I remember the sweat
Clinging to your war-torn back
Like rain,
A succulent, torrential downpour
Of fury and lust.
And in that moment
I knew myself to be much more
Than I had ever at any variable point
Thought before.

My only fear
Is that I will spend every night
Sobbing in your arms
To make up for all the times
Everyone else
Left me to fend for myself.

Freshmen year
I was involved in a play
About women in the 1920's
Who were paid to paint watch dial numbers
And hands
With green-glowing,
Radioactive paint.
The point of doing this
Being so soldiers could see their watches at night
Without giving away their position.
However,
After years of exposure to the radium,
The women themselves began glowing
And forming cancers in the deepest recesses
Of their young and tender bodies.

Before the horrors began,
The women had taken a trip to the beach
Where they ate sandwiches
And talked about the things that shined
In their lives.
And between the Rudolph Valentino's
And pearl necklaces
In the windows of department stores,
I believe they could also list you
Among the beautiful things they had
In spite of all the danger.

Pamela, I suppose,
Has taken one too many lines
And has given birth to a child
With a few extra mental arms and legs.
Green trees and
Vietnamese agent orange
Fell into her lungs a bit early
As she painted her portraits
And found her ideal of love in mine.
Women, I’ve found,
Have quite the strange way
Of making change.
We can’t all be  Elizabeth Stantons
And Sylvia Plaths.
We can’t all be the bra-burners,
The Vietnam-Veteran spitters
That this generation of tetosterone-enticers
Has emerged from.
Pamela, like so many other long-haired,
Nail-painted beauties before her,
Lost herself in an opus of *******
And promiscuity
That brought her down
To a level terribly under
Those of substantial criminals.
As Burgess wrote, “You were not
Put on this Earth just
To get in touch
With God.”
Pamela, I suppose,
Failed at just the same,
Became a Russian spy
And illuminated a flame of displeasing energy
In the heart of my breathless being.

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.

I couldn't trick myself into loving you,
Just as I couldn't bear
To bring rhyme or reason to my writings.
Trochees and caresses
Are for *******
Who don't know how to deal
With chaos and rejection.

Leave me
And you will find me
Awake until seven the next morning,
Scrawling haikus onto the wall
With my own blood.

With a voice as grainy as sand,
I was told by many a man
That love was a curse,
A soft Gypsy hand stroke on the cheek
Endured by the lonely
And accepted by fools.

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 swear we were loosing it.
How can you expect a regular man
To last longer than a week
Alone
On an island of sanity
Amid an ocean or insanity?
How could you expect me to zip my mouth up
Like a woman's dress
And keep calm about my situation?
How could you let me count off the numbers
Only to put them back once again?
How could you think
That white walls
And impertinent lies
Could mask the suffering fear
Swelling inside of me?
How could you touch me
With those cold unfeeling hands
As my friends washed up on the shore
More dead than they ever could have been?
How could you lay me out in the sun,
Watch crimes unfold
While you still expected me to be a regular man once home?
In that moment
With the knife lingering over my scalp,
I made a decision to get the Hell out
And I have no regrets regarding it.
You can chase me down:
Scream at me,
Rap your knuckles at my door.
I'll tell you to put it where the sun don't shine
Along with a dishonorable Section 8 discharge
And the little bits of my decrepit sanity.

And I have finally grown out of the roots of my suffering,
The gnarled pieces of my tumultuous past
That have left me barren so long.
I am in love,
A tortured soul cast onward
And ready to take down my foes.
The beasts I once let suckle on my breast
Are today torn away for
I now know the meaning
Of adoration in the third degree.
I rest my weary sons,
Finally relieved of battle to return home
And rest their weary backs.
I breathe today
Exhaling the agony of a million sessions of chainsmoking.
I love today
Like an uninhibited soul,
No longer basking in darkness;
No longer begging for forgiveness.

The other day I was called a *****
For loving the same man I have
For quite some time.

People are rather stupid
When you get down to it
And sometimes I feel as though
We are the island of sanity
Cast away
In a vast ocean of insanity.

Of course,
That last part
Could go both ways.
I am but a human
And your choices
Will seldom mirror mine.

It's always been funny to me
How parents are always quick to blame you
For their  diminished bank accounts
And stretch-marked thighs.

As if you asked to be a torn ******
On a drunken night.
As if you asked God
To **** you out onto this earth.

I have loved and
I have lost and
I've gone to church,
Never bore the cross
But I'm able enough to see
When I'm not welcome.

And I'm not welcome here.

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.

Tonight
I know for **** sure
That I won't sleep well.
I'll be too busy,
Wrapped within my inhibitions,
Pondering the ******-social ramifications
Of telling you
To *******.

Because in the end,
I know we're all just cosmic play things to God,
But why the **** did you get to be Legos to Him
While I got stuck
Being some Barbie,
Some Malibu Stacy doll?
Why did you get so many possibilities,
So many complicated pieces
While I got a primitive set of dainty high heels
To run the world from?

A nihilist will tell you
That suicidal thoughts
Are not bad,
More of a comfort actually.
Because as long as deep down,
You know you don't have the ***** for it,
You can use those thoughts
As a plan to run.
It's easy to deal with what's in front of you
When you have a ******* escape route.

Always have that escape route ready,
But never use it.
I promise
That your heart will feel lighter
And your soul
Just a smidgen freer.

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 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.

Number one
Smelled of Marc Jacob's cologne from Kohls
And he tasted like the cigarettes he never smoked.

Number two
Smelled of alcohol,
Tasted like alcohol.
**** Everything and Run.

Number three
Smelled like home
And tasted like fleeing dreams.

I'll take
Contestant number three.
**** Everything
And Run with me.

They say that
Absence makes the heart grow stronger
But all its gotten me
Is an addiction to your scent
And an adamant responsibility
To be true.

I'm a champagne bottle
Brimming with an explosion
That bursts forth;
Three AM, no warning.

Shrapnel.

I was not the one who lost your ******* daughters shoes.
I did not force you
To have *** with a man
Who you viewed as a mistake in the first place;
I did not force you to **** him,
Sans ******
And bring me into the world.

***** do not know what they are racing to
And if they did,
I can assure you that no one,
No one
Would be here today.

I did not tie your tubes
And force you to raise three children
When you are still a child yourself,
Unaware of the grace of JFK
And knowledge of basic admiration
That fuels the care of this world.

I did not make you become void and listless,
I did not make you my personal servant
Rather, you made me yours.
I did not ask for such torture as this,
Bleeding my veins through everything,
Loving me only when you are out of smokes
And want a cigarette.

I did not ruin your life
And I did not waste my time
Trying to make you happy through these years.
I attempted to better myself
All the while looking at you for reference.

Do not blame me
And look at me as if I were a criminal
When I pack up my things
And run, run
Run the hell away from you.

Because I was not the one who ****** up in the first place.
I was not the one
Who lost your ******* daughters shoes.

On the first day, I'll look to you
And see the light of the Earth
Alive in everything you do.
And on the second day,
I'll create my own world of seclusion
Away from all of your ignorance.
But they can't all be ballads
Because where would suffering
Finally find its home?

On the third day, I'll discover
Folk music and rhyme.
I'll waste my time
Seeing what isn't there,
The ideals I've made my shelter.
On the forth day
I'll hold you in my arms,
Kiss you deeper than I ever have.
Force you into things you don't understand.
Because you're like a thirty-something year old ******,
Thinking a metal underwire is a pack of smokes.
But they can't all be ballads,
They can't all be the same.
If they were,
None of us would be in possession of our names.

On the fifth day,
I'll leave you after finding discontentment
Over how you find upset in unfamiliar places
And make minnows into whales.
On the sixth day, I'll regret it
But have nothing left to say...

They can't all be ballads anyway.

I dangled my feet
Over the edge of uncertainty
And his words floated into my head:
"You are as big and as strong
As you want to be."

I slowly
Edged my way off.

Today my feet feel lighter.
Lying through omission,
I relayed to you
That I believed death
To be a great anomaly;
A pleasure swirl of brain drugs,
Encapsulating one
In a solemn yet impeccable nirvana
Of their choosing.

My heaven smells like the hugs you get
From smoker's seventh sons.

My heaven tastes like the metallic urge
That burns in the back of your kiss.

I am untamed,
A sorcerer, and
A God in my own right.

1.
I have been told
That I am too pretty to smoke.
I did not understand what he meant by this
Because I knew plenty of beautiful girls who smoked
And their boyfriends did not comment
On their vices, instead, only on their virtues.
Then I understood
That he was remarking on my insides-
My lungs and my horribly scarred soul.

2.
I didn't know anything about Batman.
I asked him about Bruce Wayne once
And was called a ******* idiot.
Now Batman scares me
And makes my stomach twinge
Because I feel guilty
For not knowing who he was,
I am a ******* idiot.

3.
Your mother loved Reagan
And I told her that he was
A dishonest, morally twisted pig
Who sat back
While thousands of Americans
Succumbed to a disease
Who's name was whispered
On the winds of her generation.
I don't think your mother likes me much anymore.
I think she may get in our way later on.
I wish she and I
Didn't care so much about Ronald Reagan.

4.
You told me about Joy Division
And I thought it was beautiful
That Ian Curtis hung himself in his kitchen
for his wife to find
And later had the words
"Love will tear us apart"
Inscribed on his headstone.
You called me cryptic
And then assaulted me in the night.
You made me want to die
So I could write "love will tear us apart"
On my own headstone.

5.
He asked for **** photos
And I told him no.
Upon which I was called a ****
And demeaned during intimacy
From then on.
He taught me that virgins could be *****
And now I am the ******
Time has made into the ****
It has ****** time and again.

6.
He called Wes Anderson films "hipster garbage"
And told me instead to watch things
Like Reservoir Dogs and South Park.
A year later, I only know not to tip
And how to be an *******.

7.
You told me to grow my hair out
Because a girl with short hair
Was a lesbian and you told me
You didn't want others to think
That you were going with a lesbian.
But in the end you still pulled it
With regular fierceness
And I was too much of a coward
To tell you to eat ****.

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.

When calls come in the middle of the night
I should know by now to expect them to be
Either ****** invitations
Or suicide threats.

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.

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.

And so I spend my days
Wallowing in the contempt
I believed for so long
I had run away from.
I am constantly at fault with myself;
Teasing and tearing at my arteries
Though I am blessed with the peace
I fought so hard to know.
I am the goddess.
I find myself under the thumb of the world
Though I am the superpower,
The educated one
Who could overcome.
But I am barely an adult and
I am seldom believed in
Outside of The Legend of Zelda games.

A lady asked me today if I could give her a discount
On the **** she was buying
Because she had already spent so much at my establishment.
And I just nodded my head and ******* agreed
Even though inside I was screaming.
Because, *****, I didn't ask to save all those lives I did,
I didn't originally
Feel the need to talk the world out of suicide.
But I subscribed for the long run
And ******* myself over
Because I've got men grovelling at my feet
But they're all doped up on Xanax.
So take your ******* discount and
Shove it up your ***
Because you earned it.
But somehow I still haven't
Earned my day of peace.
Imagine if he was better at timing
And jumping?

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.

I can't rightfully
Comment on the color of your eyes,
The swiftness of your thought
Without remarking
On the innocence flowing in your veins
And the worldliness
That's only been present
In drifter gods before you.

I've got a list of songs
About how this started,
Ranging back a month or two.
And when I give them all a listen
In a straight line,
I can't help but think of you.
You'll hit your friend
And go to hell
If it won't cost you a dime.
You'll wish me well
And drink to me
But I can't make you mine.
I'm tired of settling
For milquetoast men who cause me pain.
Every time he looks at me,
I see you staring back in vain.
He only wants to **** me
And maybe **** me up.
And I'm convinced he's only human
When ***** fills his cup.
And in spite of all the danger,
I'm gonna stick around.
Even if that ******* on his bike starts
To weigh me down.
Cause I can't turn back now
And I can't change the past.
And I can't make sure that that last relapse
Will surely be your last.
But I'll stay with you
And bargain through
Til this day fall south.
And I'll lend my words
And fight with you until my teeth hurt my mouth.
What's on my mind is
I can do better
And I can find a guy
Who won't spend his time wandering around,
Trying to get a free ride.
They let you off easy,
But I can't do the same.
So *******, honey,
I'm sick and tired of playing games.
Like Lennon said,
we're playing mind games
And you make me feel that I'd be better off dead.
Twist my pain
And make it your own
And I'll do the same.
But the outcome for both of us is clearly the same.
We're both headed for destruction
But you will follow through.
It's gonna happen some day but between he two of us,
I would rather it be you.

It's my duty to finish
This book of love poetry
But it's so hard
To do that when all I think of
Is the contempt I breath
With every drag of life's cigarette.

People **** me off
And I'm scared of talking on the phone.
I could once run miles
But now I'm dying in the mines.
Ambition was my strong suit,
My scars were my weapons
But I let love in
And changed for the better.

What are you supposed to do
When you're good at writing about desecration
And you're suddenly placed in front of
A communion wafer?
What happens when
You're so distraught
You're reading the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book
Just to feel closer to God?

What is there to say
When you've gone off the deep end
So quietly that those who love you
Have got no ******* clue
That it ever really happened?

He looked me in the eyes
The other summer night
And told me of the abominations men of the world
Impose on women of the world
As if I didn't know them.
As if I weren't the ******
That time had ****** so,
So,
So ******* many times.
He told me I would never find a man
Who would treat me better than he.
But I found my hero
Without having to run away with Proud Mary.

And I may have found him
A midst empty days
And a longing to fill a chasm I found deep within myself,
But I found him nonetheless.
And as I sit here,
Awake for days and
Sick,
I hear his words echo
Like back blows
Administered
To the lungs of a Cystic Fibrosis patient.

He told me men on Craigslist
Look for women to ****
And women call their vaginas "oceans"
To try to pick up men.

But my love wants only a partner
To participate in a round of Super Smash Bros. with.

We walked home from church
At one in the morning,
Basking in the glory
That was love and
Being in love.

I got judged all this morning
On how well I could fill in bubbles
On a Scantron sheet.
Well,
My friend Johnny
Hasn't got any arms.
How do you suppose
We measure his intelligence
If he cannot fill in the bubbles?

I brought you a daisy
Because that was the name of my dog
And one of my favorite literary characters.
I came up, let the light shine in
And now you're alone.
I wore my necktie made of rope;
I was ready to die,
But not ready to choke.
And when they found you in that hotel room
I flashed back to the days I spent
Locked away with the speech team
In rooms very similar to the one
Your life escaped you in.
Would holding my hand have made it easier?
If I would have talked to you more often
Would your quality of living been better?
I do not condemn you for your actions,
For I am surprised that I survived my own turmoil,
Grazing through with nothing but a nicotine addiction
And the tendency to lay awake
When sleeping in someone else's bed.  
I am ashamed to say
That I was not by your side for your departing lessons.
Would it have made it easier if I had talked more?
If instead of repressing my worlds
I had shared them with you?
It was easy to assume that you didn't care much for me
Because you moved far away and no one knew why.
No one knew about the twenty-six year old man
Beating and threatening your gorgeous existence.
Not one of us could have come to know
The parasite growing in your guts and veins.
I remember the day when we were five,
You splashed my outfit with dark and sticky mud
And I told you that I hoped you died...
Our mothers laughed.
But the other day I saw your mother weep because my prophecy
Had come true.
The only movie I have ever seen
Depict eye make up melting accurately was the movie that played
For me as I knelt at your casket.
So I brought you a Daisy
Because there was a Rosary in your hand
I didn't want to taint.
And I prayed to the God I did not care for in that moment
That you would make it to where ever you were going
Safely at least.

I still want to hold your hand.

I am ready for my close up today.
Take in all my in insecurities
And bathe me in your municipality.
I'm finished and I've received my black eyes
At the hands of your better judgement.

I am but a cold hand
Emerging from the grave in my heart;
A burned and bitten piece of flesh.
I hated Ohio for all it's worth,
But there's a record store out there
I know I could fall in love in.

I've lost my childhood heroine to ******
And I've lost my innocence to about the same thing:
That is, if men were drugs
And my lungs weren't already full
With the Northern Lights
And ambiance of darkened alleys;
The kind Mary Jane
Kissed Spiderman in all those movie moments ago.

Why do we berate our heroes
When they aren't exactly male
And why did they beat upon this withered soul
Like a rag doll
When she had nothing to give
And no one to blame?

All your friends
Will come and go
And look for something better in time.
Which is exactly the reason
To keep on keeping on
And to keep on growing
And loving and hating
And *******
And clawing our ways
Out of the graves in our hearts.

I'm ready for my close up today.
I am all right if they see the
Collagen in my cheeks
And the dirt caked in my pores.
Today I am enlightened
And today I am full.

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.

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.

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

*** 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've wanted to read a happy book
For quite some time now
But every time I crack the spine
Of a book with a grin escalating steadily,
I find that the stories that make me happy
Are the same ones that destroy my friends.

And I've wanted to write a happy poem
For just as long
But my hand always stalls.
No one wants to read about love and tenderness
When they're suffocating in their own right.

It's always been easy
To see your spark
That causes the glowing embers
Inside of me
But it was always a temporary thing before,
A lovely thing I would tend to cling to
Even when the world conspired against me.
I am alive tonight,
With wires flickering in my being
And your absence in this bed tonight
Strong.
I was never one to succumb to love
But I will succumb to you,
O wretched destroyer of my walls.
Because of you
I have stepped from my comfort zone
Into uncertainty,
Into obscurity.
How vain it is
That I say we are the cult film
Amid others so dry and lame.
Classic rock music
Teaches girls like me
To stay away from men like you
But today I am proud of my
Stubbornness.

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.

And I would just like to assume
That no matter the age difference between the parents,
My children be blessed with ones who love and cherish;
Rather than ones who are close in experience,
Who command the household like tyrants
And make their children bleed at the seams.

I would just like to know that through the flower of my love
A courageous seed may be planted,
One that will outwit the darkness
And fight on to a world of light in which
Love is simply that and
Assumptions are kept in the minds of tyrants.

He had told me that my smile
Was warm enough
To melt the ice caps of Antarctica.
And so when he left me,
I bought a plane ticket
And as I stood before that colossal giant
Of an ice cube,
I smiled.

And nothing happened.

With whatever soundness of mind
I've got left
I will bind your pain
And level your being
So you may be whole again.