And when I say I love you
I love you
I love you,
I wonder if you can hear the echoes behind my words:
I’ll wreck you,
I’ll wreck you,
*I’ll wreck you

I've gotten tired of staring at the back of my eyelids
In inky darkness,
There still are shadows that flit about and
Draw my mind's attention.
I have many voices in my head
All overlapping and overwhelming each other;
Choruses of a song heard earlier that day
Or a monologue of my own maudlin thoughts
Or  a daydream of my wildest fantasies concocted
Or tomorrow's to-do list.
Loud, and
All at once.
It makes me go half out of  my mind, sometimes.
I find it difficult to sleep.

i feel the skin sloughing off my bones;
knobby, they are.
my skin feels ephemeral, more now
than it has ever been.
i am losing weight like
i am losing you.
my hands wither before me:
all my years they served
the purpose of creating art as best as i could
but now they look like dead roses.
my ribs puncture my skin like throns.
my husk is decaying,
dying,
dredging up memories of the youth i never had.
could it possibly be that i don't want to die?

I am used to
the folds of the fire
burning hot on my skin,
the light it gives
a mockery of the darkness
I surround myself in.

I am used to
covering myself up
in the tidal waves of my sadness-
these tsunamis are my solace,
the way I drown is my comfort.

I am used to
how it feels like
being alone and sad and alone and sad;
these two words so simple,
so relatable
but not by you.

You are not used to
the black holes that form your sanctuary,
as much four walls as any room is
stars are not distant pinpricks
you restrain yourself from reaching for.

You are not used to.

I write words and words and words
all about you
I pretend that you will read them
Though I know you won't.
If you do- I am sorry.
If you don't- I am sorry that I am.
Please, don't give me another chance.
(Lies, all of them.)

i colour in the white spaces of my drawings
the pen nib goes deeper and deeper
and on the other side of the paper, there's a mark.

the colour- originally an indigo blue-
becomes dark as the night
the colour is rich and singular;
it feels like the sea.
i wish it were.
my wishes don't come true.

maybe if i continue colouring over the same lines
again and again
the space will finally be filled.

You care too much for me
And people call me a *****
But I call this
Self-defense
And I shall honour my younger, past self
Who never wanted to hurt
and be hurt
And be like those girls
Crippled by emotions
Whose love was their downfall
I am sad and I push people away
Please,
Let me push you away

My dance pants of long ago
Were like a second skin to me.
Fingertips trace the faded pattern;
Affirmation, that yes,
Like a mature rattlesnake
This skin that has been moulted
Once belonged so rightly to me.
A perfect fit.

I have outgrown these, now,
My dance pants of long ago.
My fingers yearn to try them on again;
To feel the smooth fabric cling to my thighs
To jump about in them;
Twist;
Laugh;
Love again.

I try them on.

you are not in love with me,  i want to yell,
you are in love with a fictional caricature.
the one i present, the one i script perfectly so you see no flaws
i hide my bad habits in the quirk of my brow,
falsely innocent when i shrug and say uncle,
so that you'll laugh and back down.
you'll forget about this, partially distracted and looking away,
and in that time you gaze off into the distance i will hide:
the lies i tell my mother about our relationship
the gumdrops i used to take from the sweet shop down the road
the breath that is stolen from my lungs when i cry silently at night.
i rush to bury these things in the knapsack i carry (stuffed full as it always is),
a literal weight on my shoulders.
you look back at me too soon.
i raise my brow.

i'd never seen anger like that. it was a living, breathing thing. it was tangible,
a separate entity from the tiny woman that towered before me.
it lashed out.
i fell.
its claws and screams left its mark on me;
my skin stings, my ears are ringing.
i would hunch into myself if i could, if it would mean everything would stop.
but my mother is determined to beat the gay out of me.
if i cry enough tears perhaps it will dilute my being into a single heterosexual figure,
another easily labeled and conforming thing,
a printed, approved statistic on sterile paper.

he paints me
reading a book in my faded nightie
lounging on the armchair with a daisy in my hair
huddled by the window looking at the cars passing by
he never lets me see them.

i write of him
padding around our apartment in bunny slippers and
blue plaid boxers
thanking the people who buy his paintings
wiping the lenses of his glasses with the hem of his shirt
saving the world
i never let him read them.

we share
a tiny kitchenette we don’t use because we don’t
know how to cook
bookshelves that line our every wall
snapshots of the city, framed in matte black
wood and macaroni, in the hall
we don’t invite people over.

our parents
don’t send christmas cards anymore
stopped paying for university tuition
and his sister helen gave birth to a baby we
aren’t allowed to see

(but helen sends pictures in the mail)


they can’t take away our love.

i wish
there were ways
you could let yourself out;
slip little bits of your soul
back into the wold
free it from your vessel,
your prison,
let it no longer anchor you.
the cracks in my skin:
be the gateway to
my end.

you will be buffeted by the winds
you will sail far over the seas,
skimming its surfaces;
the hot winds in the desert might parch you.
and you will have lived
as long as you think you did.

Morning light streams in through the window panes
Golden, like the hair of your baby boy
When he first came into this world.

Afternoon light streams in through your window panes
Bright, like the eyes of you darling boy when he first realized
He could speak.

Evening light streams in through your window panes
Red-gold, like the flames your boy uses to
Light up a cigarette.

Night outside the home's window panes
Dark, like your son's eyes when he pretends
He doesn't know who you are

Dawn light streams in through the hospice's window panes
Muted, like your baby boy's expression
When he learns to love again
(But it is too late)

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,

there are
cracks
in the pavement,
this long winding grey slab
of asphalt
and heat
and a thousand sweaty footsteps
it is far still to my house
and I wonder why
pavements cannot be shorter.

I crush dead leaves under my feet.
The satisfying crackle-hiss reminds me
Of when your bones crunched into a million pieces,
Marrow collapsing under the disbelief that a pretty little thing like me could have denied you.
You have been panting after me like a dog in heat for a year. Do not think I wouldn't notice.
I will use the feminine wiles at my disposal, all of them ammunition against boys like you, with your doe eyes and quickly hidden smirks.
I hear you in the locker room. A mass of hooting, crowing creatures that shout out at the slightest dichotomy between what you think is normal and what is normal.
You think I don't see Paul, who comes home bruised every day because his heart is too big for one gender?
I walk past the locker room and recoil, because you reek of privilege and body odour. I hear you talk about the man, Laverne ***, who was on your television last night. Disgusting, you say, like your opinion should matter. I close my eyes tightly and hope your idiocy is not contagious.
Bang, bang, bang. That is the roar of gunfire as I smile sweetly at you with lips you deem to red, as you call me a ***** and ****. A million slurs wouldn't do you a single favour, darling.
You remind me of the time that you paid for my meal and I blow radioactive gas in your direction as I laugh in your face. The thud of bomb shells fall behind us. I sharpen my nails into claws and strike.
Once upon a time I would have thought you handsome and sweet and popular, qualities we are taught to fall in love with regardless of flaws. If you hadn't been handsome anyway the illustrious promise of being safely heterosexual was always reminded of. Now boys like you I leave behind in the dust for girls like me. We laugh at your antics as we dye our hair colours the Church would have disapproved of. We don't care, anyway, our kisses are the salvation we were never conditioned to believe in.

The trials and tribulations of a broken heart
Will be encountered by everyone
But Augustus Waters once said you could choose
Who would break yours
And if you were to tell me I was stupid
To listen to advice from a fictional character;
Let me tell you that I had it figured out even before
reading the book.

I do not wish to find love, or even attempt relationships
Because I know myself best
And myself is a cruel person.
I do not wish ill upon another
In the form of my presence in their life.
And I do not wish to be hurt by them as well
Because as cruel as I am , I am a passionate, sensitive person.
I cry over losing fictional characters;
I do not wish to know how it is like to cry over people.
At the very least, I could relive my times with my fictional characters;
I could open page one again, or being the first episode all over.
But, I cannot relive my times and do as such with real, tangible people,
And I do not choose to get hurt by them.
And that is why
I am not brave.

copper tang in my mouth when you walk by
knee acting up just before you call
you're a regular thunderstorm
and my body, as always,
is attuned to yours

if i ******* on these sheets
will you just melt away?
will I be left with just your bones
to cradle and cry into-
tears hitting the husk
of what you used to occupy?

blitzkrieg,
that's what you are
an army couldn't fight you off
so how am I supposed
to save myself

I've forgotten


that I can't


won't



your ghost is a phantom menace.
your memories haunt my thoughts and the wisp that follows it around, trails after it-
the scent of death;
the touch of a broken promise.

when I was a child
I would
wake up
in the middle of the night
and creep to the bathroom
to read a book under its yellow light

my mama slapped me and said
that I should go to bed
she took my book away.

when I was more grown
I would
wake up
to fetch my blade
hurry to the bathroom
to paint ladders red.

the girls at
school
laughed
at me.
they wrinkled their noses like
I was
****
and said I wanted
attention.

when I was married
I would
nudge awake
my girl and
kiss her *******
under the spray of water
under the lull
of love.

she left me, two years later
for another
woman
with bigger
*******.

when I was old
I woke up
and went
to the bathroom
except my legs were
weak
and my grip on the
sink
did not suffice
so I saw my blood drip.


I heard the doctors say I wouldn’t make it.


I didn’t.

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

Once a boy loved me, you know?
I've lived a good life.
It was a sad one, but a good one.

they tell me I can have the world
if I would have their beliefs
they tell me I will not hurt
if I follow them mindlessly
they tell me such lies
I listen

she ran home with her sins;
down the steps
and round the flower beds-
careful not to trample them-
and through the back door.
it was freshly painted, that door.
she went into the house
where it all began:
the sins, she means.
she hopes you understand.
there is too much in this world
that she cannot allow
so she tucks each jewel
back into the crevices of
each brick
that her house was built of.
that was where
her mother's screams
and her dad's belt
and the blades in the night
and the empty bowls of soup were;
she kept them
in each jewel
in each brick
buried
deep down.
home was where the heart was,
after all.

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.

Perhaps when the moon
Wanes
And waxes again
I will be myself
Starved out and skinny at first;
Then whole again.

i feel you weave fear in me:
a sharp pinprick, an unsettling feeling,
then the thread enters.
sow it such that the two fabrics
become indiscernible from each other;
they are part of the whole now.
they are whole now.
only snip when this occurs.
you wouldn't want a messy piece left dangling on your lap.
that would be awfully clumsy of you.

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?

Ring-a-ring o' roses
A pocket full of problems
A scar here! A meal there!
We all fall


Down.

my insides unfurl
and the dripping mess that follows-
i touch up, with just a li’l bit of saline solution
and oh, isn’t it
pretty
like you wanted me to be all along
like i could never be all along
it’s a dusty kind of pink,
lilac or lavender,
i was never good at colours, i just knew their names
enough so i could spin them into my poems
(the ones you hated because they were so full of
run-on sentences and pain
there was my texas twang and my
desecration of all things religious
to make the metaphor fit)
i needed colour, more life than i could afford
it was the dowry you never accepted.
i’m so sorry.
i keep reliving the past,
what once had been
what could have been

the wind is raging

howling

screaming

and the trees are shaking

battering against the windows

and i can feel their pain

they beg to differ.

and the droplets stream down my windowpane

like a fairytale-esque music video

like my cries in the night

how lonely, is it, to be a tree?

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.

it is 9pm, so
i stride briskly to the bathroom
and brush my teeth.
the fibres are getting worn.
rinse, and gurgle, and rinse
again.
routine. i can live on
this repeat
one, two, three
strokes along my gum, then my teeth.
top row, bottom row, left side, right side,
inner top row, inner bottom row, inner left side, inner right side.
i rummage in the cabinets once i am done
at precisely five minutes past
for the blades and the medicinal alcohol.
dip, swab, cut.
routine. i can live on
this repeat
one, two, three
strokes on my person.
right forearm, left forearm, right thigh, left thigh.
the ballerina practices her pirouette
as i do with my suicide.
it is routine.
i can live.

there are fire drills in my school
we practice evacuation routes
to prepare for the threat
of a burning, raging fire
but what about
the similar, all-consuming, scorching
blaze in my mind
is there a way out for me?

the rain falling in sheets down the windows
they form the perfect setting for a horror movie
not those Western kinds, mind-
give me Japanese ghouls peering into the bus' windows that I sit across from,
give me Malaysian banshees crawling on the roof of the bus.
Lord, give me a gruesome death, one that I have to fight for:
give me some spirit, some passion that will rise within me and consume me wholly, this need to live:
the fire that does not exist now.
The rain continues on pouring.

i will have entered my eighteenth year
knowing that
it will be my fourth year of sorrow.
there is a riptide coming for me
and i can see it from the pier.
this poem will have so many periods
in the hopes that it will be a flimsy defence against the churning
obsidian mass that is coming,
coming,
coming.
advancing like a predator.
everything is different from before;
there is a dewy mist that settles on my arms.
oh, my poor arms, uncovered
and riddled with goosebumps,
not even a cardigan.
tell me how i can stop this despair from getting me.
did i mean to say getting to me?
stop this despair, stop this-
i am so tired, but there are no seats on the pier.

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.

there is a time in the night
when your breath catches
and it doesn't actually let go.
your marrow retreats a little further into your bones, it seems,
and there is a feeling of age
one can never express.
you are seventeen years,
but when each year is compounded
by all things horrific
the stars glow a little dimmer,
the clock's ticking a little louder.

rose had a jar of lime marmalade

and her grandmother told her not to put it in her hair

(she was only five, with an innate curiosity;

still, it ended up everywhere)

her sister kate made orange marmalade

(it amused her to know that rhymed)

kate was nine, and a big girl now

she used her marmalade on her bread-

where was the fun in that?

i do not trust my mind anymore
the sockets of my eyes
contain a thousand burning suns
and the voicebox in my throat
traps white noise
but the cranium i possess
is merely a container
of pandora's worst nightmare

My mother grew up in a small town
and she married in a small town
and she lived in a small town
and she passed away here.
And our neighbours came with their casseroles
And the florist gave my family her best violets
And there was a discount on the casket.

My sister grew up in a small town
and she married in a small town
and she lived in a small town
And she works at the high school as an English teacher.
And she takes her kids to the park every Saturday,
And her car never uses more than a liter a month
And there is always a booth for her family at Sal's Diner.

My brother grew up in a small town
and he never did marry
but he never did leave.
So now he lives in this small town.
And he only ever takes his job as a deputy seriously
And every Sunday he tends to his geraniums,
And there is never any mail in his mailbox
And his coffee order has always been the same.

I grew up in a small town
and nothing ever changed
and so I left.
And I will never manage to travel to all the bus stops
And my barista never ever remembers my face
And the librarian is stern, always, instead of friendly
And there is never ever a dull moment
In this little world I've created in my big town.

do you know
of the bones that grow cold in
the spring?

kelly didn’t eat because everyone at her school called her fat.

have you seen
the cardigan sleeves
that cover patricia’s skin?

she cuts because she couldn’t feel anything anymore.

and do you know
bruised knuckles
that shoved food up my throat
as I retched over in the toiletbowl?

No.

You do not.