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.

I want to be their eyes,
to light the match and fall into a trance,
becoming one with destruction by flame;

I want to be the fire,
to eat away the world around me
and rise my wings from the ash;

I want to be the bird,
to fill the hollows of my bones with dirt
and sink into the earth;

I want to be the earth,
to search the surface for your feet
and decompose you into me;

I want to be your eyes,
to see a world of melting flesh
and all things obsolete.

Her skin looks just like a map to me,
but not to be conquered, no,
one that makes my eyes gleam with curiosity
to explore the furthest corners of her world,
the slums of her cities,
the forests of her soul.

A map that is meant to mean something,
to find a place that feels like home;
a place to shelter from the storm,
a place I no longer feel alone.

For now I know that home to me,
where I have always belonged,
is bound of merely skin and bones,
the deepest eyes,
and the cutest toes.

The room feels heavy,
sleepy morning smiles
and satiate English words
clinging to to air.
They reach out,
trying to pinch me,
as insistent as
the professor's smile.

Some of us still feel
as we do at 7 a.m.,
though our minds are
overflowing fountains
of new knowledge
as we try to hold
and scoop it back in.
they're drowning me,
the letters are drowning
and too tired
to swim.

It's the feeling I get
of a stomach ache
and not being able to tell
whether it's because
I'm actually sick,
or just overwhelmed
with possibilities.
*What will I do?
What will I be?
Maybe I should
just try to focus
on what's in front
of me.

What does it mean to feel
Like you're drowning in life,
Like you're stuck in a permanent daydream?
When your eyes never quite focus
On anything at all
Because you're so far away?

I’m so,
So far away.

You ask me what it takes to have fallen from belief
that words aren't enough to know
what love is.

All it takes
is the feeling of being held to the ground by your roots,
metaphorically and literally.
Sometimes I still feel bruises
that are no longer underneath my hair
and sometimes
I think my ancestral veins are laced
and patted dry for the viewing of our friends.
I remember wishing the wood would hit my skull
just a little harder
that my memories might sink between the cracks
like a spilled cup of orange juice
and maybe then I could forgive you
for things you “didn’t” do
and forget
that I was born with poison already mixed into my veins.
Maybe then your screaming
would be aimed and pierced
into another stranger’s eyes.
Maybe,
but probably not.

We all want to believe that love
comes automatically with shared blood,

     that your parents thought twice and more
     about what they made you for.
          Maybe,
          but probably not.

I dug your path before you woke,
tumbling with dust off your spine,
and you rose blank from the underground,
forgetting with the sun
reasons for burying in the first place,
the existential burning
which reasons awake.

I held you up before the storm
and there your lesson went unlearned,
shaking with hailstones and bitter words...
what didn't **** you,
provided by remains,
would be not basis for any gain.

I lit your torch before you fell,
hands cupped against the rain,
but you didn't go like burning books...
more so the man who tripped with stones
and licked with flames
his ignorance away.

Distances waiting,
breaking mystique in free fall,
shook pills from the clouds.

Did I ever tell you I love you?
Must have slipped my mind
once or twice,
or maybe every time I saw you.
But I'm in denial of the possibility
that I deliberately didn't mention it,
being too scared to do so.
Once or twice I thought it would slip out,
slide off my tongue,
or in an otherwise inappropriate manner.
Because that's how these feelings are,
like a frantic bird
trapped inside my ribs.
So I'd like to apologize silently
for reasons you will never know,
and hope that you won't notice
when I'm gone.



-e.r.n.

its hard for us to speak as we feel.

but a poem has no rules to keep,
no untruth to shake us from our sleep.

no one to tell me i'm crazy when I repeat
the same words like a broken broken broken record,
or when I string them o ut
                   in
      nonsensi cal pa
                                 tter
                                        ns
like those girls out on the street,
because these words can bend and SCREAM.

no one ever said poetry is s'pos to make sense
just s'pos to be free
spoken from the unedited souls
of you and me


-e.r.n.

Go ahead,
                  bite me.

I’m sure you will hate the taste

   of this mess you’ve made

Sometimes I scratch my skin so loose
about whether we would find where happy is hiding
if we thought much less
about these twisting logics,
quieted our overstimulated ambiance
by quieting our own processing
and essentially
not caring so much.

I know I would, would find it somewhere,
but it's funny how that doesn't make me wish
I thought less in time,
I wonder what is brewing in me
that so craves a stormy conscious
rather than what we all cry those late nights about,
because my theory of life
is that the purpose of life
is to find it,
yet part of me seems to care more about the theory
than the truth and action of itself.

Once I hated you
when you told me what to do,
but the English language
is always either passive
or aggressive,
and I know you only meant well.

Can you forgive me
for hating you
every time you breathed the words with ease
that strangle my own throat;
that I can barely say?

I'm sorry for all the times
I'd rather be you than me,
thinking wrongly
that your life was easier;
But it's only different.
I know that now.

This isn't what I expected from closeness.
That each new piece of you
would make me feel worse about myself.
It's not because of you,
but because of my perception.
It’s collapsing with my life.

So please let me know
when I become too much to hold,
when your arms start to ache,
or when this **** just starts to get old.
I'll leave with no trouble,
Because under all this,
I do love you.


-e.r.n.

I'm with you in the bluegrass, swaying like the ocean's floor
singing like we used to dream of all the things we'd one day see;
     I'm with you under florescent bulbs, of late night cubicles
laughing in tune with the hum of his fax machine at our inside jokes;
     I'm with you at every gas station, a blanket-full truck bed
crunching every loss under my boot heal, taking us back to perfection;
     I'm with you tying shoelaces
     and each sigh of the new moon,
     of every heart or new blood wound;
You--you're with every piece of me, familiar like childhood scars,
tear salt soaked and burning like ritual fires in each corner of world,
in wanting of my body to be sewn, to rise back and reclaim ours, anew.