Your bullets mean nothing but void.
Void where matter should be.
Absence where substance once was.
Darkness where light should be housed.
All of this for nothing.

If soldiers ride under the flag of someone else's dawn
what choice do we have but to march right on?
So he says, "Just like god I never meant to be,
and just like time you'll never know the end of me"

"Your answers lay in the middle of an enclosed glen
I wonder if you dared to step right in"
He says, "Just like god I never meant to be,
and just like time you'll never know the end of me"

Making new frames out of broken china,
the walls came crumbling down.
Out of new frames I make the greatest picture the world has ever found.
Of all the licks of orange,
the fabric torn,
the world and all it's sounds;
it would be you,
you and a box of matches to burn the whole thing down.
The whole thing down.

If someone's going to walk alone on a dark bridge suspended above the ocean bathed in strange blue light, let it be me.

Let it be me who let's the chill creep into my veins and brush past my cheeks.

If it has to be a sad song, let me sing it.

If we all get painted with watercolors, let it simply be.

I will draw you on my life with the rest of them, but I will always pause at you.

I will forever pause at you for a moment longer than every other statue in the museum of who I once was.

This life is unsustainable and eventually we all will wither and succumb to it.
It's for the best, to rest, on the pillowed walls of complacency
or wander through the hallowed halls of indifference.
Just once, you may see the cracks in the flooring and wonder what lies just underneath your feet.
And fall we will, like dominoes.
One by one
Like matches lighting matches
to the tune of our own
and surprise of us all.

In starting off, let me just say:
I don't love you because you are a beauty I can hardly touch with my finger tips.
I don't feel the urge to contain your body by caressing those perfect molded edges.
I love you because you are greater than the flesh that contains you.
You have this ability to transcend the constraints placed on by matter.
You are almost terrifyingly free from those chains.
I cannot measure you.
I cannot contain you.
And you of your own accord kiss my lips and accept that I am merely that of flesh.
Finite and calculable.
Flawed and visible to the naked eye.

Scratching off my skin and digging my eyes out.
The cracks branch off at the corners, swollen and puffy.
A busted lip, some pills, and a drink to help me relax.
Didn't work.
Little levies break now and then to spill small kernels of my locked up consciousness, then retract back in on itself.
Functional.
Motions, actions, procedures.
Pushing through the grime towards the bathtub.
Through the haze typing delicately to oneself.
Giggle.
Glorify yourself.
Lose your voice in explanation of everything except the important parts, the parts they already secretly know.
The stomach churns, sudden twinges pierce all the muscles.
Conversations swim about other things.
The oncoming memories, the irritations of daily life.
Just being here.

Give me a ring, to slip off my finger.
It moves to my right hand.
I move to my right hand.
and you raise your right hand at me.

When she drinks,
she tip toes right through that
line;
into a different state altogether.
A train barreling towards her
comes to a squealing focus.
There is danger everywhere
in the silence.
Someone poked a hole in her bubbly head
but everything was going so well.
So well.
Oh, well on the rocks it is.

The trees breakthrough the sidewalk;
and why shouldn't they?
Send the cars careening into one another.
Overtake the city-
until there is naught but a grove where this place once was.
I could use a grove right now instead of a shopping center named after one.

I watched it run out,
like a recording where the film just flips,
over and over again.
The dull empty clicking of a machine without purpose,
and white empty all-filling space.

A safe dog doesn't run the fence.
She wouldn't break the good leash to leave you.

I'm unrecognizable.
That's what they say when they identify you by your teeth. When they can't make out any of your features from any of your photos. Your voice is changed and your legs are weak and unproductive.
'Omm neon zebra' she says,
'on beyond' is what it is.
Push those fingers in your mouth
"Omfph Beyamph".
I'm so frustrated in the attempt to communicate.
To rip through the ceiling and stab out towards the darkness.
No words.. but sounds,
terribly dangerous sounds.
No one knows your name
and it never really mattered just the same.

Make peace with never knowing,
make peace with never going,
to the places, you pledged your life to.

Yes, I can smell the gunpowder all right.
And sure,  I can hear the 'pom' 'pom' in the distance of the bombs bursting in air and whatnot.
But I'm not seeing the red glare itself.
From every angle, I'm not getting any of the rainbow foofaraws as was advertised.
Instead, it's just me and the dog here.
I'm just dizzy with conflicting ideas of what being 'here' means.
Anyways, I'm too busy, tired and dispossessed of my patriotism to really give a rah-rah anywho.

I guess you can keep the fireworks.

She looked at me in a skeptical way and talked about what it means to be a vessel.

She offered some next steps, some sage advice.

But maybe I'm just the soil in champagne France, I thought, all chalk-full of clay.

Maybe the best most renowned bubbly celebrations come from this scraggly old vine.

What do you know? As I pawed at my stomach and breast.

Things still grow in the desert, they just aren't the things you like.

"So fruits and vegetables then?"

"Less fruit than you would think actually."

I blinked.

Sometimes I wonder why you love me.
I used to think it was my own selfishness begging the question forward.
But today I wonder because when I get on a roll
(and I do, often)
I can start seeing the impatience develop in the corners of your eye.
I don't know if it's always been,
or if just now it's become obvious to me,
but I can see it beginning to irritate you.
All my highfalutin recitations of my latest reading.
All of my internal cross-examination.
All of the stones I turn over and over in my hand - at you.
It's getting a bit much.

But you see I'm just too chock-full of existence
and you are the only vessel to pour it into.
I crave novelty and I can see that you,
instead,
crave peace.
You've watched the world worry over itself for long enough and you want to rest.
I never let you rest.

So then comes the questions again,
why is it you love me?
I am so restless and so curious and so mean.

I can't sleep because everything is on fire. I look outside, and there it is- the fire. I turn on the TV, fire. It's in my lungs and clinging to my clothing. It's stinging my eyes and giving me a headache.


It's been dark tonight but now the light has started creeping through the windows to remind me, everything has to continue. I have to go to school. My husband has to go to work.


I want to get in my car and drive somewhere that the smoke hasn't touched yet. But it's everywhere. It's to my left and right, it's up and down, closeup and at a distance.


I want to yell "Fire!" but no one will let me. I want to escape but no one will show me the exits. I'm tired of watching everything burn away and smolder and ache and choke and wheeze.

Vitamin D. Prenatal vitamins. Gauze. Paper-tape. Pregnancy tests. Ghirardelli square wrappers. Anti-septic. Band-aids. Small strips of paper towels. Anti-biotic wound care. Disposable masks.

My nerves are showing up in the cracking of my skin, in my eyebrows, between my eyes, and down my nose.

My hair's growth is stunted by my sporadic picking at the ends.

Now is not a good time. Now is the only time. Now is the worst time. Now is the best time.

Oh dear.
I fear I've made a history of myself.
All the paperwork is blowing in the wind.
Don't look at all my personal transactions.
Don't look at the mess I've made of my short life.
I've thought twice about the whole lot of it.
I've made amendments to every one of my thoughts and I don't trade in them anymore.
I've made memories I wish expunged from the record of existence.

There is this plant on the patio that overgrows itself every once in awhile and dies.
Beautiful flowers, but far too many.
Over-growing without thinking about the consequences.
Four million or so flowers blooming all at once and one little porcelain *** to hold them all.
It came naturally.

Some books are hard to read and cut you on the way down.
Some books make you wish to burn the inside of your ribcage out.
But those same books teach you some things you didn't know,
and those somethings make you change in ways you didn't think you could.
Some books break you into disparate pieces and put you back together in a new way.
Some books heal you in a way you didn't know you were injured.
But those same books are hard to pick up and easy to put down.
Some books have been calling out to you from other people's bookshelves their whole lives.
Some books have been given to you as an investment.
But those same books will live in silence if you never open them; too afraid of paper cuts to learn.

We have something that works.
It's such a small thing,
but like a tiny music box that still plays a tune you can recognize,
It's just my palm pressing into yours.
I'll keep doing it as long as it cranks out those same notes.

I have never seen vultures before, until now. There they were, seven of them. One low circling and the other six huddled around a raccoon on the side of the off-ramp. It was just like a cartoon, I thought.

Vultures aren't really dangerous, I told myself as I weaved the car around the gang. Technically, they are nature's garbagemen.

Still, there is something unsettling about them all the same. Their turkey necks. Their large bodies. The pulling of sinew from carrion.

But most of all the concept that they lie in wait for death, inevitable, with terrifying patience.

The Dumbarton Bridge begins with fetid life and ends in Zuckerburg's hollowed-out castle--
the sharp lines and primary colors of a tantrum.
The San Mateo Bridge begins with a ramp into the heavens,
welcoming all motor vehicles to the same celestial kingdom,
then proceeds to descend into the bay, leaving passengers eye-level with the sea birds collecting on floating lampposts--
funneling traffic through the waves back to the baffled freeway.
On the weekends we followed the road from our apartment until it stopped-- dead-ended at a nature reserve.
The salt marshes were littered with the worn posts of wooden structures,
caked in white,
offered with penance to the birds whose long beaks needled the shoreline...
The remains of pools in candy-colored reds and pinks,
the rust-colored scrub that looked like coral springing from the corners of the pathways
that lined cracking beds of arid, once-was, soupy water.

In my dreams, I drive right off the St. Thomas Bridge into the ocean
All the twinkly lights tell me I shouldn't have
Oh how I 'shouldn't have'
and a song plays in my head that says "Oh how you've grown."

For me, beauty comes from things that are loosely held.

Looking at them too long alters them,

Sitting with them too long ruins them,

Better to show the rough stuff of life than to crush a dream by the weight of my closed fist.

Better to miss a comma or semicolon than a true feeling.

Better to mix metaphors than to lose them entirely.

When I was young, I caught what I thought were butterflies, probably moths, in the schoolyard.

I was told that if their dust rubbed off they would die.

So I held them in my sweating palm as gently as I could, feeling the flapping thing struggle against the walls of my fingers.

They all died anyway.

The pill bugs would die too.

Everything died, regardless of how gingerly I handled them because they had simply stayed in my hands too long

But before they died, I had accomplished something and it was beautiful.

If I could just let go, they could thrive, but I spent too long with them.

I've spent too long with my own thoughts and they're dying.

I'm gracefully losing my mind.
Watching it spin in real-time.
Letting it crawl down my backside

Shiver me tenderly, Valentine.

I'm tripping up my own deceptions.
I'm writing more on human perceptions.
I'm living down, giving up screen time.
I'm pouring out more of your dream wine.

Well, what of my cynical rhyme?
What of my weekend romance?
What if my color-filled prime - tickled me pink as the springtime?

I'm tripping up my own deceptions.
I'm writing more on human perceptions.
I'm living down, giving up screen time.
I'm pouring out more of your dream wine.

Shiver me tenderly, Valentine.