In a land-mass mural hung high over my
(Smaller, Statelier) existence -

One boy, permeated in a maple-flavored monotony - one boy, half-asleep in harlequin headaches and half-assed homework - one boy, munching on metaphorical muffins - one boy -

COUNTDOWN: 5 , 4 , 3 , 2 , 1
BREAKDOWN: B , E , N , N , Y
                        (Where am I?)

Between bridges burned with cigarette butts, within ***** all-night diners and pieced (or pierced) together by solemn, salt-encrusted shadows

(I could come to you, you could come to me)
(Petit a petit, l'oiseau fait son nid)

Track my tiny rabbit feet through location services and ten-second hints

(Instagram my dead body)

COLD, HARD flesh  - a very lonely girl in a room filled with fluttering moths and fully-functional nooses

- Makes a game plan, in an effort to:
  - penetrate your wavering, wandering, yet wholly conscious mind
(The fate - the fear - lurks in the futility, the fragility, of your unsuspecting ears)

- Equipped with: an anchor (the rock-climbing kind, in order to avoid a metaphor), followed by some paper (and a pen - the use of my blood as script seems overly dramatic), and - a concoction of incredible (and edible!!) proportions

                    THE GOAL:
- To become the smallest presence possible, to take up the tiniest amount of space in the real and imagined world, and to in turn envelope your very existence - like a Sunday driver in rush hour

- with emphasis on:
The ***** of your neck - I could mount my anchor into it and climb for days; I could nest in your ****** Youth cut when I reach the top, I could build the world's smallest fire with the world's saddest hands

                    STEP ONE:
When secured in predesignated cocoon, I will unleash the first sheaf - a perforated edge - and enclose a minuscule fragment of my still-breathing soul (for your keychain, perhaps, but preferably your pocket)

                    STEP TWO:
I will mail you a fraction (incidentally, a subject I still can't grasp) every week until:
- I have decreased in size with each turn, I get smaller and smaller until my tangibility disappears entirely and the only presence left of me is a slip that reads:
- apply to areas affected (only as directed)

Wait! No, not only that- my very own subconscious now rests inside your "thinking cap"

- INTRODUCING: Your every day monotony, now littered with:
- 17 scratched mix CDs you didn't want to listen to
- 4 dogs I secretly liked (and only you knew)
- a bright pink dumpster, largely livable
- a rusted mailbox with an ocean in full
- soundless Skype calls in stolen sweaters
- alphabet soup with undiscernable letters
- the unfaltering presence of a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness - confused with the very small and haunted town I couldn't leave to see you - and last but not least -

The ceaseless, repeated  chorus of "you belong to me", like an immortal fly in an endless August dream

Hi, I'm calling to tell you that:
I wrote down everything you ever said to me (in the literal sense, standing stretched against my own uncultured and violently ****** vocabulary)
- And am regurgitating it back to innocent passerby - my sincerest apologies to those poor victims of circumstance, suspended in the projectile ***** of my dysfunctional disdain

(In a slew of worm guts and warm bodies, mama-bird to baby-bird saying "please don't leave the nest" - it's too hot for blankets anyways)

My original letter to you was written on the backside of an airplane **** bag, where I detailed my favorite scenes from a movie we subconsciously made entitled "Baby's First Time", while blissfully unaware of my stern faced in-flight companion.

My first draft, though, was a series of half-hearted winks and very, very drunk texts, beginning with:
          SEXT: I offer my services as sacrificial ******
(and followed a whopping six months later by)
          SEXT: I am still young enough to accuse you of statutory ****
(The art of seduction seems to be less of an art and more of a particular science)

You are:
- My own personal Edgar Allan Poe, just blonder and younger, with a bigger gut and a bigger ego and (alas!) a complete lack of interest in your sweet Annabel (but I could change my name)
- And oddly enough, I'm the one writing the poems here

(The whole world's a stage, with me just watching your sad indie boy band from the nosebleed seats)

Sixty years ago, you could have loved me
- a sailor, - a trophy wife, - an 'okay, fiancé' in a sarcastic legacy
A turn of the century turns you around and turns you into a (skate! jam! live in a van!) type of person that I am vastly uninterested in but just tryin' to be sad about somethin'

- I am sad about your big feet, your cuffed trousers, all the places I didn't want to run into you at and not letting that stop me from carting my coffin to Kansas City art museums
(Your love poems to me must be dried in caked-on mud from tires pulling away)

Did you know you're an accident?

- The whole crowd laughs, someone get me a microphone!
(Someone! Get me anything your mouth has touched!)
- I'll bury a vial of your organic germs in my hometown backyard to find later, when you're dead as your dangling doorknobs and disguised by giggling gargoyles (you are welcome, by the way)

Ultimate hide 'n' seek warrants a worthless existence and a holy trinity of the same name(s)
(The dog is under the bed)
(You are locked out on the back porch)
(I am fetal position in a parked car)

- Can we put this on the Christmas card?

Happy Twentieth, Darling! I Love You Very, Very, Very, Very Much.

There's a turning point on my tongue when I realize who you really are.

You appear to me in macaroni art, in fingerpaintings, in cracked iPhone screens.

I dream you in refrigerator word magnets / I read you in my favorite novel from age 13 and cry about it.

Your self-portrait is etched in my bottom-bowl bulimia at 2:07 AM. And guess what?

(I'm not entirely convinced that you didn't come crafted from the sea, slimy and sultry and green trails or tails surfacing to hold hands and jigsaw your human form.)

At night, I see lines of caterpillars leading from your belly button to be your matter. Excuse me? I am going through your life with a fine-toothed comb and knitting an afghan out of your DNA.

Drumroll, please! / I've got it -

You are 47 Autumns. You Are exactly as You Were.

You and I
You
And
I

- I
Could drown myself in melted polar ice caps, or illusions of Niagara Falls (or does it?)
Could join a nudist colony
Could dismember my body parts 'recreationally'
Could (or will) document my own downward spiral/lay eggs in vast and immeasurable labyrinths/where the paradox of my self-pity mingles with my bragging/swaggering teen angst and date!-mate!-procreate!- into a thousand descendants of my rotting fleshhhhhh

- You
Present yourself in -
Hallways rambling in front of me with asylums spilling into corridors of confusion
Rrrrrrriiipppp of either paper pulling from notebooks or flesh pulling from bone
Virtual college applications tabbed over with two different Buy Your Own Russian Wife! websites and ignored by your -loving parents-
An arrogant 18-year-old boy standing before the Committee of Elders (pleading insanity)
Twenty-four permanent markers with generic names
The pseudo-poetic lure of "Call _ For a GOOD TIME" graffitis on the bathroom wall of a Whole Foods you spend six weeks jacking off in

- Look, that's great and all, but
I think you are a (beanstalk), no time to (talk), less of a (walk) and more of a climb - to reach your face, and when I lean to kiss it (fee fi fo fum) I smell the blood of a human one

(I'm tired of stooping and I'm tired of looking at old people)

You
And
I
Could have Been Anyone!
But no,
Just more of the same.

"**** the *******!", they said.
Okay, but let me at least take you to dinner first.

___________________­

Now wait just one second.

This skin you're in - it's mine, is it not?
I am fairly certain that these sighs belong to me, that this warmth is a byproduct of my night terrors.
Now just who told you that you could wear my skin?

Hey! Hello! You There, With The Eyes!
I am not something to be pulled off a floor and draped haphazardly across such a treacherous clavicle!

(Well, I mean, as a general rule. There was that one time.)

As I Was Saying!
It look me a lot of time to get stretched this thin, okay? What makes you think you can just crawl headfirst into my own exquisite casing? I know you're under there, you sneak. My own personal ringworm. Let's ring around those rosy cheeks of yours, exhausted by my less natural coloring. Clap your hands, why don't ya? Distract yourself with a melody and I'll come up for air to finish off that last verse.

MY hair sticks up more on the left side. MY forearms are prone to alien speed-bumps. MY very own flesh (and blood!) smells faintly of orange peels. Got it?

Listen closely, you.
Not only are you not welcome here -
You may not be excused.

All you are supposed to be is a change of scenery
(i've been here for four years, i've been me for seventeen)
Door opens to backpack skateboard and "I haven't showered in two weeks"
(i haven't slept in three)
Don't ask me what happened this isn't catching up
(how are you)
Show me what, I don't know
(you don't know either)
I laugh when I'm nervous
(what are you thinking)
(are you even a real girl)
(i dont think you are)
I am looking for a future in the back of a crystal ball bald head
(my band and i, we did it as a joke)
Instead give way to eight consecutive marks - neck, left shoulder, chest
(just like Hawaii, a place i have already been to, and you have not)
Come back
(where do you even go to)
You are a pop punk house show in a small town on a 97 degree Fahrenheit day in August in the basement of a friend of a friend whom I haven't seen since
Grade 9
(when i first heard of you)
Let me pretend that I'm drunk so you can pretend you didn't come here for this
(are you sure, i don't even have a ******)
Leave at 9 o clock to make way for my 9:30
(stay another eight hours to **** with my head)
A triple kick-flick on a scorching Midwestern sidewalk
(teach me how and leave)
Prove you weren't as far off as i needed you to be
(it's only an hour if nothing comes up)

there's enough space for a tiny bird's nest in the caves of your empty stomach and i'm nothing if not a tiny bird girl. envelop me in the enemy's down comforter, pull up my roots for infrastructure. crumple up the map made for meeting mouths - we'll find our way there in the dark. adventure swirls around the bottom of a toilet bowl.

we have a new home now.

Embodied in a perpetual persona of shitheaded seventeen
(Before you snuck out on a cold silver sheet)

You could measure your lifespan (or is it your wingspan, now? did you know it's the same as your height?)  in late-night shenanigans topped with bacon-guaca-holy-moly burgers, tumbling in neon spandex and the raising of general hell, which you probably can't reach right now,

(And how many flaming bags of feces on why-not doorsteps, for me?)

Speaking of me,
Do you remember when I kissed your head beside a broken down photo machine? Do you remember when we ran away from your first girlfriend (her first kiss) and laughed because you had a current girlfriend? Do you remember when we tried out clouds in department store floor levels, like you were planning on getting one all along? Like you were my (first) and now my (late) husband? Three years doesn't seem very long ago, when placed in proportion with - what was that word again - eternity?

You were but a fleeting presence not only in my life, (in her life, his life, their lives now broken from a trio into a typical twosome) but in your very own - one blonde beach-bunny darting from top-hat to top-shelf

(Could you give up World of Warcraft for a World of pearly White?)
(Would you take me to my Senior Prom?)

We will float yellow rubber ducks down the water at your wake (one by one) and eat food-court teriyaki because no one is allowed to be sad (says you)

(Jesus, baby, what's your dang address?!)

In the end, you ride off into the sunset on your unicycle, like the bad movie that this is
(Screaming, "this thing's killer on the *****!")

it's hot in a restaurant with the strangers you've since been stranded with

(look! You Finally Did It!)

and everybody knows your name but the symbolism of individualized letters with glottal stops and teeth-******* pauses and dyslexic lingering lisps is lost on them, they have their own letters to think about, don't you know?

(hundreds of pillows fly out my ears in increasing sizes, so i must be dreaming - Right?)

Yahtzee! Soccer! Give it the old college try!

(abstract oils crash and burn in a watchtower atop of your New Life)

It's Something to do with your Mouth, It's Something to do with your Hands, but we couldn't tell you why $2.50 wasted matters more than four months and the casual flinging of my (god forbid)

i n n o c e n c e

(you're happy and i'm unconscious, so in theory we're on the same wavelength - Right?)

can you assure me that everyone has two decades of nauseating mediocrity
or no - is it just me?
we Need coffee! we Need love! dread has to be evenly distributed - don't leave your years of it at my door!

(i don't want anybody's advice unless it's on how to fashion a fully-functioning noose)

tiny lips and long socks - i can't stop being in love with the whole two-eye/two-ear/nose/mouth ordeal but i'm utterly left-handed in my lust and i swear to god both hands are empty - but that's something else entirely

(back to where we started from, in bleeding headlights swimming on deserted streets)

'just wanted to throw an XO your way' say the eyes of every crossword connection i bend over backwards to trying to cater it to my thoughts of you

(For Sale: a storage unit of journals filled with sketches of you - it's pink and mushy and curled inside my head, if you're into that)

and it's only when we're in a bed together at 3:26 AM that belongs to neither you or me that i can consciously eliminate emptied emotions and neatly file them onto typeface notes hidden in bouquets decorating the dismal-ities of my freshly-planted tombstone

(fuse our bodies together and let's make this sarcophagus a necrophilia-polis)

backdrop distends
1. Nine-pane white window woman boasts bellyfull of central air
2. Sneaky sunshine sheets smothering soft sugarplums, sleepy eyes still hung with chandeliers exchange shy glances with a new world hiding behind a
3. Cheerful and robust pink mother waves goodbye to foggy ghost-cold who dangles ten frigid and grainy fingers over tiny tired schoolgirl
4. Black metal wings stretch and return to position while groggy black engine awakes to serve thirty-five malnourished miles
5. Bellyfull of central air scoops up groggy black engine both sneak into smothering sunshine sheets that envelope tiny tired schoolgirl
fade to white

Nothing gets crossed out -

A collection of the worst jokes you ever told (something about LSD and shellfish) rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls into dust bunnies (whispering my secrets) snatched up and molded with vegan butter until a collective comet increase, increases, IGNITES into flames and is suddenly the rising sun you rose up underneath from six times in my bed where the butterflies in my stomach shivered and shook and made their way to the walls at eye level with your tiny ears

-
Tie a tin-can telephone to the door of your own personal world from my mailbox and I'll leave a message on your carrier pigeon (answering machine?)

I'm confused.

"Jennifer wants you to know that she wants you and her to move into a postage-stamp house in a postcard of Italy - she says to make sure you know that the house has no walls and lots of ladybugs."

-
I think we're breaking up - "What do you mean, you know what I look like without my face? Jesus, Jenny, you're ******* nuts."

-
It's okay though, I got like, ten cents for recycling those cans. Anyways

CRASH! From behind a junkyard ~

Sounds that I will drown out with my erectile-dysfunction pills.

-
There's a candle from something called (Ireland?) here and I can't ******* blow it out, there's like twenty, or twelve years probably, you are repeated here doing sunrise stretches in fluttering orange flames

Green slime oozes from the cracks in your shower tiles and I try to pin it back up with clothespins; just in case it helps you save the world. By the way - I will write my name in the unethical fog left behind an Indian-ocean's worth of water and say I fell asleep, wasn't me, astral projection did it (!!)

-
(Are you still with me?)

-
The last chapter - the Queen of England will buy your burial site under a fake name and I will fingers crossed decompose into one looooong-winded aperçu.

liquid will swirl into the shape of it's cradle as hearts will mold to the minds of their successors. background checks?

tl;dr.

______________

­brave girls have cranberry ***** running through their veins, isn't that right? drink up, buttercup.
what's it if you and i goes on a ride? i got a paintbrush, you've got what needs to be painted. i'll paint you so good you won't even recognize yourself.
-
portraiture is dead and landscape is only dying.
let me
-make you
-in two
-into
a landscape.
you're gonna be sittin' pretty for the rest of your life, 'cause i'm not giving you any other options. open up those ankles - we're out of paint.
-
this prototype calls for one cup of honeydew, one cup of darling- stop - .
if it's on the market, how illegal could it be?
throw 'er in the ***.
the bottom drawer plays labyrinth to movers, shakers, mixers, fixers.
all those faces are too hard to tell apart, if you ask me. ten can-can dancers, please, and make it snappier than jaws on concrete!

no, not like that.
you're spending too much money on lipstick anyways. girls don't need makeup. girls will look pretty no matter what angle i've determined your elbows should be. your short-haired sister doesn't appear to be using this blood.
-
lay her on thick; and make sure you write those scars off as business expenses.

I fall asleep before 11 PM and dream that I am grazing graveyards with my fingerprints that I thought were my own when it turns out they are identical to yours. I wake up feeling soft and I wait for you to get up so that I can take over the warm spot your body left – it feels to me like the soft and butter-sunken center of a pancake stack and I like that. I like you enough to want you to come back but I do not love you enough to pay for your name to be on my license plate. I want hell to freeze over because that’s when you said we could be together and maybe afterwards we could go ice-skating there? I will lick your eyeballs with snowflakes on my tongue and fire underneath my feet. I think about you eating Fig Newtons and laughing at Wallace and Gromit, even though I’ve never seen you do either of those things. I feel like you’re wrong about most things but I would think the same way for you. I am trying to become a smaller part of the universe and less of a burden to you so that you can dangle me off of one pinky finger. I mouth-kiss you but it’s not the same as sleeping on your stomach. I mouth-kiss you and wish I hadn’t. I mouth-kiss you and wish you were a caramel apple. I mouth-kiss you in a futile attempt to remember what my fifteenth birthday was like. I mouth-kiss you period. I will wean off of you – eventually, and wane, and waste away.

Bonjour, mon Cheri, mon petit Chou!
The doorbell rings with a solemn telegram:

- this just in -
I am exactly like most girls - in civilizations lost, or civilizations in other civilizations, Italy hiding in Toronto and a government hiding in a shameful self-promotion, and 20 seconds later I'm a poly-sci major (incorrigible!)

- 911! 911! 911! 911!
What's my emergency? What's YOUR emergency? But really, what is my emergency? And when it comes to that, What's in an emergency - an aristocracy in high-waisted shorts, an ice cream social (media) scream - lets back the car out and park and loop and inevitably end up in a straight line caterpillars away from
(The truth) - (but more of that later)

Cross-continental cigarette and now I'm running out of material to trade it for. I am lonely, can't you see? A fair trade, for a night with me-

(**** me so hard I can't walk, **** me over so bad I can't detour a one-track mind)

I am not the one Hemingway prepared you for, I will not blow smoke rings in Spain or wander the streets of Paris, I will sit right here lounging in a plaid vinyl sinkhole and carry myself with delusions of grandeur

(Beyond novels unread - yet sadly written - by the unwashed and falsely educated masses)

Life as an existential film, life as woe is me in backwards bus terminals. Life as when you marry someone you hate and life as cold tempura on a *****-stained tablecloth. Pass the peas, please.

“When I was younger my friends and I would all have bonfires every Friday night and we made up fake names for each other that related to our spirit animals and we spoke in a secret language where every word started with D. Dumb, dight? Dokay, de dan dave da decret danguage doo. Dut DI don’t dare do duch dor ‘D’. What letter do you like? V? V’s vinda vunny.”


“I have in this bag here every fingernail clipping of each of your exes. I have in this bag a 14 inch long braid of every hair you ever sleepily smoothed into submission, lying halfway underneath the moon and halfway in a pile of the aforementioned’s sweat. I have blue-tint pictures developed from a baking disposable camera that weren’t taken seriously  when Instagram wasn’t cool. Film clips of them getting ready for work in front of you, where there’s no film because it’s just your eyes and no real memories because your eyes were flickering between open and shut, blinds behind you that winked at them when you were too busy reveling to. I’m not saying that your eyes are blind, I’m saying that they’re blinds. Do you understand what I have in this bag? It’s like a never-ending stream of catharsis, like a rain puddle in November with streetlights swimming drunkenly in it, that reminds you too much of coming home to the smell of gas stoves even though you didn’t live there. A feeling that reminded you of a war you didn’t fight in and shoots through your bones because you never consciously had a skeleton until the magnet in your throat attracted another. All of the things in this bag are shaped like U’s, you know? Or shaped like You.”


“Actually, I like U. I like U a lot, but it seems impossible to speak that way.”

Start by caaaaarefully removing your outermost layer of flesh - lather generously; rinse passionately; re-evaluate your life with a fine-toothed comb and carefully remove the parasites of your predetermined partiality
- String them up with clothespins to wither and flake in a badly scorched sky

- Acquire an ice pick of high quality, frosted on memories of all your ex-lovers and their numbing tongues. Begin to chisel at your own very delicate bone structure. Cease action only when the jawbone resembles the claws you disregarded in your 3 AM awakening punctured with crrreeeeaks and hazy in a soft red fog

- Dust your eyelid with arsenic until they're heavy enough to crush a small child. Tell a good joke, or two - which part of a vegetable are you not supposed to eat again? Might as well eat all of it, him, her, them - but not the wheelchair. In retrospect, pull all of your eyelashes out as well - no sense in prolonging the sought-after blackness

- Tie your lover's ruptured spleen around your waist to add a few pounds - god forbid you get too twiggy and crackle and fall into an inevitable pit of self-loathing. Stick straws through puke green nostrils and **** maggots out of gaping eye sockets. Line your lips in borrowed blood.

- Embroider your initials onto my skin and never forget where you came from.

In an attempt to be rational it seems I've forgotten how to ration - stand back! 1,095 days and 1,096 nights worth of unbearable and mistakenly shared sadness pours out and stains your only white t-shirt that I picture readily in the cocoon you built inside my head, wrapped it in swaddling cloth and laid it out to be walked upon - tumble dry low

I'm mscuzzying around your bone structure.
I want to break things, I want to wail, I want to remind you that you're supposed to want to die
(Doesn't it sound so sweet, baby? Right next to each other  - I promise your tattoos will still look cool in the moonlight of our masked and morbid menagerie, a mausoleum that I mailed you a hand-written invitation to)

Have I ever told you that you make me feel like macaroni art and that I know an earlier birth would have given me first place in the Contest That Is You?
Put me back in the box underneath your bed so I can feel like I have a home alongside your frame.

- In the midst of my cartoon confessionals and crumbling sense of worth I'd forgotten all about tonight's previously scheduled light show - like a solar eclipse of sorts, marred by the fact that my sun rests somewhere inside of you and a 'complete obscuring' doesn't entail half of how you've blinded me

A message flashes across every computer monitor in the great Midwest -

- I honestly love you.

You are a tiny person alone in a big house
(Two rainy hours away)
Maybe someone else can differentiate you from your peers but i cannot
(Will there be girls like you?)
These things, they take time
(Which there is very little of)
I do not deserve you, you do not deserve this
(Do I make you unhappy?)
Stranger's dogs and filtered water from a refrigerator door in a small town remembered for what it never had or will have
(Human beings were not meant for this)
You say you can imagine China stretching out from a spot behind my head
(Me, who has never even been on an airplane)
Why are you here / who are you / what is this
(How are us)
The bus comes at 10:15 but I will be gone long before
(Light years away, you cannot make me stay)
There are no drugs and there are not other boys but
(But there is the music and there are the other girls)
I am not as young and naive as yourself but I am just as bitter
(Loosely interpreted emptiness floating within pale irises)
Part of you belongs to a place unto which I will not return
(State, county, city, suburb)
Part of you belongs to me
(I will not return)

A friendly neighborhood reminder from your favorite girl-next-door:
- it's been a while now since we've seen one another (reflect back to long, melted dog days, amidst the summer of your heated discontent - with me and everything else in the world - and my utter digression. allow me to put a stop to that)
Conjure, if you will, a mental picture of a plastic 3-subject notebook stuffed with at least six, potentially seven subjects. Ask me what's inside: laugh when I tell you "mainly lists" (dusty déjà vu peeks it's bulbous head around the corner)
- I remain very unsure of how to put this particular list into writing, but here's a shot at it - slathered in a thick layer of milk chocolate, smothered in melted cheese and sour cream in hopes that you won't approach the subject.
     1. I want to smoke every cigarette you didn't know about and lick the roof of your mouth, maybe go so far as to blow rings around your false pretenses
     2. I want to fashion a tiny scythe and lodge it in between my teeth when we're together - while you fall prey to the assumption that these nicks I leave in your neck are symbols of my inexperienced affection
     3. I want the taste and memory of the cheap alcohol in my blood to linger in your mouth for at least 8 months
     4. I want the very strong jaw of nostalgia to meet your jaw in front of everyone you know
     5. I want you to grow up and to forget.
- I know you're leaving soon, so here's a map of where you're going: the colors represent everywhere I'd like to kiss you, and the gray areas are the places you'd rather I stopped short of.
(What do you mean, the whole thing's gray?)
A friendly neighborhood reminder from your favorite girl-next-door:
- destroy what destroys you.

and don't forget to send postcards

Be with me in ****** footprints / in your mom's silverware sets / in stucco walls

I want to sleep on dark leather couches with you.

Tell me more about cable:
I want you to introduce me to damp grass on football fields that we skateboarded to underneath the stars that I was with when i was away from you

Hello, earthling!
Let's do normal Earth things together (I could be a person for you)
I fixed the thermostat so that my bedroom can be habitable for human beans such as yourself

Drink six Diet Cokes with me so we can put six dead ladie bugs inside the bottles and BlowThemUpWithFire

"Yes, I know about fire! I've seen it all before OK! And I want to pretend I haven't so that i can ooooh and aawwwhhh when you show me !!!!"

I want to be a person for you.

Spray paint my bones gold when you're done crafting my skin into a turban so that I know it's real - I made this for you

Let history repeat itself in between your fingers.
As far as we're concerned, cotton never killed anybody. Right?
Sun glinting peach fuzz on your arms reveals how movies were made.
Attic windows cracked open with bare feet dangling flower stems - now I get how babies were made.

Hey, hello, stop by whenever you want. They say I'm worth the drive. They also say the fun is in the journey.
Most boys prefer one or the other.

Your arms are liquid. You are a jungle.
Let me get tangled up in your heartstrings and bathe naked in Denial.
Cirrus clouds fly in my ears and as soon as lips meet my forehead I'm out the door.

When we die, there won't be any more candlelight s'mores. This is what I've been meaning to tell you.

"We had all these crazy ******' dreams together, Me and Her. We ate our weight in marshmallow ***** pancakes underneath the stars and kissed each other with tongues of fire licking roofs of open mouth. Her mouth was like a ******' inferno, like in the sense that it seems so small and insignificant until you actually get there and then it just swallows you whole, gets you hotter than you've ever been in your ******' life and you're there for eternity. It's endless. If you weren't thinking about it before, now you're thinking about it.

You're thinkin' about her, and thank the ******' heavens for that. If I could get every man on the face of this planet to think about her the way I do, at the length that I do, til we all ******' keel over, it just wouldn't do it. She's somebody that gets stuck in your hair when you're not looking and somebody you trip over in the mornings when you just ******' cleaned the place up. She clings to the bottom of your shoes til you can hear her name in any number of footsteps on any number of paths."

_________________­_

Baby, let me sit in the driver's seat.
Let me drift smoothly, subtly into your lane.
Remember how you always said I was too **** skinny?
Guess what, baby?
When the tail lights call to me I can slide right in between them, like a fitted sheet or rungs on a washboard. I darted between the raindrops like you always said I would but I got wet anyways. What do you know about that?

I don't know much about it, myself.

The doctor said I can't drive anymore. I told that *******, "my eyesight's 20/20! I seen every single puzzle piece on those office inkblots for the knives and daggers that they are! The **** I look like?"

I'm exhausted, Baby. I'm leaking black smoke out of my lungs. I don't brush my teeth anymore because the fluoride ***** up my third eye. How do ya feel about that? Meditate on it. Meditate on me. Meditate on the stars, on the heavens, on God, on babies that died inside of us. I always told you, Baby, you're the best idea God ever had. You ******' did it. Tie me up, baby. If I can't drive anymore, drive me out of here. Tie me up to the god-**** tracks and cover my naked body with those whaddya call ems? Tuck me into your blanket statements so big I get them confused with the entire god-**** sky.

within an introduction exist two things: one and the other.
similarly, in such a meeting two things lie: you and i.
speaking from the standpoint of time, a conclusion must arrive
and what could be better than lying together?

hand gripping hand - seems normal
hand knowing hand - painted, pained, veined.
hand to hand from boy to girl
hand upon hand - all notions entertained

what would it take for a couple's bodies to become one -
a glance in a mirror to confirm the presence of two.
where four footprints stained, a duo remains
seal our deal with a kiss blown towards a reflective sun.

Hooded hitchhiker of haunted hours!

(Or haunted houses, as the mainstream would have me believe)
Somewhere between New Mexico and New York the tables must have turned - see, it's not you that's seeking a ride, but me

(If a ride is what the kids are calling such a sweet and final relief these days)

Life is indeed "a highway" but I missed the EXIT HERE when overcome with the sight of your dusty bone-dry thumb creeping out from underneath a solemn black bell
(And they said I slow down for nothing!)

My curiosity intensified when: I glimpsed you behind a hydroplaning semi, just north of the Missouri River: I was going left from the right lane and I shouted to you: "hop in!"

Your blatant denial leaves me wondering...
(do you feel as though you are above me?)
(are there Escalades in the underworld?)
(does a '98 Volvo wagon not convey the utmost message of doom and despair?)

To clarify things, please observe the billboard on your passenger side:

I AM RECKLESS, I AM LETHAL
I AM HALF-BLIND AND SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL
DOING 90 ON AN UNPAVED ROAD
FINGERS DUSTING STEERING WHEEL
TIRES DUSTING DITCHES

(Please keep all hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times - unless you'd rather not)

Oh, robed and rusty reaper!
My consensus is this:
- I will not seek you out, but
- I
- will
- not
- turn
- you
- down

(Our final joyride looms just outside my rearview mirrors and directly inside my stream of consciousness)

on your right, you'll see a picture of me awake in the middle of the night; sweating feverishly and falling over a little fence somebody built to keep me grounded.

look to your left - there's your eyes following me; but here's the problem: i've never set foot in a room like this one.

__________________­

I have a lot of questions to be answered but I'll start with the hardest and work my way down.
First of all, what time is it?
Secondly, do you love me?
Third - how did I end up here?

Look me in the eyes and lodge your hands into my armpits to keep me from falling into those black spirals you try to play off as corneas. Don't be alarmed at the sight of blood on my hands, I'm merely returned from the very operation you put me up to.

First question -
"I say! It's your birthday and we're late! We're late for your very own birthday party! Thousands of guests - I mean insects - I mean quests - will cry and cry, and their tears will fertilize the very soil I made your birthday cake out of! Pay no mind to the plastic tablecloth strewn over that solemn rectangle, I had very little time and time is money and what did I just tell you about how the best things in life come free? C'mon, baby. C'mere. A birthday's a birthday, eh?"

Second question -
"It's hard to find somebody to love in a big gray wire maze. However, it is easy to like somebody you've only seen in 240p. Just joking, just joking. I have this crazy idea that if you spilled maple syrup all over your keyboard, it'd be like taking warm, sticky naps together in the summertime. There's an ice hotel in Greenland that I want to **** myself i, and the only reason the whole place isn't drowning in a puddle of my **** is because you said you'd be here. Where are you, and how many inches thick is your jugular?"

Third question -
"There are clocks inside of our bodies, biological clocks. Yours seemed nicer than mine, and I want your biological clock in my room god-****-it. Kiss me through ticking tocks running amok in your immune system. I'll skin you alive looking for the perfect shade of furniture polish in your veins. I'll leave your shadow to slip down the drain so you can finally get some peace and quiet. I pulled you peeling from the walls, and I'll leave you there to dry when I'm done.

____________________­___

I won't even leave so much as a footprint.

e p i l o g u e

Smoke billows from steel chimneys and stolen O-faced lips as I try to validate myself alongside your bare necessities

The slang of the times coincides not with language, but once more - with feeling!

Seven seasons and six leading ladies gone so that I know summer's really over / and I've called you 'the one' more times than I've read it in TV Guide descriptions late-night reruns of all the Friends you have at 3 AM
Who
Aren't

me.

(What are we?)

I don't want to be existential but I'm existing and here is you here is me and here is everyone else, we are uncomfortably permanent as a 20-year stint in a cell made from changing leaves and whitened teeth

(P.S. I want to bash your disproportionate ******* head in)

Sloppy Joe's on my brain as I use the sticky fingers of my undying affection to wipe off the traces that She Left On You - and I open all the windows but the breeze is just perfume

("I don't understand makeup", you say as I paint over eight midnight love-***** or I guess you could call them hickies)

Let us talk about! Numbers, locations, dates and Age -
Or the S of your body with elbows against the wall
The nowhere of the place I wanna be
That one time? With that one thing???
(You're just a minor and I can't do this)


My sob story is
Written in blushing haikus
Like tea in Japan

There's crescent moons under his eyes and sleepy hollows in his cheekbones. Nobody ever wore emaciated the way he did, skin hanging from his frame like 2014's furs. Forget Halloween parties - I was head underwater at his very throat, neck deep in Adam's apples. Peek-a-boo ribs playing dam to his darkly violent blood that flows in currents around my star-strickenness.
Newspapers have nothing on the editions of his expressions

and the dirt underneath those fingernails is sufficient for harvesting a future family of four.


A naked body mummified in yellow caution tape...


um, what's the word for people who are sexually invested in criminals?

I think I should leave now.

I sleep next to you shrouded in thunderstorms with want to barricade myself about what is possibly the sun I spite so well. To wake up in this ray of light - to stretch myself into liquid like a cat and purr silently into the chest of my consoler - seems too optimistic for a bone-brained organism such as myself. I know myself to be what you desire, I am constructed in purple forget-me-nots and tangled so tightly as to choke out thoughts that run as lawnmower legs when ran apart. Wear me draped around our neck in midnighted velvet so I can appreciate how much you have invested in my warmth. A chair for me and in turn I will prop your eyelids up with chopsticks and tell you to mind your elbows. Niceties breed love, which rebels and grows up and drinks itself to death if only to be resurrected as contempt. I tried to turn myself into an ice statue but I just melted in your arms and now I am condensation on the cold cup of revenge leading into you. We are like sea turtles at a resort, finding their way back home to avoid being gawked at, needing only to gawk at one another in a dingy laboratory romance.

-Slightly sadistic 17-year-old girl seeks suitable mate
Re: matters of dystopic fantasties
- A cannibalistic companion, mayhaps
to soothe lingering curiosities held captive by the bright red and steady rhythm of dripping blood
Disclaimer: this advertisement (pronounced ad-vur-tiz-ment) is not a cry for help - but next week's definitely will be
"Hi, I'm not usually like this, I haven't really done this sort of thing before, but..."
thinking to self I would like to carefully extract your organs and construct a small fortress out of them. I would like to staple your mouth to my mouth. I would-
"Oh, what? No, I didn't say anything."
- I'm imagining you as more of a shadow, all tangible beings seem bleak to me - but could you still hold my hand???
"Yes, it's lovely outside. Beautiful weather."
- But when we venture outside its proven that our eyes are much too sensitive for the light and inside beckons as much cooler and safer, inside of me is dangerous - and inside of you is an inferno



(Please set me on fire)

i told you thanksgiving was my favorite holiday when i forgot to give tradition something to prop itself up on i lost the code to your apartment and now i walk the two vertical and one horizontal blocks to your house and peek inside the mailbox for a security question and answer session.

have you considered sending a postcard from where you are now, or does the idea of you having an affair with the mailman stop your conscience from turning on snooze?

when my body is cremated and my lungs turn to dust who will stop me from sending extremely drunk texts while being extremely drunk?

try commissioning somebody to make a marble statue out of you. find out you were overcharged when it turns out to be just a huge clump of marshmallow fluff, when you're lactose intolerant, when your kids are gonna have it even better than you did and you had it really good.

you take your kids to MOMA,
and i wonder why we never had *** outside except for sometimes on your balcony under a quilt. i'm not upset about it because it'll be 2065 soon and outside will be obsolete and you and i will be something similar to the Byzantium period where we have to struggle to remember it existed.

i wonder how your disco ball girl would feel about a night like this

all my friends say we aren't in the same scene and i am embarrassed to be seen with you but i love the way you button your shirt and the way you are when your stomach hurts

my feelings are raw meat and hard to chew and i drink a bottle of wine in case i'm left alone with you

ten typos later and i have tears in my tights and stains on my lips
melancholia is a mediocre movie and the truest feeling i can muster

i let a boy in through the back door and forget he was ever there aside from the fact that there is long hair clogging my shower drain and the shower in your parent's house is the smallest space i've ever been in

my friends feel violated by the whistle of a teakettle and i spent the evenings of a man speaking gibberish on top of a washing machine

he was wearing a three piece suit with a piece of wheat in the breast pocket and either he was walt whitman or the end of the summer

what have i got to lose

1.
A young and spiky boy misheard me over a pile of handcrafted valentines and said "I love you, too"
("I think I broke my tooth")

2.
A pseudo-intellectual boy grabbed at my hand and told me that we are all made of stardust, that the universe is swift and fleeting and our matter will remain etched in the very high and infinite heavens
(But do you know that I myself am made of moon dust and rose petals, laced with arsenic?)

3.
A not-very-lonely boy bought me a grilled cheese sandwich at the witching hour that he paid for with his dead father's inheritance money
(Money that I dipped in ranch dressing and inhaled in the form of a black American Spirit)

4.
A boy with jawbones made of steel called me in the middle of the night to tell me that he was nothing but a very weak and ancient stone foundation and what is the most effective method of destruction
(I told him I'd trade in my metal detector for a plane ticket to Egypt)

5.
A semi-dependent variable of a boy I had known years ago flew a kite for me in a cold and cloudless sky and hit me til I kissed him
("It's because we're getting older", I said)

6.
A boy who I might have loved named our children on the back of a game of hangman and hung up magazine pictures I stole on walls his girlfriend was more familiar with than she was with me
(I switched seats)

7.
A boy of questionable moral fiber said words I spent two years trying to say back
(One-sixteenth of them are buried in a box I'm all too willing to leave at the old house)

8.
A boy with eyes uncovered in countless concentration camps left after filling the gaps in my very sheltered universe with vegan bakeries, baseball tees, leftover curry and one-sock feet
(But I digress)

come with me, you!
i'll show you how to do things you never tried and i never knew to be true.

watch as i turn your tongue into a cherry stem and blow bubbles with your thoughts.
i'll twist all my fingers into a bundle of forget-me-nots.

keep the lights off! i think the sun shines out of your behind.
i think that rivers flow out of your bellybutton divine.

would ya look at this? the dictionary has a new definition:
'onomatopoeia' means "us kissing in your kitchen"

in this licorice spit-stained envelope blushes your love letter, simply put:
close your eyes so i can sweep it underfoot.

parts of you think that things are better left unsaid.
parts of me says "whatever, ******. drop dead."

part one is where i said "if we don't handcuff ourselves together i am going to lose it."

i said, "if somebody could just clean all that ***** out of you we would probably weigh about the same. if we looked in a mirror at the same time there would only be one reflection. if we lie at the same time we'll just be lying together, physically and mentally. and what could be better than together?"

part one and a half is where things get out of hand -

hands covered in finger-paint and hands that forgot to wash themselves in the aftermath of many a sticky situation. hands that held mine and hands that held yours, hands that couldn't be evidenced no matter how hard any arithmetic teacher tried and hands that wrote about every sketch artist but never any criminals.

part two and i'm hanging myself with an iPhone charger, hands wrapped around swan neck - bird girl messy hair tiny hands girl bushy eyebrows cross-eyed ocean eyes girl between life and death
- and solemnly stepping over that mysterious dining-room table on your front porch. my last words have something to do with Jackie Chan and i whisper
"nobody ever saw a cowboy on the psychiatrist's couch."

Part Three is exactly that: three. welcome to past present and future, i say. can i take your order and can you hold my hand and you do know that meat is bad for your heart, right?

____________________­

we sat shut-eyed and snickering and reaching our hands into a crumpled brown bag labelled "Fatal Flaws". "no tradesies" said the big man. you and i unknowing one another, laughed unknowingly. your slip of paper read "superiority complex" and mine said simply "inability to love" and i thought about how good our tragedies would look together, how our stars could align in all the melancholy we both believed in.


__________________