I am the last minute suitcase shoved full girl
I am the up for anything girl
Most importantly, I am the girl you hurt.
Now my heart is tearing in half like Jesus' bread at the last supper
and there are a thousand conversations going on saying things like,                                      "I can't believe she hasn't completely broken down yet, I would."
But I don't want you back because you left me bruised and broken
But I don't want you to be anyone else's
You never liked the idea of calling each other baby, “it was too possessive” you said
But at this point, every ounce of me is aching to hear you whisper, "I love you."
You were always so shy and I was always the social one
My heart has never felt fuller than when we were us
When I was yours, you were mine, we were us, and us was ours.
I hope you're happy, I really do. I hope your heart is still 60% in love with swimming, and 40% your mom's, because we all know there is no other man that can light up her world quite like you.
I hope you have fun in college, I hope you wake up not regretting anything. I hope breathing, getting out of bed, smiling and laughing is coming a lot easier for you than for me.
I remember the day you walked into my life, you were at swim practice. And so was I.
I don't say we or us anymore because it would force me to become a witness to my own emotions.
Hating you hurts me so much, but talking to you is like talking to the barrel of a loaded gun.
I've had glazed over eyes while looking all around me
Looking for any sort of trace of you,
It's like I am a CSI looking for a killer. I always hoped you would never be that killer but I have been proven wrong so many times I can't turn right any more. Only Left.
You: right-handed, tall, blonde hair, blue-eyed would have been saved by ******; I wouldn't have been so lucky. We used to joke about that.
Maybe I need you, or maybe I just think I do.
This is me dancing across the ocean of my emotions;
This is me dancing in front of you to a broken-hearted love song trying to remind you that I am here.
If I could write you a letter, it would say this:
Dear Love, I am yours, Love, Me.

Dim, the stagnant *****-air clears;
thick velvety curtain lifts,
reveals
a not-so-grand
piano, scarred and dilapidated
under a single, cutting beam.

On the bench, the wrung-out crust
of a moth-eaten man
slumps habitually, his spine in a “C”
from the shouldered shackles
of negative meaning.  Void.

He weighs the crackled keys
with weathered fingers; arthritically
knobbled notes float into the open air
hung with single malt fumes,
contained in vacuous walls.
Each hobbled finger-stroke and hammer-fall
morphs
melts
molds into agonizing chords, aching arpeggios.
Audible heaviness.

His oddly-angled fingers
abstain from all accountability
for the throb in his injured melody,
punctuated now and again by a dead note
on that neglect-yellow keyboard.  

Longing plunks minored
on a downbeat, a song woven with
losing the blue of cloudless mornings
in her velvet passions.  The her that’s missing,
that’s gone and packed the dog
and any solace against the pervasive storms

graying his vision, his beard, his hand—
mangled with grief and apologies—his hand
ever grasping for that lost shade
and the irony of intonating the only hue
his notes will ever know.
.

The universe is growing at a terrifying rate,
But my stagnant world stands still.
The stars pull, and the planets dance a waltz,
But the gravity that twirls them around and around has pinned me down here.

Symphonies at my fingertips, worlds within reach,
But I don’t care.
These shadows cover so much of what I want to understand,
They follow me around till nothing else matters.

Clouds engulf the L.A. basin
Layered mold in the
tubberware
lunchbox
I left home.

Except the spores
are tufts of a woman's white hair
Clumped together in the shower drain
blocking the grates.

You cannot shoot up enough
silicon to fill
the wrinkles of a body
hollowed
You'd have to start pulling marrow
from the bone.

These craters of the basin--
****** dry to burn.
hollowed curves a body barren,
tapped out, laid fallow.
Shrouded...

White noise
White film
White foam.

She, with her fingers
in every swimming pool

She, lounging behind the smokescreen

She, big curvaceous mound
smoldering rock of an old woman

She, who can **** it in and hold it in
the atmosphere

She, lasso-ing lady with wild tendril hair
She can't always keep from billowing out
hot air.
Soon enough she'll catch a sore throat.
Soon enough she'll taste the concrete waterways.
Soon enough, she, ittle too long.

The tale of Hydra is a tale of women deflated.
This lick of fire did not blanket the city but set it ablaze.
She swallowed the heat ****** back the fire
bled and wept Armageddon-red sunsets.  

White Noise
White Film
White Foam

She, a flat, airless
mortar without bricks
tooth-picked clean.
only marrow left of bone.

A kiss is a millisecond, or hour, (or whatever other period of time that you escape reality and become one with another person) through touching their lips with yours. But, as we know from Flight of the Conchords, a kiss is not a contract. It's a promise. A promise that you're sharing that moment with only them, and that you are willing to spend that increment of time devoting yourself to the only thing that matters to you in the present: them. A kiss is cherished so much that a small chocolate candy was dedicated to the universal verb of love itself: to kiss. To smooch. A Hershey Kiss is sweet, small, and traditional. Just as the action is. A kiss is vulnerability. Naked, without anything fake holding you from the other person. The real you is summoned from behind the front you put up for everyone else to make you seem stronger, only to wisp through the soft pink lips that have whispered so many secrets, said so many words, and bit themselves so many times in a blushing moment when they said you were beautiful, into the others lips where they have done the same. Kissing has no rules. It's who you are in a peck. A movement. An open smile, a nibble, a bite, a tickle. No wonder why it's a special thing. Kissing is melting into the very place you are standing or sitting or laying and melding to the person's soul. The most innocent way to become one with another, risque enough to be special. Kissing can mean nothing, as well. It can be so over used that the meaning and spark has gone from it. Melding to the other person, mashing the color of your skin and the smell of your hair and the warmth of your breath into a pool of indifferent gray. Kissing needs to be used wisely. People often overlook the most beautiful thing in the world, so I decided to give it some recognition. Love, Frances.

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

The gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten,—
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.

i know there are bigger things than me -
                                                  your music and your art
  but the way our eyes catch across the room?
that's big too.

                                                            and i know i'll write stories for you someday,
                                                                               and you'll pick out a song with my name,
                                                                           when your hands have nothing else to do
                                                                       (your restless musician fingers
                                                                                and my writer's ones always searching for something)

and i know i don't abuse your substance of choice,
                                                                                             but my substance of choice is you
                                      (and they said you quit,
                                       and i wonder if it was for me)

                                                         and even so -
               the way our eyes catch across the room?
that has substance too.

There is a massive distance
between her smile and tears
when she writes about the rain.
Because her faded dreams
put her mind at ease
behind the places
where she stands
in pain.

Sitting in the garden
where one finds love
in those eyes
that speak of alone.
She writes lines
which intrigue mysteriously.
You can see her words dance
where she's walked,
when dawn breaks
across the trees.

The inner deepness of her words
hold on to each cloud,
crying out to the depths
of our bones.  
They tell us our worst hours
contain the time outside
of her faded dreams
and that they too.....
will soon be gone.

When she writes about the rain
we smile
behind the places
where we stood in pain.  
You can see her words dance
where she's walked,
knowing......
they never speak
in vain.

they'll build boxes for my bones,
and i won't stop them.
they'll seal it
(doubly)
and i'll break through, calm and easy.

they'll curse.
"****!" they'll say.
"we sealed it
double this time!"

i'll not be held in your boxes.
i'll do nothing but laugh when you curse.

I have wide hips, a wide waist.
chubby cheeks and
short legs
given to me

by my mother.

she is not a witch.
she has wrinkles, yes
but they do not define her
nor would she let them.

I have no interest in making friends with fish,
small birds,
candlesticks or clocks,
or rodents.


I need human contact to survive.

If you put me alone in a house in a forest,
I will not clean.  
I will not wait to be saved.
I will not ask for your permission to go outside.

I will leave.


I do not need a prince to live happily ever after.

I have short bushy hair
and a ******.
yes, it's there.
underneath my cotton underwear and long lace skirts
that no one is telling me to wear.

I have a sister.
I go to her for advice.
I look up to her and I talk to her about
Everything anything everything

I do not need a prince.



I look up to my mother.
She is not a source of fear,
she is a source of comfort
and relief.


what are We teaching our daughters?

these imaginary princesses
teach our babygirls

to have long eyelashes
to have two inch waists
long luscious hair
*** appeal


and if they don't,

they will never live happily ever after.

If I need all that to get one,

I do not want a prince.

I do not want to be anyone's
cinderella.

I will not chase after anyone
if they choose to leave.

I will weep into my sister and mother's shoulders

But that poor,
poor
princess

will always be chasing
squirrels
to talk to

and men
to be saved by.

When will we teach them to save themselves?


When will they teach themselves
that there is no such thing as perfect