I am barely a mineral now, not yet a woman in the ground,
not yet growing gardens and begging people to cook my peppers.
My home is dizzy from my constant re-entry, which helps me to cheat,
in life I am looking for the harvest in  people. I am a thread of cotton pulling
every word like it is more porous than the next, which helps me.
I summersault through conversations rather read in sharpie,
on the last corner white space of bathroom stalls,
alone and blushed. I remember love like a tagline inviting a smile
and messages to strangers. When I look in the mirror I am always inhaling,
my mouth says O, O I am out of excuses. I tell everyone I’m tired of working,
which helps me to hide in my comet ways. I am tight-lined,  
which is to say I feel love on the hairs of my arms, the wind,
the blades of fans speak to me at night when I have nothing left to say.
I am licensed to moving. In the dark in the cities public spaces and
also in alleyways I am soft like a moonbeam. I am convinced the world is a sewer,
which helps me to explain the exchange of waste and skin and the secrets hidden
in tunnels of shadows. When I move the world blurs with me like a heartbeat.
I am underground like the sewer, rotten in negative spaces, which helps me,
to hear the echo ripple swish of every piece of trash call my name.
I have no response. Some days the world is too *****. One day I will learn
to quilt and stitch together every important face, which will help me
to remember my grandmother and how she loved to balloon to the sky.
I dream she is a large magellanic cloud beaming out of the universe, the force
of believing is the word Hallelujah sung from the lips of Leonard Cohen.
It is midnight. It is noon. I close my eyes for a second and I see myself as miles
from the moon. I am running every day now and there is nothing left to see. My heart
is a kitchen door swinging and it does not want to stop.

i fell in love to the sounds
of the sky falling down,
but the reflection of
the earth destructing
in your eyes
didn't bother me one bit

we laid there, holding one another,
knowing that we wouldn't
see this through,
that love couldn't conquer death,
but still, smiles and sighs
of utter satisfaction
lingered on swollen lips

urges of fight or flight
disappeared with each breath,
defined with depth
and even tempo, as we explored
the places we had pondered,
but never navigated before

i drowned in your arms,
and the panic caused by
the pressure on my lungs
never did come

love, the most powerful drug,
had made me numb,
and if i had to say good bye
for eternity, bare legs
tangled in fresh sheets,
wild curls on whale pillowcases,
hands holding hopeful hearts,
was the only way
i wanted to go

when i need a toilet,
i just sit down,
i might squeeze a ******,
but i also see brown.

then rip a leaf of paper
and flush it all down,
and i'm thinking of you as it spins around,
cause its ****, its **** its ****,
and you should eat it

i remember the way you used to laugh
and i doubt that he finds that important
paper between our teeth
we love on LSD and oh,
our love was so simple
ive found mistakes
and fixed them
dont you remember when,
i used to pull your hair
pull it all back
give you my all

friends said it was perfect then
im sorry i ruined this hall.
how about you grab my hand
you'll see
it fits just like a glove
we all stumbled around
it was jackies' birthday
life felt like but a movie,
i want to hold you next to me.

floating down the stairs
just to run right back up
i found a friend and molly
scratches to the crest make me throw up
i swore i loved you then
though now
love is just made up

When  2012 happened
I was sprayed with champagne
in a room with painted dragons
on the walls and my forty closest
friends were kissing and smiling.
Boys with long hair wrestled
and the cab outside honked
until the neighbors yelled
profanities and it fell silent.
Ex lovers ran for cover,
as cigarettes rained from decaying
porches with rusted wrought iron
awnings. A grey tattered sweat
filled shirt read 'you'll be old,
someday' and the skirts
were too short and covered
with glitter. I hid in a corner
on a rocking recliner, dressed
like Audrey Hepburn's stunt double
wishing my lip locks had meant
something other than 'we're alone,
and loveless.' Amazing Grace
rang loud from twenty out of tune
voices, the sound of a cruise ship
colliding with an iceberg in the Atlantic.
I thought about my mother
alone with a dog and a hot air balloon
puzzle, while her family was off pretending
to want to be where they were.
I thought about your grin and who
your midnight moment was with,
and I wondered if you wore the same
masquerade of happiness,
or if like me, you had already stopped
faking it.

I've been thinking a lot about
that first time after the apocalypse
when you slammed me against
the plaster and ripped every shred
of cloth from my skin, forcing tongue
to throat, grazing like giraffes in fields
of teeth.
I screamed for hours, overbearing
the television in the next room
and alerting the neighborhood
to the carnal intoxication in your tiny
bedroom. I would have let you
****** me that night, if I knew
it would make you come.

In the morning I stole away
with a few forgotten kisses
grinning like the Daliha
and building castles in
my mind. Dreaming
about going back to the time
we first met in an empty sculpture
classroom, with my face flushed
and eyes averted, trying to breathe
and slow my heartbeat, knowing
your ex-lover was murmuring
quips in my ear.
On days like this I wish
that you were Botecelli
laying brushstrokes to your image
of me being blown ashore
by the winds; that I was still
your Venus, and that 22
had never happened.

The silver drops
cascade down.  

Golden, rouge, sepia;
dry tornado in the

ally between the two
bars, on the

windows keeping my
eyes wandering the

landscape.  Locked in
not escaping the cold,

kept in the grotto
with my Falling heart.

Waiting for the warmth
to spring ahead

before we will frolic
in the navy abyss

while the iced flakes
graze our hair and fill

the land with a
blank slate.

I don't brush my hair or eat my vegetables.

Really, that's who I am. The tall girl
with the little cousins splashing careless
in the tissue paper leaves of fall
who climbs trees and scratches her bug bites until
they bleed and comes home giggling
with grass-stained knees and dirt in her pockets.
Mom would smile at dinner and say I smell like
Outside.

The compliment of compliments, untouchable with
innocence revered.

Somehow, with a little west coast living and
men under my belt, I've changed. With pressure to
be domestic and beautiful, ****** and *****,
flourish professional and more successful
than my mother's mother who mothered 6,  
I have forgotten this. I fall short.

I fall
in love with men who quell Outside joys and bike rides
with money and ******* and touch me in the dark,
cooing and cawing and convincing me
I'm happier to throw a pretty penny
around, and here, take this pill, smoke this dope,
to not remember the smells and scabs and stories from
when you gave a **** that made you who you are.

I'm getting my hair done today at some high end place.
I'm waiting for blonde dye to set, reading about
world hunger in my National Geographic. Wait,
that's probably not acceptable.

Okay, I'm reading
about J.Lo's *** in US Weekly, talking numbly to the stylist
about I-can't-believe-they-wore-that, while some yuppie
next to me with her face stretched too tight
is reading something ****** in Vanity Fair and
won't shut up about the Kardashian divorce.
"I mean, not like I know her or anything, but it seems
SO like her to..."

I'm surrounded by flourescent lights and floor length
mirrors and ******* with their caked on makeup
whispering of affairs and debt the way
you inexplicably can to your hairdresser alone.

I look at my face in the mirror,
framed in foil, pop music pounding overhead.
I mean, I'm not as bad off as the rest of them, right?
I couldn't be. I
remember the bug bites, piles of old leaves,
pink-cheeked simple childhood, and I can't
breathe all the sudden.

I
click my designer heels to the counter
throw my credit card at the $144 bill and
leave, speeding, to get away, don't know where
to go, I just end up at a ritzy bar where I stumble in
and, out of habit, order a martini, clean, straight up with
a twist.

Then I look down and burst into tears because
really, I'm no different from them and
truly, growing up in this town is
such a cruel, long hurricane of loss
that you can try to flee, past tangled hair and untouched
vegetables, all across the great Outside but you
just can't outlast in hide and go seek.

oh you are all so *******
good and ******* righteous
with your Facebook statuses
and tweets and blogs
that you pour your hearts into
reposting better men's works and words
cowering behind a screen
that hides the fact that you've
resigned your life to nothing
but giving others the publicity
that should have been yours

perhaps the more pathetic
thing is that we live in a world
where this is acceptable
and the norm
where people are given the ability
to like, and reblog, and comment
instead of actually making contact
and establishing relationships
"**** it, if i want to talk to you,
i don't actually have to talk to you!"

and here i am, the eternal hypocrite
writing a ******* poem on my macbook pro
that i'll post to a poetry forum
so i can get off on all of the likes, reads, and comments
it collects

i mean,
who the **** am i if nobody else tells me who i am?