Barefoot
in hazy summer
dew on honey skin.

Sun sets over
new chapters
blown  in
by warm wind.

Everyone’s sleepwalking through city square
It’s twelve fifty seven
And seventy families have bled black against Israel’s rockets

Come Sunday morning
The drunks in my hometown
Will be too hungover to recognise their own faces
While Palestinians across the world
Will have to sort through the bones of dead relatives

This country was built on colonial empathy
Freedom from suffering through self-absorbed apathy

We’re all sewn to our seats
Caring for nothing

Autumn reminds me of black leaves and dead lips
adolescence left to die on empty swing sets

Wilt my lungs
I’ll breathe in bitter bloom
And fill my chest with concrete tombs

At twenty one I exhaled tar
And covered my birthday cake

Ribs for the skyline
This city built a church round my heart
Before some gutter punks spray painted the side of the stained glass
With the suicide rates of middle-class citizens

Nothing has been the same since

When I was young
I was raised on Disney
And taught that my bones were living things

At thirteen years old
I nestled a heart within the clouds and smoke of my chest
It suffocated to death

I’ve never broken a bone
But I’ve trailed plenty of marrow

I spoke in nervous tones
On the day of your death
And found myself lacking all sensory depth

Some time next Spring
All the flowers eroded
And I couldn’t care less

I looked at my reflection and saw everything I hated
In the form of where you used to stand
And what was now left in its place

Gaunt and bitter
I adorned your absence
Like a crown
Hollow as my chest

I just wanted to fill my lungs
With corrosive apathy
And feel my ribs shatter free

I hadn't cried in years.  
I was always taught that strength
was not having the courage to let yourself feel but
******* it up, holding it in.
I am sick of "You're going soft on us, honey"
Today I came to understand that
you are completely okay with writing the same poem
over and over again.
This is a metaphor for the way you ****** her in my bed.
This is a metaphor for the night you copy and pasted love letters.
This is a metaphor for what really happened-
I never fall in the same place twice.
Except when I do.
I think the critical difference between the two of us,
critical because there are many differences
but- I think our hamartia, our fatal flaw,
our end scene is this:
if people didn't like my poetry, if nobody listened,
if I walked out on stage and nobody snapped their
fingers, I would still write for just your eyes.
I would still cramp my crooked, birth defect,
quadruple jointed fingers writing to you about the nights
you loved me back,
for a minute there you loved me back.
And you loved 20,000 other people back.
And you loved small towns back and big cities back and the entire west coast
back when you drove through, making temporary homes out of people
who should have been permanent
and I loved you.
And I hadn't cried in years.
Not because I wasn't sad, but because I was taught that showing emotion
was weakness.
So if my father made me memorize the How To's of strength,
if I were going by the book, today I'd be so fragile
you could say hello and I'd shatter so suddenly you'd
forget you were the one that let go.

I hear your hollow words
Laced with doubt
Sharp tongued, dull mouthed
Inattentive love

Your heaven is paved with
The shallow beat of empty hearts
Your heaven is a fortress
Desolate, apart

Closed eyes, closed ears, closed mouths
Closed minds, closed hearts above
This is a hell
I can’t reside

If ignorance could paint the world
No greys would hold
And your whites would grant passage
For only the sold

No promise

I felt him between my thighs and my heart sang songs my mind didn't even know it knew.
Warm and honeyed thoughts fill me until I am full and I am ready to concede defeat and open myself for his occupation.

But doesn't it always?
The body delights in new and welcome sensations and the head creates them.
I could easily dismiss it all as a ballet of chemical reactions and well placed hands, profoundly meaning

"Nothing".

Because everyone knows when the heat dies down, and the temperature drops, when the passion has waned like the moon, and the tide falls, only the bare bones of you are left and there are only calcium pillars to protect the flame.

Because everyone who has loved, even as a passing thought, has been left in the wake of warring bodies to observe the aftermath.
Was the tenderness making way for lust?
Did every kiss have a drop of hard truth imbued that I missed?
Were his hands caressing shallow intentions into my sensitive skin?
Did I miss the message?
Or were my eyes too open in awe, that they had closed on the casual way his hands and lips met my own?

"And what had all this been for?" Is the question that dances on the outskirts of my mind, while the meeting of my thighs still burned, and my heart had descended into free fall.

Satisfaction? Fear? Gratification? Doubt?

Love?

The worst feeling, of course, not being betrayal, confusion, shame, or loss, but plainly, uncertainty.

Nothing hurts the heart worse than not knowing.