I've got this tickle in the back of my throat
because I have something to say, but I don't know what
or quite how to say it,
if or when I do know what,
so I stand here with my mouth hanging open
and gaping
until I start drooling
like a waterfall.
I will stand here
until my teeth fall out
like apples falling from trees
and I will catch them in my hands like wicker baskets.
I will string them onto a necklace
like pearls
and I will give it to you wrapped in heartstrings and ligaments
because from the beginning,
I have only ever desired to give you the most important
parts of me.

I take salt shakers to the water spicket and I make my own oceans.
Tide lines have eroded themselves into my waist.
I know all of the sea monsters by name.
I don’t want to submarine again.
I don’t want to grow sea **** in my lungs again.
There are cyclones I have made with my red and pruned toes because I make what I am.
I scratch at my skin.
Clammy and white.
I peel off layers.
I am only trying to baptize myself again.
I am only trying to baptize myself again.
Salty and stinging my eyes.
I am only trying to clean myself off again.
I am only trying to clean myself off again.
Sitting in my own oceans.

I have three birthmarks.

One on my ribs shaped like a hammerhead shark pigmented into my skin speaking like shadows on blinding days. Protector of humans, night hunter, and forever growing teeth.

One on my thigh like tea barely seeped, a water mark bleeding through the picture and the point. Only seen in the brightest of light and only revealed in the darkest parts of the night.

One on the curve of my hip like a cherry blossom. I am as ephemeral as a bloom. Beauty like roots breaking through sidewalks and death like a handful of sand and gravity.

Embers on my eyelashes.
Eyes white hot.
I am a fury.
I am flame.
My veins course petrol.
My arms are matchsticks.
Smoke is my breath.
I leave ashes in my wake.
And your skin is paper.
Tinder.

All I ever hear anymore are four letter words and the three word sentences that you desperately want hanging from your tongue.

Darling, I have lived hundreds of days without you and I am bound to live hundreds more.

Wrinkles in my sheets will still make shadows.
I will still run my teeth over my lips.

I think everyone is as alone as I am. They are just too scared to write about it.

I stumble across the threshold with a skeleton key in one hand and a crowbar in the other.
I had run like my tights mumbling under my breath about sparking flints and knotted shoelaces.
I promise myself I will lay me down once I have washed the moths from my hair, once the dried blood has bled once again and siphoned down the drain.
And that in my bed, I will spread out my arms and legs
trying to fill the crater in my moon.
Incoherent and blind.
I feel the walls like Braille to the bathroom.
I sit down on the lid of the toilet,
one hand clutching my ribs,
and I, the second flood,
spill out into the porcelain tub.

When I write, I can’t cry.
When I cry, I can’t write.
I have ended up weeping as I am stranded between a rock and a pen.
I want a blood transfusion.
The red for the black.
I want ink to spill from me when they splinter my skin with their scalpeled words.
I want it to fountain from me when I trip on my own sentences and shoelaces, skinning my knee.
And I want it to bleed the permanency of black, when you take my stained glass heart and hold it dripping in your hand.
With your stained finger tips like midnight freeing the mocking birds and scarlet poppies to burst forth from me like water through the cracks of a crumbling levy.