it takes a village to raise a child:
to rub the rust from years of wear,
to teach him not to cower in the face of adversity
when the other boys come around with bats aimed at his limbs.
he must be led back to mother’s house;
she will take one look at his pouting lip, trembling gateway
to his muted mouth,
and she as well as the others will move mountains
to see him smile again, dimples and all.
perhaps he will not zip around the house as he used to,
as a young monkey swinging through the jungle;
but he will learn to find the forms of nebulae in his plum-bruises,
and he will learn that there is more to strength than a strong arm—
*there is more to fighting back than striking like a hammer.

sagittarius,
you only tell me i'm beautiful
when we are skin-to-skin
and your hand is around my throat.

my body is a temple
that you pray to with ragged breath.

if only i could destroy you
the way you destroy me.

dear aries,
had i known what love was back then,
we might have made it last.

dear taurus,
you were always everything
i wished i could have been.

dear gemini,
you are a fiesty, wonderful soul,
i love you dearly, my surrogate brother.

dear cancer,
i still remember the first day we met,
but i cannot remember the sound of your voice.

dear leo,
you are worth more
than your protruding collarbones.

dear virgo,
our horoscopes say we are the perfect friends,
but you are a heartless creature and i am afraid of you.

dear libra,
you are vicious,
picking petty fights over nothing,
yet you are still my best friend.

dear scorpio,
god, what a beautiful, fascinating being you are.
how i always wished to be yours.

dear sagittarius,
i gave you my heart,
and now it has two years
and eight batterings worth of scars.

dear capricorn,
i miss our late night storytelling,
i am waiting on an apology that will never come.

dear aquarius,
we are so different now,
i cannot bear to speak to you.
you are afraid of me.

dear pisces,
whenever i see you,
you take my breath away.

ever since i was young,
my gaze was drawn skyward.
i could tell you the story of orion,
and how to brush bernice's hair,
before i could tell you that two plus two equals four.
i know more about our vast universe,
than i know about many of my friends.

if you are not well acquainted with a pisces,
let me give you a bit of an introduction:
we are compassionate, imaginative,
we adapt to whatever is thrown at us,
and my personal favourite,
we are unfalteringly loyal.

however...
we are full of self-hate,
prone to laziness,
we are escapists
and horrendously easy to manipulate.

i believe my horoscope today is complete *******.
i do not feel utterly lovely,
i know i will not score a date
because no one feels for me romantically.
i've nothing to flaunt.
the horoscopes are saccharine lies,
but, those traits? those are me.

my soul is ancient,
i feel the pain of struggles i have not faced,
or rather, have not YET faced;
i will split my soul in two
i will break my bones
i will give every drop of my blood
i will breathe my last breath
for those that i love.

i spent two years of my life giving my heart and soul to a sagittarius.
philosophical, adventurous.
i admired him so.
but his negatives--
inconsistent. overconfident.
careless.
he was a burning house.

my mother, also a pisces, when all was said and done,
told me to stay away from those sagittarius boys.
they're dangerous for wary, fretful fish like us,
who ask 'from what bridge?' when we are told to jump.

when we were young,
everything was bathed in sunlight;
we loved and we fought,
we thought we would live, strong,
forever.

summers spent on the shoreline,
waves lapping at our feet--
we'd walk the pier in the evenings,
jumping from rock to rock,
spiders being the tenants between the spaces.

and then we grew,
wild and reckless--
nights spent on drugs and ***,
nights spent on choices made and regretted,
nights spent on violence and self-destruction.

our town darkened like the bags beneath our eyes.
the water doesn't shimmer in the light like it used to,
the stars don't shine like they used to.
the lights in the buildings flickered out,
windows boarded.
we don't go out at night like we used to.

we're all waiting to escape before we become
the next teenage suicide,
the next dearly-departed and gone-too-young.

we were all beaten and battered,
breaking each other's hearts,
begging for an out,
only to end up homesick
for a place we always hated.

the lakeshore was all we knew.

if you wanted to
**** me, i would hand you the
gun, accepting death.

if you wanted to
**** yourself, i'd beg you to
stay. your life matters.

your feelings conflict;
as do mine-- we're good for each
other after all.

we're just dirt underneath the universe's fingernails, baby
small and so ******* insignificant,
our beginnings carved out of ice and stone;
our forefathers trapped roaming the sky above and beyond us.

i've been told that we on earth are the measure of the universe.
what a waste; egos larger than the solar system,
we are nothing but filth and plague.

god bless and disregard the truth.