I hope that I'm your Moby ****.

I hope I'm the sneering, many-toothed crocodile from your Captain Hook head.

I hope you awake, late in the night, sweating, hearing a ticking sound,

Because I hope I'll always have just enough of you to haunt you.

I have great confidence you'll think of me often,
so perhaps that's why I could stop thinking of you.

I don't attribute myself much besides longevity,
and to you,
not even that.

One stormy day,
You'll find me,
Covered in ink, washed ashore in a bottle
on the same sands that
tick-tick-tick
your hourglass away.

My message will speak simply of your failure to toss me beyond the tide.

The mind is no place for hiding things, and fate has a way of showing us that.

But perhaps,
Darling,
you're still defying them both.

Three hot tears rolled down my face
and I think they were what's left of you.

The sky darkened as we drove home.
Somehow, even the locusts knew not to chirp.
In the damp grass the ants did not stir.

I guess that's the trouble with memory.
It makes things static,
makes them malleable,
makes them like
one of those stress-relief stones that you carry in your pocket
and rub with your thumb when you're feeling
lonely or anxious,
all the while boring a whole straight through.

You were solid but not designed to give strength.

You were my favorite mountain.
Nobody could replace you--
Except a new version of yourself.
But even in your Everestine heights,
I did not know you.
A mountain, yes--that is what he must be!

I would have preferred a man,
because when I fell down
you could not bend to catch me.

I hope you eventually forgive me
when I make myself happy outside of your shadow,
but the whisper of a new light
is enough
to call me out.

As we pull into the driveway, I slip silently onto my feet.

I wish it was easy for me to do what you do,
But I have never been very good at opening myself up.

You do it with such elegance.

Your every word begs for attention and leaks a little of you into the air.
People breathe you like oxygen,
and have come to need you even more.

Life.

Your eyes tell me what mine could be like
If I dared to follow in your
Rebellious, graceful,
Albeit complicated footsteps;

once again you are the first one on the dance floor,
But the beat I hear most clearly when I'm around you
Is not the one you inspire Club One to clap to.

One million loose-lipped ladies and never a line about you,
because no one has it in them to talk about what isn't in you.

You are a poet's dream.
You are pure beauty in its rarest form--sincerity.
You are every coin thrown in a hat,
every victory yell,
every unexpected smile at the turn of something new,
every bird who refuses to fly in a pattern.

You are what's inside every note.
You are fiercely loved.
You are frustratingly, and unfathomably,
too good for words.

and only the sunshine deserves you.

Here we are born:
The ill-prepared,
The underwhelmed,
A baby,
Stillborn,
Wondering after its feet,

Watching moths commit suicide in their mission for a light.

Given no ladder, given no rope,
We pull ourselves up on rungs risking papercuts.

Slick, sick, sliding,
The war-torn machine of humanity seeks the sweet oil can only
Consciousness can deliver.

"Here lies the illustrious Michel Nostradamus,"
Asleep in a deep sepulcher not unknown to us all.
"Awake and beat I am!"

Only some fish make it upstream.
I?

I have finally found comfort,
Dear ones.

Words have no meaning
(tub erutaretil seod).

What color is your hair?
You should dye it again.
Why did you do that?
I liked it better brown.

When I was little, I wanted to be lots of things.
A construction worker, an actress, an epidemiologist, a mermaid, an artist, but always—
Brave.
I made up my mind: whatever I did, I would do it fearlessly.
I remember, age nine, Idabel Oklahoma: the first time I saw that blue bottle of infinite possibilities.
I went in through the beauty store door and I left through a window.
Someday, I thought,
Maybe I’ll be brave.
Someday, I thought,
Maybe one woody streak of my boyish bob would become a declaration of just how few ***** I give about my reflection in the mirror like eyes of the entire universe.
Someday…

I went to a private religious school from a few months old until my graduation at age 18 in May of 2012.
“Unnatural” hair colors were strictly forbidden.
My blue fantasies remained the pearl hidden inside me
Throughout losing friends,
Throughout losing love,
Throughout losing self-control, self-respect, and finally selfishness.
I was liberated in June.

My hair is blue
For all the things I wanted to do, but never could.
My hair is blue
For the little girl who always told her self she’d do it and who finally followed through.
My hair is blue
Because my soul is blue. Not sad, no, but infinite and oceanic, divergent, powerful, indecisive and moody.
My hair is blue
Because I am finally okay with the blue inside of me, and it’s high time I looked more like the person I actually am.
My hair is blue
For me.
I exercised my powerful position as an individual, as sole sovereign over my place in the universe. I am my identity, I have the power to change your perception, the power to shift social circles, the power to do anything but remain the same.
My hair is blue
For the hearts of every single child who’s eyes have lit up at the sight of it. For the kids who maybe for the first time have realized that hair the same shade as their favorite candy-color is even a possibility; that they too are allowed to challenge the ordinary, that there is no “normal” way to be or look, and that the same window I once crawled out of is still open and beckoning.
I
Dyed
My
Hair
Blue
Because I CAN, and because you CAN, and because they CAN, and because we CAN, and because not enough people DO.

God save me from left and right.

A hundred decisions and revisions--
I never want to cry,

I want to swell up on the treacherous surf that betrays me.

May each drop of saline-sympathy
Melt back into eyeball-oblivion,
Creep slickly down my throat,
And escape hereafter through my ten toes.

But too many of them I have banished this way.

Once they merely wet the soles of my feet,
Callous from a million paths undiscovered.

Now,
They whisper terrible things in my ears,
Terrible things:
They whisper

Until my lungs grow so full of their sound they

pop
and leave me
an empty woman
chin-deep
in the satisfied grey ocean I once refused to admire.

I breathe
In through my toes,
And out through my tears.
“Daddy, you *******,
I’m through.” Your ****** reeks, as
I know the oven did.
Like the epilogue had ended,
You exit the stage.
The snake bit your ankle,
Sylvia,
And I ****** out your poison.
It tastes like a matchstick
And like the sweet, sweet stain of your pen.