The seething cold that seeps into his skin pores
bleeds into his wooden guitar too—

and when he plays, all I hear
are Heaven’s tears pounding on the rooftop
like discordant footsteps in an empty room.

It is living that brings forth words
and shapes them into sentences inside my head.
Sometimes they are beautiful,
but usually, they make my palms sweaty
and my chest hurt, as if my lungs
have expanded too large
for my rib cage to contain.

Today, the words
come to me in slow rhythms,
like two lovers waltzing.

I love these days the best,
when I sit at my kitchen table
and gaze outside across the street
while the afternoon sun warms the side
of my body, my head cool and calm.

I twirl a spoon in one hand
absentmindedly,
rest my head on the other hand.

I wish the sparrows would sing
like they usually do,
but today, they seem
to have gotten tired of it.

They are all scattered across the front yard,
little flecks of light brown splashed
in between splotches of grass and cement.
I see one perched on the top
of my mailbox, its head in my direction.
Words sprout out from the fountain inside
my head, and suddenly I am crooning,
Sing, little bird, sing.

I gaze at the sparrow intensely,
urging it to understand. It ***** its head at me
and then flies away in the other direction.

...

The next time I wake, the words flow
angrily.
They stain my head
like splattered ink,
and no matter how vigorously I rub at them,
they are there,
as black as the soles of my shoes.

The sun won’t reach me today, because I refuse
to let it. Living is safer
in my room, where I am shielded
by walls and doors, cocooned
by blankets and shawls.

My mother taps lightly on my door,
begging me to return
to the outside world,
but I keep the bitter sentences
I have formed
from slipping past my lips
and curl tightly against my pillow.

I am done with pretending. I am done with words.
Living would be easier if I could shut them out the same way
I shut everyone else out.

On days like these, I like to imagine
that I have a little hole in my skull,
and when I tilt my head just right,
the words pour out in dark streams.
Then they will be irretrievable,
gone forever like the silence I wish
I could give myself again.

Whisper to me softly
like fingers grazing on skin--
slow breaths like early spring mornings
and riverside freshness in the autumn,
emptying both warmth and coolness
into my lungs like liquor drunk in sips;
a clump of lace bunched in my hands.

Whisper to me softly
like the wind whispers to the leaves;
each word a caress on your lips and on my chest,
heaving with desire and emotion and wanting
to collide our bodies violently into one.

Of gazing eyes and tender limbs,
curves of light and dark on bare skin,
full in your words, full in your arms
of whispers held for solely me.

"left me in the dust"--I've become dust literally
and my legs now melt like lipstick left too long in the open sun.
pungent words, medication--morph into heat waves, brilliant intensity.
red-violet, gamma magnified--I swallow them whole like you swallowed me.
my spirit will crawl inside you through the holes in your soiled skin
and I'll make you breathe me in
like winter smoke, a gray cloud
of inconveniences and memories better forgotten,
to remind you of the burdens of love and life
the turmoils of entanglement, the sacrifice of my energy
wasted on the feeble candle of your inner light
and the insignificance of adolescent love.

from your lips in angry waves of nausea green
come those sweet words and feathery caresses.
a thick, musky gas that hangs,
meaningless sentences strewn from thin air,
a cloud of wrathful bees swarming;
ready to encase, devour
my body and leave you whole.
you watch as I shove firecrackers between my teeth,
sparks fiery, light flying
sending heavy shadows like knives toward me.

my love, don't go--leave me and my soul will die.
footsteps I do not hear, dim and disappear;
a candle flickers and dissipates into fragments.
my body sags under the weight of failed causes, my heart
has been stuffed with more debris than I can hold in my palms.
it's thanks to you, thanks to you, my devil, my love.

Two months, seven days; I wonder why I still count anymore
when the world has become an empty blur of bodies and mixed paint,
colors indiscernible, laid out before me,
urging me to go on and take a needle
and let seep from my fingertips his blood and energy.
I am tired of just relying on what once fueled me,
the electricity of life's purpose, my flames of desire.
My dying heart needs to be fed diesel gas, instead of
the kind of substance he has injected into me all these years.
It's accumulated inside of me and become a kind of poison,
making me move slower than I have ever moved before.
Before that, I had stomped on the flames with my own two feet
although I didn't know, and I guess if I had known, I wouldn't have.
And I'll tell you it seared my skin just as much as it did his--
I'm still recovering, still mending; but he's better, he didn't need to mend at all.
Those tiny flecks of orange and red embers were too little, so he left me;
it was like pouring ice water over what we had.

In the early mornings when the cloudy haze of the night hovers weakly over the earth, and the sun is hidden behind the great bundles in the sky, my eyes open to the stillness of the shadows, the junction between night and day. I exhale. My father's soft sighs can be heard through our thin, crumbling walls. My fingers slide over my bare legs and I curl up like a caterpillar, not ready to shed my layers of blankets and confront the stinging, cold air. My head feels heavy and empty at the same time--misty, as if the thick, morning fog had been ****** up into the space where my skull should be. My eyes are grainy and dry; my skin feels raw and cracked. I pull the cocoon tighter around my body, ready to sink back into my state of unconsciousness. Suddenly, his name is on the tip of my tongue, bitter, burning the insides of my mouth. I am pulled by my neck out of my reverie; uselessly, I struggle. They come to me in waves--the realization, the recognition, the understanding, the pain--rocking me while my body lies shriveled and numb.

It was a matter of time, I think.

I hate waking up to this.