what do you do when the light at the end of the tunnel is there ?
i always tell me to get there but never what
to do when im standing in it ?
what do you do when it's too bright to see ?
when my pupils burn and strain and stretch like skin ?
what do i do with all this light ?
and the tunnel left behind me ?

i heard a song the other day that accessed
a private part of myself
and it unfolded out of me and wrapped itself
like vines around my bones, muscles, skin.
i heard a song that made palpable emotion
within me grow outward into tiny
goosebumps littering my arms.

that is the power of music,
art, poetry,
to make those inexplicable emotions free
and cover you in their shivering beauty.

My bones are filled like licorice
and my brain is marshmallow
under heat.
You're eating away at me.

You shake off little scraps of self
that I follow, grasp with two hands.
You leave enough to make me wonder,
but not enough to understand.

And from my sugary lips,
a thousand sweet requests,
trying to drown the bitterness
and keep the sour repressed.

But you're coating my skin,
dulcet and sickly and heavy
and all that's left of my sweet intent
are the bugs nibbling at me.

these are the moments
        it's said. the quiet
the grass, the dirt, beneath
      me.
       the breeze a touch cold
these are the seconds the
  transient frame-by-frame
               animations slowed
a thousand fold.
       Everyone is connected
    I swear life is a game  
             of limbo of
              cat's cradle. I swear
                       these are the
            pauses
               the breaks the
                 breaths in between.
                          all the chains:
                 these chords, these connections, these links
        curled around our ankles.
                   I swear.
                  these are the moments
                       i'm alone.

what has my skin ever done to you?
has it sinned or lied or driven you mad?
it does to me, but to you?

what has my skin ever done to you?
besides existing in this world where the beholder is shot by firing squad and his eye spooned out for all to see, what?

we were wed in the summer some sixteen years ago, my skin and i,
those years of discontent.
i filed all the papers
but i think they got lost in the post.

still i sit here sewed into swatches of white
writing down this question:
what has my skin ever done to you?

im shaking a snow globe and all flakes are stuck to the bottom.
i can't make it snow inside.
the smiling statuettes are broken and there's a hairline crack that slashes across the glass.

it used to wind and play the lightest tinkling music
like a jewelry box my mom bought for me when she wanted me to be her girl.
that's all over now.
i think it got thrown in the trash years ago with my pink baby blanket and the arching ballerina doll.

i used to be someone's daughter.
i used to be a girl shook up in snow with music ringing in the background.
it's dead quiet now.

my thoughts are stuck to the bottom of my skull
and can't be shaken up and the music crank is jammed and my heart is a silent overture.

i don't want to be a girl
or a boy or a thing
with limbs.
and i don't want a girl or a boy
or a thing as fragile as those statuettes with fractured arms.

they're still smiling even though they aren't whole.
how do they hold their pose so completely?

ive never been much good at that so i just watch with admiration at the
art of the inanimate,

cracking a hairline smile that can't stir my eyes.

i don't think i can shake you any harder and i don't think i can unglue those tiny flakes. after all, that's the whole ******* point, isn't it?

what good is a snow globe that doesn't snow or a person that can't love or a daughter that isn't?

what good am i to anyone if i can't be whole or good or correct?
ive been playing at the art of the inanimate and
those eternal smiles and pointed ballerina toes.

i thought if i was quiet as a figurine--
i thought.
i thought.
i thought.

and I'm shaking
shaking
shaking

and nothing is coming unhinged.
there's no music.
the hairline crack has become
formidable.

I can't tell anyone still
because of the complications of
this grotesque girlhood and the *** that hangs suspended between us
so artificial and illuminated.
do you see it hanging there? or is it another thing
that can only be
and never act?

im getting better at this
art of the inanimate.
and this veneer of wholeness
and manufactured joy.

smooth down my body in poreless plastic and close all entryways to trespassers

and the womanhood that fast approaches can't find me and the selfish needs of limbs will be void
and the human desire to destroy everything it touches will be curbed
if just for a moment.

i want to destroy you with how much I want.
how much i want the snow to fall. how much I want to be baptized in the cold and kissed in a vacuum separate from the world.

our own dimension of mistakes and quiet
where both of us can practice the art of the inanimate
in peace.

i see you performing it too,
and your own hairline smile that cracks.

did you think i wouldn't notice?

i think the snow is coming loose.
i can feel it running down my cheeks.
and im smiling even though it feels wrong.

the thoughts are dusting over me and resting in my eyelashes.
i see them every time i blink.
she's gone and so is he and
there's more than i can count on all my fingers and toes
that have left.

my knuckles turn white.
my fingers tighten.
the world is glittering glass
that falls like the first snow.

crying in the bathroom of a mini golf place feels like a low

I want to make my body like fall
so that when I'm dying you'll think
I'm beautiful.
And why I'm crying you'll see
orange, red, and yellow
and the litter will cover every imperfection.
I want to be every cliche
wrapped in scarves and leather laced up tight.
I want to be your frozen dawn
and early night.

I want to be warm in your hands
like a mug.
I want you to understand
that I'm seasonal, I can only be so much
for so long.

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 hope your happiness grows sweeter and sweeter
and each layer of dulcet pleasure wraps around
your heart like some great red lozenge.

i hope your happiness grows hard in your chest
like a too-sweet lump
with a liquidy sour center

i hope your happiness tastes like my mouth
and my bile
and my love for you powdering your lips.

i hope your happiness grows like a tumor
and your skin shrivels around it
while you wither in late summer heat.

i hope you cant sleep at night
and your heart slathered in happiness
draws every hungry bug.

i hope you have it removed,
that jawbreaker you call an *****
and i hope you choke on it

i'm
feeling so much
like an object
i'm becoming
inanimate.

there's this pervasive idea
that love is needing someone,
that without them your world stops turning
and your lungs shrivel without air.

but i would rather
have someone wake up everyday
rising from their sleep and stretching
and smiling
and deciding to choose me.
i'm not their air, their atmosphere.
and they could go on if i was gone.
i want to be chosen
consistently and persistently
i want them to want to be here.

that choice
is our most definitive beauty.

i think the beginning is always like the end
a perfect circle meeting a familiar point that draws itself to
completion.
i think i'm always going to meet that same point
despite the illusion of forward motion.
despite the spinning sensation of change.
i think the beginning is always like the end
and that's why i'm here alone.
you can cast a stone on water but it always sinks
you can take a picture of yourself and
think you're beautiful
but it never cures the sickness that comes like clockwork.

i'm a circle but i'm far from perfect

sleeping means tomorrow
and i can't let that happen.

somehow i will master time.
somehow I will live in the inbetween

somehow this cigarette will last
forever

I ran a red light today, and god that's so mundane
but I thought some thoughts I think are worthy
of putting on a page.

I saw the car to my left, the slick road glowing red.
I thought, just for a moment, what it might be like to be dead.

I ran a red light today, and god that's so morbid,
I thought that if I died, I'd never
finish something I started.

I felt my lungs twitch and my heart freeze,
signals shooting from my head.
Just what would I be missing, if I was cold and dead?

I ran a red light today, and god it's not that big a deal
but my mind went still and I didn't know
how I should feel.

I still need to lose a few pounds, meet someone new
all those petty things
we people go through.

I ran a red light today, and god I don't know why I care
but I guess it's because I like it here
rather than nowhere.

Every moment blurs into a bend
of semi-reality, a question of
recollection. A thread fraying at the ends.
My heart pounds in a flurry,
and I'm in a frantic hurry
to dream my life a way and whisper nothings--
not even sweet--
and to disappear as soon as we meet
inside myself and inside a heart of amber,
in nectarine stagnation
of my own creation, balancing on the thick cable of separation
between thoughts and action, too afraid to fall into either.

Not a wallflower, but a wall indeed
caught in the mire of my own selfish loneliness.
Can you see me there? With my eyes in kind forgetfulness
and my hair cut short to show my face,
but finding it an empty place which is a cardboard front to my sagging edifice.
Oh god, I'm so afraid of being dull,
yet the harder I push, the more I pull.

I feel like I am a glacier on the run,
forced to move, afraid of the sun.
My bed is as cold, a glacial sheet
and I draw it up to my chin.
Within my head there's a circus of love,
clowns with painted faces and mirrors ten feet high.
And sometimes when I'm alone I cry and point my finger in my chest.
Always knowing why feel alone.

Is it possible to doubt yourself as much as I?
I kissed a girl once and felt blank
and I wondered why, and when
I found I sank to my knees and prayed
to my atheist god.
I am so ashamed, and with every rising sun my heart sinks in turn.
Why do my thoughts think and my courage fail
on the brink of something deep and terrifying?

These thoughts creep up on me in the night:
seethe from my skin and lay limp upon the street.
I'll play my music loud so they can't compete.

I wonder too often if I've lived my life all wrong.
Sometimes I'm lost, sometimes I play along.
I've burned myself and I itch at my knotted brand,
wishing I could change it at a command.
     Too simple, too stupid to wish scars away.
What would they say? That thought paralyzes me, keeps me static and in ice.

What is the price for the sin of lying to oneself?
And where do I begin?

i like to feel my stomach,
where it's soft and then turns
into the hardness of my ribs.
i like the contrast, the
feeling of it underneath my hand.
i don't know why
but i like my contrasts
and the way that sometimes
i feel so low
and other times like i'm
ten feet above the ground.
i like that i can laugh
and then lie in bed at night,
feeling the loneliness settle on top of me
as an extra sheet that fails to keep me warm.
i like that the wild, contradicting variation
like New England weather, like a prediction
versus a storm.
i like knowing that i can feel everything,
all the violence of myself.
i like hurting because it means i'm real,
and happiness for the same reason.
i like my contrasts.

love is saying
you won't get drunk on them tonight
you want to stay sober
coherent
together
but you
just
can't
help yourself

I dye my hair to be different
from the person I was an hour ago.
I didn't like her very much.

I take a picture or two
to memorialize my new baptism
of peroxide and pigmentation.

The chemical smell fades and the new
becomes commonplace
and I'm back to the person that I was.

And I'm fraying like the ends of my hair
and splitting and breaking and I'm her again:
just as ugly as ever.

You've made your world
of eggshells
and we're all just trying
to walk in it.

all my poems
have become people.
i've tried the imagery, the
rhyme, the stanza,
the verse.
but i think i'm cursed.

sometimes it's him,
or her,
or them.
sometimes when i start
a line
it twists into a familiar shape
and the poem is a polaroid
slowly appearing.

i've collected people
and things
and ideas
and they all weave together
like a novel.
more and more these poems
seem like snapshots,
or a failed attempt
to capture
all the little things that make
him, her, them
beautiful and real.

maybe i'm on a quest to feel
or on a journey of commemoration,
but the people i've let in
have stolen my pen,
my poem,
my heart,
without an invitation.

Do you remember me?
I'm sure you do but do you
see through the blown glass
warped blue-green?

You must remember me
I tell myself as I stroke
the puckered corners of my page.
At least some shred of me
is lodged in your shrapnel heart.

You don't remember me
as you walk past in booted stride;
you have gone south for the winter,
I hibernate and hide.

I write on that binder
where you crushed
those two blue constellations
into stardust,
and I watched you pull heaven
into your skull.
I hope for a moment,
you were full
but you seem so empty now.

I guess your
blue supernova
turned to ash.
I guess your past
is orbiting you
as you burn out
against black.

I feel like I'm watching from Earth,
your implosion,
which has already been
and I can only
bathe in the
light
of those two blue constellations
hidden by your eyelashes.

Stop looking at me
stop stop stop stop.
Their narrow eyes make me want to throw up
and I feel
so sick
welling in me like some ******* typhoon
and I don't know what do with this
energy gathering force, black and huge.
I don't know where to direct this
animal that grew in the cage
of the boxes
that they've tried
to cram the lid on top of
with me there silent.

I am more than ***, weight, gender, hair
and not that any of you care,
but I can feel and I'm alive
and my heart is banging against my chest
but nobody's home,
nobody's home.
And you might as well take a knife
and find a place for it between the sturdiness of my ribs.
Maybe you can cut out
some of my less desirable traits.
Maybe you can trim me into shape.

They look at me like a murderer.
Maybe you're afraid I'll stain your cornflower hair red
with my ***** touch.
And the more you
look look look
at me
the more I think
I'd like to very much.

So look at me
like I'm ****** and ******
and sin.
Alright,
okay,
you win.
I'll be the murderer,
the outsider, the stranger you'll never be.
And I'll ******,
god, I'll do it.
I'll ****** me.

There is a poetic irony
in being a victim.
It's an art, a skill
honed by abuse.
And the victim learns to be
one of two things.
The victimized, the oppressed,
or
the abuser, the user.

You practice
a higher art.
You can be
both.

i know no one is here
looking at my poetry.
but i like having it,
so it can remind me.

What I love the most about you
is my name on your tongue,
through your teeth.
There's meaning in it,
and in me;
you make those five letters
sound like poetry.

Inadequacy is heavy. I've never weighed it but I'd imagine
it's at least a ton.
After a while, the back becomes bent and the neck curved
and eyes twisted from the sun.
With love in our hearts,
we pass this on
to our daughter or our son
only to crumple,
exhausted and undone

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're a walking universe
and
all your stars have gone out

now it's so unfathomably
       dark.

smoking craters as planetary masses
collide
and
you there: remote, frozen
and held together with the gravity of your own depression
light years from any sun.

i wonder if every someone
is a universe spinning in
their own sphere of energy.

i wonder if universes can ever connect.

i look at you through telescope pupils,
flecks of dust catching light.

i don't know if our universes could ever touch
or if
we're both alone in the stretching constellations of our heads.

i wonder if dysfunction
is learned or predetermined.

nothing is making me happy
maybe fall will see me content for a little while
before it gets too cold
just as its too hot
and the world will be too much
and i will wonder why
nothing is making me happy

I think it's trash
that society makes me feel like a *****
for getting angry,
for being brash.

I think it's sick
that I'm ****** for saying
words like
***** and ****.

I think it's a waste
that I'm looked down on
for saying jokes
in bad taste.

I think it's insane
that I'm considered
too fat, too ugly, too masculine,
and am forced to feel shame.

I think it's a tragedy
that as a woman I have to
undo and unlearn
me.

Around my bulging linen waist,
my knees upon the tile,
my cotton chest, my very best,
stained and smudged with bile.

My mouth, my chapstick lips are smeared,
my knuckles painted white.
I run the sink, I fear to think
and cleave to shrouding night.

My throat remembers its baptism,
flat and sharp my stomach sings.
As I fix my hair, in the mirror I stare,
a wistful smile of secretive things.

i don't understand
my impulses.
i don't understand the sun
or the moon,
or the veined leaves splayed
orange, green, and gold.
i don't understand
why i feel so
old
or why i make myself
so sad.
i don't understand
why i was born,
how things got so bad.
and mostly
i don't understand
what a ******* difference it makes.

I spent the spare change of my life telling myself,
'I don't need anyone.'
And I think that I was right.
I told myself,
'Don't depend on anyone.'
Because people are as vaporous as clouds,
and I know that I was right.

And now I think,
'I don't need anyone,
but
wouldn't it be nice
to want someone.'

the internet told me it was either
mono
or
depression
so i shrugged and thought
it must be mono.
the sleeping too much,
or not at all,
eating one small meal a day
and barely keeping it down.
i'm hungry
and everything smells
like sickness.

the cigarettes are going one by one,
and my room is stuffy
and feverish.
i listen to the music
pulsate from next-door,
thrumming near my ear and mingling
with voices and laughs and little jokes
i'll never know.

i put my ear to the wall to listen,
but i know i'll
just be there
straining to hear.

it's go to be mono.
must be,
has to be,
because i'd feel betrayed
by my own brain chemistry

i'm not that person;
i'm not that person.

i still think about you a lot.
and i don't know if that's weakness.
you're in the cigarettes i smoke
(when you handed me one after another and told me not to smoke so much)
you're in my car
(where we put the windows down and you flooded your body with medicine)
you're in my mind, and even after everything
(my hands shaking on the wheel)
you're there
(telling me how cute i was from my passenger seat)
i can barely remember your mouth or the way it felt
('this **** is fire')
and i know you were a cancer, preying on my softest parts,
(you swaying, eyes half-closed, caught in center of that 'fire')
but i can't **** that cancer i can't
(your arms around me through your haze)
because then i'd have to **** all of it
('thanks kiddo')
even the good parts.

The only thing I've ever committed to
has been cigarettes.
So I've been stockpiling my doubts
and all my little regrets.
Maybe I'm useless, maybe I'm a waste.
Or maybe I just haven't found it;
maybe I haven't found it yet.

And the taste of smoke is jolting, renewing,
reminding
me of that fear that I
am designing my life around:
desperate to find color in the insipid motions of living.
Maybe I am committed to the search;
That one day I will wake up and be found
And the first thing I reach for in the morning
will not be the lighter but
her
or him
and their pluming breath, rhythmic will surround me
and the warnings
on the side of my pack will seem real
and my god, will I finally ******* feel.

I am convinced
    that when I was young,
         I nearly died.
I very nearly did.

And my soul,
   cast from my body,
was gone.
      My radiant, lovely form
          composed of collar bones and smooth hair;
I've lost it.

I have scoured all day
    and prowled by night,
searching for my beautiful bones.

Instead I have fallen
   into this body. This flesh knotted around me.
It is foreign, rough,
  and I hate it. I hate it.
      Where is my true self?

When I am keener, when I am stronger,
when I am faster, fitter, better,
   I will find my lost limbs and
       forgotten features. I will transcend this mediocrity
which is two sizes too small.

This is not me,
   this body bought on sale.
  
I'm afraid to feel otherwise.

I feel stagnant on the shoreline
watching them adrift on a yacht,
a speck of white against grey and stale blue.
There’s salt in my mouth and
hate on my tongue
and I just want to build up a sandcastle and kick
it over and stomp upon it because I don’t
know what else to do except be childish
and alone
and lay upon the shoreline,
watching the phantasmagoria of lights play and shadowed silhouettes twist in social dance,
until the tide comes in and binds my mouth
with seaweed and my thoughts with tentacles so I can
suffocate my anger because I hate it
swimming here inside my saturated mind.
I want to drag you out like undertow and fill your orifices with foam and
and sea-stones rubbed smooth by years of your rough push and pull.
I’ve balanced my life in the palm of my hand,
but now I want to scissor it from my body because it’s so full of
nothing.

I thought I tasted
something unique in your mouth.
It was clean and simple and
you smiled as our mouths
went in and out
like the tide.

I had a night that turned to day,
light touching the bedspread through the narrow window
and crawling up to where our heads lay.

And after months
of eclipse
you struck suddenly like a match
flickering into being.

I held you for a night,
but a match smolders
till it touches your fingers,
and mine are singed.

Grasping greedy claws for brilliance
nicotine, alcohol, smoke
trying to choke out brilliance
through these substances
variegated like a jangling ring of keys
to an enlightened door.
But the more I try to **** down
each little chemical, I feel
emptier, drained
and my strained imagination
leans on reality for support.

And I tell  myself that there is always time,
another tomorrow like a promise
or an I.O.U.
and that shining tomorrow will be
so effortlessly new
drenched in drugs
and sweat
and nostalgia
and I'll be present
and there
and full,
pulling on the sleeve of the almost known,
the call that could reach my phone.

And tomorrow I'll be thin
and weight as much as
smoke.
Tomorrow all those lies I spoke
will be true, and my selfish wants
will no longer be daunted by
my crippling doubt.
Tomorrow will be without error or pain
or disappointment, or that same monotony.
Tomorrow, that cool spring morning, will renew
Trust me, and forget the truth.

It's amazing
how people
love the things
that
hurt them.

being broken isn't beautiful
and it took remaking myself
to understand.

sad isn't pretty.
it's just sad.
it's crying over the toilet
and drinking cheap ***** straight.
it's looking down instead of in the mirror
because it hurts too much.

broken isn't beautiful
and don't ever let a poet
tell you otherwise.
broken is just broken
so remake yourself with me
and i'll help hot glue you back with humor
and love.
you are not
destined to be in fragments.
you will be whole.
you will
you will
you will

i sleep on top
of my sheets.
i don't need another layer
when i'm already burning.
i have so many:
glued to tendons, muscle, bone.
i wonder where i begin.
i wonder when the wafer-thin
barriers began to stack up
and when i became laden with them
i wonder when i got so fat with
fear
insecurity.
i sleep on top of my sheets
because i'm already blanketed
by safety.

i feel like i'm swimming
in a petri dish.
and some gloved hand
has dropped in a dose
of self-loathing
and i'm dissolving,
dissolving,
dissolving
molecule by molecule.

why have you given me this poison?