The first time someone called me a poet
it was in the cramped back hallway of a party in early July
heat rising between our ****** spaces
sweat collecting at the base of my brow to keep anxiety at bay
I listen as someone who I could barely call an acquaintance describe me to a boy I just met:
“she is an amazing writer, trust me, she’s so cool”
As if me using metaphors for antidepressants
and words as bandages for wounds
was reason to make me worthy to get to know beyond my first name
to pin my feet onto a pedestal I didn’t ask to stand on to begin with
I press autopilot in my muscles,
mechanically flip my hair,
split my lips into a half-*** smile,
****** my hand,
and let my laugh ring with the music.
Little does everyone know I am the broken jukebox
with a disappearing voice.

I hide behind love and at 19, I wrote “What High School History Taught Me”
It was for you
you, the NYU junior with a mouth that clung onto vowels
and whose fingertips could read the braille embedded in my skin
You loved chasing storms,
I was almost named after a hurricane,
and this was how we were born after Hurricane Sandy-
it was never a question how we found comfort in destruction
But I still remember telling you
that I wanted to love you forever even if you didn’t stay to find out
And ever since I spit that
men come to me looking for their taste of mystery
for their chance to be immortalized
They don’t know I only speak in train station
and everybody is always a few minutes too late
No one has gotten the chance to get too close
because it’s never romantic to **** the girl who makes love to her own sadness every night

I’ve stopped seeing the fire in my poetry like most strangers do
because to them
my pain is pretty
my heartache is dressed in a bow so
they can all sleep better at night knowing
some 20 year old girl in California understands them
better than she understands herself.

I have been singing in a language I never fully understood
because I am the girl who attaches my reflection to a man
whose memory I still keep prisoner in my mind
and this is how I hide from myself
this is my disappearing act

This isn’t poetry anymore
and it hasn’t been for a long time
This is the sound of survival
This is my heart leaking gunpowder and discharging bullets
Right here
on this stage
is where I understand what it feels like to choke on the gas chamber of lost dreams
Right here
is a dusky New York City apartment
with a boy dressed in the mask of a man hunting me as prey
This stage is where I come home to after being at war with myself
This stage is my peace
my prayer for forgiveness once a week
Right here
is why friends from school don’t call me that much anymore
This stage
is why me and Joe broke up
This place
is why I don’t sit with my family at the dinner table no more
because why
Why share grace with those who can’t understand
how these lights I stand under make the full moon I need
to break my neck and howl at some nights

This is where I pluck the guitar strings of my throat to sing like a bluebird and slow dance with every ghost
This stage is the only place I can forklift
all the misunderstood out of my chest and force you to watch
and you
will still call it art
you
will still call it poetry

But this isn’t poetry anymore
it hasn’t been for a long time
This
is the sound of survival
This
is the sound of me using the inhale of night
just to make it to the exhale of morning.
Right here.
On this stage.
This
is where
and why
I
fight.

We spoke in tongues that day,
Your fingers trailed my body like
a harlot skimming through the bible finding her daily grace.

The Sun, her majesty, jealous of the
nervous heat that fought for a moment of breath between your satin body and my scarred chest.

Did you know that I almost cried?
Because your touch was everything I feared the most.
Your touch was confidence, maybe love.
It hurt.

We don't speak the same language anymore,
For your fingers,
are too holy for mine.

I put you to the back of my mind,
not because I don't care,
but as the grieving mother-of-two
places her own mother's
garments into the attic:
none of you
has left me,
I promise.
It's just that I do not fit.

It would be too painful
to throw you away.

So now you stand
as a measure to dust and distance;
as a measure for every woman
who calls me by my name.
We walked together
on lonely mid-night crawls,
the pillow-talk in my empty sheets;
you were the stalwart companion
in all of miy dreams.

The miracle in the chicken shop,
the sanctum on the screen.

I put you to the back of mind
so that I could focus on
what is in front of me.
None of you
has left me,
I promise.
My hands blister
from holding onto you,

but it would be too painful
to throw you away.

if I should sleep with a lady called death
get another man with firmer lips
to take your new mouth in his teeth
(hips pumping pleasure into hips).

Seeing how the limp huddling string
of your smile over his body squirms
kissingly, I will bring you  every spring
handfuls of little normal worms.

Dress deftly your flesh in stupid stuffs,
phrase the immense weapon of your hair.
Understanding why his eye laughs,
I will bring you every year

something which is worth the whole,
an inch of nothing for your soul.

Once I held you in my arms,
I loved you in my sleep,
above the traffic
and the circumstance,
above the slaughter of the sheep.

You made me sing at my guitar,
a grown man falling to defeat.
Now I cannot find The Answer
in the company I keep.

The game is rigged, we know it is,
in a hustler's *******,
the bank cartels
and corn-fed chicken
descend upon the weak.

I held you in my arms
on a precipice brave and steep,
above the breadlines
and the cannibals,
above the slaughter of the sheep.

You have me writing poetry
about landscapes left unseen,
you kissed the addict on the mouth
and now he's looking to get clean.

But the day is long, you know it is,
forgive me for sounding bleak,
a sucker for
those sad, sad songs,
and that chemical retreat.

I am not working on perfection
in a lifetime stretched and brief,
but I am working on a promise
that for once,
I intend to keep.

See, I've got a knack for giving up,
for feigning inner peace,
I've had my fill of oil spills
and the slaughter of the sheep.

You've felt it too, that burdened love,
the dead-end of familiar streets,
you lay down with him,
habitual ease;
lilac skin now a slab of meat.

The dignitaries come,
the friends you have to meet,
a compromise of ancient ties,
amongst the ******
and the thief.

Words are falling fast for you,
though I lack the skill to piece
all the fragments you paint for me
in this temple of disease.

The race is run, you know it is,
a pace we couldn't keep,
our lungs are full
of cigarettes,
our tongues of old deceit.

The Lie is out amongst the crowds,
but I have no time for war and peace;
I am slipping into
my lover's robe,
into your twisted sheets.

Once I held you in my arms,
I loved you in my sleep,
this wolf's disguise,
those bells that chime
at the slaughter of the sheep.

My love is now a swamp
in the Poem Factory.
See, I've been keeping mean
on lack of sleep and ****,
******* at yesterdays;
an old dog's tricks,
an old man's routine.

The lung of water is thick
with chemicals; still-water bleach.
I've been trying to clean up my act,
you see;
bend my back into a yoga pose
and question what it means to be free.

I haven't found the answer yet,
but it comes in the moments
I don't question it.

It comes in the wake
of a happenstance lyric;
some eloquence through anxiety.

My love is angry heat,
a mirage across the street.
See, desperation leaves a scent
and an aura of hopelessness;
my dreams of ***
lift up from my tea,
steam buffeting from me.

The pipeline swallowed air
in the Poem Factory,
solitude, the hopeful dream;
isolation, the reality.

Let's feel alive after the first cut;
the bloom on your wrist,
the white line on the mirror
separating where you have been,
and where you want to go.

You laid down in a blanket of snow
and rocked yourself like a river boat,
turning sleep in fits and waves,
to wake as a fraction of yourself.

Let's feel alive at the steep passing;
the sheer drop below,
the winter that thawed in your mind,
that first hit of love-
first taste of smoke and sugared ***.

I became vacant at the shop-fronts
and pinned myself to sleep
with **** and binaural beats;
the sea-wall to my mental health.

Let's feel alive in our life's passing;
the intersecting plot-lines,
the echoes of old suffering
that will dissipate as we make our way
to where we want to go.

We never found each other
amongst the traffic of our lives,
though I waited for you
in a pauper's tomb;
overgrown with pre-existing grass
and violent rosebush.

What is left after old sentiment?
After the nights spent hoping
for your uncertainty,
for any kind of sadness
that may bring you back to me.
I have not found the answer yet

and I have stopped asking the question.
I just work the day,
collecting free moments
as ash mounts the incense burner,
over-thinking each word exchanged
across the pillow of my mind.

The television news keeps rolling,
the world keeps turning.
Despite atrophy in routine
and the absence of you;
that deficit I cannot absolve
when left alone in its entirety.

Love arrived once I wrote it off
as a folly of forsaken selves;
freedom reduced to paranoid glances
at inactive screens.
I am ready for pain again,
if you are the one delivering it.

Finding a living is so hard,
so difficult to sustain
without a reason to sustain it.
Beyond personal dreams
and a need for greed.

An ocean of eyes follow me
through the working day
until I crave isolation.
Only to stumble into
my blank-walled retreat
and realise what isolation really means.

What happened to our potential love?
I cannot read your last letter,
too scared to hear
that you hold a happiness
that bears absolutely
no reliance on me.

You found our distance
lost its charm. You have him,
with his immediacy
and a history to draw upon,
to justify.
I am a teenage folly,
left in the scrap of old photographs
and even older emotion.

A disused, defunct muscle
left to atrophy
as you find your comfort
and your way in life.
But you are a stray, a stray
with the desire
to be led astray;
with the want for a longing.

You know I can fill your days with poetry,
your bed with flame,
your winters with heat.

Let's defy gravity, baby.

Let's defy that *****
until her forceful hands shake us
back to reality.

We'll rise above this dreary world
and play leap frog among the stars.

We'll smoke one with the moon
while he
spills secrets about the Sun.

We'll get drunk off faith
and throw a prayer or two up ahead
for the Man Upstairs.

When the magic fades,
We'll hold one another as the law comes back into effect
and we slowly drift through the clouds
claiming lazily
that the moon prefers Southern Comfort.