We remember your old habits
And we will practice some of them.
We will leave out ******* crumbs
And we will salt the velvet chair.
They will see you in in our faces.
They will hear you in our singing
In the rhythm of our dancing.
We will tell stories about you.
We will tell them all the jokes.
We will fill your house with children.
We will fill your house with food.
We will scramble duck eggs for us
Or we’ll poach them if we want.
We will work out in the garden
We will sit up by the pool
And we’ll speak Spanish to the dogs.
We know that a space is empty
We can’t fill by being you...

I am a thing.
A conglomeration of atoms.
A little thing you can borrow
From him
Or her
Or anyone, really
But I’m also sort of yours
Just ask you
I am a milky neck beneath long sunny hair
Sunshine, you call me,
Old Man,
Just before you dig your boorish, ***** blutwurst fingers
Straight into my crunchy upper vertebrae
In the spirit of a "neck massage,"
Invading me
Injuring me
Insulting me
Bruising the skin like a ripe peach you have dropped ten times
With your sick fingertips
Until I fear cervical dislocation
That’s a broken neck in lay terms.
Skinny, you call me
Like it is my identity.
Like if I gained weight
You might call me Fatty.
Beautiful, you call me
Like it is my name.
I am not skinny. I am not fat.
I am me shaped.
I am beautiful, but that is the least of my graces.
My name is Hope, ******. Call me Hope.

I am a thing.
A conglomeration of atoms.
A little thing you can subjugate
Without even using your hands.
All you need are words
Because all I’ve got are two X chromosomes.
Women should obey their husbands.
Women should bear children.
Wait, WOMAN isn’t generic enough.
Females.
Females only go to college to get married.
Females spend too much time with other females
But females should not spend too much time with men.
Men.
A man is a male human.
A woman is a female human.
I am a THING that is a HUMAN BEING.
And I would ask you to treat me like one
But until I am more to you than a female
I cannot expect you to act like a man.

Don’t stand for too long
Or even wiggle
Because that's exercise
And exercising is a behavior
Unless it’s time for the daily walk;
Then you must go
Even if it hurts and you feel like a dog
On an invisible leash.
Never spend too much time alone
In a room away from the people you barely know
With whom you are stuck all day and night and
Forced to share toilets and
Puked-in shower drains and
Cramped kitchen counters and
Painful secrets you wouldn’t even tell your mother.
Precious heartbeats spent alone
Are called isolating and they are bad.

A smear of avocado hastily forgotten on a butter knife
Raises suspicion and a quarter teaspoon more must be replaced.
But heaven help you
If you pour a milliliter too much orange juice.
This is disordered behavior
And the few offending drops must be poured out.
Time will teach you
That wholesome rosy-faced girls much younger than you are
Holding clipboards with your life on them
Will treat you like a child
And disregard your hard-earned quarter-century
As a fish disregards an airplane.
Black tea past three o’clock is criminal;
It must be eschewed
Lest the minuscule amount of caffeine
Affect your sleep eight hours before bedtime
And override the Seroquel and the Ambien and the lithium.

And don’t you ever shut the door or flush the toilet
‘Til they’ve come in
To ogle your **** and ****
And when you’ve finally proven yourself trustworthy enough
To shut the door and flush
Never stay in for more than three minutes,
Even when taking a dump.
You will be suspected of purging
And you will be grilled like that eggplant you didn’t taste
Until you beg them to take your blood and say
Please please check the electrolytes and the pH
And I will even *** in a cup!
I don’t care! I just need you to know
I’m telling the truth.
And never say you feel sick to your stomach
Especially when it’s true.
That’s just an excuse people like us use
When we want to yodel to God
On the big white telephone.

Thirty seconds stolen in your room
To brush unruly hair is forbidden
Unless your waist-length hair
Is nearing dreadlock status
Because you might be Up To Something in there.
You can say **** but not fat
Unless you are justifying a tablespoon
Of Catalina dressing
To the Food Police.
You can’t have a hand mirror because
You might smash it and hurt yourself
But you will be surrounded
With lovely, breakable little picture frames
Full of inspirational quotes.

If you’re upset at dinner
It’s called anxiety.
If your heart hurts and skips beats
From years of puking your guts up every day,
It’s called anxiety.
If you need your space
It’s called anxiety.
If you can’t meditate
And you get so bored that
You let a juicy pregnant wolf spider crawl
Over your hand and arm seventeen times
And instead of OM SHANTI OM your inward chant
Is I Am The Walrus
It’s anxiety.
If you tell them you’re not anxious
It’s anxiety.

You can’t have your wallet
And your phone at the same time
So you’re less likely to run away
But they never check to see
Where your debit card and ID went off to
When you trade in your wallet for your phone.
They never notice the triumphant curve on your lips
Nor the slight stiff rectangle
In the breast pocket of the flannel shirt
That is perpetually around your waist.
You will keep these with you
All day and all night
In case someone drives the final corkscrew
Into your ear and you must vamoose
Before you find yourself
Floating white-knuckled in a deluge of blood
Grasping a cheese grater
Surrounded by seeping lumps of people meat.

But this house models the real world.
You are sick and you have no idea
What’s best for you.
After three weeks they know
Exactly how you work
And if you don’t agree with that
You are wrong.
You will relapse one day.
If you don’t agree with that,
You’re wrong and you will die
Because you can never quit cold turkey with food.

You must learn to enjoy the food
That you fight and claw and scramble to make,
To enjoy each perfectly metered tablespoon
Of peanut butter,
To delight in hastily and stressfully prepared dishes
Upon which you are terrified to put condiments
For fear of being told the selection is inappropriate,
To relish weak iced tea with no ice because
Someone took it all and never filled the tray,
Sparingly seasoned with two Splendas,
Carefully handed out and locked away by the keyholders,
Never sweet enough,
Never ever sweet enough,
The real sugar of real life replaced by
Bitter ******* brandied with the saccharine syrup of so-called safety.

Sitting in the car after a terrible movie and a friendzone
We find ourselves hugging it out like broskis.
Your arms tight like rubber bands cutting into my skin,
I tell you how much I hate you for leading me on
But your arms become paralyzed around me
And I like it so I ask
This really dumb question:

“I’m gonna ask a really dumb question; and if the answer’s no I’ll shut up and never mention it again.”
“Fire away.”
“Can I try? Just once, so I know what it’s like?”
“Try what?”
“You know what.”
—you pause and grin in realization that you’ve still got me even though it’s I who have got you—
“Sure, go ahead,” you say as I turn bright gold inside so I hold your face gently and
Caress those golden curls
And oh my gosh that is your mouth mmm yum ok lets try and how those fireworks

!BOOM!CRACKLE!POP!

“Just once,” I said. But I kissed you three times

And I ******* meant it

You said “never done it like that before”
I said “I do”
I said “thank you”
You said “bye” and shut the door which you then left unlocked

I drove 100 yards.
Shouted woo hoo.
Got sad.
Drank.

Slept.

Woke.

And oh god the pain—

Clouds of white March mornings
Surf inside this smokechamber I call a brain.
I was twelve and you were thirteen
Both separate rigid crystals growing
In the back of Mom’s awful red minivan.
We stained our fingers with Oxnard cherries
And got high on orange and eucalyptus.
Sand behaved like molasses.
My Walkman was full of ants
Who hated Third Eye Blind with a vengeance.
I had a pimple on my chin
Which I tried to hide with makeup
And I really hoped you’d notice
My cotton candy body splash
I got it because you like
Juicy Fruit gum and
That smells like cotton candy to me.
I chunked down short white shanks
On the red crabbed beach towel
Hoping you wouldn’t notice the ricotta billows
Developing on the upper thighs
Between slushy rivers of purple lightning stretch marks.
I couldn’t deal after ten minutes so I got in the water.
I laid myself across submerged tidal-pool boulders
Near-floating on the frigid little water-pyre
Congealing my skin like vanilla pudding
Bogging me down like a sea sloth.
It took me a halflife to figure out
That while I miss those mornings,
I do not miss you.

I slept until 4pm today
Dreaming of things the fingers of my memory
Can only scrape at.

Real life:
Phone rings. Belly aches. Cat bites. Siren howls.
Nothing matters.

Dream life:
Airport. Fog. You. Gone.
Nothing matters.

No. Rewind.

Real life:
Airport. Fog. You. Gone.
Everything matters.

“Don’t implode,” you said
before I shut your mouth with my own.

I disobeyed.

hard-candy crunches between
chattering teeth--warm blue
drool pools down wet chin. wet skin
reeks of chlorine, and swimsuit
sticks to piggy thighs
and pancake chest. eyes
are everywhere: eyes to stare
and judge and mock
and compare. it’s unfair
how these other girls eat
chips and pizza yet
their bodies are set to be
nubile marble demigoddesses
living off six pomegranate seeds.
i am teenage Taweret.

the unforgiving spandex drips
upon the floor, as if i had peed. quick!
get a towel, you’re ruining the parquet!
leg bones, feet bones hit the floor,
followed by white waves of flesh, always late,
rebounding wetly. bones and fat.
soggy pig bones.

Columbine&Blacksburg;&Aurora;&Newtown;
senseless and evil and crazy and psychotic
are words they throw around like piñata candy
“pray for _, poor things,” they say.
pray.

*****&Gomorrah;&The; Whole World&Jericho;&Ai;&…
they deserved it or
god had a plan or
the babies went to heaven or
the lord works in mysterious ways or
god wills it to be so.

No.
No.

*******.

there are days now
when my teeth crumble like bleu cheese
my nails fall out of bed
and i weep in the closet,
hair in face and
knees drawn up.
because i cannot dehumanize.
what separates the victim from the killer?

first, make sure you are very concerned with
unlearned or silenced or misread minorities. this establishes that you
are a rarity, a person of charity,
a champion and deity of the small and the voiceless.
you’ve made the right choices
swallowed the right poisons
so now you’re not pointless,
you’re with the top few
of the economic disparity.
do you aver verity?
not so much.
you just make the choicest noises.

second, it is very important that you stud your vernacular
with words like deictic, post-spaciality, and sub-simulacular.
when you, font of knowledge, squeeze out pearls like turds
in twelve-point, double spaced, times new roman rows,
lined up like crows or some other ***** birds,
be sure to write no sentence shorter than thirty words, and
see to it that two thirds of these words have more than ten letters
that even the nerds in their plaid-patterned sweaters have not once ever heard.

when you walk, A paper in hand, from your car to your apartment, past four vagrants, do not look at them.
do not look into the eyes of the man standing in the rain, barefoot, black, green, and yellow toenails oozing and crusting, nodding his head and shouting at no one, and do not wonder whether or not he’d be there had he been educated.

lexicon is not eloquence.

erudition is not wisdom.

intelligence is not a prerequisite for rights.

you have no rights.

take a dictionary and shove it up your *** and
while you’re at it, shove one up mine, too.

Sometimes my cat makes a sound like a goat
and because of this I call him Goat Baby
even though perhaps if a cat is capable of making a goat sound
then the sound is not exclusively caprine.  
He has fish breath and I call him Fish Face,
in spite of his quintessential feline features.
And sometimes he gives me this knowing look
and he says “meow”—not “meow,” precisely,
because cats never actually say “meow,”
but he says something to me in the language of cats—
and whatever he says, even though it’s Cattish, gives me the feeling
that he’s more human than cat
and for my sake I have to remind him that he’s a cat.
“You’re a cat,” I tell him. “Did you know this?”
He often responds with a purr, or otherwise rolls onto his back,
which means he kind of wants me to pet him
but he also kind of wants to bite me.
In about thirty seconds, he forgets he’s a cat,
which is good, I suppose, because if he remembered,
he probably would not be a cat.

take three hours of low-quality sleep,
and sprinkle lovingly with the midnight threats
of the racist and schizophrenic Madam Crazypants who lives on the next floor up.
for milder taste use the glowing red profanities that she hollers through the vents at the Mexicans who aren’t there.
for more spice use the white hot suicidal screams that saturate the night sky like streams of lava that shoot from Kilauea.
call the cops when she threatens to jump.
their lights and sirens will render waves of space
into solid panes of ice that smash into your head in surges.
go to school and simmer in silence until it’s execution time.
while the blood is still flowing from the bullet holes that you gave yourself,
pour on half an hour of "constructive" criticism from your professor
which will burn like lye or battery acid depending on the day of the week.
wash down with caffeine. simmer for three hours in a soulsucking class.
go home.
drink beer.
play Halo.
bury your anguished cries beneath your vice
and that secret codeine
and the bottle of wine you sequestered
and the cough syrup
which makes the world warm and salty and drippy and noodly
like a good bowl of pho.
let it sit in the oven
but don’t turn it on
and then pull it out on Monday
wrapped in a cotton blanket of cold *****
bleeding from the brain and fingers
empty of meaning.
and when the sun blows a fuse
well I guess then you can eat it.

Tonight, I cannot sleep because
I am too hot.
My face shines like wax
With sweat and oil
And the heat is like wet jellyfish in my clothes
And I must *** so I get
Up and when I see the dark me-creature in the mirror
I think of myself not as human
But blood and bones and fat and meat.
Just a biological fleshpile.
Chalk and butter and copper juice and pink slime hamburger.

I won’t turn on the light because I
Like to pretend to be blind when it’s dark.
I pretend that blackness is just water to swim through
And I feel my way to the can.
I leak yellow
And think of hospital catheters
And how I’m just a bag of warring fluids
Propped up on sticks.
I get up and vertigo swirls my brains
With an egg beater on low
Until my inner ear is quite confused
And I go whump on the sharp tiles like a dropped onion.
Before I flip the light switch,
All I can get through my greasy three-pound brain is
"Maybe it'll need an X-ray."

I slaughter
And mangle myself in this manner
Every five minutes.
All night.

I don’t want to be a thing that dies.

To soak up the dirt is to soak up the stories.
My story is grime pushed into the cracks in the concrete
From all the crusty hobos and sweat-sheened showgirls.
My story is glitter from all the strippers and their grinning patrons, and
*****, spilled liquor, and ***** from those who have sought a cure.
I am nourished by pain, and also rubber from the wheels of souped-up sports cars
Driven by men with chasmic souls. The oil from a billion french fries
Palliates the sting of alcohol upon my fractured, ***** skin.
The filth of the cigarettes and of the **** smoke,
Dank in the air, and heavy, slathers on another coat.
I see all things and I hear all things and I know all things.

I can see up your skirt right now, you precious little object,
As you flee the casino like a gull from a shark’s open jaws.
Your nightmare is right behind you, and he’s starving.
His humanity has been chewed up by the worms of his rancor,
And all that remains is an animal with hot blood on his brain.
In the alleyway I hear the pop and crack as stiletto gives way to concrete
And bone gives way to undue stress. His smile is unhinged as
Stifled screams and muffled gunshot atomize in the black air.

A decade later, the mops of sad janitors cut through like razors,
Making clean spots more unsightly than the ocean of grunge.
Surreptitious blood spatters, long since scrubbed
Still glint under blacklight.  The chalk outlines have absorbed
Into my unholy black skin, and though I was drunk on your blood,
I still remember cradling you as you died.

Something awful happened late last night,
And here I lie awake at six AM
Upon the sand of Santa Monica.
The cars drive by, but I don’t notice them.

I used up all my gas to get away
From the ****** pond on my bathroom rug.
It’s more than bleach can handle and I’m scared
That I’ve found a more seductive drug.

Fish intestines line the pier and I
Feel no misery for gutless souls.
The rocks are caked in birdshit, kelp and shells
And, as if in mourning, the cormorant calls.

Upon the rusty handrails, seagulls gossip
Just like feathered girls with brains, persisting
To trumpet my depravity in savage squawks,
And to harass the rest of us for existing.

The white-wimpled, cruel, sadistic nuns
Choose an injured sea lion as their prey.
Cowardly, they flee at his sharp barks–
It’s guts that will decide who wins today.

***** creep over the brown-furred body.
Fighting for its life, it bites the shell
And kills its fellow lifeform.  When given
The chance, I’ll defend myself as well.

When you are dead I will change the bedsheets.
The sun will shine for five billion more years.
I will still have green eyes when you are dead
And I will drink orange juice.
I will feed the cats.

Then I will drink. My tissues
will swell with firewater.
My memories will self-immolate.
I will ***** brimstone
and my skull
will be filled with sea urchins.
I will have one scrambled
egg sandwich, dripping and
greasy with mayonnaise.
I will read Bukowski and
I will stare at pigeons in the parking lot.
I will wear purple shoes.
I will get a sunburn.
I will sob
face down in the grass
and a small child will walk past
and won't know what to do with me.
I will ride up
and down in an elevator.
I will watch the sun go splat
over this porcupine city and
bury itself in the smog.
I will watch the horizon
breathe up black until it’s night
and I will wonder
how much colder Mars is.

Then I will go home and kick myself for changing the sheets and I will take them from the laundry basket and hug them to my chest because you slept in them.

The next morning, I’ll be gone too.
(Johnny Cash knew).

Some day, some people you don’t know might get spittin’ mad at each other.
you won’t have a ****** thing to do with it.
But one morning while you discuss equality at a café on Wilshire
you might hear a terrible
BOOM
In the middle of the city
And you could spill your fair-trade iced coffee
All over your Egyptian cotton clothes.
you might be able to make it home to see
If your purebred cats are not dead
But most likely you won’t get so far.
your ice might melt,
Don’t you know?
And your faucet might leak.
your apartment could be an ocean
And nobody would care.
You might try to get away
But everyone else will do the same
And you might puff up like the Chilean Blob,
And maybe your hair will come out in tufts
And you’ll possibly die with your legs stuck out at obscene angles
On a gum-dappled sidewalk,
Ashes and fallout whiffling down around your snow-angel death scene.
Mushroom cloud don’t care how civilized you is.