Your hand under mine-
your palm carefully laid out on my knee,
so gingerly, so fragile-
the heat that blossoms from it is wonderful.
I don't love you, not yet.
But I love the way your bones feel under my palm,
knitted white
under stretched skin.
And I love your hand, larger than mine,
over my knee, not quite sure whether you want it to stay yet;
not quite sure whether you want to stay yet.

I may love you just yet.

there are two girls on the rooftop
and on the horizon before them, the sun bows down
red.
it will not touch them with its rays.
it dares not.

i always wanted to be a killer, the first girl says,
head turned to look over her shoulder,
all that blood, ha ha ha ha.
oh? the second girl raises her eyebrows.
i wanted to be a doctor.
imagine, all that flesh and skin and bone. crunch crunch.
the first girl giggles. i'm a regular da vinci,  she announces,
then drags her fingers through the air.
i'd paint with all the gorgeous humanity i took. take.
the second girl reclines. it's more fun, giving it, then taking it away.

the two girls have the same shadow.

i wanted to write a poem titled 'it's okay; we all go to hell anyway'
because i realized we are
sinning and staining
what a sham humanity, oh, what a sham you've become
do you think you fool anybody?
do you think you fool God?
lies and chemicals and alcohol
and writhing bodies and ink and blood
humanity, how you bleed
how you've desecrated yourself
depressed person like me: we see the world as it is
we call you out on it
we know you are going to hell; the thought burns with us every second
(a farce)
so we write poems and you call us eccentric and we discuss how different and much better we are than you
same old game, same old game
- tried and tested throughout the ages
not a different species, but we might as well be,
the way you treat us,
the way we treat you.
down, down, on our last round

To use a pop culture reference, I am an onion.

Peeling back my layers and layers of layers will only make you cry- and in the end, what are you left with, really? What are you looking for? You've peeled back all of these layers and you'll find nothing. (All that effort gone to waste. Tut tut tut.)

Nothing of use, or worth, anyway.

Is this self-defense then? Do the tears an onion coax out of you as you  skin it and peel back its layers serve as a form of self-defense? One last bid, one last effort to try and stop you from baring it naked? A defense mechanism of nature's finest ingenuity?

Let's count the ways I need therapy.

Let's start with the demons that slither across your bed and grapple with your ears before sliding in your brain in the black of the night.

Let's not.

she drinks coffee like it is her float in the sea she drowns in, chugs it like it'll buoy her better or let her use less effort in keeping alive

(her legs are kicking anyway, mouth screaming defiant at the sea in spitfuls of salt water, and her eyes are blurred angry sore red, brows hooked like an eagle's staring down prey)

-and she should fit in with the insomniacs, whose one associated item are styrofoam coffee cups of mom-and-pop diners and the accompanying coffee rings on formica table tops (as if all insomniacs are the same and if they were they would only have one token, but we'll pretend this is an amateur author's first novel) but she's not quite them and she's not quite one of the living, either-

   oh
      oh
         silly goose, silly me



the insomniacs are one of the living.










are they?

i starve myself
in hopes that the hydrochloric acid in my stomach
will eventually erode away my insides
till I am naught but an empty shell;
hollow, like
how my heart feels these days,

She took her eyes out
Because she had seen too much.
But that didn't stop either,
So she took her brain out
Because even when everything was dark
It wasn't.

They called her crazy and put her in an asylum.