You are fire,
Wild, without shape,
And volatile,
Always on the edge of engulfing
Both the delicate apple blossom
cradled in the tree’s strong boughs,
Or the butterfly’s wings,
Which are nothing more than painted dust,
And rotting bones,
Calling flocks of flies to forgotten flesh,
Or weeds
Spreading their tainted seed
To drain an already empty world
Until all are nothing but ash
Waiting to cool.  

Yet, had Prometheus not stolen you
And given you to man
Then where would we be?
Shivering in the dark,
Pale and blind like cavefish
Staring at our neighbor’s,
With our pin needle eyes?
At the specters of man’s potential
Serving as our reflections?
Living off of roots covered in soil
And meat still bleeding onto the stone ground?
There are better ways to live.  

We breathe fire,
It is only sometimes that we burn.  

You are not invincible,
Not like you would lead us to believe
With your searing touch
And hot tongue.      
Take away your air
Smother you with sand, with earth
Drown you with water
And you are reduced to nothing but smoke.  
A fire must be tended,
For when left alone,
If it does not destroy,
It will fade away.  



I used to think of myself
As the cold –
Not the snow,
For there is beauty there
And I didn’t believe myself beautiful –
No I thought of myself as ice
For ice can burn,
But it does not give back.
Then I met you,
You and your flaming heart
Running at a temperature hot enough
To thaw even the coldest
Patch of frost.  

When I look at you
This is what I see
But my words, when they are spoken
Are incoherent, meaningless
And I am left angry
For you will never know,
No one will ever know,
That past all the blood and flesh
You are fire.

People think
That just because I don’t believe
In their God
Or Gods
That I don’t believe in souls.  
As if I am restrained by something as simple
As a security blanket.  
I exist outside of God
And I do so with a soul
That no one thinks exists.  

Sometimes
When I am deep inside my head
I pretend that I can see
The souls that pass by me
Trapped within soft skin
A tiny, fluttering bird
That hides away behind bars made of bone,
The sinew cells providing a comfort
Humanity has yet to offer
To themselves.  

I see yours
Past your snow touched skin
Gently puttering around its cage
Lighting up your eyes
Until they are like the summer sky
After a thunderstorm.  
This language fails
To describe your soul,
So I shall try instead.  

Red nebulas bleed
Into darkness, twining with
The white and yellow lights of stars
Long dead, their shadows lighting up
The vast emptiness,
An emptiness dotted with blue dust
Swirling into violet clouds
Until it is not empty at all.  






You are a sun.
Nothing makes you shine
Other than yourself,
And the moon,
She borrows your light
So that she too may be seen;
So that she too may feel warm.  

Sometimes people forget
That space, while full of beauty
Is mostly nothing.
The small, scattered universes
Serving as the perfect distraction
For the loneliness
That exists in between.  

Life can spawn in the darkest of places
And you are oh so very bright –
For, hidden beneath your
Ribs, lungs, heart
Is eternity,
And you give away your galaxies
Spreading out your universes
So that you are never left traveling the void
Alone.  

Before I met you
I believed myself to be the moon
Trapped, dull, and alone.  
Then I let myself see you
Not your face, but you,
And found that yes, I am alone
But so are you
And everyone else.  
But you did not allow solitude
To  consume you
Like a black hole
marring your space,
Rather you just continued existing
Regardless.  
And I thought to myself
Why can’t I?

Standing tall the small house rests beneath trees
Of oak, maple, pine.  That house, it is mine –
Cast by someone else, the first brick was soft
Like brown clay trembling above the stone earth,
But soon it baked in a southern sun’s
Heat, the water ****** from lonely soil –
Mine to paint, to decorate, to ignore.  
It is yours in sight only, nothing more;
Of course this was before I knew how to
Tell the truth to my hollow reflection,
Which weakens upon further inspection
In the light of a dusty, greying moon,
Who sets each morning hoping to never
Rise alone again.  Now I know my house,
It’s dirt floors sprouting lecherous weeds,
Resting in the spots I thought flowers grew.  
Made of cards, it crumbles with the first breeze
Spreading like a cool, formless smear of fire
Until ash is all that is left to rot –
Like my wire stairs, or windowless room.  
My skyward eyes bleed chilled rainwater
As they gaze at a damp, moldy ceiling.  
One of these days the stars will shine for me,
But I will be surrounded by concrete
Walls that stop the singing trees from reaching
My sad, begging ears.  Only a fool dreams
Of a bigger cage to rust away in.  
To you a small house rest beneath tall trees,
Yet there rests a pile of nothing to me.

I can’t sleep.
My brain, it won’t shut off.
Circles and lines
Thread together to create
Color, light -
Light, streaming like dust through my open window
In the purple air.
How foolish I am
To think dreams live with the stars.

I check the clock
Five minutes have been lost.  

Most people think that sadness grows
Like a patch of dandelions floating away
Or a shadow with the setting sun.
They’re wrong,
Of course,
Because they do not understand.  
It is not their fault
But that does not make them any less
Ignorant.  
Sadness just is.  
Settling quietly, and, when you finally notice
It’s all encompassing.  
It is the sky, the sea.

I check the clock
Five minutes have been lost.  

I am an asymptote.  
Stretching out a hand to humanity
Almost, I can feel their acceptance
Brush by my eager fingertips
But the fallacy of hope is dangerous
And I am left untouched.
A magnet that can’t help
But repel itself.
And my fingers are ungloved
And turn blue in this cold place
As I am left to stand alone
Waiting.

I check the clock
Five minutes have been lost.  





I look into a mirror made of sand
My face crumbling away with my breath –
The bits of grain become a desert,
A sea of beige
I am left to be lost in.
I do not know what I look like
Past my skin.  
This not knowing, it should scare me, but
Somewhere, in a place I do not like,
I relish the confusion.  
How sad you must think me
For enjoying
Not knowing
Who I am.

I check the clock
Five minutes have been lost.  

Fear is something I pretend
I have never felt
With my line smiles and hollow talk –
Black, caustic acid dripping from my teeth
As I judge.
Who sits in my court?
I don’t know –
Everyone perhaps,
Or the people that remind me of myself.  

I check the clock
Five minutes have been lost.  

I feel the ground beneath my feet
As I walk to my future,
A dark tunnel,
Lighting my way with matches –
I don’t know if I’ll reach the end or run out first.  
The ground, it is cold, and shifts
Until I am falling without the pinpricks of fire
To highlight my blind spots,
The matches scattered in the midnight air.  


I check the clock
Five minutes have been lost.  

I breathe in loneliness
Until my lungs ache
With stolen air.
Until my arms,
Laced with blue rivers,
Are touched by Moses.
Until my iron heart beats,
Rusting away.
Loneliness is like skin,
Layering my bones, my muscles –  
A coat for thin membranes that knit together
A stomach, a womb, a liver.  
Everyone needs skin
So that they do not fall apart
Their soft parts leaking onto the granulated floor
Until they become nothing more than water.
I have mine.

I shut my eyes
I do not dream.

I don’t love
How I’m supposed to.  
With my skin
Serving as my heart.

I hear the sounds of lovers
And their flesh meeting;
The dull slap
That constitutes as communion
And I wonder
Why can I not see the beauty
The way they do?

I can understand
Why *** is wanted,
Why it must be done.
Humanity wants to continue
And surely it must be a pleasure to most –
But I do not feel the undercurrent of desire,
I do not feel the fire,
That poets and children both speak of.  

Most assume then that I simply do not love.  
That I am a machine
Made of wires and currents
Rather than muscles and nerves.  
Or that I am daft in the language of skin;
That I will learn later
When the panacea walks along
And ignites my blood,
Which is made of water.  
There is nothing simple about it.  














I want to kiss someone with my words.
Let the tones and letters twine about their ears
And lavish their mind with praise
Until they are left gasping.  
I want my galaxy to collide with another
And create a storm of dust and light and color
So that I may hold a new universe in my hand,
The starlight leaking through the cracks between my fingers.    
I want my soul
To join with another
So that I may see all the shadows, the fissures, the holes
And the suns, the stiches, the whole.  
I would let them see mine.
And then we would thread together
Like a spider web
And remain so until the end.

My love
It is too much
Too frightening, too consuming
But it is also not enough
Not corporeal, thus it is not real.
But how can
Words and
Storms and
Destruction and
Creation and
Universes and
Everything and
Nothing and
Souls and
Spider webs
Not be real?

Why am I
With my defective skin
That holds everything in
Just as yours
And beating heart
That pumps out blood part by part
Just as yours
And my soft brain
That creates love, fierce and tame,
Just as yours  
Less than?

“Why does the moon follow us?”
I asked my father
As we drove past beige houses
Mixing with white mailboxes.  
I couldn’t see his face from the back seat
But I knew he smiled when I heard him
Laugh and shake his head.
“Honey, she’s following you,”
He said, and I looked out the window
Smiling at my new friend.  
I was five.  

Now I know that without the sun
The moon is for the blind to see
And that it orbits the earth
Not me
And it doesn’t chase cars down southern highways
It sits lonely in space
Surrounded by nothing,

Scientia potential est
Is what I’ve been told
In my own tongue –
And I agree.
Never have I felt stronger
Than when I am bathed in light –
Filling my pumice skin and crater eyes
Until I can happily walk around
With as much certainty as a human can.
That hasn’t happened yet,
But the day’s coming
I know it.  

Yet I find myself wishing
The light immersing me
Was that of the moon,
Which cannot be,
How could it
When the moon only reflects
What the sun emits?
That knowledge doesn’t stop me from wishing
On the stars
I know to be dead ***** of plasma.

As a little girl I always slept with my window open
To let the dreams,
Made of fairies, roses, moonshine, and lullabies
Funnel through my ears
Into my empty head
In a stream of dust –  
I had nightmares sometimes,
But every shadow is a product of light,
And I was happy.
In time I went to school,
Now I know of dreams and nightmares
What they are made of, what they are not –
But I don’t have them,
And I sleep with my window shut now.  

Understanding is beautiful
Yet mystery is magical
And school takes magic and twists it
Until you’re ashamed for believing
In anything.  
I want to learn, I yearn for it
Like my head does air –
But why must I be mocked
For listening to the five year old on my shoulder
Who whispers fantastic dreams
I forget upon waking, blinking, thinking?

Thinking and dreaming
One heads, the other tails.
I’ve been taught to imagine
Is to forsake thinking,
That dreaming is the rot
Causing intellect to atrophy
So I stopped talking to the moon
Because by then I had been taught
It couldn’t hear me anyway.  










I want both,
And so I shall
Through fight, doubt –
The noose made of fear
Can be burned
And so it shall,
By the light of the moon,
My lovely friend,
Whom I know well,
And dream of often.  

I hope she chose
The right person to follow.

I often fear
That I am an odd number.
My parity being
So that I cannot exist
In a pair
Without serving as a disruption
To all involved.  

I am a five
Drowning
In a sea of eights.  

Sometimes I wonder
Why I do not etch
Five fresh tallies
Into my soft, lonely skin.  
Watching the five new rivers
Run in red rivulets
Onto my bare, thirsty floor.  

Or use up five shiny, new rounds
To decorate my already cold body
With brand new holes –
Ones people don’t need
To understand to see –
Until it is lowered into
A sixth.  
My wax face
Made to look
As if I was put together
Rather than breaking
Into pieces
Scattering in five directions.  

And then I remember:

Pip One.
I promised,
While huddled in the dark –
Enveloped in the decorated arms
Of an angel
Forsaken by most –
To stick around.  

Pip Two.  
I promised
My brother,
Barely finished
Being a babe,
To teach him
All I knew.  

Pip Three.  
I promised
A boy like me,
Only brighter,
I wouldn’t leave him,
Like everyone else.  

Pip Four.  
I promised
A boy
I don’t even like
I wouldn’t
If he wouldn’t.  

Pip Five.  
I promised
Myself.  

Sometimes being
An odd number isn’t too bad.  
Sometimes.  
It gets better,
At least that’s what
Everyone seems to believe,
And maybe
I want to believe
It too.  

I am not a five
Drowning
In a sea of eights.







Rather I grow
Into pi,
Stretching past
The ****** sky,
And the eyes that try
To look beyond it.  

Just like everyone else.