Her beat had been so bastardized that a tree had grown to protect it;
To harbor silence in pandemonium.
Isolation was the only remedy to a disease persistent to turn past into present,
So she grew on her own terms, and her heart beat for no one but herself,
Because to let someone in, meant to risk axing away at the barricade she had worked so arduously to withstand.
When she fell into him the first time, the wounds were preemptive.
Her brittle bones cast away at the hopes that he would see her heart before her mind;
From which idiosyncratic branches wrapped around her fingertips,
And the oak shards springing from within, just barely inching away from his own heart.
Strangely enough, he didn’t seem to mind.
When he stripped to bare back the scars were evident,
They cascaded from collarbone to the dip of his hip.
That’s when he brought her closer and whispered marvelously:
“I would bleed again for you.”
At the beginning, the boy hurt,
Yet he still saw the heart it held between the prongs of wooden cage.
So he continued to hurt, for her.
His mission rooted in the purpose of painting her the canvas of what life ought to be.
Penciling in the possibility of a reality where her aching shoulders could be lifted,
And a new smile plastered onto her lifeless frame.
He painted her in the image of who she used to be-
As if he knew her before she grew weary at life’s expense.
In the canvas, the wooden cage had disappeared, and a luminosity introduced itself.
He had uncovered her heart, and no longer was it encompassed by a shell, but freely beating;
Beating for him.
Every morning, day in and day out, meters of her branches gradually retracted,
And the boy’s scars gradually sealed over.
Oddly enough, it seemed as if they had healed each other.
That the quiet embraces they held each night didn’t pierce him,
but rather comforted his mind that this time, it would be different.
Somehow, she would come to love him, and him, her.
She saw in him a soldier; whose battle wounds were ghastly.
He had lived through hell and came back to dispel the stories,
But instead of stories of agony and woe, and anger and spite,
He spoke of the morning dew on dandelions reflecting the sun’s rays and how they most beautifully sprung from nothing.
He spoke of the quiet whispers of the wind bringing music to deaf ears.
He spoke of how if you listen closely, you can almost hear each cricket sing its song
in a field of thousands.  
Each time he kissed her,
he did as if it were the last.
Each time he held her,
he did as if she were asleep.
Each time he healed her wounds,
he did as if they were preemptive.

he, the lone teleprompter,
it rings, the voice, still, silent
he calls, always, I answer

our minutes, then forbidden
by all, who grovel, hidden
alas- they won't take my love

serendipity, it drips
rose fingertips, and winter
it arrives, each time, too late

a ballad, perhaps essence
bittersweet recollections
who we were, your bruised children
who we are, long forgotten

intertwined, a shared thought
remember, how we forgot?

Salivate for boyhood
Satiate the ****** necrotic fantasies I spent 2009 stuck on
Give me waistband of your hips and the dips at which your thighs open wide
The unscathed version of you would be afraid
Be not afraid- boy- moan in pleasure
Let me measure how far my lips can reverberate against the parts of you no ones touched before

Let me be the spirit guide to an apartheid of beads of sweat
Let me take you to a place you’ve never been
I’ll be waiting next time.

Beg for me to get closer
To hurt while I peel away your insecurity until you’re dripping with serendipitous organic ******* ultraviolet shock
I want to see your body melt when I show you this world from which you’ve been deprived
I will be boy- and we will be man- and you’ll be collapsed under tents of silk while I keep going
I won’t stop for you
I know you’re crying from ecstasy- the drug of love
I shot you up. And now I can’t shut you up
We are wet bodies in locker room mirrors
All the fears of judgement are eminent
Not to the domain of their prejudice
But to the fact that
I want to devour you
Every inch of your glistening skin
In the palms of my hand, you’re not ready to begin but believe me, this is something I never want to end

How it smells like lust when I’m around you
And cups of coffee make like lint on days where my bones are rattling against yours
It takes all my strength to test how deeply I can house your body
Competing over every inch and acre that I can run my tongue along
The curves of your chest and collarbone the delicate withdrawn hiss you expel when I melt the stone wall you responsibly upheld


This boyhood
From new innocence it arises and it’s so beautiful to see you fall apart again
**** me, boy, until I see nothing but the future in your eyes.

I almost cried the second time her thigh grazed mine. The air shared between school girl fantasies of jump rope and freshly baked poppy seed cupcakes. Just enough to make me ponder whether the bounds of earthly consciousness were an object of her manipulation. And I, simply her willing subject.  

The oh too warm days on the side of the pool. The bright rays permeating the soft pretty pink promise of youth. Never delineating from the canvas of blue gray green tiger stripes I captured every time I looked up at her.

There were only feelings of nervousness, maybe a little anxiety. The feeling of a canary perched in its open top brass haven of beautiful imprisonment.

That’s what it was like being in love with Eloise.

Protrusions of the finest rose thorns. Strangulation by way of sweet, sweet cyanide. Dropping off the prepossessing coast of Amalfi.

I hoped that she too never stopped touching me, but I knew that a boy would come.

A boy would come to take me gentle Eloise away. To contort her limbs and fantasies of childlike innocence into rough boyhood.

Why should she try to keep up with him?

I was warm. I refuged her hollow bones as one does a migrant sparrow.

But like any kind thing, you must issue release. For the worlds most marvelous of things have no business being kept from displaying their beauty.

The way her feet curved and curled at my unsavory dispositions. The hugging of sandles by way of freckles and blue glitter dolphins.

I knew how I felt.

I knew because I had felt this way before.

Never daunting, or in bad taste. Not shamefully or with unrelenting dissatisfaction.

So how come she couldn’t do the same.

How come I’m left with camera film of beachy Saturday’s and coffee gelato. Of ripe succulent fruit. Her strawberry lip balm. Tire spokes peaking out of the side of mulberry bushes, and the space between our palms when her hands interlaced with mine.

And she’s left with none of me at all.

I carry the blood of many men
In my village, a stone cross stands on the coast of at lunaire , an epitaph of men who didn’t made it back home


A chemist aids in the end of the next world war
And he’s smiling, writes a book for his first granddaughter to learn the measures of the worlds excellence
But stops halfway after losing control of half of his body
He now gargles clementines and white wine in a mouth that speaks none

My grandfather sings sea shanties in his office alone, from a tape, and it bellows
Those words are the only time I’ve heard him form a sentence in 5 years

The soul has a funny way of reminding us where we came from

I carry the blood of many men
My father comes to this country seeking redemption for potential potentially lost
And through slurries of slurs and unmarked lost words
Builds an empire of wine and gin and ***

He is alone, but when we dance as a child I can see how his steps are just a lineage strewn from my own
Edith piath and Celine dion course through a heart too heavy for his own good
But he loves all like a baker his bread on Sunday morning
Takes it home and breaks it apart for his daughters and son

The soul has a funny way of reminding us where we came from

Sometimes
On a dimly lit sunday morning
When the dew sets gleefully on wildflower and freshly sprung grass
And the only sound that surrounds me in the faint whistle of a tea kettle, over a lit stove
I am a girl

A girl in the way that pancakes rise over and fall at the suggestion of arrival
And boysenberry jam meets the corner of a mouth

A girl like the bright pink lips that swallow them
A g irl in the way skipping sounds on wet concrete
Primary affairs and linoleum hallways,
Like green braces and familiar places
Beads, wooden and plastic, letters pool on desks and tie friendships together for lifetimes

A girl in the arms of a father

Sometimes I feel like a girl in prepubescent rage
In shouting the lyrics along with the radio
In liking a boy so much that my pride eats me and spits me out
In the way I check under my bed for monsters at night

Sometimes the girl is scared and gazes up at the stars and recants constellations, all by the wrong names, and like clockwork, rises and spins around with open arms in the deep blue

A girl like a rose petal falling on a lost lovers cheek
Like a locker filled with sticky notes
Like magnets on a fridge
And fresh oranges on the kitchenette
Like a bandana wrapped around a pale neck
Like hickies the day before a big test

Like the crackle of a patchouli candle
Like reading past bedtime

Like Jane ******* eyre.
Like teenage angst
And “mother you just don’t get me”
Like Sylvia Plath and a Taylor swift chorus
Like Heart break
First kisses in a cafeteria to a boy named Jeremy
Or Josh
It doesn’t matter what his name is
But it did once

Knives cleave open my shoulder blades and tears stain my face
And the dog in my rib cage rip apart ego
Peels me apart
And plasters me back together again.


I have felt like a girl before
But the parts that make me one pale in comparison to what girlhood feels like
I have been a girl
And the girl is still here
Watching
Waiting
For the last cookie in the cookie jar

The nature of yearning is inexplicably human. Animal even. An all consuming urge to digest the entirety of another body. The raw pressure to take and take and take. To gnaw my lips until the blood excites me enough to risk the second serving. I can’t explain why but you feel like god in those moments. When my face is buzzing and hot and just the suggestion of your validation of me is an apple I dare not bite. But I should? Should I? Do you want me to? I’m sick. I’m a sick animal and without need to recover. I’m an animal whose chest is caged in rationale but whose bones crackle and splinter from holding it in. Primitivity still exists in us. It’s just that it happens to exist in the bad ways. The shameful ones. The ones that we sit in pews to forget. But it feels so right for lust to visit when it’s not invited. Come in. Sit down. Consume. Digest. Enjoy me.

I hope you make good use of the space I leave.
When my things begin to make themselves few and far in between.
When all that remains is a toothbrush, begging, merely to be used, obstructed or seen.
Each wind in its direction and waft an excited suggestion of beckoning,
Like the unrequited object of my emotion that led me to my newly found absence.
Your books will be so lonely without mine to populate the shelves and make dinner party conversations of keats, deleuze, and brönte alike.
Vonnegut excuses himself with Austen not far behind.
And lovers, thieves, and poets find their owners in me once again.
But what are stories of adoration and hope and lust if not shared with that who has your heart ?
A passionless conquest to comprehend the bounds of great literature is a fools game without one to share it with.
What lonely man can claim he knows the bounds of loves measure,
When he lets it escape him?
But then again, you opened the door to the ghosts of our still beating hearts and told the dog to no longer return for scraps.
And when he sits, patiently, for your arrival, or slightest nod to extend a greeting,
You stand at the door. To turn the porch light off.
I wonder, at times, if the dust that collects on your most prized collections of trinkets and toys, is the same dust you invite to settle on those you humbly invite into your life.
She will enter, like a bright, shiny object, and upon your evaluation, be set on a shelf for future use, perhaps, or never to be used again at all.
What good is a new toy that’s been used and placed on a shelf?
Is it for her to mount her porcelain legs to the bookshelf floor and take exit?
Or for you to await her frustrations and break her small white frame onto the wooden floors of your ego.
I often can’t help but wonder which will come first.
I realize now that, I cannot erase each small reminder of my existence because for as long as I can remember, though you often commend my memory, I was in life with you.
Continuously living.
And small pieces of me, and us, and our life began to collect on bookshelves and tv stands, and cooking pans, cubbies, and shelves and bathroom sinks.
I used to love these displays of the interwoven identity of us.
But as you request the removal of all things “me”, I see this may have been a delusion
Of the concurrent and consistent need for me to place myself in every facet of your smile , body, mind, and childhood bedroom.
For the need to be seen.
Today, at your request that I no longer be here, I will begin slowly removing each layer of my love from your life, in an attempt to recosiliate the audacity of my hoping that we would forever and always be interwoven in each other.
I’m sorry, my dearest love, for polluting all of which you care for, with the dust and ghost of who I am.
Next time, I will take notice that just because I am knocking on a door, that I will not always be worthy of having it opened.

The other day when a good friend asked “what are you looking forward to” I did not have an answer. I realized I hadn’t had an answer to that question since my battle grounds were school rooms and scented pencils wielded at close range. I hadn’t had an answer since I split my last cookie with my best friend, or gleefully accepted an invitation to spend all night on a carpeted floor to wake up to drool on pillows and cinnamon buns made by dad. I don’t remember the last time I had an answer to that question. Not since my imagination was my most prized asset instead of pink pills taken twice a day. With water of course. Not since my fingers typed epics instead of emails. Not yesterday, and definitely not the day before. Though I have more money now than I ever have, I feel poorer than I’ve ever been in a life that pays by the hour and not by the gratification of $10 on book store day. No small thing has chance anymore at making me smile. Life has done a good job at doing away with smiles for grown ups.

Now I smell and I eat whatever Id like and no one is here to tell me to stop making mistakes but I was never ready to hold my own life in the same esteem as anyone prior. I dont know what it takes to stay alive. This is all a pitiful attempt at nurturing animal let go into the wild. The animal bites the hand that feeds but is afraid of the fire. I am but an animal whimpering for someone to hold it. Just once more. I don’t know what Im doing and I fear I won’t, for a long long long, time. I am a grown child who one day was told that smiling was for grown ups do, and I can do it now, but alone. I can do everything I used to, but now just alone. But it turns out I dont want to do anything anymore. Not with myself. Not here. And definitely not forever.

Let me shrink down once more, by grace of time, and feel small again.
I promise it will make me smile.