a bowl of black beans / your mother sitting on the other side of the kitchen / this liquidation of self / you would be something / anything / anyone / if it could make you safe / the black beans taste like nothing now / you aren’t crying but you’re **** near it / your mother makes a honey sweet remark / won’t you stay alive / and / eat your beans then we’ll leave / and you don’t have an answer but you listen / you are pleading with the voices to let you eat the beans and make them taste less like bleach / your mother bleached your hair when you were fourteen and you bleached your skin at sixteen / you drank that same bleach from that same bottle three days after your sixteenth birthday/ but this is a bowl of beans and it tastes like that time / smells like that time / your throat coughing up blood and your body wretching to *****.

a bowl of black beans / your mother takes that bowl and washes it out in the sink / you still have that hoarse voice from imagining it tastes like bleach / you still have that ***** wretch instinct because of how much your throat stings / then mother says; you’ll stay with them for some time / as if that makes anything better / a drive into the emptiness of a psychiatric hospital / a place they’d sent you when you were ten because you were so angry and so depressed / you break when the blue tiles turn to ocean and you drown / you break when the red tiles turn to fire and burn your toes / you are hungry again / but you know everything you eat will taste like bleach.

you can’t sleep because the bleach is still on your tongue / you think of that bowl of black beans / your mother sitting on the other side of the kitchen / maybe you’d see her smile again / maybe you’d be broken and be able to exist comfortably / don’t you want to survive to see that?

you answer / no / i’d rather die than be patronized.

o, you great young idiot!
you left blisters on my fingers from
lifting up all of your tiredness
trying to exalt it to heaven with human weight
i have broken exactly sixteen bones trying to
maintain the weight. lifting up your body
your suicide. your death. you made me
atlas and ******* my acl is torn and i have
arthritis.

o, you great young idiot!
you kissed a girl for the first time and didn't think
you'd ever be allowed to do it again. you thought
you'd be dead by next week but alas, you were
not and the reaper didn't take you in the night.
you kissed a boy for the first time and hated it.

o, you great young idiot!
you are sleeping in church and being forced to
realize god is over hyped. you think
maybe I'm wrong
but they always prove you right.

great young idiot!
don't **** yourself before the rains come.

the young girl came back home last night
with a vacant look in auburn eyes and
a sense of what it means to be dead.

she shows us the language of unwanted touch.
first, the way it takes words and slurs them
changes words like ****** to daddy
because you are afraid of where he will
touch you next and you learn
you need to speak his language if you
want to survive.

second, the way it takes aching and twists it
changes words like love and turns it to lust
but you are just trying to survive
so you stroke his ego before you can strike
his ego.

third: the way you have died one hundred deaths
and could not articulate them in a language
outside of the ******’s.

the rapists tongue is yours now
you know how to speak it but refuse
all opportunity to because you are so afraid
i will become like him.

how to not make waste;
cry over everything so
pain does not go to

the flies over graves.
let it go to art or love
maybe something sane.

water your plants each
waking day so they can live
but when it comes time

for burning season,
cry over everything so
they know you miss them.

the fields are empty
now / a cremation of your
dust you couldn't have saved

anyone/ so you
exist in utter shame and
return to our dust.

you are not the roar
you are the whimpers
the crook necked panting
your skin melding with other skins
learning new ways of exalting
(holiness or blasphemy-- i don’t know.)

you are not the water
you are not the water
you are not the water
you are the wine
a drink,
half served,
half severed.

you are not the tired reminder
you are the action the moment meant to be remembered.

i think it only makes sense that i give up
and kiss away the last memory
of being human.

learn new ways
of taking fire and turning it into art.
take off finding old ways and methods that
are just as good as she remembered kissing the sky with
pure heat.

i don’t quite remember
was it patriotism or fear?

i don’t quite remember
was it a gunshot or a celebration?

can we eat today without guilt?

it goes up in smoke
she looks on // he looks weakly
all things are half broken in this lifeless stupor.
understand,
a firework is just a reminder of what we are
burning, tired, exploding.

there is a god dying in America
somewhere over the **** ivy leaves
encapsulating whole monument walls
where i have not seen sense in years
and i can smell-feel-taste the god dying in
this paralyzed America.
he stood six feet tall
unassuming hair and a soft puerile face
where leaving thought on skin made sense and
where we could see him fully and foolishly.
he stood with angel wings and vexed spirits
floating above the carapace of the earth
dare not touch what is not his to touch.
he could make and marry and sell America
but instead took a powerless position
with a headache mind
and decided to stay along with vagabond america.
and we used to think america was godless
but no it's worse; it has a God who has
decided against taking the government's side
meaning; all of your philando castilles and
michael browns will come back to shame America.

this skin
a highway for your fingers
where you drive them down
this asphalt spine
and you stop
catch your tires in
the pits of my skin
the place where i picked and picked
until the blood came out from
the tender asphalt
but you just kept driving
you finally reach your destination
and we take moments to recollect
your skin / my skin
your car / my road
we are together.

wonderful dexterity is required
to  be clasped tight
flush against wooden walls having knives
thrown at you.

(most people call that a relationship.)

2.

the board i stand against is
a miraculous work of pageantry,
showing only the abuser’s side of the story while
the rest is hidden away amongst
a work of cabinets and springs
pushing landed knives away from limbs.

(most people just call that stockholm syndrome)

3.

this trick, when well executed,
leaves you with knives lodged just below
the crotch
leaves you close to death
but not with it.
it leaves you questioning:
will he do it again? (he does.)

(most people call that abuse)

left with a pencil sans eraser, a paper
denoting, “this is what to do if you feel self
harmful or aggressive.” down from there
a list of things to do in the sanctimonious occasion.

from the hall you can only see rooms
room after room after room
inside, i hear it, the reminder
of where i am.

a girl in a blue sweatshirt smiles
waves. makes polite gestures and suggests
maybe things aren’t awful for everyone
but they are for me.

i recognize her face from somewhere
and i realize there are so many
****** souls here that i used to
only see in dreams.

you don’t get to feel
thunderstorms under fingers
not like i did then

my mother became a psychiatrist after
the rain came and went and
smiled upon the Earth in
immense broken silence. and I asked

why does the sky burn blue
and she told me
because it is a river and will burn through
the banks and move
desperately into the ocean
a holiness we cannot make sense of
that it is both water and fire. and it was
always both smoke and steam
where you can feel the chimerical pain
of thousands of steam engines from
the middle of the industrial revolution​. father
became a natologist after the world
birthed me prematurely and i came out
covered in blood and shame.

he told me the last birth will be
the same as the first / a bursting of the river
that burns steams and runs
moving through the mud of the river banks / it
will come from the flesh and die in the flesh
it will become the last love
of the earth and the first love of the stars
birthing the river does burst into
eternity.

it is late June
there is no bell to ring
or song to be sung
so the silence is just heat
all the holidays passed and
broken in the heat.

it is late June
and i am dissociated in the
sunshine. they say that
this makes us human
but i am a drab recollection
of life and not a reality
all realities are
broken in the heat.

it is late June
and somewhere across
fourteenth and V we find
ourselves crying in tongues
and ******* ourselves
don't you know that's the proof
of a poet?

it is late June
i have yet to give up on you
but you are broken
in the heat.

7:09 pm 5/25/17

with the brook dried up,
your disquieting
sense of how you wanted
all these things to last forever
seemed to be extremely bleak.
after your eight hour shift
you visit.
hear nothing but grinding of water mills.
and you wanted to know;
if i were to be drowned here alone
would they find me or care to find me
in the dry banks of the brook?
you are a mysticist when it comes
to death
***
alcohol.
it didn't quite make sense why
you drifted chimerically into insanity
unable to stop the body from
coincidentally smashing into a stone
bludgeoning the skull. killing from
brute
force.

you more often thought about
drowning in the brook than admiring
it's whitewater beauty. you
more often broke yourself down at its
banks and thought the water was your blood.

with the brook dried up,
this place isn't real anymore.
you are not bleeding streams
you are again
a dry bank
empty and soulless.
somehow you were disappointed;
you were healed but empty.

the desk bolted into the ground
the chair equally bolted
your head smashed into it
hanging there, bleeding
a rotting orange in that room you went to every morning.
your skin against skin against skin
the resting body
your father after the sixth time you tried to off yourself and woke up in the same place you’ve always been
the white crinkled scars from your nervous tick
the same tick your father had that made him scratch that brown spot atop his bald head.
you going silent after the ****
him going off to tell his boys after
the moment frozen in time
my headaches
the will to live matched with the want to die.

i am dreaming of the apocalypse
Satan coming down in all blue
declaring the color of suicide today is yellow
that the color of pain today is red
and that the color of god today is blue.

i am dreaming of the supermarket where
god and satan talk, loudmouthed and offensive,
consistently telling the other to *******.

i am dreaming of massacre and all of her
unholy penumbras / i have colored a sun named
after her and left it hanging from a noose in
the color hell of this bedroom. marking off her
endless questionnaire:

Are you suicidal? yes
Are you insane? Yes
Are you the discoloration of the world of tomorrow? The way the future looks drab from this point in time and seems even weaker from that present that belies you with the temptress of future? ...maybe?

i am not dreaming. i am cold and alone in a room
somewhere between purgatory and massacre
where both are a disaster and the real name is
probably something to do with psychiatry and
institutes. i am greeted by satan in blue,
god sulking half silent behind him, mumbling
something in streams of cadmium red.
he tells me; you’ll be staying with us.
he tells me; i wish you luck and hope you get better.

i am not dreaming. the floor is rising in rebellion.
a white flag raised from my side of the battle
both sides truce and lie themselves down
in the unwanted nowhere of persistent ailment
in a bed with paper sheets.

and the question is; am I insane? am i suicidal?
am I the discoloration of the world of tomorrow?
yes. yes. maybe. the question doubled in on itself.
so are you here for suicide? she asks.
yes. yes. maybe.
my disaster is rolling down my throat like
molasses and i want to die. satan’s color was
blue today, right? i look down. i am in blue.
are you here for satanism?
yes yes maybe
are you here for *******?
yes yes maybe
are you here for real?
no.

father runs the comb slow through ***** hair
a dream in wide tooth picks / throwing one in that afro
for effect / everyone always wanted to look like
questlove.

father runs his hands on the back
a dream in crying fits / throwing out “it’s okay’s”
and / “you’ll be fine’s.” all until you were
sixteen and tired. so tired of being alive
and you told him in this stern steel
and he broke into anger
threw his hands on your arms and shook you.
don’t you know i need you alive, boy!

father places his hand on your shoulder when you
are overdosed and dying, shaking you again
telling you wake up as he drives inexplicably fast
down the highway. father is one six shooter away
from doing what you’ve done.

father is crying alone at night. mother doesn’t
come by anymore. his lovers all left.
his daughter in the hospital. an arctic frigidity
of things sliding quickly out of mortal control;
don’t you know we’re all ******?

father is eating oatmeal in the hospital.
sitting next to you in this
inexplicable unbreakable silence
where your insanity is a six shooter
and his hand is on yours / letting you know
at anytime, i could shoot.

you did rain honey
and gold and silver
and later acid.
you were thunderclouds
with lightning disaster
but it doesn't really matter.

we've been in a drought
for six years.
long enough where father
has up and left the farm
stopped checking the almanac for when
it'll rain honey.
it never rains.

you did rain honey
but now you scarcely exist
i question: god, why have you left us?

i am leaving my notes
my offerings to you
at the front of the village gates
building shrines for you.

you scarcely exist.
are you god or my lover?