My eyes hurt after I cry. Every time. Did you know that?

Its like my head is telling me to close them, and maybe I won't see the blood strewn across my childhood walls, my childhood hands, anymore. Their assailants were little secret cuts made each day, desperate to ask for help.

Years after they stopped, my eyes can still see them. My walls talk to my head and remind me how many times I wished I were dead. And I don't feel them, I can't fathom them, but they eat at the frays of my sanity, the few weak threads, and start tearing the life I've put together for myself apart. Who am I? I can't tell if I'm a death-lusting 15 year old or a stable and happy 20 year old woman. My eyes get so blurry here.

Its so hard with this picturing mind, to not remember how picture perfect we could be sometimes. I forget the calling and crying and cutting for those little snapshots that make me think I ruined all of it. That its my fault we're not picturesque enough to send perfect post cards for Christmas anymore. Its hard to convince myself it was never that way in the first place.

I mean, cmon, Grace, open those burning eyes of yours. You've felt like an outsider since you were young. Your father joked that with your starlight hair and sky eyes you were an alien that they adopted one day, but the odd part is you kind of understood why it could be true. Not just because of the celestial features, but you never belonged. The daughter they wanted and made you to believe you needed to be was never you. You walked on glass shards of your own shattered heart to try to reach the strange plain where your parents resided, but the more you bled the further you felt.

But they lied, you're their flesh and blood, that part can't be undone. They gave you special recessive genes to a T and made you suffer as a child for having them. To top it all off they gave you this ****** photographic memory that traumatizes you too well. Its like you can never leave the blood behind.

Yet tonight your eyes hurt, even too much to picture the blood, so maybe its time for some rest. The memories, the blood, even they can wait. For now what you need, god forbid you admit this, is some silence and rest. There has been enough clatter between your ears for one night. Who knows, some people might not even be able to withstand such clatter and chatter for a lifetime.

Guess your just a special recessive alien like that.

I can remember starving in a
small room in a strange city
shades pulled down, listening to
classical music
I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife
inside
because there was no alternative except to hide as long
as possible--
not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance:
trying to connect.

the old composers -- Mozart, Bach, Beethoven,
Brahms were the only ones who spoke to me and
they were dead.

finally, starved and beaten, I had to go into
the streets to be interviewed for low-paying and
monotonous
jobs
by strange men behind desks
men without eyes men without faces
who would take away my hours
break them
**** on them.

now I work for the editors the readers the
critics

but still hang around and drink with
Mozart, Bach, Brahms and the
Bee
some buddies
some men
sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in.

don't feel sorry for me.
I am a competent,
satisfied human being.

be sorry for the others
who
fidget
complain

who
constantly
rearrange their
lives
like
furniture.

juggling mates
and
attitudes

their
confusion is
constant

and it will
touch
whoever they
deal with.

beware of them:
one of their
key words is
"love."

and beware those who
only take
instructions from their
God

for they have
failed completely to live their own
lives.

don't feel sorry for me
because I am alone

for even
at the most terrible
moments
humor
is my
companion.

I am a dog walking
backwards

I am a broken
banjo

I am a telephone wire
strung up in
Toledo, Ohio

I am a man
eating a meal
this night
in the month of
September.

put your sympathy
aside.
they say
water held up
Christ:
to come
through
you better be
nearly as
lucky.

"The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart." -Janet Fitch

Who is she to say you're a liar?
Maybe with every fiber
you loved her.
Like you do with your
Recklessly floating heart.
You two were different lovers.
She's the kind of girl with metallic blood.
An ancient stone
heavy in her chest,
Unusual and destructive
When it arrives late.
You were wrong to have loved her like butterflies when bones like hers require sorcery.