You and I,
We've tried to be good.
The self flagellation we took part in
Has left whip marks on us
That will betray
Our forced smiles and forked tongues.
We will be better
This time.
Show me agony, yours, and I will show you mine.
Meanwhile we will make do
Until the pain is gone,
Until breath can come
Without gnashing and gasping.
Meanwhile we will trudge the canyons,
Kick against the snakes that lap at our heels.
Meanwhile we'll lie in the harsh landscape
And see, overhead, the geese we read about
A dozen Summers ago;
Watch them as they continue on.
Watch as they disappear over the horizon.
Watch as metaphor becomes reality.
Whoever you are now, whatever time has turned you into,
Let the canyon buckle beneath your feat.
Lay the whip down
And claim your place
In your chosen family of things.

I pass the turn off to the the primary schools I went to,
Where I first tasted blood
And had my defamed body
Beaten by children
Who refused to understand
And I want to turn in,
Park,
Not go on.

I pass the public library
I languished long hours in,
Studying the things
I could not afford
And would not be afforded to me.
Where I met my first adult friend,
A fifty year old man
Who checked out restricted titles for me
On his own card
And I wanted to turn in,
Park,
And not go on.

I pass the home of a dear friend,
Two dear friends,
Three dear friends
Who brought me comfort with
Their words and their bodies
When the latter failed.
I still crave the simplicity
Of agony
That could be banished with
A well-timed kiss.
As if Joy Division would
Always be on the radio
In the background.
As if tea
Made up for
A youth spent on the edges
Of worlds I would have
Given everything to be
Fully included in.
I wanted to turn in,
Park,
And not go on
But those houses are void.

I park
Outside of my father's house.
I stare it down
As if the front lawn is no man's land.
Inside:
The cancer is back.
The college is paid.
The world has moved on
Within me, without me.

The greatest comfort,
An even greater shame.
Guilt that was never mine
Shackled to my joints,
Wearing thin in the places
Once impenetrable.

Maligned.
Malformed.
Maimed.

The cancer is back.
The cancer is back.
The cancer is back.
The cancer is back.
The cancer is back.

He saw you vulnerable,
Bleeding from the inside,
He saw your purple stomach and
Pressed his knuckles to it.
He is a narcissist.
He took advantage of you
In every human way.
He set no bar.
He is not the way to love.

Take down the altar.
Cease your worship of demons.

In a world of clasped hands
Please be the pair
That opens to me.

He's vapor in your arms,
The dying shadow on the pavement
As the sun clips against a glass lens,
Distortion in the highest degree.

He may melt you,
Girl,
He may stain your lily skin,
Pierce your heart with a Sicilian warmth;
Take a hammer to the ice in your veins,
But he isn't bigger than life.
He's so small,
A whisper of stubble against the chin,
All wire and bone,
Effigy to the home you've always ignored.

Pull the trigger,
You whoreish ****,
Set your knees in the Earth and begin anew.
Hear the birds sing,
Their wings beating earthquakes in your stomach.
Fear nothing when he raises a blade
To your throat.
Remember his tears
When you told him of the one
You raised to your own.

A child stolen
Beneath her mother's
Scornful eye,
A dying bride
Slicing her skin
On her wedding night.
I see with no eyes
And I taste with no tongue
The rapture of the absence of your love.

I awaken from nightmares  un-remembered,
I cross seven seas to find you wilting.
I offer you my breast
On which to lay your head
And when you do, I feel it:
The rapture of the absence of your love.

She curses your mother daily,
Your wife only an obstacle in her wake.
She bides her time,
Wastes her life,
A moment gone in a flutter
And an opportunity taken too late.
Divorce? But what of the children,
A million fireflies scorching the night.
A puff of smoke,
A clip of the wings,
Her dead seconds will never take flight.
Who is the bearer of bad news,
Who will alarm the saints?
Who now will fit her ashes in their gloves
In the rapture of the absence of your love?

In what lifetime was this fair?
A tragedy born on the edges of procrastination,
A love story taken up in the middle,
Strangers only reminders
Of you in past lives.
Hesitation,
The knife slick with blood,
The truth hidden in the liner notes,
Stuck pinned like a moth
In the rapture of your absent love.

There's no more story to tell,
What burned for six months
Was dead in six seconds.
A white shroud was laid over the memories,
A bouquet of lillies laid in their hands.
Graves dug sixteen feet deep,
Traditional overkill.
What then do we make of the rubble,
The dirt left from the hole?
The woman who was shoved, shoved, shoved
Into the recesses of your mind,
Into the rapture of the absence of your love?

I think of suicide
In the way a small child thinks
Of honey stuck to their chin;
Something sweet and saved for later.
Your eyes as you ponder me
Are still like tea
Steeped from dogends in puddles,
Formative yet empty.
Our time on this plane
Fizzled and sparked,
Lightning in a bottle
Shaken by our unborn child.
I laid myself to rest
Amongst the fresh March brambles
And forgot to craft a tombstone.

A spirit lost amongst
Corpses fetid and sweet,
A gunshot sprayed across the countryside;
Here for a second,
The scent of snuffed embers
Alive in the night.
We sent you to sea
In a casket wreathed in gold
And I broke my fingers in the hinges
Trying to keep you to myself.

Black bats beat
Blast beats with black wings against a
Black moon.
I stare at the blood on my hands
In an effort to feel close to you.
I hold my scratched skin
To the florescents
And study the funeral card for the event
I never got to attend.
You and I were only carrion here,
Buzzards floating close enough to touch
Our pale eyelashes.
But you,
Sweet boy,
Quiet boy,
Secretive boy-
Were smart enough
And strong enough
To leave.

I saw this coming and bit my tongue.
Tyrants dance naked
In the pools of crimson they've spilled.
A mistress of forked tongue,
Scholar of vitriol,
What will I have left
When the tyrants see I'm not
Dead?

When you were a little boy
They would lay you to sleep
With small prayers and a leap of faith,
Your angel-blonde eyelashes barely touching
And you would stop breathing periodically,
Gasping into the void,
Creating sounds that would echo against the cacophonous
Tomb of your mind for the rest of your life.
I hear your screams reverberate
In every instance of a Swedish accent.
I guess you were lucky enough
To be pronounced Dead three times.

Of course you'd call it an ice skating accident;
Ever the man, ever the glowing effigy of strength,
How could you bring yourself to tell us how you'd been mangled,
Beaten so badly that your organs broke and bled,
Your ten year old knees
Kissing the carpet of your mother's living room
As you fell and died that first time?
You'd later tell stories about the progression of death,
Colors enrapturing you,
Everything dipped in blue.
There were levels to this,
You said,
And you'd stuck your skin into one that no mortal could have
And yet you returned to us.

Nothing about this poem
Is going to make you seem more evil
Than the vision you've already placed in people's minds.
Thin, pale hands tossing a severed pig's head into an audience,
Those same fingers tracing the path of a jagged bottle blade
Down your arm in a business motion;
Pelle, I'd write an ode to every scar on your arm
If I wasn't sure that you'd already done it.
A heart corpse painted as black as the inside of a closed casket,
Your closed casket,
What was it that ruined you?
What was the trigger that pulled itself
Besides the so obvious one?
A broken kid from a broken home,
What made you run so far away
Only to hide in the arms of those who
Let you parade your mental illness like a banner,
Let you wear your delusions like a cape around your neck?
Who let you climb to the roof
Just so they could cheer for you to jump
With your fantasies and shredded silk hair flying behind you
Before your bones crumbled against each other in skin
Too tender and frail to contain you?

When they talked about you in magazines
Writers were always lamenting the tragedy
Of your cut-glass jaw and your piercing eyes,
Masculine beauty of such a caliber
Wasted on a character so evil and vile
It might as well have blotted itself out against the sun.
What you thought you were
Doesn't define your worth.
You're so much more than a corpse on a bed,
A couple of necklaces made from your bones.
You are so much more than a voice that was
Throttled out of existence by its own hand,
So much more than a statement piece.

For years after your death
Your family would receive packages for you in the mail
From bookstores around the world,
Tomes of witchcraft and ancient magics,
Spells designed to enchant and bewitch,
Pelle, were you trying to necromance the Dead?
Were you trying to take the parts of you
That felt less than human out?

If I could talk to you,
If I could say one thing,
It would have been what I've told
A dozen friends who've jumped in front of trains,
Called me from mental hospitals,
Called me with guns and knives in their hands.
I wish I could have told you
To wait one more ******* day.
In one more ******* day your father would have called.
You might have had a ticket back home.
You might not have a strike through your name
On every online page referencing your work.

The screaming may have stopped,
The air raid sirens in your head might have dulled
To the point where you wouldn't have felt the need
To blow them away.

If you didn't feel human,
If you felt like this was all a dream and that you'd wake up soon,
Why are we still living in the remnants of your nightmare?

Mom's in the kitchen
Weeping openly over the loss of a human life
For the first time in who knows when.

A solitary friend comes to visit;
Someone caught in the crossfire day in and day out.

We are a ****** of manipulators,
Parents and children quickly working to out think each other
In a game each one of us will lose.

There is a tension here.
I refuse to take care of you.

Your bullet eating daughter,
Your easily impressed son,
We do not flourish here any longer.

The fig tree metaphor
Seems to gain much more meaning
The older I get.
I put a cigarette behind my ear today
And when I removed it to smoke
I realized that it was wet with the oil
From my scalp; I smoked it anyway.

Does smoking my ****** fluids
Make me seem a little more
Bukowski than normal?
Bob Dylan, the unwashed phenomenon
Of his day
Held no candle  (in my opinion)
To Phil Ochs
But here we are,
Marching on
Because the Times Are Changing.

Remember me
When the draft comes
And they forget your sunken eyes and sallow skin.
Remember me and how I said
That purple and yellow
Were my favorite colors.

We see our fathers as Gods,
Our mothers as tourniquets
Knotted at the scathings
Our Gods have given us.
Are we gifted or are we at fault?

She makes me wish
That I were twenty years older
With an extra letter to my name
And the solace of owning you
Deep in my heart.

*** sickens me as an artifact,
A cruel twisting of the womb;
An androgynous vein
Bursting out of a wealth of shame.

They tell you not to soak
A new tattoo for two weeks time
But these wounds, these ethereal,
Spiritual tattoos of mine
Have been festering under water
For a lifetime.

If only the ink
Of the pen
Of my past
Could just bleed

Out.

I would ****** my arm
Above the water's edge
If only I could be certain
That you would save me.

How old were you
When you realized
That your friends
Were slowly disappearing?
Waxing,
Tracing the moon across their fingertips
As they dissolved into stardust?

I am twenty one years old
And I am the loneliest
I have ever been.

I can hear them now,
"Get off me, get off me,
Poor creature, poor creature,"
I have arrived at an impasse.
In what kind of world
Will justice be served
Based on the hem of my skirt;
In what world be it served,
Based on the drink in my cup?
I speak not on the forked tongue
Of a miserly bedfellow,
But on the wings of a **** moth,
Gorgeous and pale
And fragile and small.

I may be a **** moth,
But they named a war plane after me
For a **** good reason.

Like Severus and Lily,
We came to each other by chance.
I transfigured myself into your life
Already on a pedestal,
Our words chaining ourselves
To each other
Until death.

Years have passed
Without so much as a flicker between us
But here you stand
Today
With the words of our pasts
Strung together and hanging like frayed ropes from your wrists.

In my dreams you come to me
With your hand outstretched,
A snake burrowed into the cuff
Of your long sleeved,
Blue-collar work shirt.
I do not hesitate to take it.
I am bitten.

I wake up in a cold sweat,
The snake of men past
Now burrowed next to me
In the king sized bed.
I am not afraid
But I do not trust.

I live for the nights
That tread lightly into the hours of day:

Talking to you about anything
Is like mind-*******,
And not in the David Lynch way.

I promise
That I will not notice
The little things about you.

Like the way your lips curl
When you impersonate someone
With an English accent;
Or the way you hold your glass
Not like a forty ounce
But like a hand.

I promise that I will take your kisses
As what they are:
Merely stone-faced
Applications of misplaced subterfuge.

I will make my sufferings my own in you.
I will bear my cross and carry onward,
A gaunt figure in your otherwise electric life.

I am a sallow husk
And you are the sun,
My jaundiced being yearns for you
But only through artificial means.

I am the sociopath
Who writes you letters
In coded tongues
That the New York Times
Will ask for help deciphering.

I will ask you for your love
In the fleeting moments of the morning,
The brightness in your eyes finally aflame
And you will give it to me
But take it back when the Earth rotates once more.

I want to know
What Illinois smells like
Besides John Wayne Gacy's cologne
On a blue collar.

When I started working fifty hours a week minimum
At eighteen years of age
My father told me he was proud of me
For the first time.
What he didn't know
Was that I had been chasing my depression away
By masking it with exhaustion.
There have been times where I have worked thirteen hour days,
Four days in a row
Only to come home too exhausted to eat.

I consider this a triumph.

I spend my days off thinking too much.
I think about how easy it is to buy a gun in this state,
How I wish it was more difficult
If only to erase one more burden from my mind.
I spend a lot of time buying make up
That I seldom ever wear.
I read every single issue of The Walking Dead comics up to the newest one
In two days
Because my mind frightens me more than fiction.
I think a lot about leaving here;
Not in a way that would constitute a cry for help
But more in a way that sits in my belly
Like liquor on a cold day.
I feel the urge, it is there,
But I simply carry it with me.

Have you been shredded
By the tenacity
Of your alcoholism
Yet,

Or will we have to funnel
More worldly atrocities
Into you,
Filling you to bursting?

The swish in your belly,
The boldness of your talk;

Decimated.

Let me be the one
To **** all you are
With my well-kept home
And all-American children.
Let me poison you
With my son and husband's baseball game,
My seasonal dish towels.

Let me tear your being
With my baby
Who doesn't even suffer a diaper rash,
With my laundered and ironed clothes.

Let me destroy you in domesticity,
A cold beer at the end of the day
And too many addictions
Kept hidden.

Let me dismantle your establishment
While I bear my blemishes under the skin.

Let me break your concentration.

Let me make you think
I am perfect.
Let me make you think
That my family is sound.

Let me convince you
That you mean nothing
To the world
If only because
My children will be more intelligent
and more well kept
Than the one you poisoned.

Let me be
The Stephen King novel,
Bruce Springsteen song,
All-American house wife
And let me be kept far,
Far away from You,
Dazed and Confused
And depressed and medicated,
You.

I kept poems
Hidden in the darkest corners of our house
So that he would not find them.
While in bed
I would look to his resting tomb of a body
And wish that he understood.

There's an overheated tea kettle
Hissing away in my mind,
Clouding my thoughts with drunken worries
And hard pressed steam
And I am too lazy to take it off the burner.

I stare outward
With formaldehyde kisses
Caressing my arms.
I look at the knotholes in the train tracks
Because that is the last place I saw your hand
Before it went under.
I absolve myself with work,
My hands too tired to hold you
At the end of the night,
My eyes blind to your suffering
With every drop of *****.
I will swear to the day I die
That I am the ****** time has ******
Time and time again.

Our eyes met
And you scurried away.

You may have been a roach in my life
But I will always regret turning on the light.

I think one day it might be nice to call you and tell you that I'm sorry. I just bought a house with this guy I love very much and I've been very busy but he works different hours than me so I've also had a lot of time to think. I think pretty often about how in love we were and how it could be said that I went ahead and ****** everything up. That's okay though. Because you loved hanging on your mothers coat tails at 30 more than you loved me and the guy before you loved *** more than me and the guy before him loved men more than me and the guy before that loved liquor more than me and the guy before him loved drugs more than me and the guy before that loved himself more than me.

I see now that no matter how much you give it will never be enough.

Though I still refuse to stop giving.

I'm sorry.

Maybe someday you'll put on your own coat instead of hanging onto your moms sleeve.

I hope whoever you love next is more complacent than I was.

I never liked to see the wheels stop spinning and we were always stuck in traffic.

But maybe that was just me.

I don't know. I just wanted to tell you that I'm doing fine and I'm happy.

I hope you get better.

I get easily annoyed,
Being the only sober person along
On this tirade
Of ******* kisses
And malformed care.
I spend my time easily convincing myself
That the only way I will believe he loves me
Is if he splits his bleeding heart
Over my chalice
When they display my body to him
At the morgue,
Toe tag so lifeless against my sole.
I think of my body not as a temple
But a bear trap,
Sprung or in the process of springing,
His ankle twisted in it's teeth.
We walked into this together
Knowing each others baggage
But suspecting there to be hidden compartments.
With ease
I compartmentalize my anguish
And move one,
My emotions just a simplicity
Too enticing in their entirety
To be dealt with accordingly.
I have brought myself to believe that he loves me
But only in his frontal lobe,
My life and personality
Being at the root of who he is today.
I say ******* kisses because he is addicting
But I say ******* kisses because
He is deadly.

It's been one of those days
Where I hope that you still stalk what I've written
So you may potentially see
That I'm starving for salvation.

At nineteen years old
I had to ask my coworker
What it meant to have someone
Stand at your wedding.
I have seen more overdoses,
More suicides,
More accidental shootings
Than I have seen lives created;
Lives joined.
I do not know what it means
To stand at someone's wedding
But I do know what it means to be a pallbearer
Because I remember the tears
In my father's eyes
When he laid his father to rest
Due to medicinal negligence.
I do not know
What exactly happens at a wedding
But I can tell you
What happens
When they find your best friend since kindergarten
Cold
In a hotel room miles away
With a needle in her arm,
I can tell you that we all hugged her mother
And smoked cigarettes
And wished that we could be spelling it
Heroine instead of
******
But the world doesn't work that way
And sometimes,
Most of the time,
When people ask you if you want some coke
They do not mean the soft drink
But sometimes the people I love
Accept it any way.

I wish I could tell you
That I have fallen in love
With warmth seeping from my pores and pain
Departing from my body,
But I fell in love
With thumbs pressed into my eye sockets
And a noose around my neck.

I wish I could say these things
Without implying that I fell in love
With an obligation
But there are only so many defensive words
When your walls have fallen so far.

I brought you my still beating heart
In a bismol pink bedpan,
Your hands lifting from the gurney
Awaiting salvation through my touch.
In my visions I am seventeen.
I am seeing you for the first time at my work
And you make me laugh.
You reiterate the scarring in your soul and down your back
And I ask, rudely, if I may see some time.
You say sure,
But your face wishes that I had never asked.
In my wonders
I am eighteen and telling a group of people my age at a party
Why I am sober,
Because my body is weak
And I am not tempted.
Thoughts of you and my future swirl in my mind
But they do not connect.
I will try in vain for another year
Before I realize that maybe I need to sober up from you.
In my recent memory,
I'm sitting on the side of your bed
Hoping that you do not die.
But I'm half naked,
Underwear and undershirt the only things I have on
And your skin is too hot
And your voice sounds coked over
And your breathing is not a slow hum
But a ravenous wheeze
And I'm scared
And my breathing becomes torn.
I'm nineteen again
But now I am saying goodbye
Though you are still living
And a week earlier I had pledged myself to you forever.
You cry to me that you were saving for a ring
And I had hoped to hear that
But now that you've said it,
I can feel my stomach toss
Into the bedpan
Which houses my heart
In your hands,
I've taken my place among the dreadfully unbalanced
And the perpetually sad.
I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake
That is too late in the making to be remedied.

I will spend the rest of my days
Praying that the decision to ruin us
Was the right one.

I wrote poems about
How lonely I felt in this goose flesh cardigan
And you brought me bullets with recliners,
Our house full of mistrust
And anguish.

It was with a bottle we began
And with a bottle we will end.

You used to make me nervous
And I liked that.

Now you make me nervous
And I want to die.

It's one in the morning
And I'm in the bathroom contemplating
The social repercussions
Of grabbing you by the shirt
And punching you
With Tyler Durden might.

It's one in the morning
And I'm thinking about
Making love to you
Because you're drunk
And you won't remember it the next morning;
Because you know how badly
I wish people couldn't remember
My mistakes.