I’m cat ears on a cold, winter night;
bite a mouse neck
just for the tease
and let her run

away& life leaks slowly perhaps for
years and those
scars will stay
'til the end.

blooded fang, true love of the taste
of wide-eyed horror,
gut screams;
-- insatiable.

a victim caged yearns affection by
the soothing voice
of a beast
in the dark

but mama kept me far from the zoo.
baby eyes, a woman
never feared
                  so.

as the savage that am I, tear
into the flesh of the weak and power-
less
my brow is furrowed.
I carry razorblades in my pocket (just incase)
I don’t want to hurt you
but I can

.it’s morning for whiskey in
black coffee
(two o’clock PM never tasted so good)
but who wouldn’t if they
cried until the sun came up?
and then
died.

.but life never over turned a stone
to find a key
hole
that fit your fingers
without break-
ing a couple b o n e s      to find nothing.

I knew when I picked that tulip from the neighbour’s yard
that I wasn’t just killing a flower but something inside of me.
I didn’t know what it was, then.


(innocence.

that’s what it was.)

I didn’t know why I told them that I found the flower that way,
broken and left to rot and “all I did was save the poor thing!”
it seemed natural to weave this story rather than confess.

I felt bad about taking that flower. for stealing someone’s
pretty pink petals
that they’d undoubtedly cared for,
pruning and watering,
that’s why they looked so good.
that’s why I picked the best of the bunch.

they knew I did it.
I insisted otherwise, and received a slap on the wrist
no more severe than when I’d pushed my little sister
or spilled glitter on the new carpet.
but this wrist-slap stuck with me.


I’d discovered more than the sweet smell
of pollen or nectar or chlorophyll seeping
out the snapped portion of the stem.
when I told this lie I’d felt a joy in me that as a four-year-old
I couldn’t explain
but it made me warm.

I inhaled the shame and drowned in guilt and I thought
of how I could do this again and not get caught.

I was addicted.


and I knew it, then.

there once was an art
fashioned by alphabet
and life and diction,
but the papers have been consumed
hungrily by starving brains
and purged upon the ignorant
to be eaten once again
and precisely expelled;
citations unknown.

to search for clues beneath the soil;
perhaps it hides inside the talking trees
absorbed into the longing, thirsty roots
is true and beauteous given by the sun.

beat as a heart should

                  Heart never understood
the motion of Her words ‘cross page
and page

and
infinite
as th’ Atlantic
kindness flies through space;
abandoned.
when He left
She clung
                   to the blood.

beat as a heart should
    
                  Heart never understood
the penmanship,
or heartbreak                       as a muse.

pursuit came to an end,

                  relinquishing  Her pen;
does beating Heart
                    demand the sight to feel?