The whole concept
of adulthood
is one that seems to
trespass
from the ever-anticipated world
of the theoretical,
just to barge into your life
one night
like an uninvited drunken friend.

It will never really “hit you,”
but it’ll come **** close
the first time your aunt
offers you a glass of wine
as she and your mother
gossip frankly about
your father’s mistress—
you sip on cheap Chardonnay
and pretend to be used to the taste,
as they talk
of the man you were raised
to believe
was too virtuous to be
in debt for some glitzy
engagement ring that he
bought to restart his life
with a woman he left your mother for
shortly after the pandemonium
of a guiltless affair.
The man
whose brutishness
you were told to overlook, cradling
the sparse memories
of when he’d tuck you
too tightly into bed, or
when he’d tell you that he loved you
even though half the time
you really didn’t believe him.
The man who brought you into
the world as carelessly
as he raised you to face it,
torn apart
like every illusion that makes a child,
the ashes of which
that slip through your fingers
inevitably declare you
another bitter adult.

More wine will reveal
that your beloved father
is a controlling ******
and his relationship
with that *****
the whole family hates
only appears to be functioning
because she lets him have
all the control
he couldn’t exert on your mother,
even though you’ve had dinner with them
a couple of times
and if you had met her
under any other circumstance (even though
you’d feel like a traitor if you said it aloud)
you wouldn’t think
she was all that bad.

In red, declarative letters
I want to write to any children
I may ever bring
into this ******-up little game that
goes by the name of “life,”
that when they first gaze with awe
at the unattainable grace
with which every grown-up seems
to be navigating the world they created,
with all the pain of tax-paying and womanhood,
I want to scream
that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing either
and if at any point I try to convince you otherwise
you should tell your mother
that she’s full of ****.

There is no poem here.
I still hold onto your
words made
obsolete by time
and damage,
clutching onto them
like holy scripture
in a godless world—
reciting what now
means nothing, distorted
by the stains of sacrilege.

There was never a poem here.
We killed the prophets
weeping, kneeling
with a sinner’s grief
at the ruins
of sacred places
we’ve destroyed.

Don’t make me put a poem here.
I can’t create anything,
I only rearrange
the thoughts over-ripened
by silence
I can’t suppress.

I used to think
that those who swept
their issues ‘under the
rug’ were weak
and lacked the maturity
to address their problems.

Now, thanks to you,
I think that that anyone
who disdains
sweeping anything
under the rug—
is just lucky
to never have had any
problem
immense enough
that if their mind slips
for a second long enough
to so much as think about it,
it makes their insides curl.

Bitterly
I miss the naiveté
of not understanding
the appeal of living
at the mercy of the timer
rather than tempting
the bomb.

I have learned several
things I wish I never had to
know, from you.
Your bitterest lesson
being that only one side
of any outcome
can go about their lives
believing that fate is
deliberate enough
for any event to be
intended.

To drown out the murmurs
of doubt you’d rather dismiss
as unfounded paranoia,
you may say to yourself
that even though
you’ve recklessly left behind
a path of ruin
for everyone outside
of the delusion
to joylessly sweep up,
everything will eventually play out
in some sick game
of destiny—
naively overlooking
all the precious things
you’ve carelessly destroyed
to get yourself there.

No words will reach you. I’ve
reduced my one feeble wish
to hoping that one day
you’ll feel that same powerless rage
gut out every delicate tissue of your body
when you’re selfish enough to tell me
that there is any force in the universe
who manipulated the fabric of time
to give you one thing you want
that has thus far made
everyone else around you
needlessly miserable.

I am neither
a war trophy
and indulgence
nor a hobby.

Because I live in a country
where women are no longer
legal property of their husbands,
I am, as of current
unavailable for mail order
due to the radically progressive
notion, that took years decades centuries
to develop
that a human female is, as a matter
of fact, a human.

You can, for a vicarious experience
leer at me
like cheap jewelry
then, appalled, denounce me
as too ugly for your usage
when I give the implication
that I am sentient.
And of course, I must be modest
Lest my tantalizingly average looks
provoke some poor man
into committing a crime
against humanity.

I dated some glassy-eyed narcissist
a while back
in a regrettable period of youth,
who indulgently stated
that his three favorite things
in the world
were food, music
and women.
(Charmed to be a novelty)
And a privileged, modern woman like me
Shouldn’t mind being consumed
like a pain-staking meal prepared
especially for him,
Or replaced in his tri-annual rotation
like the discovery of a new favorite song.

I continue to be
a favorite
thing, as somehow in 2012
the term “feminist”
continues to be the social equivalent
of “kitten strangler.”
And because my father
can no longer sell me
for a flock of sheep,
I no longer need to be more human.

I used to believe
there could be somekind of
god, when I prayed
for someone like you.
Now that you’re not all
a prayer was meant to be,
maybe God’s as reckless
and as ungracefully human
as the drunk of you
and the misfit of me.

I thought I was being saved
by Peter Pan
until they evicted us
from Neverland.
We thought we could outrun
debts higher than numbers
we could count—
the bills we must pay
to Foreverland,
when childhood became some distant
part of space-time
that mocks your
hilariously brief existence,
Where life is a fluorescent-lit
doctor’s waiting room
where you twiddle your thumbs
waiting for death to get around to you.

And then there’s the fear of death,
that an optimistically counted eighty years
of ******* are annulled by the
billions of years surrounding the beginning and end
of everything in existence you will ever possibly know—
ensuring that a Nobel Prize winner and a drunk on the
street, have essentially accomplished the same ******* thing:
existence.
And so goes the life of Foreverland…

(I buried my optimism
to see what it would do—
I’ve grown no fruit
and should I be surprised
the ground’s as barren as my faith in you?
I sold it up and gave it a price—
my ignorance, my security,
And you can have the sacrifice
I make to exist in a world
I’m sure I lost everything to.
So what is it now?
What’s a mortal like me to do?)