You remind me of an onion.

As the layers peel away,
I struggle not to cry
'cos you're just the same inside-

and in your heartless little way
you blinded me with love,
enough to make me stay-

to cut you up in little pieces
and chew you like
"Take that, you frickin' onion"

.

We won't be part of
your social pollution,
but will be part of
the solution.

                                        We are the confrontation
                                                   ­             and the fight,
                                        the declaration
                                                     ­    of human rights.

We won't appeal to
your expectation
or narrow our minds to
your "education".


                                         We are the rebellion,
                                                  your­ red flag of the news,
                                        though toleration
                                                   and a merging of views.

We will not weaken
under discrimination
or be products of
your degradation.
                                        
         ­                               *We are the revolution
                                                      ­      and the sign,
                                          the liberation
                                                    to­ step out of line.

Listerine fountains are falling,
breaking through the roof,
shingles like helicopter blades,
scratching up my face.

Your mouth is making violent motions
and I can see mirages between your teeth.
It took me a long time to master,
but I can't here the news on repeat;
I don't want to anymore.

I don't know what you thought
mismatched socks would accomplish,
but those mixed with an heated face
sorta make my scull feel like
marzipan.

5, 4, 3, frozen in the moment,
right before a scream.
2, my iPod crumbles in hand,
just like the game I always lose.
1...one, one, one...

I blocked that out too.

i like my tea with a glow of sunlight
through canvas window curtains
with peaks of skin underneath
big feather blankets
and a sleepy morning smiles

i like my tea with warm, scratchy tones
from old vinyl records
deeply etched with memories
and all the ones i love
here to sing along

i like my tea swirling with thoughts
of everything i live for
everything i hope to be
and all the luminescent people
each day that i see

and most importantly i like my tea
hot from the hibiscus flower

brewed and set for two minute, no less

no milk or sugar added

just my
simple
bliss

that night, I saw bodies in the motel bathtub
beckoning like a 50's Cadillac
back seat beats and Father's  
bottle of snatched brandy up
to bring back our youth

and stay
for one last whisper in a last-innocent ear
the diner lights buzzing like
a lifetime of loss to mistakes
that can be little more or
less than broken glass lies

I see shapes in your sunken eyes,
pressing like last night's lifeline,
telling you to keep your heart safe,
but I have to look away.

Please don't cry,
I can't possibly turn tears to gold.
I'm not the type to indicate
what should fill these empty spaces
and I don't know what to say
when you don't say it first.

When the shivering starts you'll see,
I can't be your blankets and late-night radio,
or anything you used to believe.
When those eyes mean oceans in mine,
you'll see how nothing I can be.

Bristled blue feathers
Like nature's forgotten child
She chirps to no one

You've taken too long to come haunting,
wading through instances of mud, of regret,
until my wanting has all but dissolved.

You've broken my spine with curious fingertips,
an innocent ghost with fireplace eyes,
where questions went unnoticed, unsolved.

You've come knocking with empty cages,
pulling behind what you'd begged to forget,
you spoke to my spine like needles, absolved;

until my teacups are dust on the shelves
and your flowers don't wilt, but burn,
of stove and house and noose and all.

Cash registers and sleepy morning smiles
swept with the exciting smell
of new-old things.

He greeted me at the end of the line and  
I asked him how he was-

          "Cant you tell? I'm radiating with joy!
           Every breath in my chest is a light
           charged and glowing through my bones.
           My throat is sore from laughing,
           my cheeks from smiling,
           and it's the sweetest pain I've ever known."

   -and he was.

I didn't hold tendons between my fingers like
street boys on rain city rooftops,
crumpling their futures up to smash into shredded jeans,
shredded hearts,
some wrappers escaping, flying over this city
as our neglectful witnesses.

Their hands were broken bottles. The black top
made my guts look like escaping snakes,
my eyes hoping to be Medusa.
Fictionalizing gets me through most things.
Sometimes pain tastes like metal, sometimes like cherries.

I stare at the sideways sunset, a wrapper spit up
and drying out, a pipe dream promise;
reviewing my time strips as if they'd had a spelling change,
recounting every drop of blood word and smile.
Sometimes I forget that I'm real.
Sometimes I'm not.

You told me to write about
what scares me.

At first I thought, well, everything scares me.
That sense of endless possibilities is what caused my writers block
in the first place.

Sorry.

Further down the road, my depressive nihilism kicked in.
Nothing can scare me,
and nothing really matters.
It's the illusion of life
pointing its big, daunting finger
and laughing.

When I finally hit both ends of this,
felt everything and nothing,
it hurt somewhat, yes, but-
I began to write.

Now my words reflect
everything I feel and don't feel,
everything that is and isn't.
Now, I take everything that passes through me
and make it into something else,
something completely new.

In this moment,
I have complete control over my little universe.
There is a world out here,
more vibrant than I ever imagined.

So thanks for that.



-e.r.n.

If only for once
Maybe this time I'll make it

Just maybe I'll be
Be able to not fake it

Maybe let them see
Possibly the truth for once


-e.r.n.

summer night sweats
and whispers in the hay lofts
forgot our purpose

Every time the butterflies come,
they crawl up my throat and start to choke me
but it's a good kind of choking,
like scratching an inch even though it makes the rash burn
or liking the pain of dotted blood lines on my skin
after a long day of holding in monsoons and earthquakes
beneath calm serenity.

Or like telling myself I can never get better
even if a part of me knows, knows I can.
It’s like deciding never to speak again,
or stop eating just because you can.

And why is it that pain tastes so much like love
when I willingly dress myself in it,
yet someone lays a finger on me
and I feel the same way
when my friends are mistreated
and animals are abused,
I feel a surge of fierce hatred
throughout my whole body
and don’t you ******* touch me
ever again.

I believe the world can be better than this.
And what does that say about me?
Does it make me a hypocrite in a sort of vague way?
Because I keep wondering
if I do things without thinking
that another me would hate me for.

You woke like windows,
shattered in Jewish hellfire,
shade by burning books.

to her with tea bag eyes
and wrists like scarlet fever,
gently undue your bruising ties
and unthaw your years of winter

--  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --
she breathed the where
and exhaled the won't be,
if only you'd been with her there,
to slow the feverish sea
--
up, to the nearest fall
down, in the mountain mist
she falls from nothing at all
just as she had wished
--
the moments leading to a place
took shape and color like music,
and with all the grace it takes
to purposefully lose it
--  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --

to her with shaking hands
and a mind like a burning temple,
remember your wish is your command,
and to always hold yourself gentle

1; Every time I think hard about a theoretical concept, the rest of my thought processes become out of focus, like on a camera, and I find it hard to speak in regular conversation as that fades.

2; I think dark blood is beautiful, but light red looks too much like small talk.

3; As you can probably tell, people make me feel like I'm drowning in a foreign sea.

I'm so scared.

I'm so scared of what you will mean to me at 4:00 in the morning,
when I get to thinking most about my life
and that much thinking
can't possibly be alright.

I'm scared that maybe you are just a mirror of 2014,
an illusion made for laughing at all of us
who think maybe we can do better this time.
This time we'll change for sure.
This is it.

And 2015, dear friend,
I'm scared that maybe this time I won't make it
to the hopeful beginning of 2016
When I can say again with conviction
that this is the year we'll be great.

Yes, we will be legendary.

This is it.

Across this room,
                                     your vibrations are loose,


                  weaving into mine.

I have all this scratching
and leaking
at the edges of my mind
that I know I can’t fight off
forever.

Sometimes people lose
their subconscious drive to try
all at once
in one day
and just go crazy,
but then I think
my most alluring thought
of all
is that I can't wait
for it to happen
to me.

It was the way you carried yourself,
as if universes scratched at your shoulders
and the care you kept neatly inside
was killing you slowly.

I remember the words you spoke
as if they were poking, pressing
at your already bruised ribs;
as if they climbed up your throat
holding ice hooks and torches.

I buried them deep as they'd go
in the sweat-drenched sheets,
hoping you wouldn’t remember
or want  to search for them.

But one night I awoke
to an unfamiliar breeze,
those sheets untangled and draping
halfway out the open window.


I'm sorry I couldn't keep you safe.

I'm collecting each passing moment
with a pinch of salt and sugar
sprinkled in my memory

One, two, three shakers full.

but the sands of time keep slipping
through my mortal fingers

I keep an empty jar on the top shelf.

and everything else is a blinding mishmash
of my mind in the morning light.*

Please don't look under the bed, it's embarrassing
what I forget to think about.

The way you can't look at me,
'cos I'm not the little girl I used to be;
your tired recollection
of each gene in recession;
your knife heart, sad heart,
raised by a bad heart--

but I decided it’s worth battling your
droopy-eyed disapproval;
but I want to run into this fog
with my arms open wide;
but I always thought I’d rather burn in the fire
than die in my sleep.

That smell
of burning skin
like the way I felt when lying
on the bathroom floor

is not the same
as the hollow places
when I take up only a fraction
of the vastness in these bedsheets

but the worst part
is that metallic taste
of bitter end
with every single breath I take

when I can't shake off
the sheets of blood
or knowledge
of what I've become.

My hands weren’t sweating when I said it.
                    I will never write a love song.
It never seemed like anyone could see
past the pink
                swirly
                       fogging their eyes.

   How pathetic.

But cheerios get soggy
when I look away this long
and I wrote my first melody
because of your swirly eyes.

   They’re so much darker,
                 like rotted leaves.

And second,
                third,
(voice cracking, echoing)
      my fingertips
are splitting over these strings.

Fourth-
palpating vibrations killing the me
I’d thought furthest through.
I swear,
I wont crack as hard this time, but-

I can’t tie my shoelaces
without tearing flower petals,
so I walk around stumbling,

falling
into pretty girls.

Is that still you?
I remember days of not breathing
at the thought of your last breath,
of loose words
and using them to carefully twist
a heartstring hammock.

I can't see past the red in your eyes now,
the spots on your face like footprints, track marks,
soft and tired,
hard like needles.
They stripe your skin as if for an ancient battle,
for a war that soaks your empty spaces in kerosene
and scrapes the match off your wrist.

So while these butterflies pull my stomach
out my mouth, to the floor,
and your feet shuffle from the bombs erupting
down to your toes...
I can't bear the thought of a cloudless conscious,
of reality too close to the glass.
The thought that I can't save you from this,
because all I want
is to burn down with you.

A sea of glass eyes
plagues my waking, breathing, fault
dries my brain with salt

I need you to take
the fragments that broke
and stick them back
in swiftly stroke.

I kept trying, I did, but
couldn't do it myself you see;
oh please won't you rip off
this bandage for me?

I want to be able to feel
all that's past but isn't gone
but with my heart in pieces
I just can't know what's wrong.

There's no pressure really
just please make it clean
and don't puncture any of
my major arteries.

I'm strong enough?
No, you don't understand
I knew what I could take, but-
this isn't what I'd planned.

This broke me but it didn't hurt;
now I'm just practically dead.
I need someone else to fix me
so I can remember how I hit my head.

Your eyes mean bees in my
throat, but the first time I
saw you it only felt like fire.
I don't think I realized that
is the only element I could
let myself go to, because
the beauty of it looks like
the burning of things better
left forgotten. Like lying
mirrors. Like blind trust.

The first time I thought you
would hold my hand, I was
wrong.  It was by my wrist
instead. I have never felt fear
like that, like razors. Sweet,
slippery red. I never thought
I'd be one to let myself fall
like that, but your skin looks
like a promise I can't keep.

I watched my  family grow and break in that house.
Little barns for playing hide and seek turned into hiding, hoping
never to be found
and forest games of tree creatures turned into alone and breaking
in the highest branches,
deciding whether it would be a good idea to fall
and break my outside to match.
Matches on the pottery wheel looked so much of unsteady faith
and I grew to love that memory
of running through a muddy grass field,
sinking my flesh into nails left by forgetful builders.
When my sister first got drunk,
the big screen window was torn wisps in the hot night air and I felt
that it took away my ability to breath right like I used to
at age seven, shallow pools in my grumbling belly, but
I built a circle of twigs in the woods
and sat inside it for a long time,
believing that I had made a line that only I could cross-
that it was me, just me
and everything beyond meant **** that I wasn't supposed to
think about.
Age ten was when I first fell to that place
where dreams look like death escapes
and ambulance sirens sound like the kind of music
you aren't supposed to listen to twice,
because the lyrics will just make you feel bad about yourself.
I never connected the way I grew up
with all the ways you tore yourself apart,
but I hated how you related to the world
because my relationship with you was too tired,
barely even trying,
and hoping that the painting turns out anyway.
I watched my family grow and break in that house.
I held it between my teeth like wheat-grass,
just barely keeping my country cool,
and making sure the crickets didn't hear me crying
each night to the dirt and sweating moss.