i have been practicing the art of
concealment
because i once thought that love
was a wide open field
where i could spin in careless circles
and scream at the top of my lungs
my every lucid thought
but have since realized
it is instead
a cold, haunted house
with creaking doors
that only open
with the hardest push
and the strongest of intentions
to get inside.

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

Fix me a dish of your lie delicacy
Pretty please
With a cherry on top
And chocolate syrup aphrodisiac mind body control
Oh yummy, so delicious
May I also ask for a glass of fluoride water to compliment
Your plague cooked to perfection
Fake and suspiciously over-sweetened
Your contamination is a serious thing
Somebody call the health department
Because women and children are crying
Their stomachs are being filled with artificial hope as they
Throw it all back up onto the just-mopped linoleum floor
Check, please.

I have a very intriguing nerve to ask you what this is, now
But I fear if we gave it a name it would destroy itself, like everything I touch
If these voices in my head are accurate, which they usually are
I know that you know that we know that we've surpassed into the "more"
Because you could not say that this is nothing
This is not nothing
This is not nothing
But we only acknowledge it in those seconds we collide and ignite within our eyes beyond our bodies
Then, crash, our own individual chemicals released
Swirling around our helpless brains, breathing heavily
Our oxygen caught up in the smoke
Our hearts caught up with our actions
Realizing how vague the rules seem now, wanting to break them
Wanting to connect, wanting to run away from the temptation
Of falling madly and deeply...
No, the strength inside gained from loss before will not let me
I can, and will, resist to mention
Oh, but it feels so...
No, dopamine poisoning has taken control, this is only a passing wave
Or is it?...
Everything just disintegrates and morphs along the scale of time
We have mistakenly created an inpenetratable boundary
A barbwire fence, but the dark side taunts me to make my hands bleed attempting to climb over
I just want to see what it would be like...
I pull myself back together, pull my shirt back over my head
Solidify my own intentions, withstand inside my translucent shell
For we are water and if we are not contained we would leak everywhere.

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

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

sometimes self-care is buying a nice pillow, something softer than you were
something that can stand the weight of my head, my thoughts

mascara stains

other times it is going to the gym and sweating you out, one heavy step at a time

going nowhere
but at least away

you can run run run as fast as you can
but you will always look back and wonder,

because i know you see yourself in me.

i am
a magnet
for broken things
pieces of boys
forever
clinging to me,
making it hard to
walk

i am the honeybee, finally having enough of you swatting me away
giving you every ounce of poison i can gather in my stomach
and losing myself
in the process

Where am I?
Have you seen me?
I am the tiniest object in an I Spy book
Strewn randomly in miscellaneous artful clutter
You scan in concentrated scrutiny but happen to see right past me
Eventually you give up and turn the page and I remain forever unfound.

spring days in the park

you were just traveling through, you said 

you didn’t mean to end up here,

but life has a funny way of bringing you places
and you say such horrible things

everything evil spilling out of your mouth

like pandora’s box 

and you leave my tongue tasting sweet

but it never stays for long
i want your hands on me but you take them away

as soon as they start sweating
i want to bare everything, this worn-out soul

but as soon as i take off my clothes

you’ll see my body’s secrets

and you’ll just keep
running

she says YES
DON'T LET THIS STOP
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
******.
and you've done it again.

I will bite your tongue
while you bite your words
i miss writing like i miss your mouth
soft,sweet,spicy

do what you want
you're not needed on this side of town
just receding,slowly
away and away and away
up in the sky
in a hot air balloon
around the world in 100 days
because we need the extra 20
to enjoy the sights and sounds


yes darling, australia is beautiful
but the coral reef is dying, and rotting away
no more rainbow shores
just an island in the middle of nowhere;somewhere

i will find you
even if 100 days later
you are on a street corner
smoking a ciggarette in each hand
stuffing the world down your throat

INHALE;EXHALE
INHALE;EXHALE

Antarctica is melting away.

that sad little rainy sky
the chill of the sheets from your sweat the night before,
and the creases it left behind.

step one: create an atmospheric barrier between yourself and others, fill it with auric spikes, like the black fence encirling the haunted house nobody wants to go near. become the whispering voice in the hallways, become the creak in the staircase, and sink into it.

step two: disengage the emotional counterpart in yourself, be the intellect or be nothing. be air, undisturbed. when they walk through you, only be still.

step three: do not be tempted by the scattered sweets they drop behind them to reel you into their cage, do not eat what they give you, do not be hungry for anything, do not crave nourishment where it cannot be found.

step four: do not fuss about your hair, your skin, that machine you are in. exist simply and softly, do not turn on the lights in the morning if you don't have to, do not speak, and that is important.
though they will dare you, do not ever speak, for they know your replies and have only fire to stuff back into your throat.

we've become walking coffins
throwing dirt on ourselves
with the idea that if we all
somehow, managed
to care less
loss will never find us
but the slow death of feeling
buries us alive

and i,
am not yet ready to die

eat
sleep
write

repeat as necessary

I just want the pain to float away into outer space far far millions of light years away and fill me with vibrant healthy radiating luminescence to battle my worries that keep me awake and creating more anxieties upon my body aching contracting squeezing fear into tiny stress dynamites exploding inside internally introverted paranoia worst case scenario expectations this is probably nothing and I am driving myself sick with my illness of mind quantum imbalanced fields vibrating and reacting to thoughts well stop thinking stop thinking stop thinking stop feeling stop feeling stop feeling for just a second to pull this all together before I fall apart and disintegrate and my optimistic limbs fall off leaving me with empty pockets empty answers tests and x-rays determining the origin of breath loss gnawing biting monsters eating my structure within images of myself bleeding obliviously not waking up because I am too stubborn to acknowledge I am not invincible to myself anatomy is an art form and I painted this hurt.

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.

There is this woman with stringy brown hair
Blue polka-dotted shirt, the same one
Head droops down
The weight of melancholy stampedes her to near-death.

She hardly holds herself up straight
She barely looks me in the eyes, she is shamed
Every time, she is paler and paler
Every time, gets the same comfort treat, maybe this will help this time
Maybe,
This time.

Chocolate peanut butter flavor with hot fudge and whipped cream
I am the only one who notices her slight shaking..
Fiending? Needing?

$4.61, please
I am the only one who notices the scars on her arms.

"Thank you, have a good day."

And I am frightened that one of them will soon be her last.

I am frightened because I want to save everyone
But I can't.

It's like throwing starfish into the sea, one by one
Still seeing the shore still filled with them.

Everyone around me is drowning and they pull my hair down with them.

i want to
be the thing
you twirl
between
your fingers

how many times have i been so acquainted with the ground
gravel filling up my throat
stuffing these useless words back into that deep dark somewhere
where everything dies and nothing grows
a fever that's been killing me for days
my brain hot with over-thoughts
a pain that's been killing me for years
a scalpel in the back is nice and steady
but the knife that you hold is red and rusty
i have many scars but none have hurt
as much as yours
death would be nicer
even death would be much nicer

i bet you think i'm writing love poems
penning down the
exact
color of your eyes
or trying to capture the mimic
of your musical heartbeats

my limits were pressed
first, lightly,
as flowers between the pages of an old book
then forcefully, as it shuts

there is no entirely benevolent being:
god, must know, suffering.
he placed us here, knowing
that our capacity for feeling was not
as it should be

there is no plan, destiny, reason
just another layer of purgatory
just hearts that crush too easily
just monsters that look, and sound, like men

don't tell me that
all men with bouquets of flowers
also have knives in their pockets
not when you fed me poison every day
and called it medicine

and that's when i decided to keep my words to
myself
my veins forever excluded from the daylight
my blood no longer yours to feed on
you kept me outside like a dog gone rabid
no wonder i gnawed at your mouth
begging for sweeter words
you gave me nothing nothing nothing
except a muzzle to sleep in
i am taking away your power

i am adjusting
i am pretending

just because i can forgive you every time
doesn't mean it doesn't rot inside like an apple core
until one day you take the last poisonous bite
and there'll be nothing left of me
just an empty shell of the girl you once knew
who absorbed so much pain she became death itself
a still born love, a stale heart
it gave too much without getting enough
just because i can still love you every time
doesn't mean i am strong
in fact, it makes me weaker
until one day your world will collapse from my shoulders
and you will have to hold it up yourself.

you were the reddest,
most delicious apple
and i never had a choice
but to take the first
dangerous
bite

i have such violent longings,
they are quite disquieting but
hardly disheartening

enough was never a destination i reached,
a thing i could acquire and hold in my hands
i was cursed from the birth with "more" on my tongue

i want your volcanic mouth
and all the dangerous things that come out

you leave me in ashes

The pregnancy tests
Are right next to the condoms
Either way, you're *******.

colors
and escaping smoke from lungs
heat scorching bare skin
families burying animals in their backyards
a drunken ******* a bed
mountains with crusted hands reaching, how i once lived among the trees
the green light signal of the music that fills every pore with fragments of intoxicating sounds
a reflection in the morning, with no regrets as to what's there
amethyst extravagance
the seafoam green walls
a **** cake in the fridge
a beaded reminder: carpe diem momento mori

everything but the unmarked road we will walk

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.

miss you
even though you are convinced
that no woman could even
breathe
without your
existence

At the edge of space I contemplate
The best way to go about expressing this...this..
All-consuming breathless reckless calm frightened indifferent contradictory stillness
And I can't figure it out because it's not even words anymore
So I laugh and look up, around, and I feel so tiny and insignificant
Look back down and still just as small related to anything anyone everything everyone
Bemused and confused, still a little bruised
Either way I don't belong so I close my eyes and let go
Out
Of
My
Head
Soaring
Soaring
Soaring...
Oh
No
Oh
No
Oh
No
I think
I grabbed
A backpack
Instead of a
Parachute
So
If I
Shatter
When I
Crash
From being
Brutally
Exposed
Weak and
Unprotected
Just
Remember
That
At least I
Enjoyed
The fall,
The feeling.

I've never seen anyone cut as deep as you do
And do you bleed?
Is your blood diseased with toxic venom
Do you feel sometimes as if
You are backed into a corner, and everyone is watching you
Attack yourself because you would rather self-destruct than face the contradiction of your actions
You are greedy with the ones that love you
You eat them up like the sap from the tree of life
Until you spontaneously combust into the flowered ****** hearts that have sacrificed themselves for you
And you live forever as the ones you've pained.

you are one of those
that keep me on a leash-
tight enough to let me know you're in control
but loose enough for you to roam
only selectively showing me pieces of your life
like opening your front door
but never letting me walk inside

i am still translating your many languages

but i understand a sort of warmth 

emanating 

from the deepest parts of you

even when you think your life

resides in darkness

throw away all of our material *******
our iphones and credit cards and television sets
throw them in a bonfire, take off our clothes and
dance around the flames naked chanting freedom mantras
we could do anything we wanted
climb to machu picchu and try to feel the past
drink ayahuasca and play shaman for a day
be wild and open and part of the earth again
for once in our lives we might feel important
unrestricted, powerful
like we have a purpose
and even after the hallucinations fade
maybe the plants will still whisper to us our destiny
when we are sleeping in hammocks and eating bugs
i guess i just wouldn't care if the guts got stuck in my teeth
because you'd be there and encourage me to give up my ocd habits
of always being clean
because you'd make it worth it to not care
i'd give you my soul if it meant we could always feel this way
so wonderfully lost in each other that nothing else matters.

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.

it’s a pen of bulls in your stomach
the wonder, the not-knowing, the what-ifs, whens coulds and might-bes
the numbers on an oxygen tank dwindling down

too many thoughts becoming their own creatures,
tearing down cities that we carry inside

it’s leaves shivering from an island wind,
the people running away from shore

that moment when you slip on ice and you don’t know if you’ll catch yourself

it’s dying, not knowing where you’ll go
and space, not comprehending how vast

counting all the possibilities in the universe and only thinking
about the most horrific ones
some of us always live in worst case scenarios
and i,
have not yet mastered the art of surviving them.

There's always been something about that feeling of books
Books rotting away beneath laminated covers
The fingerprints from hundreds thousands of ***** hands
All turning the pages, some slower than others, taking their precious time
Some hastier readers, eager to consume knowledge, there's not enough time
But me, I am caught in between
When I read, everything is still
The story pours out filling the emptiness of now
Frozen in a vocabulary paradise, a language of dreams
Not thinking about where I have been, where I am going
Just a limbo-land serenity
Where memories are freed and replaced with new fictional ones
The characters become my friends, my allies
The villains my villains
I feel their kisses when they kiss and the taste of food when the narrator eats
Absorbed in a false reality more so than this one
Some people drop acid and watch wonderland
And I prefer to dive into a sea of words
The waves lift me carefully and carry me away into a far away place
A parallel dimension, a paperback time machine
An hour fades into three, hunger pangs and missed phone calls but
I am on a cognitive vacation, having intellectual *******
And I want to stay here forever.

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

Why do you always return out of nowhere at the most inconveniently convenient time
Where do magicians go when they disappear, it's a secret we're all dying to know.

note to self:
you do not live for yourself this time around,
your love will be taken for granted and
your body will be wrung out
like a used rag after
it is your use, do not question the place
you have been set so carefully
maybe in your next life you will
wear diamonds on your finger
not be born to prepare for the worst
you will be wrapped in silver blankets
your skin a warm shower, not
just something barely holding it all together

A twist and turn Rubik's cube
When we already knew what the last fitting color looked like
We've been spinning this puzzle a while
The flame has always been on its way to the actual firework grand finale
The sparks they fall and they fall so far to the ground
To the ground I fall
I want what I can't have, I've had what I can't keep, I keep only what I can grasp in a memory
And am I scared because I didn't grasp enough, the time I couldn't capture anyway?
Or am I scared because I did, and I am scared that I want more?
I've worn my words on my lips before but now I just kiss them away
My mind has a showdown versus yours, clairvoyance isn't working
Turn on the screen and show me how I'm just a pixel in millions
Only a slight shade, vibration, a tiny barely significant something
That's what I'm used to seeing, this is what I expect to see, I expect you to just shrug my dust off your shoulders
Where my problems lie, what I want to see and what's really there
Your eyes are black holes and your body is a carnival
You subtly steal my senses and replace them backwards
These screams are whispers
And my hands are fireflies, I just wanted you to feel the glow
Did you feel it...could you ever feel it?
You've always had that way about you, that space between, that almost
Always been in that sunset background, somehow
Like you're the adventure I've been packing for
I wish we could have an adventure
You're a wordless song in my headphones, a hidden track on the mix-tape
A cleansing melody filling me when I thought all there was left was no voice on the other end
I want to write you as lyrics down, but I don't know how to spell you out
But if I had to rhyme I would match hope with soap
Slippery, through the fingers
I'm trying to forget your taste, (but oh don't let me forget)
I'm only forgetting because I feel like I have to
So I can keep up, so I can forget before I'm forgotten
The ink fades but will still stay
I'll try my best to wash you off my skin.

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

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

Lust consuming the mattress on the floor

Dressed in sweat and black silk

The escaped gasps caught in the entwinement of young flesh

i'm sorry for needing you to touch me all the time
it's not a ****** thing
though
it could be
if you were okay with that

but no i have this naked way about me
i'm always cold
and longing
and you're warm
you mammal you

perhaps i'm a special kind of vampire
why yes i do stay up all night but
i feed off of love instead of blood.

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