Feeling not so pretty
in the middle of the night

I've got a glass of wine
and a fluorescent light.

I've got a fridge full of leftovers

of feelings

of spite

I've got a bottle to my left

and its contents to my right.

And there's a morning fast approaching
In which the real life lies

but my body isn't tired
and my brain is stirring fry

and my hands are typing nonsense
as my face becomes my eyes

there's a birdie in the corner
in the corner with the flies

I've got one more chance to make it
but my head's become my mind

I've got one more chance to shake it
but I just can't quite decide.

Now we choose
The fights to fight
The end is nigh,
A coming night.

Now we break
Our jagged vow
Unspoken word,
An unwiped brow.

Now we cast
Our eyes aground
We break our hearts
To prove the sound.

Now we scream
Or hold our breath
We live our lives
Or die our death.

In my head, this poem is already titled.
It’s terrible practice to title a poem before writing,
at least it doesn’t do me any good -
A disorganized, stream-of-consciousness writer will be limited by a title if the title comes before the writing.

There’s a metaphor there maybe.
About deciding how things are gonna end up and adding weight,
shape,
food coloring,
substance,
meaning to your version of events without considering the infinite, tedious branches of time and meandering possibility.
We bury ourselves, is what I mean, by titling it before knowing how it goes.

Now that that’s been addressed, and stay with me because there is method here, onto the meat and potatoes of the thing:

The many flavors of goodbye.

An elusive creature, Goodbye.
You know what it is; there are examples that volunteer unbidden in our memories.

Still, even with clearly defined edges,
A goodbye wriggles out of our grasp a little
When we hold onto it too tightly.
Or it becomes cluttered, muddled with past and future partings,
When really, each goodbye belongs only to its moment and nothing and no where else.

If you’re like me, a goodbye skitters away when you look directly at it,
Leaving only a shimmering impression,
An unfulfilled opportunity to share a piece of your secret intangible insides.
If you’re like me, it hits you and slides to the ground unacknowledged, where it stays
gathering regret,
until you find it in a dusty corner one day and hold it finally to your chest,
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

People are ******* woefully messy,
we’re flawed and broken and vulnerable in the extreme,
Soft little mammals awake within ourselves against our will.
Doomed to loss
To pain
Fear
The unpleasant trappings of our station in abundant, endlessly accessible supply.

There’s a trick though,
They don’t tell you this,
A trick to surviving without the beating heart that you could swear lived in you too, for a blissful miraculous moment.

Ready? Let’s see if I can find the right melody; the Knowing doesn’t often lend itself to casual plainness.
People only go as far as you let them
And if we’re all waiting in line to shuffle off this blah blah blah
We can hold our goodbyes in the space where they should be, in line with us.
Not as an empty pocket of wishes and heartaches
But as the flesh and blood of our own self,
our own beating heart.

So that when those moments stun us,
Knock us backward out of our seat with unbearable force of longing, crushing in the cosmic weight of their suddenness;
when a cardinal, say, visits your mother’s old rose bushes
You can remember and unbind the reserve of space inside you
Let them walk ****** in
And sit for awhile.

The title of the poem is “On Goodbye,”
The title I prematurely chose
And the poem that followed which attempts to wrangle a wild, unyieldingly ferocious beast by treating it like a friendly stray dog.
It’s wishful, and I wish it for you, too:
That the minerals in your blood rearrange themselves into the shape a cardinal, say,
And I’ll carry you with me, too,
Until we meet again.

The darkness is
alight with static
filling the air,
washing the barren ground anew.

She sleeps just there,
I see her from the ceiling,
measured breathing,
stealing dreams from the ether blue.

On this snowy night
may we each be warmed  
against this frozen blight
with the promise of summer’s dew.

There’s a family of bullfrogs nearby
Their cries rise and volley
Shimmering in mezzo-soprano melancholy
A torch song to the new moon,
Pleading her silver bloom
return to the black spring sky.

There’s a spark
Cradled in the hot and glowing dark
Divine
And all mine
A hidden or forgotten corner
Once a wasteland
Now a hearth

(Burn this ******* forest to the ground)

Kindling catches
Discarded matches
Wild; raging
The brain detaches

Reaching up but I don't know why.

It all was dark but now there's sky!

Tangled together with tendrils like fingers
Alive, I'm alive
And my body is new.

Where there once was a seed,
Now there's a view.

Do I even have eyes?
Can I see?
Is there someone taking care of me?

My purpose is clear and I climb
and when I do
The sugar courses through me and helps me burst through with leaves and seeds and pods of green.

Will it hurt when I harvest?
I have no voice to scream.

Just a need and a drive to create,
to be alive,
To drink water and sunlight
And to remain always green.

My then boyfriend
Now husband
Never forgave you for putting your hand on my thigh,
Casually mentioning the ******* beaches in the south of France.
Your daughter needed a chaperone on your family’s upcoming vacation.

You went and I stayed of course
The ******* beach all the poorer for my absence.

I am not the kind of girl who
Finds herself at Disney Paris at the end of the movie.
That’s not the way this movie ends, anyhow.

12 years later
One lung lighter
Tens of millions denser
and poised to send your daughter
to Dartmouth
Or Tulane
Or anywhere she’d rather.

She’ll have everything the world could offer her
In exchange for her father.

A parent shouldn’t have to know.

So I forgave you the hand thing
And the lewdness of a drunken survivor
Poised on the lip of an ever-widening hole.

If you asked to take me now,
I think I’d go.
I’ve always wanted to see the Louvre.
I can almost hear it:
The clicking heels and murmurs,
Your overwrought humanities professor explanations of this or that and me humoring you with appropriate reverence as always,
And the dead certain silence of the thing we will not speak about,
Pointedly conspicuous in its absence,
Filling the space between.

We eat dinner together,
discussing the houseplants.
Is tonight a good night to give the dog a bath?
No, we decide. It’s a little too late.
Almost bedtime.

I change you into your pajamas,
and you resist.
You’ve been rebellious tonight,
trying out your independence,
walking around in it.

Daddy does bedtime:
it’s an easy one, you go right down,
and the whole world gleefully burns.

401 miles away
The oft handled Ceremonial Old Testament has already been presented, the rituals completed, and the ancient book returned to its resting place where it will wait to again be summoned.

The plans are laid and known by those present,
But let’s not talk about work, shall we?
The imagination fails to conjure limitlessness
As anything other than a yawning mouth
A ravenous, bottomless black hole.
The breadth of all Earthly treasure under the kingdom of heaven is laid before the expanding emptiness and
consumed
Consumed
Consumed.

The guests will remember this night for the rest of their short, comfortable lives.
The bounty of life, so plump and sweet, available to them each in perpetuity;
Yet how dreary, wouldn’t one say, to possess only one’s own life, own liberty, and so forth.
Thrilling to **** but so messy!
But then ah, to control the very right to existence while the people still live;
to hold their beating heart in one’s sweaty palm?
Exquisite.

I receive a text from Devin.
I ask them if they need anything from me.
We touch on the usual things and I miss them terribly,
Brokenhearted and blind with rage.

You are powerful, I say to them.
You exist.

And the band plays on as the demons feast on souls in Hell and the mausoleums lay cold and gray and still.

It's not so much the giving. That's living, the burst from your heart that connects to the hive mind; the leaving all the doubt behind.

It's the after. Exhausted and shattered and sweating out all your exposed emotions, and nothing. No word, no glance, as you stuff all your **** back into the red suitcase that contains your world and no one else's.  

There's no expectation for commendation, but you wish someone would attempt some relation as you mop up the ****** mess that once was beautiful, but is now splendorless.

Music is useless for making a statement. The whole world is trying to make you complacent and you'd smash your guitar, but your money's all spent so you cry in your bed wishing you were a poet (or a surgeon or a botanist or at least brilliant) instead.

There were some roses, once, a long time ago.

They grew out of nothing, out of a tiny seed that burst and ****** its contents out into the new and terrifying air, and even then they didn't exist but for the idea that one day they might.

There were some roses, once:

the product of a process that included water and light and the removal of weeds and the implementation sharp protection from predators: deer and birds and squirrels and the like.

There were some roses once:

great surges of crimson fruit that bloomed so fiercely in their rebellion against the surrounding thorns
dedicated to the protection of the home of the finely spun veined silk that blossomed almost overnight.

There were some roses once:

Never has such beauty been guarded so staunchly;

and with good reason, for the rose in its radiance has but one short season to stretch its arms and breathe its perfume to which all lovers beg and swoon.

There were some roses once:

They faded,
green
then red
then crimson
then purple and umber.

But in their slumber we see the bloom we once beheld on that summer day.

We fondled their petals, hastened their decay.

There were some roses once, a long time ago.

They had to die, as if on cue, as living things tend to do,
and oh, they dried so elegantly!
Plainly meant for royalty.

And even in their most brittle form, they're somehow warm
Somehow still new.

So you plant some more, you cut the weeds, you draw blood on their thorny guards,
knowing that it's not for you, but for the birds in their back porch churchyard.

And the moment the first rose peers around from inside the womb, well
there's your reward,

to forward the growth of something so fragile and sweet.

So ruthless if you aren't aware of its teeth.

Reclaiming my time
From tequila to lime
Breathing the air, and
Pretending it’s mine

I’ve mined for gold
But I’m getting old,
Too many holes.
Searching for souls
Has taken its toll
An empty bowl
For a mink stole.

My 60 lb lap dog,
Wet nose pushed under my calf in the just-morning.

Ruiner of couch cushions
and muddy backyards,
Seeker of the softest blankets,
Speaker of many grumbling, awooing, harrumphing languages,
Your gigantic brown eyes home to the secrets of the universe.
My sassy girl, head tucked beneath my chin,
Here you sit, leaned casually
Against my side, your arm
Lap-barring me into place:

“Stay.”

I am 4.
14.
24.
38.

I am 38 and you’re making me scrambled eggs.

You got the call and you’re making me scrambled eggs.

It’s the night before the morning of your transplant.

Old women sing of their mothers.
And I know I will always miss you when you’re gone.

But not today.
Not today.

I’m sorry, I say.
And you say, no. I’m your mama.

I’ll always be here to make you scrambled eggs.

I am 38.
24.
14.
4.

And we’re at the kitchen table. You’re so tired and I’m so little and it’s so late.

I’m sorry, I say.

And you say, no. I’m your mama.

I’ll always be here to make you scrambled eggs.

I wasn’t there for The Final Fight.

Frankly,
it sounded like the same old *******,
Old words, new spit
Old hurts that won’t quit.

I wasn’t there.

But I’ve attended that fight,
And it’s too shiny to die,
Glittering with layers of lies
Roughly the shape and size of a perfect slingshot stone
And worn hot and smooth from years of carving into bone.

It isn’t fair, the choir sings,
As one triumphant final chord rings clear and long,
So ends the song.
The war lost
The battle won.
It’s not as fun to take the bow when the audience is gone.

You know,
Trauma is tricky.
It evolves quickly,
a parasite
That grows when you feed it
And knows that you need it.

You shaped yourself around that shard of pain
And it lanced through your childhood and ate the remains
There’s no knowing where you end and it begins.
You are the same.

Its’s strange to mourn someone who isn’t dead
Your aliveness rattles around in my head.
I picture you alone in your garden,
Which thrives the way only a loved thing can.
It repays you in lilies, tomatoes, sunflowers,
a hundred different birds in springtime
Who return again each season
Hoping you will feed them.

Bleed your heart for paint.
Dip your pen into your veins,
Wring the refrain into the fine mesh colander,
boil your water
And feed it to your daughter.

Here I am,
sick again,
a small pile of cough drop wrappers
growing on my nightstand

It’s spreads,
they say,
from brain to body.
I can’t speak, can’t scream,
no one would hear me.

Stress wins today,
it got my best.
Tomorrow I’ll fight,
today I’ll rest.

An oil spill
From a brain drain drill.

Whoops.

I didn't meant for my scoops of goop to fall in your soup.

So come on now, toss it all out.
Toss it out with the rest of that garbage,
that infected syringe.
We're better than this.

I prefer it chilled,
so would you mellow out?

There just isn't time for self-doubt.

It’s the early morning that does it for me

I don’t mean to seek it
But I am sought in these quiet empty-full hours -
All or nothing out-with-the-bath-water seclusion.

(Delusions of liqueur
cocksure
Every flavor of azure)

Oh god what I would give to extend the great expanse of 4am, ribbon slick and taut as a ******

And me, warm and creative.

It’s the early morning that does it for me

I’m staying up with a song.

-Call-

Respond

Eyes and lips and abandoned ships
Mirages of **** below long, fluted throats
Gliding between notes
and me too

Ready to drown you.

(It’s the early morning that does it for me)

As you give yourself over to the caresses of the mistress
and dream of flying over perfect fields of wheat

and then land

and then wake

≈furrowed≈

disappointed to find
a cold pillow where a head should be asleep

I release my held breath and meet you
Half way

I was singing
I say
And collapse in a heap

Wet hair
Bare feet
It’s dawning and day

Closing my eyes
Sunset at sunrise
Holding onto a secret key

I dream of the sea

You're so floppy.
Like a puppy,
all arms and feet
gangly, knobby.

We sit together
to work on work
but nothing gets done
it's all just talk,

Just stories about grandpas
from World War II
Freedom of love
Religious views.

And through it all
in your attentive eyes
I can see your heart
And can see how wise
You are for sixteen
And I'm twenty-nine
so that makes thirteen
years between us, christ.

I hope I see you down the line
Ten years, or twenty
And you're still just...fine
I fear for you in this terrible place
It's unkind to a gentle mind
It can shut down an open space.

But it feels like nothing
Could create a person
Not years or experience
With such clarity of vision
And depth of innocence
As you showed me today
Under the tent where we spent the day.

I believe in you.
And in who you'll become
You've already got the glue
Now you just need some
Confidence, but it's ok to be green
When the world is bright
And you're barely sixteen.

Sixty degrees on solstice day.
An incubator.

If we go to the beach we can find all the bones of the dead animals
that are supposed to be buried in the snow
and throw them in the lake.
We can dip our heads in the cold water
to wash away these nasty thoughts
growing on our brains like bacteria in the warm weather,
send them into the lake with the bones and the souls of the dead animals
that are supposed to be buried in the snow.

The supercharged atmosphere
zaps my fingers when I open the car door.
Static electricity.

If I collect all that ecstatic magic
I'll let you hold it in your hands
in a jar
and we can watch it dance.
A hundred million fireflies
that should have died on the lips of
December.

Stories!

Thousands. A thousand thousand thousand.

All misremembered together,
A plethora of memories of memories

- that's what they say, when you have a memory it's of the last day you had the same memory -

on and on forever,
a treasury of pleasure and grief and madness and drunk sadness
floating like leaves
through the air.

And it's not fair
That you get to have them
Because you're home
And I don't
And I'm not
And I feel all alone.

You must have been so lovely, Sylvie.
Your song sounds purple, like the underside of rose petals.
It shimmers and flickers in the water of the Seine, held together by a whispering, weaving thread, a voice in the softness.

I know you,
I've seen you.
You're me when I play, the piano keys conductors for all of your loveliness,
Pouring your essence into my heart as I begin to learn your curves and your lines.
I am you, Sylvie, a woman in love,
and I caress the keys and sing with your voice a song in which you are forever imprisoned, captured in a jar and preserved for eternity.

I’m an imposter.

I’m an imposter and no one can know.

I may end up on the street in rags that once were my clothes.

Money isn’t everything,
But being poor blows

And I’m facing the clock.

What then felt like freedom now feels like a box;

Like a long leash
in a big yard
Where the gate’s always locked.

I remember the first time I got high.

My boyfriend’s mom
Had bough croissants
The day before.

It’s Thanksgiving Eve
And these croissants
Are delicious.

From the beginning:

It’s a new year and I quit my job
**** it, I’ll never be good at serving
Directionless in 2013
January.
It’s unusually warm.

Your presence in the room is a rock in my shoe
You’re so cool
And I’m a mess.
Remember, you called me Heather in bed?
And I made you go home?
Well.
I forget.

Now we’re crossing the street
For your birthday, it’s your birthday,
Makers Mark, count ‘em, 2 ounces at a time.
Stacked up like unread texts and why don’t you like me’s
I don’t remember
But I’m probably crying

Flash in to outside
God it’s like 60
Deciding to go with you
Asking you to kiss me

(I had a long term boyfriend in my 20s
And his mother would buy me toilet paper for Christmas
The gift of hindsight is kind of like that:
Practical and helpful and a ****** of a gift)

Today is 9 years to the day
My parents know and they’re on their way
The nurse thinks I might be paralyzed
11 broken bones and two black eyes

This is the end of the beginning
Which is the easy part
I’ve never been able to write it all down
Spin it into art

Be warned, I can’t guarantee poetry
From a patched-but-still-leaking heart.

It’s the anniversary today
I haven’t spent much time with it lately
Nine years of weather
Have dulled the flush of urgency.
Discolored and worn smooth from the hours spent rolling it between my palms.

Now it just is.
Vague.
An unspecified ache and not even that most of the time.

Today though.
Carefully, carefully,
I unsealed it from its resting places -
nestled in my right shoulder, cupped behind my right knee, bound to the place where my neck joins my body -
And I popped it all in my mouth at once
and chewed.
And chewed.
And c h e w e d.

God the taste
So sour, bitter, unbearable on this cleansed palette.
Salt on my face and in my mouth too
And I chewed.

The thing is, you could easily make a meal of it
And oh did I once feast on the freshness of its sharp edges, bleeding and asking,
Why does it hurt?

These days I choose to fill myself in other ways.
A person could starve on broken promises.
I can think of nothing sadder
Than ending up the only casualty of a one-man war.

Lord grant me the audacity.

To again be a 23 year old marshmallow
Partying every night at the campfire with a bunch of skewers.

The audacity
To feel outstanding
With an underdeveloped frontal lobe
Floating around in cherry bombs and Stroh’s

To survive being invincible and brave and strong enough to make bold and terrible decisions
And blessedly wake to another sunrise

Never grateful to be alive.
******* *****.
How does anyone survive their early 20s.

Sheer audacity.

He fancies himself a cowboy
In line at the corner store
Concealed carry snug on his hip
(He secretly hopes someone gives him some lip)
The cashier hands him his change without meeting his gaze
He’s surprised and aroused.
She knows her place.

Selling your soul’s not a deal with the devil
Selling your soul is a deal with yourself
Make the choice over and over
To shake your own hand
And pretend that it’s somebody else

He fancies himself a nonconformist.
A free thinker
The sheep will all do what they’re told
And he’ll be ****** before he goes peacefully to slaughter.
It was easy, he figured it out
Demanding proof is just an excuse to hide behind doubt
A warrior,
he wields the flaming sword of truth
His wife asks a question; he breaks her front tooth.

Selling your soul’s not a deal with the devil
Selling your soul is a deal with yourself
Make the choice over and over
To shake your own hand
And pretend that it’s somebody else

Somewhere a fat man is checking the math as he’s being served lunch
Picking through numbers, looking for nibbles
He dribbles drool onto his chin,
as he dials his guy in The Caymans
His stomach is rumbling, it’s never enough!
To deepen ones pockets, one first must make cuts.

The determinant cause for the silver mine fire
Will read “Accident: faulty electrical wire; Company denies liability
per signed agreement at hire.”
And the cowboy free thinker won’t laugh at the joke,
he’ll just choke
There will be no survivors

But today, The Cowboy nurses his hate,
while Somewhere a fat man is writing the fate of the cowboy in pen,
pleased to be Great Again.

Selling your soul’s not a deal with the devil
Selling your soul is a deal with yourself
Make the choice over and over
To shake your own hand
And pretend that it’s somebody else

The Body rejects it
And The Brain reflects it

This night has fallen so must I into the sleep so dear only the the singing birds slinging their melodies hear the last dying crickets in the gray glow of the first hint of the sunrisen day.

Catlike and furtive, creeping toward the last of this or that odd prey, these words unwind till the thread runs out.

All heart within but stark without.

Music.

It's within. Without.

We share it with everyone. We hide what it's about.

We protect our privacy. We let it all hang out.

We want it, oh how we want it all, it all defines us until we find the wall.

The wall! What a joke. We're all in on the farce. Just give us your music, we'll decide what is art. Just sell us your soul, we'll take it from here. Have another beer, we have plenty, my dear. You're valuable, oh yes, just keep your thumb on the pulse. Drink up and polish your gift of schmaltz.

But it's false. It's all false. It's the ******* waltz,  our partner keeps face while we're falling apart, and then kicks us aside when we're behind in the race. We're falling apart, we're floating in space.

I want this to have a happy ending. If you ever hear one, its ******* worth defending. Keep me in mind. I've got music for spending. Together we've got the means for the mending.

Rachel coughs in the room next to me
A mattress on the floor cradling her softly
As the air mattress beneath me dies a slow, excruciating death.

(I chose this for myself -
Rachel has a bad back, remember;
My own back groans in protest.)

We moved you from Cleveland to San Diego -

three days of driving

- Rachel and my competing energies warring silently the entire time,

Both wishing

The other

were not there.

I reflect on the number:

3.

It’s your brother’s jersey number
And everywhere in your mother’s house
(Ten years now since he chose
To leave this earth)

We three kings,
The magic number,
Prime.

A crowd.

Its my birth order
Three of Five
-the middle child-

Guess I’ve always been
The odd man out.

I wipe away mascara,
Glad, so glad, to cry with you.

It was a rough day
We tried.

We are all creatures of emotion
And what do we really ever leave behind
But our attempts at understanding?

Our attempts at crawling inside someone else
And crying with them?

The loss so great,
We’re overwhelmed by their suffering as they relay their first earthquake;
Their restraining order against their child’s father.

I am the odd man out
And I’m still okay,
Wiping away mascara.

Glad, so glad, to cry with you.

There's a horse who is primed for battle. She's been broken and saddled, muscles hard and keen, her frame is lean, she's got all the necessary means to carry destruction into the heart of the fray.

But. She's afraid. She dreads the day.

There's a child who is primed in playground. She's been beaten and shoved down, she's been left to bleed, the teachers are too late to intervene. And she waits for the day for them all to pay.

But she's afraid. How couldn't she be?

There's a leader who is primed in sovereignty. She's been brought up high society with a sharpened gleam, smart and mean, quietly she gathers steam. With the tools to rule, she waits for the day to carry the horse to heart of the fray, to make them pay, to make them all pay.

But she knows the game, knows how to wait.

And still the world will twirl in its hate.
Until it needs a leader who's great.

She'll rise like the cream to the top of the pack, and pick up the slack, and possess what they lack.

And finally grasp the ultimate power!

To rule. To instruct. To provide the anchor for the ones who were broken and beaten, afraid.

And she'll heal their wounds, for she knows their pain.

She wrote poems about sunflowers
and about the colors of each of the different flavors in her afternoon tea.

She wrote about the foot-worn path in the concrete floor of the history museum;
About a stranger’s dog who licked her hand at the park.

And to her future child,
And to the boundlessness of love she knew but could not fathom that existed in a forever-expanding space inside her,
And about that brave and resilient seed shared by all of science and art,
the interconnectedness of all things.

In radical joyful tones,
she documented the goodnesses of her Ordinary on scraps of paper and deposited them into a small chest,
her Memory Bank.

The people pointed at the lonely beergazer
The outraged wunderkind
The housebound widower
Each lost in the past or in the future.
Ah, misery.
The father of poetry.
They would shake their heads,
A shame, they would say.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town or maybe the world,
the mother of poetry, undeterred,
sat in her garden
singing to the souls of the vegetables.

The clouds

lift

with a perspective shift.

Accept the gift.

I think the secret to a long life
Is to be in love with every thing.
It’s easy, honestly, to love greatly and truly.
It’s the easiest thing.
You should try it,
Just try it.
Breathe and the air is sweeter
Open your eyes
There is so much to pine for.
Being in love is noble work
And we need you, the lovers.
We need you more than ever.

I like myself
I try to find
the common ground
in Me and I.

I like myself
I try to find
the common ground
the eye to eye.

(I try to see
the eye to eye)

I like myself
I try to find
the common ground
the desperate sigh.

I spend it all
I spend my time
on basking wounds
in deserts dry.

I like myself
I try to find
the common ground
the Me and I.

The statements made
the inner spy
I escape
the spinner's eye.

I like myself
And by the by
I make myself
the glowing I.

I hate it all.
I hate the cry.

I hate the Me.
I hate the I.

I like myself
I like the spy
I accept
The spinner's eye.

We venture into the storm
Against my better judgment
(I’m ready to go home)

The wind kicks up
And a thousand
No
A million flower petals
Swirl around us frenetically.
Great beasts of raw, hungry light snap their jaws
Not so far away

You aren’t scared,
Your curls wild in the dark.
The storm, you say.
The storm, Mama!

The sirens, now,
And the rain,
And so many flower petals.

We turn and head back inside
To wait a little longer.

Wine slides into my belly
Hot and acid
Mm, needs to breathe.

Empty, a domed cavern
Hipbones,
my mother aghast.

Cast the flashlight around.
If there’s a heart here,
Let it show itself and
BEAT.
Rage the kettle drums
Of war.

Unleash in pieces,
Conceal the door.

Red with pink flowers
This blanket
And maybe on my insides too.
Blossom as they break apart.

Machine, start
Crush and crunch your barbs
Flick the crumbs away and reshape:
Curly hair remorseful,
Sad and sorry face.

You know I love being right
And I knew this was going to be a ******* day.