you call me *****
label me with broad brushstrokes
to paint onto the tableau of
my life a permanent stain where
you think i don't already see one.

the joke's on you.

trying to sully an already *****
contaminated crime scene
you won't wipe away fingerprints
seared into my skin
by those who also
saw me as that *****
were you disappointed when you saw
i already had ruby red marks
of hands wrapped around my neck?
because your flying shrapnel
accusations make me wonder
if you wish you had
gotten there first.

*****.

though the declaration stings
it certainly doesn't take me
by surprise when i
see that word stamped across my
forehead any time i look in the mirror
the syllable lives between my legs
and bleeds my secret shame
but i can't let you see me cry
i can't let you know it hurts
i can't let on that i would do
anything to purge this stain.

how could you understand
that i see my reflection in
***** in the toilet so i
shove my fingers farther down
my throat to recreate
that feeling of drowning
the gags that created me.

*****.

i want to blame that
violation
or even my erratic neurotransmitters
for morphing that flaxen-haired
nice girl
into the gnarled old
shame-riddled creature who sits
silently before you
being named *****.

but it was no one else who
led myself to this place
who traversed dimly-lit rooms
of iniquity
and was reborn as this contemptible creature
i take up my cross
my new mantle
my ******* scarlet letter.

you make me want
to run through the streets screaming
to stand on a street corner
preaching the gospel
of my culpability
have you heard the news
of our ****** executioner
the *****
the label feels even more
familiar than my own name.

i don't deserve a name.

take my clothing and dress me
in rags
strip me of my name and address me
only as *****
my life will now be only
passive acceptance and
those hands will explore my hidden places
though they are as unknown
as Disneyland on a gilded
summer day
but you can watch my searing shame
in the invisible white hot tears
only i know.

don't touch the *****
or you might fall victim to
my contagious disease
of optics and opinion
myself the lowest caste of society
relegated to empty halls
and abandoned structures
where i am abandoned as well.

you seem surprised that
the *****
would be fiercely independent
would be accustomed to
being alone
but who stays with a *****?
who takes her home to
meet the family
my independence was merely
an adaptation
Darwinian evolution ensuring
i would survive
to suffer another day
another trial
another sentence.

i understand now why
criminals are handed
multiple life sentences
because i'm punished daily
deservedly so
i would **** myself and if
i came back i would
cry out for more
more pain
more lashes
lay me bare and cut the skin from
my bones and call me *****
never stop
never let me forget
what is burned into the back of
my eyelids
a memory connected to
that word
my name.

i was given that name
by violating vandals
who spray painted my guilt
all over myself
and i can't escape that night
whenever i close my eyes and
pray i won't wake up
or pray i'll wake up in some other body
uncontaminated
a form that was never touched
virginal purity i wish i could
somehow repackage and
re-insert into my ****
to purify the orifice of all
those who branded me
*****
the mantle i took on myself
and made manifest.

i'm the monster hiding under my bed
lurking just below the placid
surface of my own personal Loch Ness
and praying that i remain
a legend of the local townspeople
masquerading as those who
call me friend and lover
those perfectly content to take in
my slow crumbling facade
and name it history
roman roads meandering across
my features the ruts of those
early onset wrinkles which
threaten to out me
to scream out my sickness
a diagnosis of malevolence
hiding in my tightly wound double
helices the ladders i climb
as though there were salvation waiting
at the top
though Sisyphus would understand
my plight but more so
comprehend my incessant pursuit
of a false flag promise of
redemption.

but i can't escape the prison of my skin
my identity the crystal lattice of
epidermis holding in
the supernova of destruction and death
the famine after my insatiable need
consumes all nourishment for
i'm too much
too much need
much too much malignancy
spreading like a cancerous mass
consuming and metabolizing all that
is good and innocent.

do not extend to me
your tendrils of sympathy
of compassion
look upon me as the condemned
war criminal on the stand and
the Hague chilled to immobility by
the tales of my horror.

put me to death and think no more
of the fallacy i perpetuated
for decades spent offering
silent pleas for intercession and yet
unable to ever escape my transgressions
which live below the surface
in the deepest parts of me
intricately woven into those essential
parts of myself
a tumor grown into my heart
too close to the life-sustaining
machinery for any to dare extraction.

but i could **** every part of me
and one day i will
as i pay and pay my way to salvation
clad in sack cloth and my feet bare
praying for smoldering coals to
traverse searching for pain
pain to wash me clean
pain to fill the need for punishment
because i've learned that even
punishment which provides no
redemption
gives me the appearance of at least
seeking that which
i know i'll never have.

and after all these years
do i really want it at all?
would i forego any more pain?
could i even believe that i
have been forgiven?
that my slate had truly been
wiped clean?

even if everyone watched me
be washed back to infantile innocence
i would still know
always
my inner stain spread through my
entrails like some perverse
Rorschach test for reading by an
oracle who could proclaim
after my death
that the beast had been slain and
now they welcome the eternal
kingdom of god.

but do not call me martyr.

do not send pilgrims to my grave
do not consign me to Apocrypha
do not dilute
or contaminate the
sacrosanct of some
even if i always believe it was
superstitious *******.

they believe it to be real
to be holy
and myself the human stain should
never be near.

burn my bones and burn them again
grind them to dust and jettison them
to the remotest ends of the earth
where no foot treads
and my disease might not spread.

i flay the skin off my own bones
so no one else must.

do not touch me

leperous disaster
harbinger of the end of all things.

let me starve and rot
the putrid scent of my decay
finally dissolving the mask
and in my death i can't even
lower my face
dead eyes can't look away
but you couldn't know
that's how they've always looked.

sometimes i think no one can understand how
when i finally release in savasana
and my sweat is pooling in my ear canal
and deafening me like i'm at the
bottom of the ******* ocean
that i suddenly stop feeling
the crushing weight of a mile of sea
above me
and become the sea itself
exuding lacrimal saline
and luckily no one can distinguish my
oozing despair from my
sweaty travails of
chaturangas and vrabadrasanas
but what warrior sobs in silence?
of memories of life squeezed from
corporeal forms
of final breaths
of person become corpse
of the loneliness of transcendence
of the destitute state of calling yourself
survivor.

but i sob.

myself assuming a pose named corpse
allowing me to be reborn and emerge
from asana as enlightened
how can a corpse feel the weight of
the world on her chest
the weight of miles of tilled earth
crushing memories and corpses that
drown me until i am too much
too close to actual death
that it makes me ache for those who
have gone before me
and whose tendrils are still stitched
into my heart making me wish
i actually believed all the *******
saying i will awake after
departure from my moral coil
to be greeted by those i've lost
those i miss
those who make me sob in savasana.

but how healthy would that be?

it would probably be the only
thing which could make death seem
more appealing
to someone who fantasizes about
overdoses and suspension bridges
long falls ending in darkness.

don't tell me there is a better place
when just nothingness and
non-existence is already my
better place.

don't promise me i'll see her
again when i'm
one of those people who wants
to see her so badly that i
would walk out onto the freeway
to facilitate that reunion.

but luckily i don't believe
i can't believe
even if i wish i could
have that security blanket to curl
up with in the dead absolute zero
of night so i wouldn't have
that bone-crushing anxiety and loneliness
that exploding grief when
it all hits me anew
like i'm watching her take her
last breath all over again
myself the corpse now
sobbing in savasana.

maybe it's the stillness that gets me
as i lay covered in sweat
eyes closed
it's the first time in the day i'm
present only in that moment
not mentally worrying whether i've
missed an email or
somehow ****** up my relationship
in ways i still can't fully understand
but i can't dispel my thoughts who
lurk below the surface
they bubble up in my sweat
they slide to the surface in each down dog
and destroy me when my
body stops moving and i release
sobbing in savasana.

because you can't see
the bottom of oceanic
depths do you doubt
their existence?

do superficial ripples
signify nothing?

for mine are smoke signals
little earthquakes
and stirrings fathoms below
my surface
geothermal vents spewing forth
unbounded and unbridled
emotion which
originated from seismic shifts
in my molten core
and i yearn for volcanic release
for ashes of love
to fall and rain down on my life
unique as each snowflake to
anoint the heads of those
who i've chosen
who've chosen me
Shiva the destroyer
a goddess who denies her power
and mortals who cannot
understand
two love
the limbo of
rejecting your authentic self
and trying to culture
a love from
the charred remnants
of a ship splintered on the rocks
victims to sirens of silence
slicing out of myself
my very essence in an attempt
to destroy this form
this vessel which carries
in itself my
two love
whose power is incomparable
impossible
yet so real and tangible
its dichotomy now laid bare
exposed
not separate but integrated
conjoined
drawing power from itself
like two orbiting galaxies
whose existence is
intricately woven into the other
yet are the two
any less splendid
even on their own?
but together
an orchestral masterpiece of
two love

the sun gives life
and you are most certainly my sun
the one i orbit
the one i worship and
lay at your feet
burnt sacrifices
myself the goddess who
consumes the world but
allows herself to be consumed
to be destroyed so you
my sun
may give me life

but the moon
she reminds us
that you
my sun
are there when you cannot be seen
when your rays can't
penetrate me and warm my
weeping countenance

my moon
she loves me in the dark of night
nestled amongst her stars
and watches in the day
as i dance in
wild admiration for you
she smiles in my joy
she lives in my
two love.

i've surprised myself and
i've thought about it now
and it's been put out in the world and
i don't know how to escape its
constant knocking on the hollow inside
of my skull around
my atrophied brain that is
starved and parched
a barren wasteland of rejection and
inadequacy

we simply see the world differently
but
isn't that my entire life?
being the one who
is rocked to the core and
feels an earthquake when
it's just the quivers and shaking
of my hands as i extend them
towards you
begging for you to take me and
hide me from the truth that
you won't come back to me
that the pursuit of some
professional dream
an ethereal race towards
a person you wish to be but
is there room for me?
do i fit into the little suburban box
he sees for his future?

i manipulate
but it's not what i intend
how can my cataclysmic emotions
be expressed and yet not
interpreted as some demand
the stomping foot of an insolent child
unable to be placated until
i get my way
that's what you told me
and no matter your denial
those words are seared into my mind
and even when they've healed
and no longer ooze the
agony of being this odious person
the scars will linger
and i will remember

i've considered life without you now

our priorities don't line up
like obedient soldiers await orders
to propel them into the future
for us the future is a black hole
all that matters to me
being together
i would live in a cardboard box
and as long as i
could lay down with you at night
i could deal with anything

but you

you are driven by
materialism
a salary matters more than me
and somehow
the distance between us
doesn't seem to be a motivating factor
in finding a place here
a place with me
how can you not feel that agony?
if you loved me
wouldn't you fight through
rain sleet snow
wind
tornadoes
hurricanes
to get back to me
i would wade through neck deep water
i would run until my body collapsed
i would throw myself on the fire to save you
i would do anything
and you can't be bothered to
ever
come back.

JUST LEAVE

i want to scream it
inches away from your
******* face that i can't
erase from the back of my eyelids
haunting me any time i
blink
or sleep
trying to shut out the world that
revolves around you
and your closeness
but you're burned into my retinas
your narrow bearded face
branded into the secret parts of me
even your absence won't
expunge you from
my sight

JUST LEAVE

i know your departure
looms in the shadowed future world
the same one i
have to consciously choose to
inhabit
because i could easily take
a handful of pills
and blissfully drift away to
that other dimension
and your face
wouldn't haunt my dreams
a cessation of nightmares where
i see the reality i am so
desperately searching for
hidden somewhere in your face
but this is not reality
and your face is still a
mystery

JUST LEAVE

take your empty words
your unspoken fear
that hidden suppressed terror
you feel when you
see me
naked in front of you
waiting to be devoured
because i would sacrifice
every ounce of my body and soul
to hear you say
i love you
but you can't and
i am crumbling like
a cliff face bowing to
the persistent crash of the ocean's waves
you chip away at me
a sculptor trying to pull the
figure from a block of granite
but you've gone too far and
it's too late to salvage
what was once a grand vision
but is now
a pile of stone

JUST LEAVE

let me go
free me from this
emotional prison of hope
whose torture is the
promise of a rosy future
where needs are met and
wants coalesce into a
coherent reality
and us
together
you whispering into my ear
and nourishing my
ailing starving mind and
shrunken emotions
stunted before they are
even born
brought into this real world

i don't even know anymore
whether reality
or fantasy
hurts
more

please

just leave.

it's pain
missing someone you know
you can never see again
but it's a special kind of torture
to miss the man sitting right
next to me

has he left yet?
an imminent departure that
looms ominously in the future
concrete and yet nebulous in
its heat-wrenching reality
but am i not already gone
departed from this bag of bones
the sack of flesh
that holds your hand
physically next to you but
miles away
lost
in the shadow world of
haze and fog
detached so that you can't
be ripped from my heart
or at least
i won't be able to feel it
like a ghost reaching for the
tenuous solidity of life

you slip right through my fingers
the last drops of water
in the barren wasteland of
famine and drought
sun scorched earth
desert land parched with
cracks running like
fault lines
and i'm waiting for the earthquake
the meteor impact
for a chasm to open up and
devour me
to take away my agency
so i won't have to die
by my own hand

but what else am i to do?

i am a rapidly swirling
hurricane
a typhoon of uncontrollable
emotion and thoughts
chained to the white matter
tethered to my brain
scratching away as a constant
reminder that you're leaving
and i'll once more be
abandoned
alone
nothing

but loneliness is a familiar friend

am i a monster?
or just a machine
trundling towards the
end of the tracks
the derailment of my
tenuous sanity
and i welcome the carnage
the shards of glass and
twisted metal that
harkens back to the
burdening truth inside that
i'm still here and the
pain is unbearable

and i'm broken
like a swallow's shattered wing
i try to fly but
that gelatinous appendage
can't bear me to the sky
so i fall and pass you
on the way down
and i never expected you to catch
me

you didn't

but your face
that blur registering only
as that unmistakeable longing
that soul crushing emotion that
settles in my heart and
clogs the arteries until
its furious beats are choked out
but i welcome death
because i live in those
tenuous moments between
the last heartbeat
and the cessation of neural firings

i'm drowning

i can't keep my head above water
but the burning in my lungs
can't distract me from
that ripping clawing terror
in my chest
and not even death can
erase the gaping
empty
vacuum
you leave in your wake.