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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.