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 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
You saw through me
that first day you stepped in that garage
your eyes sharp,
making their incisions,
finding things even I did not
know.
They call people like you
old souls,
your knifelike philosophy
they name intuition.
Sweetheart, I'm sorry
I couldn't save you from seeing all of me
I couldn't stop my tired feet from running
you couldn't save me from myself.
Yet you still came with me,
you rode the elevator down just to see
what I was hiding from
and you found her, Anna,
in all her glory, tumbling from the window.
You cut your foot on the broken wine glass,
just like I do every time.
She laughed at you like she laughed at me
and you ran from that cursed hotel
while I stood and let her rip my heart out
again.
see: Inception
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
You write my name on grocery receipts
and lose them the next day;
I whisper your name in my sleep,
and forget my dreams by sunrise.
We sit sunburnt on the lawn,
me watching the clouds melt,
pretending not to feel
your eyes on me.
I want to write you a song,
but the words don't make it
from my heart to my fingers.
The sticky notes you leave
on the fridge don't stick, they
slide underneath,
forgotten dust-collectors.
One day you'll remember them,
you'll read them to me and I'll cry,
because you wrote about me,
and I never wrote about you.
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
red zeroes,
circumscribed about
our sallow
wrists. yellowed
paper, we
circle our
mistakes and
fatal flaws
no erasers.
lemon eyes
pulp and
peel crammed
down our
throats. how
were we
to make
lemonade? four
american dollars
to our
names, it
means everything
it's worth
nothing. crowds
love the
tragic heroes,
but we
suffer our
own stories.
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
This is the story of smoke,
mirrors,
broken fourth walls,
and me.
I
used to play with fire and pretend
I was a goddess, like
I'd created it with my own
fingers.
I once set my carpet on fire
(that's not a metaphor),
and for one brilliant moment I
thought I might have
inadvertently burned down the house.
But I outgrew fire,
grew bored of ice,
and discovered the final frontier—
it was disappointingly tepid:
dull, a bit smoky
from ex-flames that scorched the carpet.
My once-raw lungs are now
jaded and fading.
What is left to grow tired of?
I don't care enough to find out.
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
a summer scent seeps into spring,
the bitter hint of our endings
the years, begun in swelling tides,
now ebbing toward the shores of time.
this summer heat is scathing now;
the sky found wanting of her clouds
and sun the sole tenant therein,
burns with echoes of what has been.

so long ago, she deigned to rise
from darkness to uncharted highs
and now, our greenest life is graced
by torrid waves shone from her face
once lush and verdant, now descend
the lifeless leaves to life's grand end
our feet will find, in passing by
remains of those who knew the sky

so autumn falls, apprising death
and beauty takes a ragged breath,
exhales a gust of frigid truth,
reminds us of expired youth,
then lies down in her crystal bed
as isolation takes her stead
our memories and warmth are lost
'neath blankets of life's lonely frost

we seldom see the craven sun
we crave that fire that kept us young
and full of life's bright, loving rage
but fateful wind has turned the page
it leaves a blank chapter for us,
to our ink-stained fingers entrusts
invention and a flash of time,
future ahead and past behind

where life began, we pick up now
and to the blessed spring endow
an offset to the bitterness
that once beset our eagerness
we suffered, learned, and now we fight
not nature; not the flow of time
but to preserve humanity
to safeguard that insanity
we named love, for we have found
it is all but by time bound.
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
How does that make me feel?
It's complicated.
or maybe it isn't –
maybe it's outrageously simple,
like the condensation that becomes rain that becomes
a raincloud again:
I am all three and dangerously unaware,
trapped in a comatose fever dream
wishing you would pinch me and
disappear.
If I knew how the game was played,
I'd be so unbearably bored.
I spare myself the tedious details:
whether you're real or not—
whether I could ever wake up—
whether I care enough to try—
ignorance is bliss, honey,
and imagination is only everything they say
reality isn't.
The narration is a little confusing, my editors said,
the perspective is a little jumpy,
my thoughts dissipate before they can be
properly understood.
They can't tell whether the story is supposed to be a
tragedy, or perhaps
dramatic irony,
I don't reply because—
well, I'm unconscious, of course.
And busy—
I've got appointments all day; being ignorant and blissful
is quite involving.
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
If we could truly feel love
perhaps we would rise with the dawn
like steam over the lake,
evaporating into the soul-shaken skyline.
Our questions would have
not answers, but more questions.
The flames that licked our lips would
fall on flowers and
they'd bloom.
We would plant gardens
sow them with our dreams,
and the seconds that sprouted would stretch
to last lifetimes.
We would see the world
in a drop of rain,
folded over in paradoxes and surreal truths.
If we could feel the vast expanse
of time and space
of pain and regret
and if we could love all the same,
it would not be romantic in the least:
romance is heartbreakingly unequal,
and if we could love,
we would love with billions of fragments of
broken hearts, sewn together,
perfectly imperfect,
spitefully ironic and
irrationally equal.
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
Do you sleep on your back
with your heart to the
sky, and your face to the
sun?
Last night, I wondered
as the moon peeked through my window
and the night awoke,
I wondered with my heart to the
floor, and my
face pressed to the pillow.
When I was a baby,
my mother lied to the doctor:
"Yes, she's sleeping on her back,"
but I would only sleep on my stomach.
Still, I turned out fine,
right?
Sometimes I lay out on my back,
and I can see my heart beating
in my stomach,
through the fabric of my shirt,
but I can't sleep.
Is this what you feel like?
Can you watch your chest rise
and fall?
When you cry,
do your tears make two tracks
from your eyes to your ears?
Maybe you don't sleep on your back at all
maybe you turned out fine,
like me,
sleeping with your heart to the
floor, and your
face pressed to the pillow.
Maybe you don't watch your heart beating,
or your chest rise and fall,
maybe you don't cry —
but I'd like to think you do.
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
Euphoria sewed her golden ecstasy
in the scathing arms of the sun
we knew our world was hers when
the last of the ocean had evaporated
and we had drunk our tears away
with nowhere and nothing to hide
we joyfully traipse through desert heat
like newlyweds, heading towards the Honey Moon
singing dead romantic words
of antiquated crystalline towers
where young maidens once were trapped
'til summer sounded her blissful clarion
and her castle melted into the fallow earth:
this is the beginning of a new era
of heavenly heat
we will all burn together.
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
The doctor called today
to inform me that I have a
critical case of you:
tears hang heavy in my heart always.
but I never cry,
I never sleep
but dreams dance in my consciousness always.
In the night
I shiver as the dark settles in my lungs
in the morning
I am blinded by the light.
I shattered all the mirrors in the house
in a rage, because
I cannot agree with them.
I have taken to self-medicating,
reading tales of me, in an alternate reality
where I have love and tranquility and a little sanity,
and no you.
But my symptoms are worsening
every day with you,
and twice as much
every day without.
The diagnosis knows one antidote,
a terribly plaintive remedy.
All this is to say,
I think I need your help.
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
I lay down on a bed of thorns
to be next to him:
roses are quite romantic, they say,
and they were once my favorite flower.
My skin became sticky with blood
but I never cried, because we
bled together.
Later when I scrubbed my body
and the water ran red, he
was nowhere to be found.
In the aftermath I realized
my scars would never fade
my skin has stayed scarlet and sensitive
and now my tears betray
how my nerves scream at the touch.

I searched for him;
maybe he would assuage this pain —
but all he could give me
was months of bleeding silence.
It was only when I finally gave up
that he camped outside my door,
fists pounding against the wood,
hours upon hours, screaming
that he loved me.
But he looked like hell,
like he hadn't even washed his hands
since that night.
How could I tell him
that he reeked of acid?
That being close to him made my stomach churn?
That he looked like the worst mistake I ever made?
I said nothing;
I locked my door
and listened to him break.
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
You emerged from the breaking dawn
glittering to rival the rising sun.
Molten gold dripped
from the tips of your fingers;
shimmering dust encrusted your footprints.
Had our paths not crossed,
I'd not be frozen here;
a statue of fool's gold,
the work of your touch.
But I'm stuck in your kingdom,
watching the golden age
waiting until you wash your hands in the river
and come back to me —
you are cursed with the Midas touch,
and I am cursed for making you king.
 Jan 2021
Tiger Striped
Tonight I'll wear
the black dress that never left my closet
hear it rip when the
backs of my thighs meet the cold piano bench
my stiff fingers will scratch the keys,
eliciting aching ivory groans
I'll wear it in the shower and shiver
as icy water skims my skin
I'll press our polaroids to my tongue
and chew you up
you'll stick to the roof
of my mouth when I swallow
and my skin will turn angry red
because my body always knew
what a bad idea you were.
I'll wear my youth like a medallion
hanging where my heart should be
and soon my red eyes will
forget what it feels like to blink.
The hairs on my arms will
stand on end as my
fingernails scrape the tile on my bathroom floor
tracing the lines of old poems I burned
in your fire.
I'll bite my cracked lips, just to
remember what regret tastes like
and with hot blood fresh on my tongue,
I'll stumble to your empty house
drag my bare feet in your driveway and
silently beg you to ask me how I am.
I'll shatter your bedroom window and
almost glimpse you through the haze and
when my knees buckle I'll
collapse where your bed used to be
and for a split second
I'll think it was you beneath the sheets.
Aren't I beautiful, darling?
I wore this dress for you
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