When did I become my mother?
I didn't see her coming.
I just stopped short one day after delivering
a dose of contempt and derision
and there she was
hovering in the corners of my mouth
keeping the world at bay.

lodged in my attention span like
a noisy commercial, I was sold affection
with no guarantee of love

lying in my bed as if you didn't fit it
the sheets seemed to hover uncertainly
over your bullet body and baby bird kisses

unbalanced by uneven understanding
we straggle along a wet sandy *****
in the distance nothing gets closer

my heart is dotted with ghosts

I walk in the direction of a cemetery because I have
no choice
all my friends live there

everyone who hurts me pumps

air through their lungs & are not sorry that
some cannot feel gravel between their toes or have
dirt for hair

because
after a while, you become where you sleep.

I am okay with blood in soft spaces
like between her neck and collarbone, flower shapes on
her *******, a trail from thigh to cotton sheets,
the sky vomiting sunset
on the carpet where my kitten sleeps.

Just not on concrete, nothing should escape a
person where one could not rest
and be safe
while clouds regenerate clear blood for her veins.

i. you took the clouds
and dyed them, used droplets of food coloring
so the sky would almost always
look like it was in mid-sunset, aching for the moon.


ii. tomato vines, tomato vines
tangled on you
and you are not even mine.


iii. songs that stopped being beautiful after you left me


iv. they named cottage cheese after the
first place we watched the food
network and
pretended to make a casserole for our family of six.

blind and black andromeda drops her skirt
and
around her waist she drapes the coldest dirt
when the pink pearl parade is nearing
don't ask, for long forgotten what was told her
monarch and viceroy we age (but don't get any older)
2 dark lovers sleeping in a midnight clearing

overland their dreams they glide of a lower shaded tint
darkness over top of light white chocolate eggs and mint
linen kitten sheets under branches lined of frost
the surface tower rises by a shower sky of cream
silhouetted hours joined discreetly at the seam
riding overnight trains so as not to wake the lost

the cauldron of a moment seen after a lifetime's purge
parallel hips that light a smile never to converge
"she smells like nina simone with a humid voice like ether
pastel lips, renaissance legs and august sunset *******..."
a second to align our love before the blackened water crests
nobody, nobody, nobody knows the depths that lie beneath her

this fairground love ends in blessed rapture flame
the terminal separation that God has given name
of a strawberry village girl isolated and honey tressed
whose severed fingers have guided paths anew
when she could have left she decided not to
but bound her deserter's hands behind love's holy breast

now the violet sands cover our tracks then shift
returning to a landscape's nightly spiral drift
that was the night everything changed
the hunted left the hunting grounds
the silence longed to find a sound
the equinox flowers lay rearranged

i can't drink hot apple cider without thinking about the house
with uneven kitchen counters and gloomy walls.
back when i used to steal rachel’s cinnamon
and stay locked in my room whenever i heard people talking in the house.
the year i lived in that house was the year jenny and i did a full moon ritual
to cleanse ourselves of whatever was weighing us down.
we broke bottles against a wall
and spent hours talking about  the tattoos we wanted
and the people who made us feel like the walls were closing in.
i let omar pay for my concert ticket and my drinks
until he wouldn't let me pay for his.
i told him i wasn't interested in boys,
but then in january i fell so hard for a boy who left the country,
i had to find a new word for myself.
i didn’t believe in ghosts,
but i knew our house was haunted
because i could hear the piano playing at night
and there were some nights i had to stay up until dawn
because i couldn’t fall asleep in the dark.
that was back when i used to walk everywhere,
and when i closed my finger in the door
and had to start painting my nails to cover up the black spot.
that winter was the worst.
my feet got stuck to the scale
and i decided to stop eating and keep smoking
until the number i saw was less than three digits.
i was so deep in my own head,
i didn’t notice how everyone i was close to was drifting out of my life.
i cried on my nineteenth birthday
and spent a night drinking so much
i came home and fought with rachel
and was as honest as i needed to be.
so in january i started packing up shoe boxes
and taking them with me every time i went back home.
the fort st. house was never my home,
i just lived there.
jenny and turner had two black cats,
and i still wonder if they split the cats up when they broke up.
i always thought i’d get to see willow grow up.
i wanted to live alone so bad,
and most of the time it’s exactly what i need,
but sometimes i miss those late night conversations on my bed
or having someone to talk to while i cook dinner
or even just knowing you’re sharing space with another living being.  
but if i could relive any part of that year,
it would be sitting under that november full moon with jenny,
reading our secrets to each other
before setting them on fire.
that night we went to her parent’s house and ate cookies and drank tea
and we stayed up late and watched practical magic
and i still have those secrets written down somewhere
and i hope they're not still true.
i want to believe we really did work magic that night
because i wanna believe something about that year was permanent.

There I stood
In a long hallway
Stretching thinly
To a lit point

Lined with doors
Opening as they closed

Its prisms transposing
Euphoria as it shone

Lifting my chest
It dragged me breathless
Down its stretches

As I was reflected
In my own projections
Of sentients

Until innocence
Was all there is

And that is
Where thoughtless
Narrative lives

Where languidly it gives
Wordlessness meaning

And that is
Where fraughtless
Intentions can win

Acting replacing thinking

Incentive in Zen
Awaking and thinking again

Was is and gonna be
Everything I believe
Even while deceived
In sets of themes

Numeric categories
And the tragic stories
Of grander things

Things of grandeurous dreams
That I wring out in the sink
While winking
The well wishes away
In splashes
Of graying
Paint

My hate
Is displayed
In the mourning
Of Mondays

And with relatable monotony
And some mundane

Everything goes back to the same

Or at least
That's the philosophy