http://vocaroo.com/i/s0WQ9j4rDjc8
.
.
.
.
There’s something about the word flesh,
your circuit board is copper,
there’s no way to tell who is made of metal,
I am made of metal and blood and your voice is sort of like ice which is to say that it’s too hot for me,
that your saliva is acid
which is to say that your breath is possibly an antidote.
How many times have you been opened up like a white man’s mouth, and do you think you could swallow me or should I skip dinner again? Should I skip family again?
Should I break myself into bite size pieces to be more palatable, should I be another long sleeved t-shirt so you do not need to ask me why I am cracked-
We are a doll’s tea set. Sometimes you try to hold a tea party and even the dolls stand you up, sometimes you hold a teacup at just the wrong moment and it shatters.
Sometimes you never manage to pick up all of the pieces.
I’m fine, which is to say that part of my head is on fire and the right side of my body is made of wax.
You are beautiful, which is to say you are constructed out of pain.
you are not broken which is to say you are destroyed, we are fighting which is to say that we are blasphemy and gospel at the same time.

when i say i want to take kickboxing,
join the gym
it's for the meatheads
it's for the men who think their cars are armor
who think their voices are god
it's a properly thrown punch for the girls
who do nothing but exist in the world
in their own bodies
in their clothes
this is the one time my mother excused me
for screaming *******
to the man who said
a girl walking on the other side of the street
was
a **** **** ***** and
honking his horn
i want to learn how to down someone three times my size with a single strike,
to be the silent
protector
of the world

I did not want to write a poem titled obituary because I was worried that it would become about you. I did not want to read a poem about you out loud because I did not want anything that I wrote for you to fly away from me like you could have flown away from me, but this poem isn’t about you anymore, it’s about me. This poem is about everything I could have written my own obituary about. I was made out of the kind of smiles that show your teeth and I was always made out of the kind of skin that nobody thought they were going to need to turn into metaphors. and my scars are as pink and white as anyone else’s scars, my bruises don’t look like flowers, they look like tiny blood vessels under my skin have burst. I do not want my obituary to say that I was a valued member of a community I did not feel safe in, I wrote this poem as I dissolved in a hotel room in yokohama, I wrote my obituary once on a bus ride home from school, I wrote a suicide note on the back of a US history assignment that I never turned in, I write my own obituary once a month, sometimes once a week. I am not broken. I am not sad, not shattered. I am building an altar inside of bones that don’t usually have poems written about them. I wrote down all the words I couldn’t pronounce without breathing, and I wrote it in ink but it may as well have been blood.

the less you eat,
the less you weigh
it'll show more every day

the more you eat,
the more you grow
and getting fat is a big no

so stop eating
it'll all be fine
just stop eating,
but dont you whine

if you stop eating,
you'll look like me
and dont you see
how happy you'll be?

it was the kind of year that lasted longer than the ones around it, at least for some people and i guess that i cant really say what kind of year it was because how am i supposed to remember that far into my childhood? i was little. littler than i can remember being and it's been sixteen years since then and i keep trying to calculate the weight i have gained since 1999. and what i've lost, who i've found, since 1999 we were a tangle of potential. since 1999 i lost weight, i gained weight, i gained heavy strain on my shoulders and i didnt carry water buckets at camp because i thought i'd thrown out my shoulder, since 1999 i have been existing but i dont think that all of the time i've been exposed to the elements counts as being as alive as i am when i'm the only sober one at the park, when the boy next to me is whacked out on codeine cough syrup and asks me to punch him as hard as i can i will try to remember 1999, when i couldnt remember existing.