who
lock their doors & love their mothers without realizing
what it is that they are doing.

(My fingers won’t stop growing like shells!
My fingers won’t stop growing,

but without water, just with food!)*

As I stand in this bathroom stall
in this congested church
I can’t stop thinking
about how much I hate my fingers, about how much larger
they suddenly seem. This stall is stained
in blood and *****
and graffiti that reads, “girls day 11/13/14.”
Nothing seems so sad and so dry as this stall does.

I think of you sitting in the pew
with your hand on the thigh of the girl
whose hair is sheared short as though
it were Judgment Day and she were an apple tree,
its branches cut into small, fragile pieces.

On Judgment Day
my grandfather died
and everybody in my family
and everybody in my town
went to the funeral

except for me

who cried
and cried and cried

and I’m still crying

for the way his skin used to fold over
like a moon violent in its softness:

1. he’s a dead man with a body like a fish
who has just ripped off its scales.

2. he’s a dead man who before he died liked to stand
on top of the one cliff that looks out onto town  
and yell, “I will not spill my guts!”
But he died anyway.

Would I be lying if I said I loved my grandfather? Would I be lying
if I told you who I loved?

Here: I will tell you who I love, for a dare (triple doggy dare style)
Here: this is an experiment
Here: on Judgment Day (on the day my grandfather died)
we’re all experiments; we’re all experimenting with those we love
in terms of the way we kiss them:

we go into the woods
just to touch each other’s chests.

We lie on tops of rocks and I kiss you
as though I still need more fat on my huge body.

My flesh is freshly skinned, because of my father’s
nails. My father is brushing out the tangles in my

hair. He is used to the brushing, he says, because he
used to have a sister. I don’t think to ask him where

his sister is now, although I picture her with hair
perfectly tangled, like an extended family, like ancestry.

My family tree is knotted and webbed, but every member
has a place, and if you’re lucky, a purpose. My mother’s

purpose is to cook soup for the Passover Seder. I picture
Passover as ****** as when the planets forget to flash

across the sky. This happens. I have seen it the way I’ve
seen a boy look at me from across a wooden table.

The boy feels like my cousin, even though he is not my
cousin. He just happens to have a gaze that calculates,

like the gazes of the old men that sit together in my town,
on the corner of the two streets whose names I can never

remember. When I walk by them I make sure to shuffle my
feet even quicker than I usually do, because I want to forget

about my body. I don’t look in mirrors anymore. I don’t even
look into my favorite lake anymore. The way it wrinkles together

hurts as much as my father’s nails do: my father’s nails against
my scalp and against my skin. My father picking me up out of the bath.

I am still wearing my organs. I don’t think I’m three years old anymore,
but I’m not quite sure. I can never remember what it is like to age.

(when the first bird crashes & dies into a fainting sun
a second bird comes to take over the first bird’s place.)

(songs about mountains are the most important)*

i wonder if birds listen to mountains, if they think
about mountains. do you think
about mountains?
in the dead of summer
(death of july)
the two of us climbed a mountain
& you saw a snake
& i vomited.
it was then, after i vomited,
that you started to become
less & less the boy
with a face like sweet fabric,

there was this way
in which we tied ourselves together
dangerously to your bedpost
for an entire year.
you were good for something
but don’t ask me exactly what.

i want to make a friend soon, who also
has trouble with missing
& very much not missing
a boy:
hello, friend!
if you ever want to ride a carousel,
you can!
come with me.
we’ll claim two horses as our own,
forget that they ever belonged
to those who touched our bodies unapologetically.