Sleeplessness keeps me unkempt
Every evening I lay, restless mind wandering--
Not slept

I am most organized when--
Forced to take my mind from you, make grocery lists—
Not slept

What raps? What rustles? What howls?
My child, laid next to me, fits and turns eyes wide
Not slept

Eight months have passed since last I’d
Felt your hand at mine, restless I search the bedside
Not slept

I watch the skunk in my yard
Slink between dim fences and ferns, paws wandering
Not slept

Is it him who toils in dark?
While my home attempts to sleep, to dream, but remains
Not slept

Or is it the Hindi star?
The angry night washing over me, keeping me
Not slept

Yesterday I cut a gathered lump of hair off of my head
and all around me were the tendrils
and the tail I held in my hand I thought I might save.
Nicky told me "If you think it's so weird, then stop doing it"
But I kept the hair I didn't mean to lose.
Like I did my first night in jail,
after Chris,
When they gave me a comb and threatened to shave me,
I kept a ball in the pocket of my stripped shirt
then later in my underwear for safer hiding.

The box of long blonde braids,
and a thick black pony tail,
and bags of blue hair
sits in my bathroom cabinet above the sink.
But the hair in my hand I discarded willfully.

It is not the memory in front of the mirror before school
with the swollen brush marks across my legs.
Nor was it standing in the dining room across from my sister and mother huddled,
across from my stepfather out of breath,
and she choosing him.

I said I'd answer, "I didn't want it on my head"
Or "It just fell out, oh my God!"
But "I'm losing my mind" burst out instead
And I guess I feel alright just yet.

Just now,
after two ***** cranberries
Errol burst into tears.
He began with an aching whimper,
but loud,
and my little self boiled with indignation,
this "how dare you take my time--this is my time"--
my time to watch pause-able movies, and read endless Facebook posts.
Secondly, after a tiny moaning cry
I run into the room
and in the black find him
to pluck him from his sad dreams.
There is the happiness
though,
the thing those mothers yap about
covered in hair, ***** from a week's sweat,
the tired, collapsing hug of an infant
wakes me from my drunkenness
to weep.
I bring him into the light and he releases from the crook of my neck to stare with wrinkled eyebrows
and I wonder what I am:
This woman,
a smell,
a voice,
a flowing, shadowy goddess who rescues a sad boy from sick dreaming.
Then he plucks at my nose and nnns.
Then ears.
Then laughs.
Then sighs in a real, big, adult way that shrinks me.
As I carry him sideways into the kitchen I wonder,
will he write stories about the late evenings and his mother's red glass?

I'm really sick.
Like ***** is going to come out of my mouth--
an eruption of **** from my ears is due.
I've laid too long dormant
and one by one the hot spots of my petty jealousy,
     indignation, and
     mistrust are at boiling points:
The Ring of Fire, they call it.
Yellowstone
I'm the ******* Yellowstone caldera.
The great rim,
****** up and blister scarred,
knock-kneed from falling out of bed in nightmares,
weird from the predisposition to volcanic shittiness
      (not in a romantic way)
but none the less active,
         or reactive.

This vexation is as old as grinding plates.
This repulsion is as old as the poisoning of Aristotle

My head is the Spartan scythe
because I'm a new sign in an old world.
I use old signs to poison this newly dug well between us
But not well can I keep this message
        banner
        ******* billboard to myself.
So let me just wrap the code from ear to ear,
in plain text where you can see
the cypher: **** your red dress.

You see,
those blisters are the gravity between White Dwarves
pulling at skin, and earth, and ending thrown halfway across the universe.
I knew I'd seen you before,
there at the edge of the Oort Cloud
where we tell people we just met:
I stopped eating
I was hurt once
I was ugly too
and no one was really listening.
You and the rest of our red dresses meant too little.

But still then why do you whine over the hungry, and hurt, and ugly
and spit in my face for being there at the Edge,
and for loving the thrill in listlessness,
the passion in mundanity?
And that ******* about the shallowness of victims?

You didn’t learn a thing
traveling and trusting and falling out of beds.
Your drunken honesty is your sober lack of layers.
This isn’t a far reach of space,
your torn dress and cork heels won't work here.
Don’t bring that littleness here,
you're the only one not really listening now.

I tried to show him Jupiter last night
and the night before, my *****
and before that, the knuckles of my fist.
Then, also, the sinking of my soul on far too much Adderall
and the nature of a festering crush-- in a huge symbolic gesture.
Because saying, "I fantasize about this man daily"
would be too obvious and obviously intentionally hurtful.
This man barks about fidelity, wretched women and suicidal Nihilism
while I scribble, "Oh my ****, if it was me..."
and I watch his legs move and my body groans
groans into the next two hours.
I think about them both performing *******
on the beautiful, small breasted women I ******* to.
Today in History, I used to ******* to women of my own body type
because I once found myself desirable.
Now it's the women under the "Most Viewed" tab.

I love hearing a strong woman say "****".
I love hearing him blend nasty words with rhetoric.
When I retell moments, I fantasize foul language.

I wish I was a scribbler like Ry
who doesn't scribble anymore.