You are
delicious
And I am
greedy.
You are
generous
And I am
needy.
You are
experienced
And I am
learning.
You are
flammable
And I am
burning.

you had birds in your mouth and sunlight dripping from your eyelashes.
i promised i wouldn't speak if you wouldn't change faces twice an hour.
we made conversation under a tree and sleep-walked through your kitchen.
i couldn't stare for your poetry disguised as fingers, always moved your hands.

i opened your window and slid to the street, took a walk with the recycling.
my hands looked tired the next morning, and you wouldn't take no.
when the lights fell asleep, we ran for the boats and slipped into the water.
the moon smiled and pulled us apart, i never matched your shoes again.

The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.

i.

a girl once told me that sad people close their eyes
so they do not see the world anymore,
and that i should count sheep when i cannot fall
asleep and that her favourite flowers were azaleas.


she also told me that she keeps scabs
on her knees, and on sundays
she comes to me with bleeding wrists.


another girl paints artifice out
of artlessness and human flesh. she
has scalpels for arms and a tempest on
her thighs and she lives in the
mirror and when i blow



ii.


on her i understand, through air condensation
and self- anathema, that i am the girl that she  
de-fleshed maliciously herself, slit out of the cardboard
and painted out in artifice and artlessness and


i am the girl that once told another girl to ******* cut
her arm off and i meant it so she would not hurt herself
again because


i am the kind of the girl with scabs on the bone
of her halo, because i believe halos are made of
nothing but cartilage and helium bones, and a heart
as transparent as a vampire and its split opened like a monarch
butterfly, ******* off


azaleas or malarias or other pathogens
giving infants cancerous proclivities and my eyes are
swollen in mauve from divestiture because i know too well


those sheep won't jump over the fence
anymore because they have been ****** raw
in the *** by inhumane prospensity and i understand that


sad people close their eyes because it reminds them of death.




iii.


death is a scientist that theorises the
duality of elusive particles in artificial marrows
and mediocre decolourised melancholia in discordance,
it is the finger forced into our tiny vein and
it is nothing but a dream within a dream


but i could care less and this poem
is not about death, it is about how i
like ugly girls and how i'm just sorry
that i do not taste as corrosive
as the bleach in her mouth.




iv.


when people are dying, they almost sound poetic.




v.


i am the girl humanised by ribbons of
flesh and bile and atrocity, and i am the girl who
understands that a 'broken heart' is
nothing but a metaphor for utter
disappointment.  



i am the sleep that dreams long for,
hope for, phlebotomise for
  
and i am bitter.




vi.


i am bitter because i will not believe in sundays
unless one day, fortuitously, the sun osscilates,
in the most serene of all mannerisms, down the earth
and kills us all.


i am bitter because semantics does not authenticate
the abiding human apathy towards death
and all the flowers in her hair.


i am bitter because people only read my poetry
because they think it is about them.


i am bitter because of other horrible
reasons that words can simply not express.


vii.

ugly girls are always prettier
because god loves ugly
girls, because he ***** them harder than the
rest,  and because they know how to
make others feel ugly.