She shot me dead on
With a pistol that
Would have looked better on a cowboy
It was too heavy for her holster
Her body shifted from side to side
As she walked towards me
And she had to eventually prop her hand
Up on her unarmed hip
As she stopped to stop over me
She let her sweat drip down from
Her forehead to dip of her collar bone
And she let her mouth smile
Bigger than had seen it grow in years
She didn’t bother to wipe off
Her black powered fingers
She touched the spot just below my neck
Where I could feel the bullet sink further in
She shot me dead on
And I remembered telling her once
How she wore tears like a diamond necklace
She shot me dead on
And I remembered telling her once
How I much preferred rubies.

She shot me dead on
With a pistol that
Would have looked better on a cowboy
It was too heavy for her holster
Her body weight shifted from side to side
As she walked towards me
And when she stopped just short of my body
She had to prop her hand up on her hip
It was a hot desert day and
She let her sweat drip down from
The corners of her eyes to the dip of her collar bone
And she let her mouth smile
Bigger than had seen it smile in years
She didn’t bother to wipe off
Her black gun-powered fingers
Before she touched the spot just below my neck
Where I could feel her push the bullet further in
She was a good shot
And looking up at the beads of sweat around her neck
I remembered telling her once
How she wore her tears better than Elizabeth Taylor
Wore diamond necklaces
She shot me dead on just below my neck
And I remembered telling her once
How I didn’t care for diamonds
I much preferred rubies.

You said you keep the best secrets.
No one keeps secrets as well as you.
They are never as safe as they are when whispered
Into your ears to hold.
In that moment all I wanted to be was a secret.
A quiet whisper entering your ears to stay.

I’m violent by nature
Where even the fondest of nurture
Has only ever been enough to barely suppress
The violence that slips into my unconscious silence
But all these violent thoughts I keep safe
Sitting on a bar stool alone with them
A couple dozen other people around me
Staring at me buying me drinks
Wanting to lace their
Fingers around the base of my skull
Wanting to pull my thoughts forcefully out of me
But I never let them
I will never let them get to you- my violent thoughts
Don’t worry I’ll never let them touch you
I’ll never sell you out
Instead I’ll go home alone tonight, sed for your quiet company
And lay in my bed and let your circle up in me
Spinning around until you are comfortable enough
To spill yourself out onto my dreams
And so you do and unapologetically unleash
Every single thought of hate and of spite
That in my consciousness you are too modest to show.

I love you in ways immeasurable
On timelines that have no end
In cups that aren’t marked
And on rulers that aren’t straight
In some ways I love you like a child
Who never learns that the stove is hot
And in some ways like a student
Reading and studying you all night  
Always I love you but sometimes
In ways I don’t understand
Like how I love you like I love
Salt, and water, and sand
Though the ocean still seems too deep
Like how I love you in my dreams
But not always when you steal covers in my sleep
I love you in strange ways that I fear
Will never be truly known
Like how I love you for years
In one day that you’re not home
Or like how my love for you
Is a poem always writing about itself,
Folding up its words and placing them on the very top shelf.

I never noticed the sound before
When I stumble into sleep at night
The sound of a thousand
Militant ants crawling through my thoughts
Eating them up
Creating mazes of my memories
Now its all I can do to muffle their mouths
Munching on my membranes
Mimicking movements of mimes sprayed with mace
Pacing through their tunnels trotting past my
Old thoughts and lingering ideas
It’s all I can hear now
When I stumble into sleep at night
The slow decay of the little things in my brain
And the hope they eat you away with everything else.

Do you know how often I speak of you
Even when you aren’t around?
No one notices as I don’t speak of you
In words nor in phrases
But the spaces in between them
Vacant as you are-
The pauses marked by punctuations
When written but when spoke-
Marked by nothing anyone else can hear
They are an empty space in time
To everyone else who doesn’t know
To me they are filled with you
Even when you aren’t around.

I know I am not really lying on the beach
Eyes facing up towards the sky
Where I really am is in Vienna
In a small classroom filled with fourth graders
Sitting in a circle in a room
That was decorated in glow in the dark stars
And a fake camp fire next to a cardboard cutout of a wolf
I remember learning about the Oregon Trail
And how cowboys would campout underneath stars
Guns close by so other dangerous creators wouldn’t be
And looking at the fake stars in that room
I was in another world, a realer world
Where the cosmos didn’t make stars
Bullets did
Silver bullets meant to hit werewolves
Who were so compelled to howl at the moon
They forwent the odds of being gunned down
And so easily they could be when the moon
Lit perfectly their silhouette  
Naked in plain view
All the stars were silver bullets
One that never met their target and flew
Past the wolfs and up into the black sky
Where they pierced the world’s barrio
The bullet holes became not stars
But un-mendable scars
From men who wanting to mutilate
The sky’s beauty with weapons
There to remind me
When the lights turned on in that classroom
The glowing little stars melted into the white popcorn ceiling
And as we, the fourth graders, disconnected our circle on the floor
The reality of the origin of stars I had just come to know
Never left me and the stars I see at night now
Are not as real as the ones I saw that day.

I think if you would let me
I’d treat you like the night sky
I’d bundle up all of your wonderful traits and
Perfect flaws and mysterious unknowns
And I’d create a constellation for them
I’d search for it with my telescope endlessly
I know you don’t see yourself
The way I see you
And you still sometimes argue with me when I call you wonderful
But all of the things that you can’t stand about yourself
Are the very things I never want to go a day without
I think that if you let me I’d build you an
Observatory out of hundreds mirrors
Each facing you just so you could see yourself up close
I’d make you sit in front of it simply to show you
All of the other constellations
Who will never have stars that shine
As bright as yours.

In the end it’s the smallest of things
That make the biggest of impacts.
It’s the last ripple of an earthquake
Or of a skipped stone.
It’s like how you’d rather cut open your leg
Than turn a corner and stub your toe.
It’s the smaller kiss on the forehead
That follows the longer one on the lips.
When saying goodbye
It’s not the deep looks into each other’s eyes
It’s the rear-view glance at that person’s
Back that makes you cry.

I have this house of a heart
Each pump of blood
Blows open a window artery
Leaving all the rooms a bit too drafty
And I have never been able to find a sweater
Because there is no light in a rib-caged heart
It is not a sanctuary of a place
It’s one that keeps time and rhythm, yes
But the rhythm is only echoed back into itself
Confusing my muscles red as brinks
The rhyme throws off the time
And the record that places in my house of a heart
Skips and repeats its song
So I can never remember to feel around for a sweater
Or even to wait and feel that it’s too cold.

My muse for writing is hatred
I hate this and I hate that
I hate you.
My right hand seems perpetually pressed
Against paper
And the pressure from my left
Comes from a clenched fist
My fingers wrapped around
Some crumpled scribble of a thought
Most times my body feels like the vertical pole
Balancing opposing weight systems
Constantly pushing for power only to lose it
Again every single time.
And I hate that I rhyme
Because I am too off set to stand straight
On my own two feet
I am meek and I must teeter between
Who I am and what I write
When what I am in a ball of hate
Writing about how I wish it was love
And how nice cool metal would feel on my left hand
Compared to the hot blood
That seeps under my finger nails
From constantly clenching back cascades
Of callous conscious thoughts of hate.
That I hate I wished was love.

For a few years in college
I lived across from this church
And every Sunday morning
When I was alive enough to wake up
From the first of the church’s bells
I would begrudgingly wrap myself
In my comforter force my feet to
Flop on the frigid floor and walk
To my front door
I pushed through the half-on-it’s-hinges-screen
Sat on my porch lit up a smoke-and watched
The parade of cars unloading
Women in too tall heels
Pushing them higher above hell
Men in their dress shoes shined
Into mirrors for the heavens
And like a much more bitter
but surely a just as hungover Noah
I watched them as I counted off all the couples
And I wondered how they must feel
Just for that 40 to 60 second stroll
From their car doors to the bow of the chapel
And the worst part of me
The part that belongs hidden from
Social niceties and common social civilities
Thought they must be so smug
Them thinking along this walk that
They are the saved ones
That the ones like me have certainly missed the boat
But always after thinking that the part of me
Aware of my own spitefulness the peacekeeper
Of my temperamental nature
Adds how nice it must be to be a simple animal
Filing into a sanctuary of hope
Where they believe they will be kept dry
In a world where sinners like me are soaking wet
Then again the worse part of me finds humor in that
All of these thoughts usually pass through in enough time
For all the patrons to pile in and the last bell sound
And my worst part, the part that finds humor in grit
Made me laugh out a puff of fresh smoke
And think but how is my cigarette still lit

The Baker boy down the street is a peculiar thing. His book bag is a familiar sight around town, its red and aged with dirt, it’s anchored to his back by brown straps that are torn and excrete small little tuffs of white stuffing. Like the kind you’d find inside a teddy bear. The large front pocket is scribbled with poorly drawn cartoonish characters. Doodles one could assume to be depictions of imaginary friends and by the boy’s sheepish and largely odd demeanor one could also assume these imaginary friends were probably spawned by the lack of real ones. The boy’s book bag is more familiar than the boy. If only because his face solely exists in a light tan hoodie too close in color to the completion of his skin to readily differentiate between the two. Either way, the Baker boy usually always has his head down, this allows for a small ***** in his posture that pushes his book bag up to the very top of his back, making it very prominent, making it something like a substitute for a head. People started recognizing his book bag as the boy himself. In their minds they could see it as clearly as they could the faces of their own children, spouses, close friends. They gave his book bag the same recognition and remembrance of aesthetic value as one would give to the details of a face. They notice quickly and with the same concentration a new rip in his straps as they would a pimple on someone’s chin. He never spoke. Not to anyone. Not a word. The kind of recognition given to a person’s voice with whom you are familiar is a sign of their presence in your world, a kind of confirmation of their existence other than their physical self. The Baker boy used a sound instead, lacking a voice. The specific sound the Baker boy used to validate his existence in our town sounded like the soft scratching of an itch, a repetitive petting of his book bag strap that marked conscious thoughts from underneath a silent exterior. He did this when he was nervous, or if he felt he was being prompted to speak. A repetitive thumbing of his book bag straps.

Every now and then I miss you terribly
What a cruel way my heart remembers
To tell my brain I love you.
And what a crueler way my mouth
Never told you.

The water is always calmest at night, sometime around one or two on the Carolina coast. It’s right around the time the moon has grown tired of pulling the earth towards it; when its hands are shaking from holding in something so big, when the water takes a little bit longer each time to kiss the shore. I’ve learned to love how the water looks at night, it seems more selfless to me than it does during the day when the sunshine reflects the peaks and breaks of each wave, when the water is clear and you can see into every part of it. It’s different at night, it becomes a blackened mirror reflecting only the images of those awake long enough to see it, and it’s much more humble- to show off other people.

The difference between me and her is that I was built for this ****. I was forged in heartbreak and birthed into quiet suffering, but I’ve conquered my demons and I’ve slept with angels. I’ve been taken advantage of, I’ve robbed, lied and lied to, I’ve been hungry and full, I’ve been drug through the mud and then after I’ve washed myself off time and time again. I was built for this ****, to be the stronger person. To be the person who won’t fall apart, the person who- over time will mend my tiny broken and cut up heart till all that’s left is a bruise and I’ll live with it. To be the person who can take rejection off the hands of someone who wasn’t built for that kind of ****. Never think of me as shattered, but rather a mosaic off all the battles I’ve lost and won. That’s the difference. I can take this ****.

It’s their clothes
That’s the worst thing of theirs to get rid of
Each removable of a garment from their closet
A different  scent  hits you in a wave
That you have to push back just one more hanger more
But then after the scent passes
You remember Easter
Christmas
Thanksgiving
When they wore that blouse
Or button down shirt
When you go through their drawer
The one you couldn’t a few months ago
Because then it was still too private then
That watch that was probably a few links too small
You remember the sides of skin around it that were
Lightly suffocated highlighted the veins that flew through them
They seemed  so alive then
It’s their clothes
When you pack them into boxes when you
Donate them to charity because the sight of them on anyone you know
Would send you into a spiral of remembrance
That you’d rather not slip into
Those truly were the slippery slopes
Ones that tiptoed on a double take
Ones that made you think if only for a devastating moment after
The initial realization of those clothes on someone else
That they were no longer going to wear them.
Yes, their clothes are the hardest part
Not wanting to slip into everyone
Garment they owned when you were forced to pack them up
Jealous of that cloth that touched them last
Them after you did for the last time
Yes, their clothes are the hardest part.

A thin black eye lash on my sweater
One of the dark cloaked guardians
That stand so close together in line
and puff out their thickened chests
To guard my fragile blue eyes.
Their bodies drawn in tight like curtains.
But it seems the weakest
Link has fallen off its post
Not as mighty, or as fit as the other
Bristles that still remain.
Why is this the one I am to wish on?
The feeble pray of the huffing wind.
The unfit shepherd who let my
Sheepish eyes be eaten by wolfs
I pick it up between my thumb and finger
Place it in my palm and
I would tell it, but in a whisper
My wish
And I would latch it on tight
And as I blew it away with
Pursed lips and eyes closed shut
And I think that perhaps a lighter
Lash will carry my wish further to you
Than the stronger ones I have plucked out
And wished on Before.
That it will not be weighed down
By its own girth as my wish is already heavy
Enough to hold
And then perhaps my wish on a lash
Will find its way to your lap
And it will sit there in my place
And tell you in the things that my voice
Cannot scream from here that
No one has ever wanted anything more than
I want you.

You seem like something incarnate
Something like the ocean
It loves, weeps, kisses the shore
It defies all attempts
At being captured with words
And rejects all lyrical shackles
A poet’s only shortcoming
No matter what I can say about you
There is always that which I can’t
You are the ocean and I am your shore.

The trees are stricken with a terrible illness
a certain shrillness that permeates
their perpetual stillness.
And I have seen them.
Their pitch dripped hearts buried underneath
Their brown and rough bark, our version of skin.
And I have cut them.
Looking for their sap, their form of our blood
Hoping to find it still sticky sweet with life,
Hoping it has not succumb to their illness
That is our men.
Men, with burly beards and chainsaws
That are the trees versions of sterile masks
And metal toothed needles
Chainsaw needles that pump poison into
The trees’ version of our arms
Their form of cancer that
Ravishes through what would be our
Organs.
Men with saws that are our version of chemo
Shaking off the leafs that would be
What we call hair
And I have seen them.
They fall down the same way we would
And are covered by our same dirt earth.

We were planets that collided
In a perfect black sky
Searching for similar skin to share.

In the darkest days of our humanity
I often wonder why we thought not
To turn on the lights
Why we condemned wrongs and injustices
To small rooms
And only entered them through back doors
Why the judges of damning deeds
Didn’t dismantle the decay done by guilt
And instead locked that guilt away
Not erasing it but not affording it the right
To catharsis either.
Keeping it in the dark leaving it to fester in and from itself
Why not expose guilt?
I asked
Then thought it strange the answer was in the question
Who does that help?
When has the airing of guilty feelings brought on by damaging deeds
Benefitted the one who owns no stalk in guilt
It is the guilty it helps
It clears their conscious and frees their soul
But so
If theirs is the one tainted shouldn’t it be they
Who have to live with guilt - a punishment
That doesn’t have a casualty count.

I never thought of our goodbyes
I didn’t think they would happen
Or if I did I would have thought
Them more as see you tomorrows
Not actual goodbyes
Remember the time when we drank
And sang of our lives forever being lived together
We were living together at that time
And we agreed that time is the only thing
Other than each other that we should value
We live in time, and that’s what we should be saving
We should be putting it under our mattress
And in our piggy banks
See, our lives live behind our credit cards and folded dollar bills
And we waste so many minutes wondering how we will spend it
Me? I would sell mine
I would barter off everything I own
Just to buy some more time to spend with you
Before our goodbyes.

Time does not heal all wounds,
Cannot make everything right.
All time is—Is future and
All the future does is leave you with
Immeasurable space filled with ****** earth
And the promise of fresh crops
That could be your thriving life
But for your need to think,
To ponder ,
To wonder,
To mull over every decision
Rake over every choice
Picking up and turning over
Every hard as rock thought.
Planting new bulbs tainted with old ideas
As you purge out all of your memories
Just to sift through each one
with your ***** hands—naked without gloves
The muddied clumps of soil riddled with the worms
Of things you used to know
Slipping through your fingers
As you pull them apart and leave them,
The tufts of unfermented soil
There on the ground.
More broken up than they were in your own head.

Sometimes I feel
Like a tethered titian
Of sorts
Tied to and underneath the
Footsteps of morals
Above me on earth
Angry with no shoes
I stomp around with my thunderous feet
Because no tailor would tie
String around my arches and leather beneath my soles
To protect me from the hot coals that line
The carpet of my cage.
A mythological beast of old is what I feel like
Some days
And in many ways
I feel like
A god of flight
Not confined to the barriers of night
But to the endless blue hued sky
That my golden wings contrast against
So sharply they cut through the air
Propelling me in circles around a bigger circle
That the mortals below me still think to be flat
My heels clasped with wings confining me
To the jail of myself where I am
The warden of one and exact my
Revenge on my prisoner daily
With the force of a titans foot
Tricked into thinking wings could
Be shoes.

Would it be too much to ask
That we use this bed as a cocoon
And wrap ourselves so tightly in blankets
That we forget that there is outside for awhile
Morph ourselves together  
And only to each other
Finally emerging as something different than what we
Were before
Something easier to handle than two
Something more simple like one.

One’s own personal philosophy cannot be
Accurately expressed in words
Nor can it very well be spoken out loud
The only blueprint offered to guide
One through the psyche of their own mind
Are the choices they make.
It is in their choices do their stances stand firm
And their beliefs made to be believed in
I do not think
I will not accept
And I cannot support
The idea that choices are only two
They are many and they are often
And they change and they are tried by life
They are what shapes one’s philosophy
Because they are the things that
Torture out the truth.

Crazy things we didn’t know were there
Without an X to mark its spot,
We shoveled and we dug over our bodies
We pillaged acres of skin, ravished even,
Our flesh fueled by the promise of glowing treasure
Wielding shovels and picks only our better natured angels
Understood, or could call “sweet intentions”
No map we possessed ended in gold
So we drew up our own tracing mountains and streams,
Upturning every rock, wading in every pool,
Our made-up languages became passcodes for secret doors
Our hair and nails became *****-traps
Like poisonous ivy and razor sharp spikes.
Perilous our hunt for heirloom, we would find.
But how could we not look?
Our compass points Northeast from down here
So as I climb towards your chest and you to mine
Our knocking proved there were unhallowed
Cavities under ribbed-caged bodies
And still we dig
Closer and closer to the treasure in our chests.

One question is almost always answered dishonestly. And most times with the dishonest answer, “I’m just tired.” But we aren’t. Not in the way we want it to sound to the person asking us if we’re okay, and we even lie with that a little to ourselves because it could be true- we are tired- but not from lack of sleep, rather and more truly from lack of belonging. A lack of enthusiasm for people, a lack of togetherness, a lack of luster for the world that we find ourselves in. We are stuck in a paradox of our own making, sometimes we feel so empty and disconnected from the world that when we feel that way we lie- furthering our own disconnect. Perhaps, if by some great grunt of force we were able to lift the weight of fear that is is our perceived weakness off of our backs maybe our voices would be less strained and more apt to answer honestly about the disconnect we feel rather than perpetuate its existence in a lie. We are the hands that feed our own loneliness and we bite ourselves time and time again because we can’t admit there is a problem. We can't be seen as weak. We condition ourselves to believe loneliness is a disease and it can be spread with a single sneeze that could lead to the death of our strong egos. So we use lies like tissues and cover up the fact that we feel alone forever fearful that someone else will catch it and reflect to us our own emptiness. Why condemn weakness and the feeling of emptiness to the fate of a negative connotation? Cry in public. See how many strangers comfort you. See how human this feeling is. Embrace it. Answer that person honestly. Hug someone who is sick from loneliness and catch their illness and let that be a bond that in itself cures the disease.

Like i am not who i am.

Sorry and love are two words you’ve worn out for me
I will never truly believe either again
And that has to be the worst thing you’ve done to me
I broke my own heart loving you
You killed what was left of the good in me
And if I had the chance to hurt you the same
I’d want to, so bad
But I wouldn’t.
It hurts but it’s okay, I’m used to it.

Find me a place where heartache ends
And when you find it, mark it with an “X”
But instead of burring gold there
Bury you’re betrayal, bury it deep
In a wooden box with a padlock
So that even over the years
When the salty air and crashing waves
Erode that sandy grave
And that pain surfaces again
I’ll have had enough time
To wash in the tide
The smell of you from my clothes
To baptize myself in the sea
From your sinful touches
To let the waves beat down
On my ears so loud
They’ll forget how your name sounds
When that wooden box floats
Back to me on the opposite side of the shore
Then I’ll know when it’s safe to come back to that place
And I’ll brush off the “X” you put there
Because that’s where the heartache ends.

Sometimes I sit down and I try
To find new things to cry about
Because crying has never come naturally to me
And once I’ve cried about something
I can rarely cry for it a second time
And anyway someone once told me
That crying is healthy- is human
And that’s all anybody wants- just to be human
To be a small part of the bigger humanity
And I try every now and then
To feel the humanity in myself
Even if just for a second- even if it’s just me crying over
One shoe in the middle of the highway.

I think some days
I am not wholly me
I am solely my own, I know
but some days I feel like only half of who I am
its not like the other half of me is missing
I know fully where, if I were to split,
where the other half would surely go
it would go with you
and while I am sitting or writing or
doing nothing of particular importance
a part of me would be carried with you
if you knew it or not
I would fold the extra half of my being
into the creases of your pant leg
the underside of your tie clip
or the heels of your feet
so that with every movement your body makes
I could make it too and then at least half of me
could dance with you.
and if there is ever a day when I feel  
a little heavier than my whole I'll know
that half of you yearned to dance with me
some days too.

I think you should love a girl that writes
Live her many different imagined lives
In her vast collections of created worlds
Find her somewhere buried beneath them all
And when you find her pressed between
Scribbled pages and coffee cups filled with pens
Kiss her ink black fingers
Let them stain your lips so when she looks at you
She won’t forget
You’re the hero her books are about.

The other night I was walking down the street
In a sweatshirt and blue jeans
And to the left of the street I heard
“Hey baby, get in the car with me”
And I knew this couldn’t be a nice gesture
And I should be afraid
I should rely on the pepper spray in my purse
Over the compassion in a man’s heart
Because after all I’m just an itty pretty bitty
In this big ol’ city
And I need help
I need a white knight to protect me from dragons
That used to be men but forgot the meaning of the word no
And twisted it so
It meant try harder
Look at how short her skirt is
And I thought since when did the length
Of my skirt become the measure
Of a man’s self-control
When did the visibility of my thighs
Warrant unwanted invites
I don’t remember sending out mini-skirts
To request people come to my birthday party
The length of my dress does not mean yes
And the cut of my shirt is not a man’s control test
And when I say no that isn’t just a request
Why do I have to be afraid to be a woman?
Why can’t men be taught not to ****
So I won’t have to be taught ways to avoid it
Don’t walk alone
Don’t talk to strangers
Don’t walk at night
Don’t leave home without pepper spray
Don’t walk in that neighborhood
Why can’t being a woman mean don’t
Be afraid you never have to wish
You were born with padlocks instead of knees.

If I could have three wishes
The first would be for bigger arms
The second would be for bigger arms
And the third for a bigger chest
I would use my newly acquired body parts
For nothing else other than to help you sleep
I would reach out and grab you from
Any of the corners of this earth
That keep you awake
I would hold you close to
My bigger chest so you had room
To move around on it like a pillow
And with my arms I would wrap around you completely
Making myself the world’s first human blanket
And I would tell you just as sweetly as I could
That it would have been pointless to simply wish for
A pillow, a blanket, a whole bed
Just for you to rest your head
Because within my own body I also have
A radio
One that can play you the various beatings of my heart
A set of lungs
Full of air that will blow on you more gently than any fan
And I have a memory that knows you better
Than the memory foam between sheets and mattress
I wouldn’t wish you a bed to rest your head
I’d wish to be your bed, to know I am the thing that rests your head.

I cannot breathe with these words in my mouth.
So long they have lived in my thoughts and too
Long perhaps have I ignored their cries for release,
Too long have they had nothing other to do than to multiply
To feed off one another creating sentences and paragraphs and
Books of their anguish, of their hate for their keeper,
They have swelled too big for my heavy head to hold
These words, they seek room, they seek open air, to breathe free.
They look for it everywhere.
They seep into my eyes pushing out buckets
Of water, eddying around themselves, elbowing at
Themselves for space to be spoken, and I their master
Hold tight the dam they push at.
They drip defeated down my throat as I swallow
The lump they’ve shaped
And in attempts to follow the air they yearn for
They sit at the base of my lungs.
Spawning bigger with time they push their
Way up again my throat, they spill out into
My mouth as I try to hinge shut my lips
They gag and choke my lungs wetting my eyes
Blushing my face. And with irony they fill my mouth so
Fully, I cannot release them.
These words that were so
Simple and few at first, now only spawn
my strong undying feeling of regret, the regret
Of never saying the words I’d always felt.

Never be afraid to make me laugh
Even if over time I ask you to stop
And I tell you you’re making me look older
Just brush that off.
I really do love the wrinkles that you’ve put around my mouth
And when I look at them I see tiny quotation marks
That remind me of all the things I have to say
And that all of those things I say are important enough
For you to quote me on
And as more time passes and those tiny wrinkled quotation marks
Get bigger and bigger and start to blend together around my lips
They’ll look more like parenthesizes
And I’ll really, really love those too
Because they’ll remind me that when I used to have to say, “I love you”
I’ll know that I love you is always implied.

The dead often come to visit me.
My favorite corpse a delightful copy of
Something it used to be.
He comes to my door and I embrace him
He smells like aged formaldehyde under a coat
Of strawberries and mints
His front teeth are still spaced evenly
Sed for one
Hanging like a faulty Christmas tree light
Right over his holiday red bottom lip
If I could still kiss them I would tell him
As sweetly as I ever did, “your lips are as soft as whale blubber.”
The way they used to move around and in between mine
Makes me think your mouth could have danced on Broadway
And the crowd could have thrown up at its beloved star roses
Only the petals would rub your lips too rough
I would tell him, “baby I miss you.” And
“I’m sorry I never returned your favorite book.”
But in all fairness I think you have never returned anything of mine
Not my favorite blouse, my grandmother’s portrait
Not my heart. Not yet
For it is little and porous and too dead to give to
Someone one who is still alive
I bet you keep it there in your back pocket
Riddled with granola crumbs and sticky excrements of gum
And maybe every other haunting you take it out
Before sitting on it and you dust it off
And kiss it.
There is something sad about that.
Having your lips touch things I can’t feel
You might as well have ****** on my liver
I wouldn’t feel that either.
Come to me when you cannot rest in peace
With pen and paper and too much coffee
And in between cigarette puffs kiss the outside
Parts of me I can feel.