This is the dangerous part. The world swings you around and slaps you. The fatigue hits my feet before I feel it in my face

It hurts, the people I've touched along the way. Everyone is so hurt. Everyone is so hurt. The hurt ones came to me for healing, and sapped my strength. Now I'm scared. Now I hide. Now it shows and I'm ugly. Or I feel like I'm ugly, and I'm ugly. Or all of that turned around, painted on the mirror in another language, screamed at you while you slept. Screamed at me while I slept.

I love. I'd like to know how to love. I'd like to think I know how to love. I'd like to continue to learn to love. I'd like to help others learn to love. I'd like to be a part of something that is wholly, beautifully, love....



... this is like kissing? I'd kiss you
I'd love you and let you go when the sounds start
when the music starts
in
sounding
waves
hitting
our
ears
the
sound
of
sleep
reac­hing
our feet, reaching the moon the moon the moon
          the
moon

This is the dangerous part. You've been conceived and nothing will ever be certain, there will be no control, there will be nothing perfect, not even the people you love.

And it will be worth it

he said what do you feel when the wind blows
eyes out like the sun, back bent straight
coffee dripping in corners like moons in the nighttime

all I want is wine and poetry,
but especially wine
I said
thinking of kissing fingertips
and fingertips in my hair
and learning how to breathe

you get rusty, with the wind
I'm rusting in the wind
Even my fingers
breaking off and becoming dust
in the wind

Catching my reflection in the mirror, I noticed that I look beautiful today.
I look like still sadness, or slight grief, or a breeze through eucalyptus trees.
I smell like the sea.

I feel like a storm, or like the shore freshly pummeled by waves.

My skin is peaches. My skin is rain. My eyes are rain.

I want it to rain so that I can cry and belong. The sadness never stops with talking.
I'm talking all the time now
tying myself into knots and hanging my brain to dry when the clouds die

I'd like to slap you.
If only anger could boil over and burn our eyes and make us all forget
I would callous over my burns and it wouldn't matter anymore
Layers of burnt skin



I'm like an orange, I think. I'm easy to peel
and easy to eat away piece by piece

I'm outside the glass box, watching you
You don't want pity, sweetie, but I pity you
I remember the days of leaving all to blue
Showing skin for want of love
Miming moments seen
on TV
on screens
in scenes
You'd give all to be seen

Walking with a stilt two paces behind sober,
shivers bared to the air and the eyes of adorers
You tug lightly for a kiss and he succumbs
before maintaining the gait
You've only put yourself out as bait
to be eaten by looks
This love that you're seeking can't be pulled in with hooks
and ***
and sadness

You're see-through
He pities you too

You don't even know me,
other than a few flowered up, brushed-off words

which is why I'll say it here

You are the modern portrait of a woman I looked up to
You hold the life that I lost two years ago
in your smile without knowing what you carry

You are every kind of beauty that I want to be

Stay classy, stay adventurous, stay happy
you have a special kind of soul, and I only know because I knew one once
she was swept away with the wind,
buried in the sea with my tears as I scattered her ash by ash...

My voice cracks when I see your pictures; it's a good thing you don't know me past the words

I want you
to be
concrete and metal shards
ripping out
from inside me

rusty with the dried blood
of the last century

one hundred years from now they'll form you into coat-hangers
when they still haven't figured out what to make of heartbreak
they'll hang you out to dry
in the sun that never rises

eternal injustice, like salt
on the wound
the pain is a distraction from the
cancer of actual problems

Actually,
we live in
the first world

which is awfully pretentious

See what I see:
the trees clinging to these orbs of light
like spiderweb shadows cast by the moon
fingers once clasped, bent now to reflect
an eternal grasp
the instant illusion of age,
of near-death

the confrontation of another kind of cold,
the distant past and future
the distance between here and the horizon

Mental snapshot taken with shivers,
the tree follows me in whispers as my shadow shortens,
zipping my skin up to hide my heartbeat,
lock it away tightly,
walk into my footsteps
and the nighttime
swallows
the reasoned stillness
.
.
My recent stillness,
I notice,
reflects back at me in the
puddles left behind the storm
and the remnants of light flicker

like stars

hearts
beat
the rhythm
of
my feet

fading into the black and soft
and safety in the age-old breath of trees