i was born blue & you were born yellow
& you colored me with yourself.

only that made me green
& you didn't seem to like that very much.

you asked me why i was such a noxious shade
& i couldn't answer.

i couldn't answer

i am early onset gum disease,
mouthfuls of pink spit lining the ceramic sink.
i am enough to warrant concern but not enough
to change.

i am skin stretched tight as a drum
with a living thing trapped inside,
stretching scars into its elastic prison.

i am ***** evaporating on suburban pavement
and the halo of litter around a garbage bin.

i am the stickiness of salt water drying on skin,
dribbling down and down and down.

i am the sensation of growing too old too quickly, of a rip in the seam of a shirt you once loved, loved, loved.

i am a nobody that is everybody.
i am so crushingly common and so
******* singular and i am the terror you feel
when you think of this.

i am lowercase i and capital I and grammar tables and the volumes of modernist poetry.

i am the twinge you feel when they speak his name
and hers and the ones who are just faces living in the corners of your mind.

i am touched and taken and drowning in liquids turned amber and sweet. i am gluttony and those six other sins which have never seemed so deadly.

i am speaking for myself, and i wonder if others speak for me.

i am nurture given living form. a product, a creature, a many-limbed thing.

i am all repulsion and vile intrigue. i am the
hall of mirrors and body cut in two. i am gemini sighs and red skin flaking free.

i am a half of a whole of a half that is
tired of completion and its worship.

i am a pilot, a lookout on the highest point. i am cracked lenses and falsely tripped alarms. i am the things that frighten then grow dim.

i am twenty and i am nowhere. and i am a living time capsule of things not worth remembering.

i am so disgusting and fat and ugly. i am a pig and a fat ******* waste of space.

i am bulbous and horrendous and vile. i am a massive mistake. my future will be nothing but pain. that is all i am made for. that is all i am born beneath. burn me in smoldering smoke. scar me in shallow deeps.

i am built for nothing but struggle.
that's my design.
i wonder how much i dream
up and how much is real.

i am nothing and so much skin.
pull it off me please

you cried behind the steering wheel and said you didn't understand
why i hated myself
my body
my being
so much.
you cried as if i could divine the answer in those wet trails.

i didnt have a word then.
i didnt have an answer.
feelings are so much bigger than words sometimes
and that was the only truth i had to offer you.

i cried too
but my tears didnt shine like yours.

i think i understand now.
i think i have an answer.

but i think that would just make you cry even more.

i miss the butterflies and all that other
lovey dovey ****.
they must've run out of air in my stomach.

i miss the feeling of someone taking your breath away
like a punch to the gut.
i miss my thoughts being consumed and filled and bursting.

i miss love
and wanting it.
the butterflies are dead in the pit on my stomach and i dont know if that's all i get.

i watch romance movies and wonder about
That Great Love
and if i've used mine up already.

i turned it off because that easier and now the switch is stuck
and for a while i didn't care but now
my fingers aren't strong enough. the fluttering inside me is gone.

it's gone.

this is the only way I know to absolve myself
and it's not working

there is no relief.

eat your words like a last meal that makes you sick

fill yourself up with haphazard and call it finished

tell her you want and then watch it shrivel like wet paper.

make promises that die like bugs kept in a jar.

watch the hands that once held yours draw away, slick with your sweat

realize you don't know how to ask for help.

smoke because it hurts and you know you deserve it.

ache because you're so good and getting it wrong.

hide because your limbs so fragile and boneless