in the coldest months i let the hair grow like ivy up the sides of an old house,
my old house of a body
let the blemishes form, i invited the oils into my pores and the dirt under my fingernails

i wanted to be ugly- (but not too much so)
i wanted eyes to not rest on me for long
i wanted to dissipate into the background

a chameleon girl,
a blurry figure at the edge of the movie screen
a girl just walking by
with no plotline or context
when she opens her mouth only ravens fly out
she wanted to erase all the places she had been hurt
but she could not reach far enough
so she became invisible, instead.

aloneness
   wonderful desperation

   spoke changing language,
pulled mask,
                        revelations

the truth is a bomb and the blast
is a woman standing in front of a man with red lipstick marks
where she could be fixed up pretty and brightly
could be made brand new,
a cellophane covered easter basket shining with glitters and bows
just a vessel to hold eggs, to hold their growth, to burst forth
she knows she is not worthy of a sunday morning
that he unwraps her every day and does not find a gift
but just another thing that
occupies too much
of his very limited
space

war, hunted lives.
hungering toward clarity
choke
          unerring
                         inequality

beloved
          pneumonia.

i may be an optimist,
but the truth never escapes me
the soldiers in my chest have long
abandoned their posts
with the foreknowledge that
some wars
will never be won

darling you just pulled the trigger,
my brain does the rest of the work for free.

i am a hotel room, a refuge to many but a true home to none
i am the rack of coats, all of the pockets turned out
i am unmade sheets
i am old curtains, worn from looking outside
i am the bible in the drawer, my significance long forgotten
i am the light that doesn't work as well as it should
i am the television set missing the remote
i am the complimentary notepad with no notes
i am mass-produced framed artwork, lackluster and faded
i am the armchair with questionable stains
i am the heavy darkness at night, the feeling someone is watching
i am repetitive carpet designs and tasteless coffee
i am the morning, an almost-hot shower
i am an empty hotel room, a refuge to many,
but a true home to none.

you asked me who would hurt a face like that
then you spent the next two years showing me the answer:
a boy who does not like women, who has to put them in their rightful place
as cherry trees only to be picked from when men are hungry, (and they are always hungry)

someone who would hurt a face like this doesn't speak carefully,
is an entire thesaurus for cruelty
they hurt so they won't get hurt
even though they are never the ones who end up leaving
the burden is on me, it always has been
there are trenches in my neck from holding us together
i have the back of a thousand year old witch
still casting curses in my garden
to all those someones itching to pick my fruit
chanting
stay away stay away

i built a fortress around your body
when i realized that's all it was
i spent years asleep in a cold desert
waiting to be awoken
waiting for your moments of clarity
those sweet miniscule pieces of time that stretched on and on that i took in like oxygen, like *****

i started to fall out of love on september 18th,
all morning i stared at how the lights made rainbows on the
motel floor
i wanted to chain-
smoke cigarettes all day and watch
those diamonds dance
while our love rotted away, unseen
in the corner of the room
my sanctuary now a crime scene
though there was no blood from the kinds of things that were murdered here

those colors the only thing left in your wake,
the only truly beautiful thing left

the moment is gone as soon as you catch it
time is a butterfly in constant motion
and it dies when you touch its wings

sometimes i get so angry that you are
empty
i want to shake you shake you shake you until you are gasping my name because
i know if you knew how to love
you would love me
but i refuse to get out while i still can
i hold onto the briefest moments where we are inside of each other
and you can almost see the light

do you feel the electric pulse between our fingers
what is hallucination
what is real
because life is imagined for me,
most of the time

it would be easy to erase you
just a few taps and your face would be gone
i know you are forgetting me
but i'll forget you first
i have already forgotten
your skin
and your scars
because i haven't been close enough
to touch them

i danced with death all night
and woke up in his arms
now everytime we kiss
the edges
of life
grow
soft
-e
r

bedroom--where

  Mind
      becomes
  
      dangerous

i became restless when
the path suddenly opened up before me
the cocoon in which i spent these years curled up inside
has now cursed me with an itch
that refuses to reside
i have only just noticed the mold on my edges
in this cupboard for too long

a still life, a stale life

but i dare not say that the time was ever wasted;
i have grown gardens of strength
through floods and fires i have resurrected myself countlessly,
standing in those currents that should have knocked me down

and now in them i walk on,
towards the mouth of the river

i want to be swallowed whole

perpetually
         haunted

writing    
      waiting,
                       listening.

i journeyed to the other side and begged to be haunted
so i wouldn't feel alone
there is too much space in my head, too many places to fill with fears

even the demons want to leave.

i could never live forever
i would spend all my days
trying to die

poems--are
indeterminate
analysis questions
giving purpose
to existing.

you might listen if i could write melodies and not treacheries
of spirit, violations of the psyche
stabs that pinch just right (just wrong)

you might just listen
if i was a songstress seductress
a siren in your bed in your head
(i could make you listen)

i remember you as the boy who drew mazes next to me-
endless kubrikian structures with #2 pencils,
always leaned a little too close,
crooked on your elbow, making jokes until i laughed
my ugly girl chortle

you might remember me as the girl you did call ugly-
in front of your friends, my only few friends,
i didn't laugh when i was the joke that day
but i blamed my ambitious pigtails, and the metal grinding against my teeth
hopeful for future beauty
i couldn't blame you

i couldn't even blame you a few years later when i grew *******,
and we rode bicycles to the track
where you put your maze-making hands in my back-to-school-sale jeans
i said stop
you said it's okay
so i said it's okay

i still don't know if it was but i do know you called later that day
i sat nervous and twirling the thick cord around my fingers, my chest, my neck

you made me so many things at once,
things that i could not yet name

i remember you saying sorry
and me saying it's okay

a dialogue that,
to this day, i have not escaped.

i didn't know
that the heart could break in
so many directions at once
a windowshield that started to crack with
just one pebble, but here we are,
still driving
on an uneven road
filled with rocks

pretend to know me:
at my very core there is a door that leads to another
you will find nothing that you find sense in
a collective molecular abnormality
a genetic dysfunction
a soul made of equations that have not yet scratched the surface of geometry
i am not something to be solved in your laboratory mind,
under scrutiny i change my shape and very essence before you
i am not the box you put me in, nor am i the ribbons, the tape, the thin festive paper that rips easily
i am underneath that and underneath that
and the atmosphere surrounding it
but don't you dare tell me who i am
the years have not been kind and i have suffered, too,
and i deserve to keep the truth of my being to myself,
that deep well guarded
by creatures only found in mythologies
i find comfort in fiction, because i have been forsaken by reality
i do not hand myself over to others
and i will not hand it over to you.

i still admire the innocence in others
objectively,
like watching a movie already knowing the ending
but still suspending my disbelief for a few seconds of tenderness
where skin doesn’t feel like sandpaper
and nails against dry clay
(a feeling you never got used to.)

a relief to think that somebody must exist with purity, a somebody, truly
for somebody
else
before they have withered
before they have been neglected to be
placed in direct sunlight

weeks were spent prying you open with a crowbar, with a scalpel

wire hangers in all your doors  
when i finally got inside
the car wouldn't even start

take me nowhere cowboy we have already come so far

intent is nothing to a gun in the mouth a shove off a cliff nobody
meant to be power hungry and carnivorous but
the chips have fallen the angels are falling
our halos our ego spotlights
look at me look at us how bright
like high beams in the mirror

nobody can see each other
anymore

we were trapped in there for so long that the hand on the clock forgot the direction it was going
that still sameness, over and over
that void, our voids, never being filled, and i tried
to cover them with beautiful things but the walls screamed
“lies, you’re lying, you are not in love and you never will be”
i formed habits i never had, sleeping pills and 42 proof

i just wanted to close my eyes for a while
i just wanted to be held for a while

i never knew what you really felt like, a piece of glass between us
so many times i broke through, but i always paid the price
my fingers bled and you’d build it up again
so i grew comfortable on the other side

we have been ghosts floating next to each other in here for eternity,
but each too immersed in our own death, to notice.

you are a burning house
and i walk through flames

because you didn't think the southwest was beautiful in a desolate way
all of those ancient layers of rock
stayed standing despite the earth shifting around them
perhaps they are stargates that we have once passed through in other forms
only to come back to where it began
you quoted nietzsche to me:
"time is a flat circle"
in fact you said that many times
i have already done this, i have already made my choices
i have resorted to convenience when i thrived on the uncertainty
coming and going is all the same when there is no end
you're an old bruise i keep pressing on
the blood underneath fresh and flowing to the haunted spots you keep leaving in me
maybe i hope you can cover enough area that i finally dissolve
the ******* in me wants a reason to hurt
i really should not feed her, but she is begging
and i have a hard time saying what is enough
when i am so good at turning nothings into somethings,
and somethings into nothings

the boys will always win because they have fists
and if we cry too hard, too much
they can shove them in our mouths
spit in our hair
trample our dreams
destroy things without consequence
fear a great fuel, a great devil they welcome
and tango with
fists are stronger than feelings because there is no time for such
distasteful, factless,
imaginary concepts
such wastes of space, such wastes of time

this year i am letting silence speak for itself
i spent too much time bulldozing over its insinuations,
the clear echo of hurt, the ringing of your nothings

they say when you die you hear a buzzing
i heard it when i pressed my ear against the shower wall
‎everything else was far away

maybe my soul is already leaving my body
maybe i already died and continued to somehow live

this won't just go away because you have conveniently removed yourself from it,
forgot how your tongue formed the words
the echoes are marching bands down a long, long street
and my ears keep ringing

you are lucky to sleep so soundly
while i toss and turn until i am pulled toward the beacon of day
i am a slave to time and pain against your simple animal rhythms
eat sleep drink drink eat sleep
and sometimes bleed

(but the way you bleed, and the way i bleed,
are very different things.)

maybe you're right
we don't have anything in common
i am a ball of yarn unraveling in your hands
and you like to play with the string

you tell me i am a bleeding heart in place of
an insult, a slap, a swift shove into a bathroom counter
say it like it's easy, too easy
to be this way, like i
crawled out of my mother's belly
begging for my veins to turn into highways that travel through the cities of
hard-working men and women hardly making it work
your freedom for greed comes at the greatest cost, and we are all
paying for it
the children hiding under classroom tables are
paying for it
the one choosing opiates over antibiotics because the
pain is intolerable and it is cheaper to die than to stay alive is
paying for it

and yes, we write so much about dying,
we serenade the dark side with guitar riffs and cannabis
call me a bleeding heart because i want to scoop all of us up like fragile eggs
in an abandoned bird's nest
and whisper softly
i know, i know it hurts to live
like this but we have to keep going
we have to keep trying