The greedy little ladybugs
eagerly waited to mourn me,

dying
to don their black spots as veils
meant to cover the raw redness of their bloodlust.

Dying...

and hoping that I would return the favor.

I can't write poems
because they won't give me a pen

because they're afraid that I'll **** myself with it.

But what they don't know
is that I'm not the perfect Venn diagram
between suicidalness
and patience,

that I'm not creative enough
or desperate enough

to use a ballpoint
or a fountain
or a quill

to hang myself
or poison myself
or slit my wrists.

And because they won't give me a pen,
I can't write poems
to
    save
            my
                  own
                         *life.

She kept laughing
even though it wasn’t funny,

shrinking in the presence
of two men sent to interrogate her
about her purity,

the red brand hidden under her tongue
that she tried to hide under nervous giggles,
tried to mask with inappropriate joviality.

She tried to desperately communicate what had made her
choose the wrong side of the road
between laughter and sobbing.

She tried
and failed
to make them understand
what had made them think of her as a hysterical and trivial woman,
the stereotypical horrible driver,
unable to stay in her emotional lane.

You could be my Jericho,

and I,

your blasphemous lover.

you remind me a lot of your brother.
same delicate temperament,

but i could break through your walls with a twitch of my garish fingers.

you could be my Jericho
and i could be your blasphemous lover.

The only thing keeping me from you
is this pockmarked suburban Tupperware
and my Thumbelina complex.

My favorite birthmark
is a brown dot near the center of my left eye
that makes my iris look like a leaky egg yolk suspended in time:
the mark of a girl
destined to never quite color inside the lines.

This is the most emotionally present
that I've been in a long time.
And now that roll has been called,
I'd like to go ahead and strike my name off of the roster.

It's way too soon
to write you a love poem,
but I think I may be in the socially acceptable time frame
to write you a like poem.

Yesterday, my doctor told me to cut cheese out of my diet,
so I'll try to keep the sentiment as vegan as possible.

Why doesn't my boyfriend want to hold my hand anymore?
It's always been clammy and frigid,
though I suppose it has gained this new
rigidness.

And no one wants to feel responsible
for a dead weight abandoned
in the palm of his hand.

And because it's my lifeless hand,
severed with all the fixings,
rabid and unruly,
nipping at the palm that smothered the life out of it,

Because of this,

he can't even pass it off
as a gag paperweight for Bill at the office.

My hollow regret fluttered to the ground,
bound by gravity
to fall as swiftly and ignorantly as my gaze.

When I fell back into the cramped nook of your shelf,
you didn't even acknowledge me amidst the other knickers and gnats vying for your attention.
You overlooked the viscous hatred glazing my bronze porcelain.

And after you spit-shined me in an attempt to erase the set-in stain
that so starkly contrasted all of the work that you had put into the cocoa complexion nurtured in the heated vacuum of your built-in incubator,
you showed me off to your friends,

your little nesting doll that had shrunk down to its true form,
so cute and abridged that you could fit its summation in your pocket,
doomed to eternally room with your dusty love shields and dingy photocopies of past mistakes.

She was quivering like a full saucer awaiting his approach,
each step resonating inside of her gelatinous bones,
breath held at the starting line of her lips.

Three
Two
One

He called the shot
and she slit her wrists to let him in.

You're the silent promise held
in fingertips lazily murmuring to my naked skin
while they cross theselves behind my back.

You told me that I was only eighteen
and I had the rest of my life to love other people,

And you told me that you weren't good enough for me anyway,

And that it isn't even worth trying long distance because some girl you met online broke your heart in middle school,

And you told me that you'd still love me,
only in a different way,

And you compared me to your ex-something-or-other and a cloying cookie,

And I kissed your neck as you were leaving
and you rubbed the lipstick back on my dress.

You caught me by the shoelace
and tethered me to your side
but I was born to float away
and be destroyed by the sun.

They say that you're too inept,
too immature,
too young to know better.

Don't listen to them;
you're exactly the shade of green that I was looking for.

I'm the crumpled soda can you used to kick around when you were a kid;

I'm the shot glass you emptied into the pit of your teen angst;

I'm the wine bottle that's going to shatter over your skull and **** us both.

there were soggy, downtrodden cigarette butts
on the stairs leading to her apartment
where fresh ashes smoldered--
the remnants of her newly-cremated self.

No one told me that the taste of defeat
isn't bitter
or sour
or acidic,
but embarrassingly cloying.

The water was murky
with ashen clouds
and my thoughts were overcast
with fears of nakedness.

Once when I was at an age at which I was
embarrassingly old enough to have known better,
I feigned "coolness"
by taking drags out of the end of my pen
like it was one of those foreign, long, skinny black cigarettes
that was all the rage in some exotic country like Italy.

But I ****** too hard,
and instead of sampling a taste of ink-flavored air,
I dove headfirst into the real thing--

which is to say,
that I tried not to laugh for the next few days
lest anyone catch a glimpse of my ink-stained tongue
and think that my love for calamari
was anything other than platonic.

I'd like to work up the courage to ask you
if it is a cultural thing
to dress like a plushy carrot
that I'd like to passionately julienne
and sprinkle on my bed sheets.

Sometimes I forget that I'm the owner of my body
and I'm not just housesitting until the person whose home it really is gets back from vacation.

Thankfully whoever lives here always leaves me a roster that includes a list of the people in her life
so I don't embarrass her with my social ignorance.

Yesterday, she left me with the person she had labeled as "boyfriend" in her reference contact list.
And even though I didn't recognize him as mine,
when I stole glances for intel purposes,
I felt this surge of emotion
like she had left the electricity running in the room she dedicated to him.

I'm hesitant to tell you that I love you,
because the last time I left my heart on someone's doorstep,
she left it out in the rain.

So pardon me for finally nursing it from its two year bout of pneumonia.

Because even though there are shots that prevent cooties,
I'm sorry to say that modern medicine has yet to find the cure for heartbreak.

If fathers teach their sons the art of shaving,
shouldn't mothers teach their daughters the intricacy of doing and undoing bras?

Unfortunately, this world isn't a utopia for gender role demos,
so I'd appreciate it if you didn't laugh at me
while I fumble to get you *******.

I wish that I had gotten an extended warranty on my body.

Who will I turn to now
when it falls apart at the seams?

Maybe if I hadn't tossed out the how-to manual...

...though I have a sneaking suspicion that it was blank,
and wasn't worth the paper it wasn't printed on, anyway.

I feel like my entire life has been about falling
(falling in love, falling to pieces, falling down stairs, etc.).

When you're teetering on something precarious, like air,
people tell you not to look down,
not to open your eyes.

But I've gone a step beyond just shutting my eyes.
I keep my hands fastened over them,
as an extra layer of protection,
because I'm afraid if my contrary nature gets the best of me
and the screws holding my hands in place loosen,
I'll give in and take a peek,
peering up instead of down,

But I won't see a suspect looming over the edge of the cliff that last saw me grounded.
And the only culprit for my plunge...
...will be me.

I asked, "Should I shave?"
You said that you didn't care.
I said, "I love you."

When you're falling,
the wind is like an accomplice
that will tell onlookers that you're only crying
because it's battering your eyes.

They say that it's in the journey
and not the destination,

but what's the difference
between gliding
or plummeting

when the end goal is the pavement just the same?

I think I'd like to pick pocket your heart,
though the jury's still out on whether or not I'm keeping the contents.

Because I'm only reaching in there to confirm that your feelings are still home,
that somewhere in that torso of yours, your heart serves as more than a ****** conduit.

But before I could even brush against you to distract you,
I saw the "For Rent" sign stapled to your chest.
And when I knocked on your rib cage to place an inquiry,
I saw the fine print that read:
"Tourniquet Not Included".

But didn't anyone tell you that if you dam up your emotions,
they'll leak out and poison your brain?
That's why they say love makes you do crazy things,
and I don't know if I can stick around until you're certifiable.

I'm afraid I'm your
origami imitant,
your paper tiger.

Last weekend,
one of your friends called me your manic pixie dream girl.

So in the movie that is my life,
I'm not even the main character,
just the quirky sidekick to my male protagonist.

And it's probably my ego speaking,
but I don't think that's right.

And I don't think that I,
of all people,
should be the one  showing you the beauty of a world
that I only see in kinetic blurs and swatches,
passing by me in my free fall from this life to the next.

Because I tried once to see the world without a filter,
but its stagnancy sent me in a downward spiral
and somehow I ****** you into it--
into me.

And I don't mean to be your whirlwind woman,
destined to spit you out--disoriented--
somewhere that you've never been before,
somewhere that no map ever cared to acknowledge,
somewhere stained with my essence,
my idiosyncrasies,
and your new found head trauma.

And you're a rational guy
and I'm an on again off again rational girl
who needs a little help stilling the edges of her narrative,
who longs for a tether or a buoy
to keep her from flying off or sinking down.

So maybe if you held my shoulders to stop me from spinning,
my vision would sober up,
and I'd focus solely on your curves and your angles
as they entered my retinas,
while the rest of the world behind you
faded into blurry suggestions
to be adhered to by someone who gave a **** about them

And after you wiped the puke from your shoes,
maybe you'd see me focused in your eyes
and maybe, just maybe...

...you'd just call me your dream girl.

I didn't think that I was comfortable enough to fall asleep in your arms,

to snore in your arms,

to drool in your arms,

to babble incoherently in your arms.

So I dreamt that I was lying awake while you slept,
enveloping me in those gangly things sewn into your shoulders.

But when I woke up,

you were gone.

And I thank you...

...for having the courtesy to get up to ***
instead of doing it in my arms.

a couple of days ago,
i had a dream that i was mad at my friend,
and so i tried to frame her
by hiring someone to shoot me in the chest
and put a tardis in the wound
because she's a doctor who fan.

i've realized that my poetry is far too bombastic
as if all of the big words will distract everyone
from the fact
that i have nothing to say.

(I think I've lost the ability to start things, so please forgive this poem for not having an attention grabbing genesis)
I've been twiddling my thumbs for almost eight months now
Putting off all that I care about
(And especially everything that I don't. Here's lookin' at you, AP World History)
Sitting around amassing a booklet of words to use in the future for novels and whatnot
But only using them in essays so I seem smarter than I am
(For example, susurrus means 'a whispering or rustling sound; a murmur')
Hoarding anything affiliated with Ben Folds because he makes me feel things on occasion
(I currently have 189 songs of his on my iTunes library; No one understands me.)
Making **** jokes at lunch while masking the thoughts of substance ricocheting around in my head
(Also your mom jokes because no one would think that you're crying internally about the uncertainty of the afterlife whilst making lewd stabs at their mother's integrity(and ******. Ba dum tss.))
Apparently craving the lingering feel of another's touch
(I had a dream a few weeks back that Ben Folds licked my hand; My stomach folded (hahahah, folded) in on itself.)
Thinking that my feelings of misanthropy and apathy and everything else I can't find the words for yet are mine alone because everyone else is too stupid to have thought them themselves
(Even though I know that I'm not particularly special and I should stop being so elitist and stupid)

But I've finally found a light at the end of the table in the last place I'd expect--
(I meant to say tunnel, but hey, the source of said light does sit at my lunch table.)
A cherubic Presbyterian boy with an aversion to all things perverse,
(Which includes my sailor's tongue and occasional tendencies to want to put it on a member of my own ***, though he doesn't know about that)
A spec of cleanliness on the grimy waistcoat of humanity who makes me want to be the best I can be
(Today when I saw him, I only swore once; I was very proud of myself)
But maybe I'm just jumping the gun
Because what would a good Christian boy want with a heathen like me who isn't even sure she believes in God?
Maybe his prolonged contingencies were merely contingent and I'm just overreacting because of my few and far between incidences of human contact.
(Seriously. Don't touch me.)
Maybe I just want someone to talk to for hours about everything and nothing at all.
(What with me being relatively antisocial, it's hard to find people with similar mindsets.)
Maybe I just want someone to funnel my adolescent attention into
(Because teen movies have taught me that one obviously can't be happy without having a crush on someone at any given time.)
Or maybe it's just because the way the Bible quote on the back of his t-shirt conflicted so humorously with the way he shook his hips to a J-Lo song on "Just Dance."
(Seriously, though, it was hilarious. I was dying.)
Or the way our fingers brushed when we were catching frogs
Or the way he blushed when I stepped out in my bikini
(I went to a pool party today.)
Or the way he held me momentarily in the delirious confusion of the flashing strobe lights
Or the way he got one point higher on his research paper than me a month ago
(He was excited; I was upset.)
Or the way that he does everything nearly to perfection.
I could go on..
But I don't know.
Maybe I'll get over him in a week and slip back into myself.
Because, like I said, what would a good Christian boy want with a heathen like me?

This week I need to start writing that novel I've been putting off,
and finish reading that book that I got last week,

and not try too hard at drawing,
and draw an effortlessly abstract social satire,

and spend more time with people who make me laugh,
and spend more time alone, so I don't depend on others too much,

and start running again because it's getting balmy outside and I've been putting on weight,
and stop worrying about my waistline because it's shallow,

and spend more time sleeping, so I can get to know myself through my dreams,
and spend more time awake because I've been wasting my life,

and straighten my hair because I haven't bothered with it in a few days and it's starting to get frizzy,
and leave my hair ***** because it's empowering to my racial identity,

and stop wasting time thinking about the past because it's making me crazy,
and start thinking more about the future because it's practical,

and,

and...

I think maybe I'll just get started on that sleeping bit first.