Bleeding into the rain
Crimson ink rolls down
Worn fingertips
Onto soaked pages

Broken in time, this
Moment has yet to end

When all the words
Left to say, bleed through
Years of stories, scattered
In the puddles ahead.

Yellow streaks rip open
The violent violet night
Just waiting for the boom.

Thunder crashing
I'll follow suit.

They called us names on the playground.

We were small. Cherubim-faced terrors with bruised knees and perpetually greasy hair.

We dreamed of our lives after college. After our first cars. Our first houses. Our first jobs. Imaginary model wives and spoiled children. The All-American Daydream.

We didn't know what college was. We could barely see over the dashboard on Auntie's old Cadillac.

We grew up.

You became a man. Good-looking, strong, covered in tattoos. Scars on your chest and scars in your head because they called us names on the playground and those curses stuck with you.

Through every needle, every pill and every doctor's visit.

It was worth the pain, you said.

You'd do it all again, you said.

Live through the taunts. Live through the nights spent screaming up at the sky and asking God why He made you that way. Why He didn't make you a he and gave you ******* and hips instead.

They called you names on the playground. They called you something that you never were and never wanted to be.

Now we've outgrown the passing fancies of shiny trucks and four-bedroom houses in quiet suburbia.

Given up a life of apple pie to live between paychecks in a ****** Brooklyn apartment.

You're happy, now.

Happier than you ever were when they called you girl as if that were an insult.

As if they didn't understand the contempt they parroted; spat, hate.

They called you a name.

Then you changed it.

Became it.

Then your name set you free.

They dragged me
screaming
down the highway
to their sacred hell.
My torture was a whisper
to their grinning
over fires
that fester.

Nothing in nature
can rewind:
naught but the hand
of God.

Upon retaking my first
steps
anew
I mounted the struggle.
Peace my birthright.
Truth my shield.
Bold conviction
became shaking steps
ascending
the stairway
to heaven.

With my folly transparent,
I witnessed
the cackles and claws
of the demons
to be mine own whip.

I set down the weapon.
I let the ashes of despair consume it.
I do not look back,
for the stairway is its own guide.

Bittersweet is the rasp of envy,
and gratitude: the beckoning of peace.

Even after all this time
When I feel broken and alone
I tell myself I need you


You started my brokenness
I don't need you

Or maybe I always will.

from the eye wall
thoughts of imminent rain
banked clouds assemble
black and ominous
with saturated breath
will not be denied
their time to rage
against the numbness
of each little death

barometers fall
coastal fortification
futile sandbagging
forlorn gestures
against the flood
a tropical depression
jet-streaming blue
wild moon tide
to desolate shore

precipitation
gray accomplice
faithful torrent
stratified walls erode
sodden wood, bone
unbalanced homes
collapse gracelessly
no match for gravity
or the merciless sea