so you sit there,
your awkward little hands folding awkward little birds,
as if you could inhale your own paper wings.
so you sit there,
and you think
about you watching the people and the people
not watching you.
and i whisper darling,
darling the only thing you're good for
is reading walt whitman out loud
to your used-to-be-white walls
until your throat chips, and your eyes dust over.
and you just shift your weight
and shake your head
like something
buzzed in your ear.

i am a thing dug of poetry,
labeled *****,
and mangled into death masks
for the tortured,
burnt, and drowned.

if i slept, i would sleep
between your fingers,
then twithe down to the padded
things that hold your words,
bend them in a kiln
fired hot by the breath of
my hellos.
if i were to eat,

i would consume the entirety
of your vision, swallow
the rods and cones
to curl in your tear-ducts
and taunt by holding
back the curtain
just long enough for us to smile.

if i drew, i would outline
myself on your forehead,
as a stamp, swim under your skin
and carve each bloodcell's
name into their limp, cracking
foreheads. if i breathed,
i would

breathe in your humanity,
and char it, exhaling
only the cinders to
gift on the outstretch of my palms.

i am the death that
encapsulates some,
only weighing
in the mouths of others,
tacking their days on my body
for a high. i am
more tired than you,

but i will be around for longer.

the people look like ache,
shriveled and lost inside
their twisted interpretations of movement.
we're tired here,
spitting out apologies and
niceties, the things expected
of a well mannered member of society.
looking at the hands passing by,
wrinkled and lined with everything
they've loved-
it's exhausting to think of every life you've contained.

the windowsill is hilled,
shoved into lumps and valleys,
too frothy for flight,
heavy to be held.

the pane of glass separating
twenty degrees from a cool sixty six
would shatter neatly,
somewhat like poured sugar
or the skin of a balloon,
stretched tightly and then
released.

the asphalt is stubble,
unshaven uncleanliness, blackened
by ages of rain and snow, seattle slush,
still elastic when a rubber
ball hits it, throwing
material back,
to be clutched in a moist
chubby palm.

calm, pale,
smoothed by the run through air,
skin traced by blue (ish green)

my stories are writhing under your hands,
remember when we shed
everything of us in portraits of airports
you'd never flown in, in
descriptions of raindrops i'd never tasted,
remember when i twisted
sideways, fell smoothly out of your mouth.

the expectation of sanity
as you emerge from a nine-month womb
is commercialised.
a waving sensation of breathing
overtakes instinct-driven lungs
and that is when your humanity begins to dissipate.

do your invisible friends get recycled
when you decide that society is more
important than imagination?

if we're all hiding something,
why hide?


-


people are entirely too polite
when you sing loudly in their inane
faces. sometimes expression
is the best way to get ignored.


-


stuffing cotton and paper
down your throat, does not,
in fact, shut down your emotions.

shrugging off your body,
in an attempt to be god-like,
even subconsciously,
is human.

on sundays i ask myself questions without question marks.
like: how did you figure out that i hum when i'm afraid.
like: why do my parents call themselves christians when my younger brothers sound racist at the dinner table without knowing the term.
like: how old is the term 'hipster', why do people name themselves after spit-upon-ground-up words, what is the number of swallows you could conceivably snap the necks of in an hour.
like: why
am i writing this.

do you remember talking about mental disorders and broken beer bottles on railroad tracks. do you remember wishing we were younger and then forgetting that in the haze of 'growing up'. do you remember asking me why i never wrote i with a capital and spewing on about the underlying self esteem issues that represented and why do you say that, you don't have any self esteem issues, do you shen. do you. do you remember talking about rubbed pink thighs and ladder arms and elbows too bent out of shape to hug someone. do you remember the month when i would only eat rosemary and olive oil bread and you didn't speak, not once.

some people write about bones and teeth and the skin scraped under nails when you blackout twice in a row. some people write about the decay of humanity, and some people blather into the air on buses, the stale air between business men and crying single mothers, some people blather and whisper and write about the space bar and aluminum foil and finding themselves when there is nothing to find, because that. that is quite a feat.

volcanoes and thunder storms, bolts of lightning and heavy clouds, heavy eyelids, lead coffin words and the whirling dervishes that spin holes into your palms sometimes. these are the things little girls are made of.