i've the mien of a human,
alien among his own.
gross animal urges, brackish greengold flits, uncrushable surge; then,
demispoonfuls of Other emerge, light like photons
barely reaching, then lapping,
at my fatigued bare feet, toes curling up
in the sand of someone else's time.

i don't let people in,
because i
myself am
outside of me,
full of blocked ways,
full of rationalizations.

i am all hallways
without any room.

--- it's ******* weird, i know that.

i am not
altogether
normal.
i am out
there, but
still here.
please please, understand
this. it's key.

like, the other day..
while taking out the trash (that i pathologically neglect to do),
as i approached the dumpster,
that old-as-the-hills
tall, ornately carved double door glinted
into my space
- yet again -
out of nowhere;

made of an ancienter wood hailing from
a lost time and a lost space,
whose two adjacent hatch windows were lithely guarded
by some bizarre crisscross adamantine sentient metal -
this precise door, which
i have never been able to open up, let alone fully approach -
laughed and widened its grasp:

and, with a confusing series of heavy deadbolts  
receding from its nook with a resonant boom,
the left door,
ajar,

beckoned my
being,

as i
am,

and i crossed its threshold
into a velvety grooved room, remembered again
as a toward flesh warm and sliprune.

i've known the boys like him, the boys
with the gentle eyelashes and the
lip petals and spikes.
he touches my hair, twirls it in his fingers.
i am always nothing more to them.

i want to be earthquakes and avalanches,
yet i fold, becoming the beers in their guts, the ash
on their tongues.
but the way his tongue finds my pelvic bones,
how his calluses kiss my bruises.
his scent echoes inside my pillows,
denial like ***** bordering my throat thick.

the boys want my skin, to flay and wear it.
i am a prize, shiny and golden,
and he is licking my insides, my blood and guts.
like wine,
on his mouth, dripping down his chest.

i see how he stares at others,
calculating and timing,
but in the end i am the one, bent over, the one he says he loves.
(to ****).
and i wonder if this will always be this.
nights tasting like cider and ***,
knees scabbed and bleeding and scabbed and
bleeding.

he never touches me outside the bedroom, his
fingers glued to the bike handles.
i want to cut him open and see what's really inside.

your blackbow words
melt my syntax
into a scarfelt dew

things
feel
possible again
when i lay myself down
along your darklit spectrum

my words
prostrate before you,
crowgoddess,
ruler of all
that twiststurns
and licks clean
this lonely vessel of yeses no'd