I am a cocktail of spite and melancholy
sip me slowly, my percentage is high
and my intoxication will sneak up on you
like children's ghost stories

i am sorry for nothing
except knowing you.

So today you'll be in love this girl from the internet and tomorrow you be in love with that girl from the internet and today your mother will ask you to look up from your phone for two seconds and tomorrow you will be ******* over a girl that you can't that you can't look in the eye because her eyes are miles and away and they're always watching you with disinterest, until you lose interest; some Catholic girl told me that long distance relationships make it easy to fall I to son and I got to understanding why God stays so far away. I know how to ruin myself with one hand, I know how to tear you apart with two. I know how stop taking care of myself until I'm overgrown with weeds just to watch you grow; some idiot said you don't forget how to ride a bike so I got lazy and stopped using one and some idiot said you don't forget your first love and I did the same thing. I saw the train coming and I laid you down on the tracks like I cared, and I did but I just don't know how and that's how the deal, no one knows how to do anything, hardly anyone knows how to derail trains.
And today I'll fail my test becase I didn't study, tomorrow I'll remember that a year ago you said my name for the first time; today I'll sit on my hands until they tingle just to make sure that I'm alive; we'll delve into the meanings of 'love' and 'lust', but in the end they'll both still feel the same, I'll wonder if you track dirt into your house with your boots or if you just track hurt, you'll always keep me right where you can see you but never where I can hold you. We'll speak well about each other and keep our dark secrets tucked into the waistbands of our skirts like crisp white shirts. I can't understand why anyone would want to live in the first world, where all we do is keep things we love in dusty boxes and sit in traffic and hurt the people we love and write about it.
And then we'll leave the internet and grow up and be gray and our tweets will die out like people do and then we won't think about it much. We won't think about it much.

We were sitting on your bathroom floor when you told me there was nothing worse than seeing people in the shadows—
you caught yourself because we both knew
that wasn't true.
we looked at our hands and thought of the times
we saw shadows in the people.

I want crazy, I want cranky
Let me be that old woman who gets mad easily
Let this misogynistic society grow so great it will never be over oh no
Crush me, objectify me
Romanticize the way I dehumanize myself
Discriminate me
I am the stigmas, don't free them from me
I will drink your *** and be happy
Break me, let me crumble
I am a lump of inedible meat
Make a bet on my rushing blood
Don't lose, don't lose oh you will win for sure
Just say it and ***** on my mouth
Don't let me have worth without you
I am lesser than a slave, don't let me stare at your eyes
Play with my broken bones, cut my veins as you please
Make me beg, step on me
I am watermarked and it says your name
And yes this heart beats for you to stop
It can start again if you say so
You are the God, just do everything you want, just do everything you want
I can't not take it
I am inanimate
I am inanimate
I am inanimate

You tell me you're empty
And I know you want my sympathies
My acknowledgement of the problem
But all I can give you is the gawking gaze
Of a child on his first trip to the zoo
Leaving smudges on the snake tank as he tries to fathom
How something could be so alien and smooth and powerful.
You tell me you're empty
And all I can think is
That I have not a moment of my life to compare that to-
A day without suffering, without pain or danger,
Without that or joy so intense it tips right back over into treachery
I have no memory of any such day
To draw from for empathy.
I stand and stare at you
Empty you
And I know your sadness should be respected
And I know I shouldn't wonder so perversely
What it must feel like
Not to feel
But I can't help it
I feel like I'm standing on the other side of glass
Staring into the beady eyes of a boa constrictor
Wondering irresistibly
What its embrace must feel like for the mice it devours.
I know you are suffocating
But I
Am drowning
And I wonder
What empty feels like.

you have made your differences.
you have painted your sky blue
(without the undercoat)
you have snuggled up with stars in bed
(knife hidden under the pillow)
and cooed and giggled all cute-like.

now you come home all cold and silver.
you cast me a moon gaze,
nothing more,
and use your words
and your jaunty movements,
like each joint is a mechanical hinge.

i still think you’re beautiful.
no matter how slippery and wet you get
(in the worst and best of ways)
no matter how much your smile stretches
past your teeth and no matter
how many times i want to put my hand
under the pillow. i still think you’re beautiful.

i don’t think you’re perfect
because i have seen your imperfections
the way your dapples fall against the grain
the way you talk and the way your words
are wrong so very often.
but your imperfects make you so much more human,
and so much more beautiful.

if i die tomorrow just know this.
just know that i was sick of your
starlight manipulations and the way you
twisted silver light (all wrong
and reflective).
but despite this, please know
that i very almost fell for you.

I'll be eaten alive one day:
one day, i see it in my mind
so close to closure along an empty street
late at night
(owls just retired and birds
not yet up),
orbs of light tethered to tall electric poles
cast dappled circles on cracked pavement;
illumination and safety
(for that two metre radius).

Stepping between them
like a girl child on stones
across a garden,
I anticipate each missed step
as sinking into sand or frightful waves.

Singing drunk back-alley lullabies
i'll soothe the skelebabies in their sleep,
their poor crusted noses snuffled against
a cold shift of air
(their private torment plastered over billboards
with corporate logos and dim colours,
suggesting the city's lights have gone out and
the local government is in frantics.
That is, after all, what you'd focus on)

Girl child games were so tipsy and magic
(and so close to real coldness);
between two orbs of light i'll slip
through the cracks
in the pavement.

THE END.

(eat me alive,
eat me alive,
eaten alive by the
wolf at the door)