Act I: get triggered by smell

Act II: gaslight yourself

Act III: guide your demons back to hell

there is a universe inside your chest
infinitely expanding
though infinitesimally slow
at times
boundaries stretch, breathe
though confusing at times
destruction feeds growth,
dichotomous paradox forms whole,
stars implode, give way to supernovas,
give way to planets filled with lava and snow
there, inside, a universe
constantly churning,
the incessant spin of all burning
that births light and shadow

here I stand on the precipice.
here, in an amorphous dusk and dawn,
unclear if day or night
is about to kiss the horizon
unsure if I should call to moon or sun
or neither,
or    you.
here in limbo, arching my spine to
sneak under the guardrail of loving
here, instinctually shoving myself
into bottlenecks and genie lamps
oh, how my gypsy soul wants to run,
yet feels so enchanted it stays, here
on the precipice,
itching to gain entrance
into the universe brimming
inside of you

there
there, inside your chest
there I said it.     and I'll say it again,
and I'll say it even louder:
I confess! I'm enchanted!
I'm enamored, enthralled, enraptured,
I want my heart
to know your heart,
I want to dive chest-first into your outer space galaxy nest
an astronaut without a helmet,
I want to explore, awestruck
never trying to label, box, or understand - simply experience
your universe

there, I finally said it
I'm finally starting
to write the poems I'm afraid of,
the ones I don't want to say out loud
I'm starting to write out shadows and solar flares and floods,
starting to let my heart bleed out of my pen, cause
what the hell am I hiding from?
what are we all so scared of?
we were ****** into this strange world
blind and wet,
groping in the darkness for heaven
meant to rip ourselves open again, again
meant to feel with the depth and tempest of oceans
meant to risk and be fools and fall to meet rose-hued ends

I just want to make love with the light
of a thousand candles, a million stars, and the moon turned on
and panting
silver dripping from her tongue,
dizzy with the heat of solar undulations,
stripping down to the heart of the matter
down to the simple truth of it all:
I was born to feel,
and my god, you...
you make me feel universes
you make me feel thunder and lightning and bedroom churches and power surges
you make me feel sunrise stillness
and it makes me fall silent.
so here I am, writing the poems I'm afraid of
and sending them out, messages
in bottles, adrift
in the endless oceans of your universe

I will map the constellations of your sun-born freckles,
obsidian cinnamon blooming on forearms,
trace the reflection of starry foremothers onto skin
as a remembrance of origin.
And when we are light years apart,
I will draw your ancient imprint in the sand and lay amongst your roots,
soaking spirit into my heart.

my nostrils spit fire
sandpapered passageway from boiling lungs
cracked and ragged,
bursting rivers to dust bowls
try to keep breathing, dragon woman.

so naive, how I believed collecting miles upon miles of rusted road signs and concrete structures
between
us
would wash your face from my mind
as if I had not already seared your eyes
into the sky of my daydreams
even now, you stare into me

I gnaw bloodstained lips,
scratch fevered fingertips on tweaking knees
and you,
you are rabidly foaming in my memory

how does an addict quit cold turkey
and not remit?
I ***** your name to strangers any chance I get
just to feel it
crawl out my mouth and tumble through my ears
back into the creases of my mind
pupils ****** open, I can hallucinate your breathing in my lungs
bartering oxygen for ghostly touch

werewolf mistress
haggard howling at a new moon
leave me to commune with absence,
to laugh in the face of doom

tell me,
what clammors in your mind when you cannot sleep at night?
what are you clinging to when you do not rise in the morning?

a stiff lesson in letting go.
a fastball to the chest.
an image of death
approaching on his warhorse.

got a lot to accept about catch
and release,
about the karmic patterns chasing me.

i'll eat my own tail before i acknowledge
history is repeating itself.
a recursive curse
of love unreturned,
rebirths.

dizzy at the sight of my own bleeding/bleating heart,
i howl in frenzy and
deny i was bit by a werewolf
in the new moon's dark.

am i as translucent,
as you are opaque?
does my breath feel like an earthquake
as i quiver at the sound of your name?

nowadays,
i am sure of nothing
more than my spinning.
your elusive grin
pins me to the wet dirt of august,
and dares me to chase you all over again.

a lesson in walking away.
a slow burn in the stomach.
a never-ending plummet
into this fever-dream's abyss.

I am laced up in black.
Spurs skidding sparks at my heels,
striding up a leaf-smothered hill
during the golden hour.
Sun splayed upon my cheekbones,
holding hands with my long shadow,
grenade-pin heart, and brewing eyebrows.

I am forgetting what it sounds like
to lean into your slinking shoulder,
covering the aroma
of your neck's skin
with coffee grounds and wolfsbane
too ardent to taste like your mouth.

I am humming to myself, juicy and thick,
to slice your silence into fragments
that disintegrate ashen through my fingertips.
Just like the parting look you gave me,
sterile-eyed and hazy.

I am all splinters and sinkholes,
a tragic reminder that things do not remain intact
especially when you chase them.
My lips are glued to the horizon, begging the sun
to watch the dance of the moon,
enchanted and writhing.

will you remember me as the scent of lavender and pine,
a long embrace of wild flowers that sends your mind
into the silence of the forest.

will you remember me
as the golden hour tip-toeing its way through your blinds,
stretching it's warm fingers to touch your jawline,
laughing
all tangled in saffron sheets. will you

remember me as the sound of river summersaulting over stone and wind to reach your feet,
a wordless song
of change flowing freely.

will you remember me
as the taste of promise in spring's first peach,
an overwhelming sweetness,
the whisper of heat.
will you

remember me
as the taught reverberation of
metal string
against air,
the pulse
of love
returning
to itself
again
again, again, again, again will you remember me as the touch

of skin on skin during the rosy hour of midnight,
the magnetic kismet of feeling in flight.

will you remember me in the small moments,
alone
in the hidden corridors of your heart.

will you remember
me in the in between
of stop
and start. will you

remember my voice lilting 'round corners and downstairs
to kiss your eardrums.
will you remember the easy silence of mid-afternoon dream bums.

will you

remember my rooftop and spontaneous embrace and forest fire love.
will you?

will you remember?

remember me,
memories in a chromatic key,
the push and pull of harmonics on heartstrings,
the all but lost things
of a poet's loftiest dreams.

a rush of unspoken loving.

I felt your spirit follow me
ten thousand feet above the sea - floating,
flee(t)ing over aquamarine mountains
in a metallic bird with frozen wings.
In my dreams,
you are a wild sycamore tree who sings
lunar symphonies to bumblebees
sun spotted eyes,
sight of a man searching after ephemeral mystery.
I will whisper your name into the wind, send
my spirit back round the earth -
we will breathe the same air,
after passing through a million lungs (heaving)
see the same clouds,
after traveling distances unspeakable..

And will you remember me:
eyes brimming (in silence)
hips twitching (in stillness)
biting lips and picking skin and
itching to hold you with palms and fingertips,
head in crook of shoulder,
hand pressed upon chest,
stomach to stomach breath stolen,
heavy, wet -
having communion without the wine or bread
just the body, unbroken
no call to repent.

smoke stacks babble their chemical love note to the gods,
huffing and clawing
and spewing their pumice
at the morning sky,
a milky stairway to heaven
dispatching
the greasy whims of a faceless man with an unquenchable addiction.

it towers over the overstuffed veins of the highway,
where a once square body
contorts its aluminum frame to mimic the spiraling form of nature,
spilling its fleshy guts into dry winter wind.
the steaming rubber neck of the world cranes itself
longer than the Mississippi
to gawk at its own mortality.

in the distance,
the steely blue city veils her face with haze,
stoic and sturdy, she stares into the thin air
past the ardent, bleeding
display of humanity
gushing
awkward onto her concrete stomach
and staining the stubbly black and beige
with sticky finger prints.

the city takes a long drag off her metallic cigarette
and sighs
exhaust,
blanketing the sky in morgue sheets.

you felt like a new texture, a fabric i'd never slipped through before,
but darling,
you and i are merely old habits gussied up in
tulle and a paper mache artifice - ghoul masquerading as prima ballerina
fouette for me baby, twirl me dizzier than a whirling dervish
and flounce me on my head to spin out over this choreographed failure.

i've shoveled so much chocolate in my mouth-hole this weekend
i think i'm rotting from the inside out,
made of only sugar blisters and quicksand sores
that are bursting new caverns to life
crafting a base relief depiction of my longing into my throat,
how deliciously destructive!

i'm loony-eyed swooning over this 90-watt moon replica
and these reflector paint stars!
oh, i think i'll trade the entire night sky for this masterpiece
and a macrame bandage for my chest,
much more utilitarian than the atmosphere i drown in these days.

my reckless howling and witchcrafting whimsy
have loosed my lungs from their cage,
wheezing out an incantation into the far-reaching wind,
Everest is ablaze under my spell
sobbing it's ice into the earth and
melting it's bones to ash in my palms.

some men just want to watch the world burn,
i, however, merely want to reconstruct it
from the bottom, up
shoveling all of its innards to the surface
and making the unseen
known.

i want to ***** out everything held inside of me,
yank the remnant gunpowder from my throat
and load a pistol to destroy the ghosts that crawl forth
from the cramped black holes of my memory.
The sound of your name makes my vision turn crimson
and my feet cling to the ceiling.
What you did
is too much
for me to carry,
haunting me in ways i do not understand
morphing me into creatures i cannot bury.

i never even notice you've seeped into something,
until its too late.
i surface gasping in the middle of a fit of confusion
to realize that your grubby, sticky hands
are tainting
my every movement
waking
and
sleeping,
dancing
my legs on puppet strings.
Iron-locked hinges control my hips opening,
closing,
opening,
rusted and stuck in a position i refused,
a place i did not agree to be folded into.
Weighted down by the heaviness of you
your mass
your gravity
bulldozing me into glass shards, and blindly
mixing my fragments
with
mud
and dust
and
ashen debris.

A resin of my innards is caked dry
under your ragged fingernails.
They snag at the holes in my tights
and i feel the unwashable stickiness of me
skid
against my skin.
The room is pitch black
but i can see splotched neon demons
lurking in the corner behind my back.
And the gurgling of the television
is harmonizing with my rasping,
and my tired anger,
in a key i can't decipher,
although it sounds minor.
What an ominous overtone, dangling
over our dizzy heads.
Stop trying to scare me,
soften me into your arms.

I am the monster in this room, remember?!?!
There is almost too much guilt
in my sandy mouth
to make room for another insistent plea.
Stop.
STOP.
I
am
not
joking.
I
am
not
a
joke.
I
am
not­
a
target.
Or something
to crush
and ****
up your nose.

i'm much too grotesque for any of that.
I'm the monster here, remember?

i fear i am
translucent
and
forgettable.
a vapor that is constantly
dispensing
and
dissipating,
accidentally breathed in by absent-minded victims.
forming weak phlegm at the back
of numb throats,
coughed out with the thought of too many cigarettes.

there are some things that do not wash from skin.
even more that can stain a mind
beyond the finesse of chemical cocktails or fire to purify.
birth marks and blood omens and
calling cards of demonic henchmen.
harmless helicopter seeds shed
flakes into a ****** garden,
a second-hand inoculation, mute until retroactively
activated.
a forged acquiescence
to a sprouting voice of dissent:

                                                "you?we­ren't you wise enough to know?
you, fortune-teller, mystic mistress, reader of skies, you
how did your intuition lead you blindfolded into a werewolf's den?
you, knowing the heart's riddled map of blood,
you, knowing the incessant looping of events,
you, knowing the enthralling
addiction of desire, shame on you, after all,
boys will be boys - don't pretend
you did not suspect it of your friends, too.
sayings are rooted in truth,
and themes on that mantra have been force-fed to you since age five, you swallowed
that pill dry (remember? throat surrendering its gag-reflex
like a good little girl, masking the strain) and its been re-administered
in endless refrain
as medicine, as supplication, as pledge, as training - don't you act surprised.
by the ripe and raw pulsation of twenty-two
you
have surely learned the golden rule:
your body
was not built
for you.
your skin,
your flesh,
your
body is:
a pilgrimage to grasp the heat of god,
a beacon on moonless nights,
a temple to spill hungry prayers upon,
an ancient altar of blood sacrifice.
honor your obligation, your tribute, your destiny.
submit to the iron-rod trademark upon your breast.
it will not wash clean, trust me, there are some things
that do not wash from skin."

even more that can claim a mind.

I curse my body daily.
Waking up with the sky, my tongue
lashes red sunrises onto my thighs,
my lungs vacuum a familiar
poisonous plume. Oh!
the relief of mortality!
the sturdy promise of decay!
An ancient blood pact with the moon
turns me sour at her zenith,
and I slink down in my weather-torn coffin
smirking with anticipation.
Crashing waves of maggots pour
over and through me,
shaving away this amorphous effigy
to dust, debris.
Released back to the soil,
soaked in dew,
reformed in clumps by absent-minded shoes,
bled dry by stelliferous roots of sycamores -
my body giving birth to life
in ways I never could before,
in ways only revealed to me
by death
the spurious specter becomes pure again.

Let me be the first to warn you:

I am wildfire and catastrophic destruction,
I am consuming fever and searing passion,
I am possessed by infectious radiation, a contagion
for all things surreptitious and sacred.

I will vacuum the oxygen from your gasping lungs,
blister your lips,
and plunge you deep into my inferno.

I will gallop as chopping thunder across your oceans,
etch lightning streaks zigzagging behind your eyelids,
and illuminate veiled dimensions of your incandescent spectrum.

You will know me,
in flares sparking your night sky
into snapshots of opalescence and shadow.
You will know me,
in relentless flames licking your woodlands
skeletal and hollow and barren.
You will know me,
in remnants of cinders, ashen palms,
and smoky ribbons evaporating through your skin.

I am celestial pyromaniac:
daughter
of Hephaestus and Artemis,
incubated
in the womb of a supernova,
birthed
in the creation of Andromeda,
purified
by internal cycles of eruption,
hurled
through the cosmos by shooting stars,
magnetized
to earth by gravity and destiny, carried to you by entropy and choice.

I am volcanic and heaving
beneath the crust of the planet.
I am ultraviolet hallucination, I am firework destruction, I am spontaneous combustion, I am electric incineration, I am smoldering embrace, I am all things cataclysm and rebirth, interlaced.
And when I pierce molten and ecstatic and untamed
through your reality, you will know
what it means to drown dancing in flames.

the leaves of the forest are erupting into flames,
flaring orange and honeysuckle red,
swaying, stretching their fingers, dooming their neighbors to burn.
embers catapult skyward and tumble to the ground,
the fire devours itself, withering to reveal hearty skeletons beneath.
the sun is perched atop a golden throne
ever slip-sliding down the earth's dome
to embrace the horizon.
his smoldering gaze fans the kaleidoscopic furnace,
igniting ****** pockets of wilderness,
hovering for only a hushed breath
before bending to kiss another expanse with incandescent pigment.
the wind fondles scorched leaves as they sigh
and curl into their chests.
after sailing the departed to their ashen graveyard the breeze disappears, whistling through a maze of branches.
it carries the scent of the inferno on it's charred palms to the city beyond,
running residue swiftly under the noses of sidewalk dwellers
who absentmindedly look up from their shoes
to see if signs of smoke hover in the darkening sky.

the fathers of the forest turn a new chapter,
all silent like ripples of breath upon a lake.
under the gaze of a waning solar mistress
they rotate their pigments and shed their costumes,
revealing decades of patient listening.
the stars tango in unison to the left,
holding hands and spinning so quick they appear
motionless
to the eye of the beholder.
I stand in awe of the illusion of stability
as I hurtle through the milkyway on a melting rock.
the sheer impossibility of unveiling meaning
at the ephemeral core of this reality
stings at my stomach like one thousand hornets drunk on whiskey.
and as my laugh echoes orchestral through the meadow,
I discover the secret of everything.

chained up on a visceral boomerang to your apathy -
disembody, then shrivel back into my chest.
infested with a vile peanut gallery
snickering in the belly of my ears.
cursed with an over-active mental ***** reflex,
born with the habit of re-ingesting bile and lies.
gag-order on the heart so it doesn't whip me
with it's crown of thorns
twisted from plucking the horns of dead roses.
he loves me, he has no room for me,
beyond the tip-tap of trembling bones upon his shoulder.
i've trimmed myself down with neglect,
i've perfected the presentation of deception
as a romantic encounter,
monotonous plunging of doubt across layers of skin.
carouseling a patch-worked mantra of ambivalence,
motion sickness riding on my collarbone dressed with a grin
heaving and green.
i caught whiplash from sneaking glances at you
while creating the illusion
that i was forever turning away -
always leaving, always shaking out a no,
always building up a wax paper wall
(always clumsy, always patching holes with cotton).
i'm wasting away on the offerings you drop at the pit of my stomach:
all lead anvils and hurricanes.
i wish i could carve out the part of me that thinks of you,
drown it in cyanide, and mock it's funeral with fireworks.
i am toddler-tantrum-flinging my limbs wild at the sky,
eyes pinched shut, and teeth blooding my lips.
loving you tastes of salt and iron,
what a balanced palette for dining on a soul.

I found god
while cleaning out my childhood bedroom,
he was buried all dusty
in the left corner of
my mothball closet
underneath the boxed remains
of other men who have left me
guilty and
hungry.

today i am feeling the stains
of my mother's memories thrash in my blood stream.
moments shadowed from my ears
lay their vicious consequences upon my chest.
ancient itches poke out at me
from the unraveling seams of inherited sweaters.
vintage fears passed down through
generations of women since the first reflection
was ever seen, garish and distorted in a rippling lake.
i wonder at the smudged details.
i wonder if these vanishing phantoms that appear to me
loud and visceral and jumbled
are just apparitions of my murky underbelly
or elusive clues being unearthed slowly.
each step I feel the weight steepen,
my features molding into ancestral craters -
variations on a theme i've been aching to destroy.
my thoughts are betraying me
yet the eyes staring back in the mirror tell me differently,
they pour back the razored gaze of jaded history.
i try to remind myself that i am a sculptor,
but this truth gets warped towards dreams of
shaving away
rather than building.

i'd love to tell you that i don't mind sleeping alone,
that i have tough skin, that i don't sink into my pesky thoughts
and let them marinade me as raw meat to be devoured
down a ravenous cavern burnt to the point of
tasting only its own fiery scabs and blisters.
i'd love to tell you that i never whisper obscenities
to my chest about itself, that i am in love with the way
my hips bulge uneven and wavy, that i don't pinch at my
skin and curse it to dissolve, that i have explored each
inch of my earthly terrain and found it magical
and full of life and wonder, instead of finding
unfortunate mountains bubbling forth where they should not be
and unwelcome things i want to scour from its surface.
i'd love to tell you that i am full of humbled pride,
that i don't question every move i make,
that i am bursting with more of myself that i know
what to do with, but the more i live the more
i discover i am not my own, not an inspired
or unique soul, but i am piece-meal plastered,
shafted together from cherry picked muses
and i find my form unraveling as i wade through
these foreign seas.
trust me, i have long since
woken from the illusion of my permanence, but
i still long to feel true, honest, unmistakably myself,
and each morning i grow more and more and more
aware of my subtle shifting and morphing and reconfiguration
and i find that my environment is constantly reshaping me
with my hands helping.
and i don't know when i signed that permission slip,
but i find myself barreling forward out of my self-conception
my past, my roots, my image,
and it feels terrifying and terrific, trying to listen to
things i have ignored and shhhed for decades, but as i
attempt to reclaim my ground, my existence, i
find it disappears as soon as i think i have a grasp on it,
like chasing ghosts and playing with jello in zero gravity,
it keeps me reaching, fumbling forward,
and at night i wonder when i will be standing still again
and i wonder if i will even like it anymore.

a spindly girl scrawls narratives
upon her walls in red ink,
candle flames splash shadow and light
flickering across the window pane as rudimentary morse code
to Venus who hangs heavy in the night.

the howling of invisible wolves
ricochets round alleyways and up crumbling telephone wire,
crawls inside the ears of a hypnotized veteran
"remember the bodies of crooked mountains,
remember the barrel of steaming guns,
remember praying to a god you never knew
crouched into submission."

big brother's hands don't rest in the dark,
every silent minute the masses slide into their coffins
cushioned by LCD screens and soundbite slogans.
an endless barrage of information lullabies people
numb into their heaving dreams, and they don't question
when they wake shaking and empty.

this morning's fog paints the sky a bleary white,
a blank canvas for streaking black birds and
deep green oaks to dance upon.
a forgotten cold wind sweeps in
over the blue blanketed mountains
dragging the new season along
with a caravan of burnt sienna nostalgia.
the smell of leaves dreaming of
their fall to come crinkles on the earth below,
and they rattle with anticipation
in their wooden beds.
steaming coffee trickles down throats
****** open with yawning
and swaddled in knit scarves
from the crisp, saturated air.
the thickness of the day is delivered
again, and again, in a thousand
cardboard packages
and comes with a knowing feeling
of endings and renewal.

it's okay to let confusion drown you, pour over you like the wind sweeps the Great Plains clean.
it's okay to mistake up for down, and have to wear a compass rigged with alarm bells as an amulet.
it's okay to forget your name and make up a new one.
there will be days when you can't see out the window past the dust and sun-charred veneer,
and they will serve as reminders of the universe in the bathroom mirror and it's impossible reality.
it's okay to feel like mundane chaos, or a deflating balloon in the dessert sun.
it's okay to save secrets for yourself and to wear your mistakes as medals on your chest.
it's okay to doubt all that you've ever been told.
there will be days when no amount of coffee will cure the weariness compiled in your bones and you will have to set a timer for breathing.
it's okay to squeal in ecstasy and in fury and in despair.
it's okay to miss people who do not think of you and wish that they would.
it's okay to wonder if you have every truly loved anything.
there might not ever come a day when it all makes sense, and that is okay too.

red-eyed pigeon pecking for scraps in the sand
staggering through white-washed ripples of land, and
separating cigarette butts from orphaned leaves.
the sea is heaving her depths
ever toward the static shore,
sure that sore feet will willingly greet her
refuge from the blistering sun.
sons of fisherman
scuttling about on waves no bigger than your thumb,
humming drum beats
to the wind and romancing the sky.
the clouds dome over the earth,
mountainous and whispering wisps upon the water.
my hair is bleached, painted by the daylight
and I am gradually washing, washing away
into the sea.
the world tinted cerulean
my tongue rolls out mysteries, doubts, prophecies
trying to envelop contradicting truths
in a shrinking shoreline.
disillusioned, hands fall slack
from the choke hold at my throat
and salted air rasps into lungs
grappling with the gravity of  tides.

I am still reeling in mistakes I cast
When I was seventeen,
When I was already stuck in my past and my doubt and
Testing feelings with a likert scale misread,
Misfortune on my heart and confusion on my mind.
I still think in meter, still answer in rhyme, still fall in love with ideas of men
Projected onto flesh  and blood and skeleton,
Carefully crafted concepts of cavernous consequence.
I am still reaching to grasp bare bones without carrying a fantasy complex,
My head weaves a life of it's own
Reality be ****** to drown in my sea!
You see,
I thought I fell for your eyes, but maybe it was the mountains staring back at me.
I could never tell your soul apart from nature's majesty, and
I still don't know if I've ever loved anything.
Forgive me if I've trailed my karmic goop through your bedroom,
I am still learning how to tame my longing.
This poet's mind wasn't built for easy detaching.

my body is too numbed to speak
to my desperately straining ear drums.
hollowed timpani ba-***-bums echo back ad-nausea.

I've found this magnifying glass is a mirror,
and you can only inspect your shadows in broad daylight.

my heart is full and my tongue spits spite,
biting eyes drink the blood of the blissfully ignorant
as I hand out gold medals to the reapers of the night.

can you smell the crisp air that swallows bonfires
rolling in from over the distant mountains?
the turning of seasons has played its magic trick again,
blooming in a cloud of smoke.

as the beginning fades, I slink into the familiar dance
of the incessant machine,
spinning hypnotic hallucinations.

I stack you upon piles of hay bales and whinny at easy lies,
stamp up dust in hopes of maintaining my belief in illusion,
thinly veiled and wearing rotten.

I don old metal shoes to retrace the path carved for me
before I learned to breathe and blink,
it feels like syncing into cracking expectations
and reciting lines of poetry I pretend to understand.

I am static running in all directions,
stagnant and unstable propulsion,
pinning paradoxical buttons to my lapel to scream my confusion
in silent revelation to the audience.

a dusk-lit forest full of branches sprouting car keys walks toward me,
reflecting the blood red moon.
stairs form beneath my feet as I step
escalating me up past
the jangling silver canopy into cool green sky.
night darkens with each breath.
waves crashing through the atmosphere tumble urgently past my head
to meet with the spies of the desert floor.
I sigh out my thoughts in bubbles
and they ping-pop up,
exploding
into stars and planets.
standing at the edge of the thick glass lake
that covers the earth, I spew rainbow jacks out of my mouth
and they echo
tink-tink tinktinktinktinktink
across the darkness.
I watch them splash into the sun's paint bucket
off the end of the word,
splattering
yellow and orange up onto the black glass.
stretching my arms a hundred miles long, I dip my fingers in
the glowing colors and taste it on my spiked tongue.
the lily-pads laugh at me for ingesting poison
as I balloon over them
and the lake.
I begin to float, up up & away,
into the green sky.
when i reach the stars, their pointed corners pop me
and I rain down as moonstone,
running iridescent veins upon the earth.

please don't
look me in the eye,
I'm trying to pretend I don't care
trying
to hold an empty stare
without breaking
the nonchalant veneer
I've smothered my telltale heart in

my skin is soft
satin snagged by hangnails
hung in loosened sails
to catch the wind, but go
nowhere,
nothing can rip me in two
if I am moldable goo,
yet I grapple with ghouls
who snicker at my boo-boos

boo-hoo little foolish one
no one is remembered
once their hands have
disappeared into foreign lands,
a lacerated tongues spews
sinister commands
and my brain swallows them whole,
slip-sliding into the wormhole
to become the nothing I feel so

I am a child with a dusty attic for a mind,
barren but for phantoms drifting through dust motes
suspended
in beams of light sneaking in
between cracks in the floorboards gnawed into existence by
feeble mice mistaking decaying wood
for answers.

I am sculpting my fears
onto bark with the blood of a squid,
outlining the contours of uncertainty,
breathing in-
to quarantined corners.

I have spent twenty-one turns round the sun
searching with empty questions
and a map penned by a charlatan,
blinded and bound
believing my fingers had grasped more than my own flesh, yet

I am huddled in my attic,
scrawling gibberish onto the walls
endless and irrelevant,
swaddled in a flea-infested blanket
of regurgitated beliefs.

"God give us this day our daily intolerance."

I am helpless on the edge of the multitudes,
speechless in the face of unmarked territory,
with wide eyes and clenched palms
in the sight of divine anarchy.

today I began to leave my body on the seat of the bus,
so I leaned into the stretch
and pull on my spirit's shoe strings
hoping faintly
that I might feel your hands
reaching
from behind my eyelids.

to tell the truth,
I dream of you far too often
slid between sheets
wet with fever,
and sometimes
my thighs feel sore of running
from ghosts
so I concede to being caught
fingers plunging down my throat
and I gag
on time travel fantasies - but
I've stopped drowning
memories in whiskey, instead
I get high off
the lingering traces laced in my bloodstream.
nightly I ignite my veins to hear you
moaning
and my bed frame
quivers
with the knowledge of your absence.

I've carved the story of us
raggedly into my skin,
a narrative to tell round the campfire of my heart,
where trees parade heavy
with questions I've been whispering
for a decade,
and leaves rattle
made-up answers in riddles.

I play butterfly hopscotch when I can't sleep
due to tsunamic activity
in the aftermath of earthquakes that frequent my bones
as their tectonic shifting shelves the continental plate of you
over
me.

I urge you,
do not grow complacent in my volcanic dormancy.
the compiled magma will
leave you in a heap of radioactive ash,
which will in turn erupt
violently.

take heed.

this is your silent warning swimming in my eyes.

I am too full to hold casually,
marked "handle with caution"
in fiery green,
slyly grinning
as I slip ever faster into entropy.
the laws of the universe are
consuming me,
breath
by
breath,
blink
    by
      b
        l
          i
            n
               k,
     b
    

         y

belated



    good
    bye.

the ocean is roaring over herself vacuuming space with sound
and when I close my eyes she gets closer than ever
washing me over, cleansing sandy pores
and I find myself floating above her gently fixed to the horizon
and she laps at me
licking dirt from my feet, clutter from my mind
and she bellows louder and louder
shhhhoving open room inside of me
creating new shelter for breath
and she winks sun into my heart
refracting rainbows from a rocky harbor.
I am awestruck and speechless as she tucks me under rolling sheets
and I dream of
letting go
letting go
letting go
til she lullabies me into watery peace.

the sea is roaring over herself hoarse and deafening
summoning her darkened volumes to surface
churning ceaselessly
with no purpose but to churn
against porous boulders raised sharp into salty air who swallow her spit
kiss after ecstatic kiss
biting lips and
breathing
into her fullness.
tree skylines peak up as cardiograms pumping, plunging
daggers into the sky and raising valleys in dusty ground
kicking dirt plumes
to mix with the low hung clouds
drumming up potions where
earth meets air
fuming
and beating soil into the certainty of sustaining
life and decay
decomposing symmetry to divine disarray
nature circles it's prey
all are one
and the same in her eyes
she bows to none
yet loves blindly
providing without agenda, taking without malice
equaniminous
balance of zero
random nonsense coalescing
to a flat line
emptiness
so vibrantly
alive

One Thousand hands holding
One Thousand suitcases stuffed suffocating
One Thousand costumes and memories tethered to expectations,
One Thousand pieces left behind that
would not pass inspection like
fragments of self and habits to lean on,
One Thousand pairs of waiting eyes wistful and worn and wondering about
One Thousand ways to say goodbye,
One Thousand stories swimming in minds
reasons to stay devouring reasons to depart
parsing apart
One Thousand unfinished thoughts
stacked upon each other as layered
remnants of crumbling towers,
One Thousand coterminous beginnings and endings swallow
One Thousand middled narratives,
the taste of
One Thousand lives flavors the air
circulating in
One Thousand lungs huffing the
breath of
One Thousand neighbors estranged and silent save
One Thousand unsynchronized heartbeats
bleating and bleeding and belching
One Thousand rhythmic intricacies into
One Thousand hands holding
One Thousand suitcases.

your mind is screeching over itself
fast forward looping
stuttering to sta-finish it's own sentences
before they begin
begin again
again rephrase
in a foreign tongue
sputtering auditory train
each song sounds the same
same thought new place
pacing backwards yesterdays
yester-year's dream spawned oiled seas
see the lochness creature seeping tar from smokestack wings
cleanse the river
boil the stream
seems where the hydrogen and oxygen meet
the breath drowns
defeat
retreat to your fiery cocoon
lace your wounds with spit and delusion
dilute your medicine til it tastes like lover's skin
again begin
begging the stars to swallow you
howl til one becomes two
rebrand suffering to resume
your pleasurable consuming death

a river runs through a ghostly town
soaked clay red with the blood of the earth,
the land is marked with tire tracks like an addict's elbow crease
sweating oil and electrical wire,
fields tilled with the claws of a paper beast
sprout telephone poles and generations of debt
amongst indigo coffee beans,
rotting tin roofs striped with rust
creak folklore in the pouring rain,
muddied palms clinging to trust on mala beads
are stung with poisoned ink leaked from shrines golden and winking,
an ornate temple carves god sharp into a clouded sky
its steeple piercing his hands
shards of bone spilling ash onto upturned foreheads,
sun scorches unsuspecting soil and it cries exhaust fumes,
the sputtering song of a motorbike is answered
by the howl of a stray mutt in an alleyway
reverberating pleas to a clenched fist,
an unremitting flame sweeps ruin
across leaf barren trees
wind choking on smoke coughing up skeletons,
and the planet heaves
and the planet heaves
weezing on humanity's delirious daydreams