cold tea falls behind my teeth.

I always liked dead flowers better anyway--they're easier to draw.
at least they're done decaying. easier to relate to.
"sometimes too grand a compliment hurts worse than a slap to the face",
their pretty painted petals only ever waiting to die.

wherever they grew originally, I'm sure they thought they would live forever.
they thought they were free, but they were only beautiful, trapped in a greenhouse, blossoming, dreaming.
they were pink and thought they were immortal.

now they sit in a vase, next to my bed, slowly shedding petals.
the charade is over and they know it was no field they were growing in.

brown, like everything and everyone else now, we were beautiful and thought we were free.
but these days, flowers are grown for glass vases.

I write poems, not people,

And in them we all move so gracefully.

I diagnose myself freely with the
fluidity of tongue that can only serve to
mask motives.

no love is sloppy

Besides, it is heartbreak that is the most poetic, and I, after all,
write poems.
(poetry dictates artistry, ensures emotions, grants form, prevents freedom)

Even myself I work over into prose,
selecting words carefully,
double meanings,
hiding secrets within stanzas and passing them off as purposeful.

I am no riddle.

I am a poem like the rest of you,
terrified to be messy and avoiding interpretation.

I howl for you, against myself.
I howl for you because I hunt.

primal instinct
unstoppable
echoes
moons

I howl for you
it escapes
Loud
before my mind understands the function

I
LEAK
this urge out of myself
and the black air steals it

My throat carries this betrayal
into everywhere
into you

I don't know what it means but this hallelujah is hateful

I howl
I howl for you
baby
my baby

Should I squelch it?

Chasing wine with cigarettes--I can hold your face but I could never hold you.

My love, you are far too heavy;
Dense with things I never should have told you.
At the time, a sweet release for me
But I did not know I would have to pick them back up inside of you.

One day I will look at myself and wonder where I thought it would lead to, this trail of my pieces I leave scattered
In cluttered woods of stronger arms
In oceans of deep longing
In a moan that makes its way out into the impenetrable and inviting blackness and plants itself in the ground we've already pressed on,
The next point by which you'll try and follow me.

I would love to kiss you,
But I'm convinced you will sink,
And I'm either too weak to save you
Or too scared to try harder and
I'd hate to find out which.

Sometimes I think I could have loved you.
Quietly, in my way,
like a guarded mist that surrounded you.

You must have been blind,
at least in that temporary way,
playfully,
to have known my deluded cloud-ness,
to desire that weather,
to even let my
encumbered enchanting
E-R-I-N
out into what swallowed us.

I am what you fear I am
and my fog has left my love impalpable,
even to myself.

I am what I fear I am
nothingness
pure speculation--
If my heart beats, it is only to shut its own doors.

As a child, many great green vines of wild honeysuckle overwhelmed our wooden fences. Beautifully misplaced and sweet-smelling I drank their nectar out of appreciation for these small gods.

Every summer we would slash and tear them apart for the fear that soon they would overwhelm our boundaries.
How bare our home seemed without them.

But my whole life
has been practice
at protecting my fences,
and I have come to love them so fiercely
that now
no seeds
are thrown
there at all.

You should know I still adore wild honeysuckle,

and that darling,
sometimes,
I think I could have loved you.

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.

I drop my clothes and they beat through the air with
A deep
Dark
Thud.

The water turns my toes blue.

I swallow salt like you
Swallowed me,
The vitamin to keep my bones strong
Wrings out my tongue.

The water licks my waist.

I feel my heart finally burst:
The coldness ate me, and my white flag
Rolled in
With the roaring white caps.

The water whispers in my ear.

I have never
Entertained suitors other than you,
My blue cacophony.
At last,
At long last,
My eyes search up and see

The Water.

You closed your eyes on me. You closed your eyes on me. You closed your eyes on me. You closed your eyes on me. There was something about your shutter-speed, that curtain-call, that eyelash-escape. If a door closes that never was opened does its swing still reek of creaking finality? You closed your eyes on me, but I’ve only ever seen your eyelids. There’s some humor in that—my gaze ricochets when you close your eyes. Myself, I play Sisyphus: chasing their constant motion uphill only to eventually realize my curse and slide down subjected to eternity. A forever of the ****** function designed to exclude. I had a dream once that I caught you, eyes open, staring into forever from the wing of a plane. I was dying of thirst and leapt into you, landing on the horizon of your attention. The black of your eye saw me there, but quickly grew tired and retreated under a thick, peachy veil of resolute disinterest.

They were every beautiful color the world had ever set right.

Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, Pink, Purple, Orange
All grown from the green and taught to worship the blue.

But how could I ever tell you what
I was worshiping?

You,
You flowers,
Six-handed-many-mouthed
Beings of impenetrable soul and ***** knee,
You,
Who that same day had only just let me show you how to make a mudpie,
You,
Who nearby looked on, disinterested, but I knew better,
You,
who held the shovel and a discerning eye.

You who I would rain for,
You who I would kneel for,
You who reminded me not to be so sentimental when
They're only flowers after-all.

Flowers planted carefully in my dry ground.

When I blink those flowers become forests and you run through them,
Barefoot and starry-eyed.
You forgot their source,
But it never
Really
Mattered,
Did it?

If you can, just find a way to let me know if what we really planted that day is growing.

He's right, you know.

Somewhere,
A sweet drop falls hesitantly
Into the dark, dark well that runs
Underneath us all.

You can barely hear it,
But I feel the echo all through my bones.

Forever is such a long time to fall.

Someday,
Somewhere,
We will all collide again.

In stardust,
In soil,
In the sweeping memories we will force ourselves
To forget
Because their sting will only ever be as real as we once were to each other.

Oh, we will feel each other again,

But only through a gasping for air and the horror of that
Dark,
Dark,
Well
Resurfacing from our eyes.

The most beautiful thing in the world is disappearing.
Eyes half-shut,
Eyes, half-shut,
Infinity.

The most beautiful thing in the world is your
Hungry,
Still-searching eyes,
Always unsatisfied,
Only ever somewhat watching anything other than the reachable nowhere.

I don't see anything in your eyes
And I think that's the point.

Famished,
Poor, and
Crawling
You exist,
Stomach curling
And stirring bones in its wake.
You exist but only over the horizon.

Searching for the furthest thing you can see,
Searching for what lies beyond that,
Looking for the grayed creatures above your touch
But
More than that,
Raining thoughts upon them like a curious god
Only just remembering
His own power,
His own creation--
Wondering how they're holding up away from you.

You miss them,
And you've been dying to see them.