where am i?
how am I to write when
I am no different from
those gaseous ephemeral words
who lie prostrate upon
the pages of my dictionary
carved plainly into
those battlefields strewn across
the wartorn country
my heart the despotic dictator
whose primal drumming
carries no tune
and no rhythm
and throws of explosions
grenades that
black out the world for
a brief moment
until it careens back and
slams into me
disorientated

i should have been born twice
for how could i have
both my body and that
intangible inexplicable
something inside
it stirs at the molten core
of me
that chasm that forged
those graven images
that first gave way to
a pictographic language
and offered me
a voice
to explain that immutable
all powerful
urge
lust
to throw myself on that
red button and
detonate
burst into a million pieces
and finally relieve that
nauseating pressure
of adipose smushed between
holy bone and
saintly skin
interloping in that space
and separating two lovers

barriers create madness

walls box me in
and yet i grow
an expanding balloon girl
macy’s day parade and
candy littered streets
and razor sharp edges
to steel walls pressing harder
against me than
my supple skin could
ever possibly press
back

i can’t breathe

there is no room
for my lungs to expand
and feel the
fresh sun filled meadow
of crystal air
delivering oxygen to
starved alveoli
and i can’t find your chest
to guide me
in impossible respiration

i’m suffocating in my own skin
from no outside force
but my body itself
turns inward and
shouts its dominance at my
cowering self
sniveling in the corner
of my dusty half used heart
where no blade could possible
land a blow deep enough
to silence the torment and
particular personal poison
a torture to course through
every part of me
activating every single neuron
and making me
hyperaware of my
shame and noxious
venomous corpulence
a reality i
never wanted you to see
but is written plainly
in fiery script across my forehead
and in every fold of fat.

how easy it is to write a poem
of unrequited love
an ode to that insatiable hunger
that lives unwelcome in the pit of
my stomach
and slowly eats away at me
gnawing a black hole into that space
an emptiness i couldn't look at
its darkness burned brighter than
the eclipsed sun
who always called with the most
beautiful voice and promised that
if i simply stopped averting my eyes
i would most certainly become one with you
and i forsake my sight
to have your heat
your radiation from all parts of the spectrum
to burn my traitorous eyes right out of their sockets.

how different it is to write
of contentment and perhaps even
a love that i can reach out and touch
without having it sublimate each atom of my being
and reduce me to a radioactive ash
scattered to the wind.

it's a love that i can submerge myself in
it presses in all around and the
mega-Pascals of pressure simply reach
a placid equilibrium with my porous skin
i breathe it in and my lungs
somehow learn to pull the oxygen from
the molecules of liquid desire and vitreous joy
and it fuels my body
infiltrating and inhabiting every cell
feeding my muscles as i
sensuously move my body
fluid as the frigid water around me.

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 was born in a ghost hospital
a pile of stones and then a blank slate
with new antiseptic rooms
invisible blood-stained linoleum
and the sound of rubber tennis shoe soles
replacing the place where
i was born with dying stars in my eyes
and supernovae bursting with the
last of their fiery energy before they
blink out of existence
like the hospital where i was born

am i now to be a woman
without true north
a single brick from the single place
where i respired freely and
crisp breaths of truth passed
like whispers over my wordless lips
before the oozing obsidian night
slowly crept up and
wrapped itself around me like
a flea infested blanket
and the blinding white light
of a growing chain reaction
a deafening ring in my ears
nothing

then slow realization that
i'm still alive
battered by beta particles
attacked by alphas
and i'm alone in the nuclear winter
to trek towards my kaaba
the only piece of
where i came into the world
and was the baby girl that
my parents cradled in their
awkward hesitant arms
the little angel my father thought
would certainly break
into a million pieces by the slightest breath of wind
and scatter to heaven
for where else should such innocence be?

i yearn for that brick
from my hospital
because its foundation was built
on something apart
from eating disorders
bipolar disorder
suicide attempts
neat lines of cuts in various stages of healing
when i hold that stone in my hand
residual sand from the
demolition site crumbling
as i turn the cement over
and over
its warmth and weight so real in my hand
that i can see a dim light in a window
a glowing blonde kissing
her black haired beau
and the baby in her arms
theirs
even just for that night.

you don't see life as a game of skill
playing hopscotch on the
white and black checkers
reaching out to infinity with their
comforting symmetry
and severe geometry

you say you're unobservant
but how can you look down
at your calloused mud-caked feet
and not see the
chessboard that is pressing
just as stiffly against your feet
as you reach down
and root yourself into it
burying your head in
the world of fantasy games
without winner or loser

i envy your blissful ignorance
your hope
however misplaced

do you simply refuse to see
how every pensive move
rook to E7
knight to C5
seems to me not an attack
on the mockingly vulnerable king
but an action of
vicious hostility towards
the most powerful piece on the board

so the queen enacts
her equal and opposite
reaction
to slash the entire cosmos to ribbons
an infinite fury of blind terror
that seeks blood
and scavenges the last flesh
clinging to bone.

it seems too contrite
to think that it is a revelation
that life can change in a single instant
like the fraction of a second
the blink of an eye
when the world goes dark and
you forget that you can
actually see

but i get stuck there
knocked out of this reality
and thrown headlong
onto the asphalt that
doesn't give way for
my crystalline bones and
tear-stained face
how can this not be real
when the pain is inescapable
taking up residence
in each secret crevice of
my war-torn self
and i can't run
with these compound fractures
ivory bone peeking through
my crimson stained skin
my spilt blood somehow
reabsorbing into my pores
trying to return home
but those cells are outlaws
they've been expelled
exiled and it feels like
they are now more a part of
the obsidian ground around me
where i've lost myself

where no one can reach me

i'm behind a mirror
hidden in a plume of smoke
and my agony
my suffering cannot be touched
or sublimated into ether
where i can die
and all the world will note
is the lack of my return
to the reality of
the world around them
so concrete they would
never imagine the
tenuous connection that we share
a fishing line that
i rely on
that i wrap around my fist
until it cuts to the bone
and i am certain that
it cannot be pulled away

but i lose it
i grasp desperately
to pull it back into the
wounds where it
fits like that's where it was
created to inhabit
and when i'm empty
when i'm not bleeding
from self-inflicted
gunshot wounds
and razor slices that
never seem to fall
deep enough
to remind me that i'm
still alive
to spread bloodstains
and confirm the
strange world around me
is actually reality
and that i am a part of it

because most of the time
i feel like an interloper
an alien species
and integration
is impossible.

you say it's not about the ***
but the declaration does nothing
to ***** the boiling terror
to shoo away that yawning hole
digging deeper and deeper
into the root system of my ribs
tilling the lush soil that is
my traitorous stomach
and ever shrinking lungs
it uproots me
grinds the stump where I once stood
a towering oak
or was I only ever a sapling
that was snapped in half
severed the exact moment
that the floodgates opened
and the raging storms remnants
poured forth unshackled by the walls
I carefully constructed around my trembling heart
how I screamed when they fell
the resounding crash
of my fingers digging into your back
pulling you closer
and closer
I can't stop wanting you closer
to inhabit that feeling
the safety of a harbor in a storm
you somehow can protect me
from the radioactive wasteland
that I am still traversing
dodging gamma rays of manic frenzy
and alpha particles heavy with the
black hole that swears it will consume all of me
its final sacrifice demanded my life
how can I trust this?
when the reality of the matter is
you are no lead apron
absorbing the radiation for me
some kevlar vest that can ever protect me
from the bullets of vitriolic bile I hurl inward
not to mention grenades thrown my way
by wayward neural firings
which find me craving my blood
a box of razors is
a box of friends
and reality diverges into an orthogonal plane.
you could be snatched from me
you are a small worm on
the biggest hook to make the juiciest
most succulent amuse bouche
for a big world of sharks
how ******* stupid am I
to be a fisherwoman who has
fallen in love with her bait?

i am not your blooming flower
i don't belong in your
garden kingdom populated
by perennials and ruled by
thorn stemmed rose bushes
where you go
to seek solace and discover
the bursting lightness of
that sensuous pain when
blood erupts from that
thin line where
the white fatty layer threatens
to spill out into the world
and stain your white carnations.

and i never promised you
that it would be pretty
and that one day you would be
able to look at those sensationless slices
and see more than just
an act of scarification
that i asked for
that i endured
but the physical embodiment of
that internal scream that
bounces off the sides of my chest
and shatters the crystalline lattice
that protects my dispassionate heart
from your touch
as soft as the downy feathers
of the spring's children
emerging from their
incubator eggs to
greet the world where they
will fall before they fly
and i will impale myself on
the pyre of their sacrifice.

they say home is where the heart is
well my heart sits inside this
war-torn body going through the motions
breathe in
breathe out
smile
suture together the gaping hole
that screams from the center of my mass
tugging on the ragged edges
trying to fold in on myself
my own ouroboros
subsisting off my own flesh
eating my muscles
a supernova collapsing with a crushing
blow that rattles my bones
and reverberates through my heart.

so this is home
the lodging where my
beaten soul and battered consciousness
have wiped away the dust
taken the sheets off the unused furniture
and curled up with their feet tucked up
underneath their body
paying no attention to the
leaky roof
pitter patter of water droplets
heavy with the chaos and ire
of the outside world
as they land definitively in pots and pans
littered throughout my body
lingering in my liver and
sopping up moisture that springs
traitorously into my eyes
burns straight through my retinas
and reminds me of my weakness.

how can i be my own big bad wolf?
alternating between a warm bed
and hearty meals that
bode a bountiful harvest
suddenly replaced by howling wind
and razor sharp rain drops
cutting into my skin
and i welcome it.

i let myself be cut to ribbons
until all that remains is
shredded flesh clinging precariously
to ivory bone
hanging by a thread
an elephant at the edge of a cliff
tail tied to a dandelion.

i relish the destruction
in razing my corporeal temple to the ground
reducing myself to ash
and scattering to every edge of the earth
until I burst forth from this atmosphere
this geological prison
my dermal incarceration
and fly as star stuff
to become a distant universe
for didn’t the liquid power of the stars
always run through my veins
an oil fire burning higher and higher
until the black acrid smoke
consumed the entire world
and absorbed the sun’s rays
to bring about a never-ending night.

close my eyes.
it doesn’t matter if it’s dark outside.

My calendar isn't on paper
it doesn't hang on a wall
neglected pages to be turned
two months behind.

It isn't on my computer
in the cloud
synced to all my technological tortures
physically formed as notifications
short chimes to coax time forward.

My calendar is plastic
it sits on the toothpaste coated
counter in my bathroom
and I tell the day by which
of the seven perfectly segmented
little boxes are open and closed.

S, M, T open
it must be W
Wednesday
the red capsule and three white tablets remain
it is still morning
i trust my calendar
the light outside
or the absence thereof
can be a trick of my mind
day and night are not so
clean cut as the purple pill organizer
which contains my madness for me.

When things seem clearer
I approach my calendar
knowing beforehand which
cube on the string I must open
and retrieve these drugs
that keep my feet planted firmly
on the rich earth.

When I know the day
I rue these pills.

Why do I need them when
each day flows effortlessly into the next
like iridescent pearls strung along
into an unending sequence
of beads on a string
each one singularly unique
imbued with the essence of
the divine mollusk who incubated
this precious day?

When I can turn the pages
of the socially acceptable
calendar on the wall
I am a perfect imposter of
what is considered the norm
and I can look at days as
units in months
or years.

I stop living inside a partially
opened weekly pill organizer
and I am convinced
that I've taken up residence
outside of that gravitational
pull of the underworld
who buries me six feet under
to suffocate by the weight
of the soil pressing in.

My castle
my palace
is seated atop
a mountain carved into
the rugged stone
enveloped in a downy blanket
of cloud.

I'm miles from madness
light years from the person
who doesn't recognize her
face in the mirror
distorted
melting.

It is a seemingly endless summer
the easterly sun's warmth on my face
harking morning's glorious arrival
and hazy lilac hues dancing
an unparalleled pas de deux
with the sun's last pink rays
peeking over the western horizon.

My mornings are not
one red capsule
one white tablet.

It is a morning flight
free amongst the last stars
clinging to the pastel blue
of night's retreat.

Night is no longer
two white tablets
one yellow
it is sitting on my
mountaintop and watching
the god of the sky
falling in slow motion
imperceptibly lowering
into the horizon.

And the cycle repeats itself
in a euphoric loop
of twenty-four hours of heart-breaking beauty.

But the cycle is not in fact endless
just as day turns unfailingly to night
my cicada days
turn to static
and the churning black clouds
take hostage my paramour
the sun
and lost in the abyss of un-delineated time
I run to my mistress.

The weekly purple calendar.

I look forward to seeing him everyday.

What is this torture?

How do I stop castigating myself
and throwing myself prostrate
on the burning coals
those spitting embers
spider web cracks
spreading like contaminants
foreboding of the epidemic to come
intricate designs carrying grave warnings.

I tremble.

I have never trembled before.

Not in response to the mere
idea
that image in my head of
his arm tenderly around my shoulders
to shelter me from the inevitability of the future
the dancing spectre of his face
lingering in the goose flesh
that breaks out like a cold sweat
when my heart aches
and my mind cries out in anguish
at the terror and sheer immensity of
that crushing longing.

Never have I wanted so wantonly
a wildfire consuming
ravaging every inch of my world
reducing me to a snarling beast
bared teeth
hair standing on edge to lash out
the power of the entire universe
pulsing through my veins.

A mother’s love pales
to the ferocity of my fight.

I have nothing to lose
I have seen the mountaintop
I have seen the destruction
the darkness and storms which
lie ahead for the burning chasm of
pain and beauty and love
that is my very essence
and I must continue
I must go there and know
that I can survive the gale winds
and the pelting rain
slapping my face
with a lace glove
as if that could somehow insulate me
from the sting of your absence
and the looming murky world
that you leave in your wake
expecting my gratitude
for the silt and dust that hangs around me
whose hollow presence
doesn’t keep me warm at night.

I feel my control
slipping through my fingers
the sieve through which my power is filtered
and I am left with only the dregs
why did you have to come here?

Why did I listen to your whisper
to open my eyes and
see
and have your face be the first
image haloed in the sun’s glorious offering
of light
bathing my retina in the warm liquid matrix?

How long could I have held onto hope
that two parallel lines
could one day diverge from their path
their arrow-straight shot to infinity
and converge
to know that touch for even a fraction of
a femtosecond?

How long will I continue my self deception?
To listen to the dulcet tones of that uninhibited
purr in the back of my mind
which exists outside of knowledge and logic
inhabiting the world of unmentionable desire
a longing that I suppress
a wanting that I can never trust.

Crumbling facades and fading frescos
are all that lie ahead
as time’s march crushes all dreams
under its steel-toed boot
stealing everything away from me
until I subsist on arid dust
and musty, time-worn clocks.

my body is an
electron multiplying charge coupled device
and the burning photons
browning my skin
tinting my hair to an effortlessly highlighted hue
are absorbed
shooting out electrons
from the arching potential
running just under the surface
like my skin is some insulator
to protect other’s touch
so my electricity doesn’t
stop a beating heart
has my heart somehow turned into a generator?
pumping out electrons like
some sort of continuously accelerating
perpetual motion machine
i tremble
the noise from the signal emitted
static snaps in my hair
and imaginary wildfires dance forth
ripping and roaring in my head
the tinder of my thoughts
feeding their starved pallattes
and they need more and more
as the flames call to me and weep
the goddess of electrons
with voltage running through every vein
and amperes arching through arteries with the energy of my heart
the exception to the notion handed down by Newton
energy and matter are neither created nor destroyed

what can i do when there are hands
hands all over my body that
are disembodied reminders of that
night
when kristallnacht fingers slashed my
tender soul to childhood ribbons
penetrated me in my flowering womanhood
and stamped my forehead with
that bloodstained W
and you still see me as that
*****
that infant abandoned
at the red brick fire station
safe haven laws
but i didn't even go to a hospital
when sanguine shame
seeped from my cursed hole
that secret between my legs

and i wished they'd unraveled my entrails
disemboweled me rather than
stabbing me with their flesh
samurai swords of virility and
i wish they'd killed me like
a stuck pig and maybe
placed an apple in my mouth
to silence me instead of
asphyxiating with their hands
that i now can't escape
their sensational escapades
across the plains of this body
that i am forced to
inhabit and traverse the
Serengeti wasteland where i
beg for predators to once more make
me feel like i have no control
and maybe **** me in the end

because those hands

when they first touched me
i would have hacked them off
with a butter knife
some dull rusted blade
but they disengage already
they follow me as if
superglued to the hole which
for them was the complete
embodiment of myself

just a cavernous nothingness for them to inhabit
with their manhood
shooting pain to complete my
empty soul
and fill it with seething shame
and a layer of dirt to
close me up and
forever taint the white sheets
with blood stains absent
and are you still a ****** if
they took you by force and
you never wanted it but
didn't fight back

they are inside me
forever
and they wake me in the
dark of midnight whisperings

they wake me when
you turn over in your slumber
to wrap me in your arms and
you are greeted by shoves
and tears
when will i not whimper
because you aren't them but
those hands
in the darkness
i can't tell the difference between
those hands
and my own
and yours
and i want to be ripped apart
torn open and laid bare
excise them from my secret place
from that place in my brain
from which my nightmares seep
and those hands
hold me down to relive their
searching violation
in bold technicolor revelations
that i'll always be that girl
the drunk *****
the dumb *****
the ***** who deserves to
relive that night to no relief
world without end

you must see a dumb *****

you must see the marks of
their handprints
all over my body

you must be disgusted

but i'll take your *****
and consume it in your absence
just to be closer to you than
those hands.

it's possible to lose yourself in loneliness

at some point
my solo reflection that
gazed back into
glassy hollow unequal pupils
began to claw hungrily at the glass
bated breath fogging the
thin membranous divider
keeping back the
unadulterated
most abject terror

that wooden grain
geometrically containing the
image who must stay
hidden in the holy of holies
or risk the ruin of all
things

she beats against the glass
that wraith girl with the
sutured mouth and
blinded eyes
and skin who cries out
for the slice of liquid mirror shards
and grasps the edges
of that rectangular prison
jagged pieces sliding sensually
keys into forbidden locks
surgically opening
the red liquorish vines
pulsing with a viscous
pungent poison
just underneath
onion paper skin

her nails scrape lead paint chips
off the crumbling frame
and i take them into myself
sewing them with the care
of a grandmother's arthritic hand
into the warm moist black
i can ever count on

she falls
like a newborn foal
glistening with those
maternal fluids
the literal matrix of life
hesitant steps on the
feet from that other dimension
where laws diverge and
perception is not relative
but horridly absolute

how can she manage
that leap which
knocks me straight out of my body
astrally exiled from myself
and filled to the brim
with a ghost girl
marionette
with painted sanguine smile
and strings attached
at each one of my joints
moving me with a flick
of some nameless fear

i think i spent too much time
trying to reconcile
the foreign body whose
defection left me howling with
a fiery bloodlust and an
insatiable hunger to vaporize those
staining contaminants
those long chain fatty acids that
deposit like stones in my pockets
weighing me down to the
river bed
whose mirror still reflects
the graven image of
a sinner-saint
whose sallow complexion
demonstrates her devotion
and in her death
faith
though her sacrifice was no
crucifixion to relieve me
of any of my
transgressions
or prevent me from
besmirching the god
i'm not sure i totally believe in

how do i give myself to you
and banish the apprehension
that comes with the
crash landing of me into
this corporeal form
stolen from me ages ago

how do i tell you that
when your hands trace
the curvaceous line of this body
that it feels like a fire's touch
scorching me to the bone
burning me at the stake of
my inadequacy and simultaneous
excess

it's too much.

you say it like it's my fault
like i shook you
goddess of earthquakes
and my fault lines
etched into my face don't
give you the answer you're looking for?

you look upon me like an alien
like some creature who crawled forth
from a darkened alleyway to
burn in front of you
and pull you
a moth to the flame
Icarus flying too close to the sun
you melt
when you're in my arms
and i in yours i can see
the beeswax of your eyes
slowly turning to a viscous liquid
a rain-shower of that infernal desire
emotions that ***** like needles
piercing veins to slam home
a neon poison
higher than ******
to know my power
and hold that pulsing dripping
heart of yours
within my secret place
my holy of holies and
all i want is to tear the veil
and expose the bare truth
no more hiding in the shadows
a divine face you cannot look upon
i imagine god gets lonely

what is the meaning of a beauty
that cannot be seen?
that will consume every part of you
with a single glance
burn your eyes to charcoal
the only smoking remnants of
those bottomless brown cups of coffee
that swirl in your irises

i consume the world around me
more more more more more more
if left alone i would eat your heart
a feral animal
the pure incarnation of natural rage
thunderstorms in my eyes
and lightning bolt curls
blood-stained lips still dripping
with your 98.6 degrees
that same fluid which rushes
to your cheeks when
i shock you yet again
though you shouldn't really be surprised
anymore

if you know what's good for you

don't look at me

I was there when the atom bomb
vaporized a city
and burned flesh until all
that remained was a charred
silhouette
without face
without name.

I'm a bird in flight
through acid rain clouds
I am a woman without country
crash landed
from beyond the stars.

I have seen the edge
of time and the cosmos
and stood on the ledge
to contemplate the exploding
yawning abyss before me
a multiverse to transcend
the geological primitive
the infantile blue planet
locked in its calculated dance
with the sun
where I must constantly fight
gravity as it weighs me down
and ensnares me with its human
chains to tether me to the
terrestrial soil
whose corpse-fed worms
are more relatable.

Their whispers are songs
which hold the secrets
taken to the grave.

An alien wouldn't be so obvious.

i want to sew myself into you

black wire stitches to close the
gaping hole and
ragged edges of my fragmented self
held together tenuously by
crocodile ocean tears and
a bloodlust that is the only drive
keeping me alive

but you

you are somehow whole
a sweating glass of full fat milk
a body that is not
fragmented
a mind that hasn't been
shattered and the minute shards
ground into an irreconcilable dust
scattered to the wind
and how could you not be
ripped to shreds when
a hurricane fueled tornado
ripped your world apart one day
and cracked the looking glass
through which you saw the world

perhaps you are as self-deceiving as i am
maybe you have an even darker
wool pulled over your eyes
a piston to continually
push down
and errant emotion that
threatens to remind you
of that nameless pain
or shame
an inky black spot i would
rub out of you if i could
if you'd let me

i want you to sew me into your broken places

those crumbling cliff faces
bowing to the persistence of ocean waves
those places where you feel yourself
growing thin
threadbare hidden places that you
lead me away from
because why would you lash out
like a cornered animal when
i inadvertently touch on that
raw nerve which you
tried to ignore but the
wound just festered and now
leaks a pus and
emanates a stench of your
fear
trust issues

how can two broken pieces
from different people
fit together and make one
coherent functioning unit

i want to sew myself into you so you might trust me
like you trust your own self

but maybe you don't even trust him
that uninhibited man who lives
at the core of your being and
transcends all the pain and hurt
and is a perfect mirror image of the
man you were before she
cut out your tongue and
blinded you

i've let you see the
emptiness
the grand canyon that gapes
and yawns open
in the center of my being
with the gravitational pull of
a black hole with the entire universe in its
orbit
but you're like the stopper for
a bath tub and you
fit perfectly into that void

if you'd only let me stitch the edges closed
to a soft pink sensationless seam
a roadmap memory of
where we came from
and couldn't it be a scar that
reminds us of how we came together
reminds us of growth
of a vibrant returning spring even in
the bitter cold winter
we both escaped

and your eyes were the headlights
on the front of a screaming
ambulance that brought me
broken and bleeding to
the emergency room
and your face was the one of
a meticulous doctor
frowning on my damage but
methodically sewing me closed
to keep my entire self from
spilling out

i want to sew myself into your heart
just so that i know
you'll be just as torn
just as wounded
just as broken
when i watch you walk away
into the blinding sunrise
of a new day.

I can't breathe.

This vacuous hole
starved for oxygen
the scavenger of the stars
who found solace
who took up residence
at the center of my chest
sinking its barbed claws
into the warm, moist
flesh pressed against
my ribcage.

His yawning roar reverberates
off the walls of the prison of ribs
screams pregnant with
vitriolic shrapnel to
cut through bone
and vaporize to dust
my hijacked heart
pumping out thick
poison to necrotize
every living cell
who respires to
bring life to my
corporeal form.

How could I have hated
that vessel
who carried me and
nestled my vulnerable
essence in its walls
and surrendered to my will
to be the vehicle of
my humanity?

How could I not worship
the body who
bent itself to my will
and endured the torture
the wild ride to hell
tempting fate?

Now my body is not my own
and the black hole
consumes every piece
making up my
disjointed mosaic
taking my features one by one
until all that remains is a face
that he's sanded to
blank flesh.

Now I am in ruins
and my frescos are
bowing to the regal
procession of time.

could my restlessness
just be little earthquakes
calling for tremulous gestures
like a flick of a string
attached to
the puppet's lifeless wrist
wherein lies the
constantly turning nebulae
satisfied only by the
empty obsidian space
a spattering of crystal
on midnight whisperings

my bed clings to me
a parting lover
or perhaps a parasitic twin
bound to me by flesh
our surgical silk bond
rope veins lashing us together
tied in perfect boy scout
honor badge knots
sharing my blood that is
now our own

why does the throbbing nothing
seated right between my temples
cry out in agony for
the stillness of a deep sleep
and yet rages against
my fluttering eyelids
hummingbirds on honeysuckle
scattering to dust
at the coming nuclear winter
that ever consuming fission reactor
at precise center
pointing true north
the exact point within me
where each other position is
equal distance

i write to you
somewhere out there
a beautiful part of that world
a string in the tapestry
that no theory could ever define
i write to you so you can know
that i straddle the brick wall
barricading this world
from the ever-present storm of chaos

half of me is woven to you
but half of me is still being pulled
by the unfathomable gravity
of a black hole

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.

it's not a prison that
keeps me segregated from the
general population to
protect their neurotypical minds
that are terrified by
a blood lust directed toward the self
or perhaps that urge to consume
and consume
all just foreplay for the
grand finale where i'm
bent over the toilet and riding
that stratospheric high
catapulting me out of this world
and into the forest of stars
a pinprick in the infinite black of
space

but do not misunderstand
it is not some sort of jailbreak
a streaking figure in the
black and white stripes of shame
clinging to my exiled body
it is more the futile pulling
i am not stuck in the trap

i am the trap

and i lock down on my
vices and the
self destruction that sings
the most sickly sweet songs
that somehow convince me
that if i am pulled even tighter
i might somehow break the mould
and no longer lash myself to
those actions and thoughts
that terrify
and destroy

i worry i am the strip
of glue that hangs in the kitchen
to catch the fruit flies that
come to visit in the summer and
pester me until
they land their feet on my
sticky
sickly
trap
they can't escape
and so they die

is that what i do to them?
is that what i do to you?

do you become paralyzed
by some sort of
noxious agent or
a viscous bog that
cements you here
and forces you to watch
eyelids held open
as i dance with the demons that
you assure yourself
you will be able to tame
you will be able to banish

but they're the one's who've been there
decades of companionship
and torture
Stockholm syndrome that
ties me to them
through some sort of
vital connection which i can't escape
clipping the umbilical cord
and leaving me bleeding on the ground
aching for that part of me
that is gone

so i pull myself
i stretch myself so thin
and the harder that
your fingers fight to escape my trap
the harder i clamp down
because i want you to go away
to prevent the inevitable pain
and yet i pull you tighter
i lock your fingers into me
my nails digging into your back
as if somehow i can affix myself
to you.

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.

you know who i am
you have seen her
dancing in flickering candlelight
heady breath wafting the
sickly sweet smell of
too many consumed beers
drowning my inhibitions
inundating my irises and
letting my eyes betray my
carefully constructed façade
the grenade you throw yourself upon

but you haven't asked the right question

have you never wondered
what i am?

i am the tolling of
bells echoing through
deserted streets
cobbles screaming for
footfalls and bustling crowds
the only witnesses to the
belfry's solemn song
reverberating off the
business fronts boarded up
to ward off the reality of sobriety
and Death's march through the streets
sending the inhabitants running
disturbed dust blinding their
frenzied eyes
who search for a sacrificial lamb
as if a swathe of blood
across the door could
keep away such an
inevitability

i am the stars
but don't confuse that with
a confession
or profession of some sort
that i'm something infinite
for you to probe
with hyper-drives and
deep suspended animation
there is no alien microbial life
lurking below my frozen
absolute zero surface
i'm only the stars that
you lose track of as
you leave the blackness of
open space and enter
a deafening city where
skyscrapers obscure
and the pollution of
a million lovers' ecstasy
drowns out the light
wrought in the deepest parts of me
and catapulted through
the lightyears of black vacuum
only to be lost
choked out by incessant
revelry

i am the heaviness that
yolks itself around your shoulders
and the night black that
wraps itself around you in
its vicious velvet embrace to
***** out your breath and
envelop you
swallow you
pinch the flame
asphyxiate your existence

i am the tunnel under
the Pont de l'Alma
a loss of control and the
echoing reverb of
skidding rubber
tires whose
black smoke chokes out
the screams which constitute
the end and last breath of
a goddess among men who
never could understand her
and in her end
found culpability

i am the petrichor haze
that settles
nestles itself into every
corner of the barren graveyard
wherein lies my comfort
and my greatest hope
my fear of names and dates
and chiseled stone
and finality that means
a peaceful nothingness
that welcomes the most
effervescent
ebullient
peace
that comes with the
cessation of neural firings
and the end of all things.

i heard my mom use the L word
when i was telling her
about my personally forbidden escapades
with the boy
my doctor
who i’ve let see
a framed picture of
an iota of my wounds
but still cannot bring myself to call
my boyfriend
as if the word is somehow poisoned
as i’ve convinced myself
in my loneliness
that the idea of that
feeling that most definitely isn’t love
was the stinging venom
burning through my veins
melting my skin to
waxy torrents coursing
from gaping wounds
butchered into my supple dermis
trying to escape my corporeal prison.

my body seizes at the utterance
of two syllables
because i am terrified that
the house of cards that
hold up that word on such an
unnatural pedestal
will crumble
evaporate into the
ether hanging around me
keeping me drunk on
that piquing ache churning
reaching deeper than
the bedrock of my stomach
that my incessant pepto can’t touch
a blowfly burrowing itself
into the mucosa of my abdominal cavity
that i know is filled with my
vital organs
but feels more like a vacuum.

he’s not my boyfriend
even though i tell him to turn over
in the darkness of our
shared slumber
so i can be the big spoon
and he can teach me how to breath
his respirations in his back
pressing my chest into
inhalation
just as my head on his chest
rises and falls
with him
my pectoral moon
pulling my tides
surrendering to the
inevitable turn and living
in that imperceptible moment
between inhalation and exhalation
a silence wherein
we are one
and i feel like his skin
could perhaps be mine.

i know that empty space
the hologram earth she inhabits
in what could have been
what never was
a hollow heaviness of
that excruciating longing
a waterfall of curses falling from
her lips and disappearing
into that yawning chasm
that consumes her until
she is no more than a shell containing
a love she can't let go of
for without the full weight
of her entirely spent body is
the only force which keeps her yearning
pinned to the ground
stationary
real
a love she can reach out and touch
and fuse with it until it is impossible
to disentangle her very being
from a made-up
idealized love that somewhere in her mind
burns brightly
and casts dancing shadows on
the walls of her minds
scenes of his closeness
the feeling of his palm cupping her face
melting

and it is more than that warmth
that gushes forth from
her chest as he holds her
she's bleeding on his shirt
and she imagines her red blood cells
setting into the fabric
the stain of her existence to be carried
forever
on his lapel

how she heard the people sing
but could they have known
that this entire business
the fighting
and revolution
had nothing to do with
politics or some
misplaced surge for justice
the fight was for her freedom
to solidify her shadow world
where she belonged to him

and somehow as she pulls
her last breaths
and watches her blood stain
spread and spread
she wished to consumed him
his kiss on her face
lingered forever
her final memory
the epitaph on a tomb
that represented the ultimate freedom.

apparently i wear my hesitation
my measured self control
in bold streaks of watercolors
across the pulled canvas of my face
but somehow that tension
the taut bounce of my shallow panorama
slides thinly by your
probing eyes poking at my weak spots
and waiting to watch me
shatter

search me
put the hidden words in quotations marks
and hit the return key
to query the google of my mind
whose only existence to you
is a retreating shadow
running past the wind
with a sonic boom of silence

it's easier to find something
when you have an idea where to look
and my subversive games
of smoke and mirrors
throwing my voice to a
different part of my body
the elegant distraction and the
final solution to my
nebulous existence
as a paper doll girl whose
amorphous two dimensional body
wears whatever
diaphanous primary color frock
the world demands to keep
it turning without hiccup
a sacrifice to the gods i have
foresaken and blasphemed
whose names i've taken in vain
and cursed with the most excruciating
fervor and
resolution

i want peace
which does not in fact live
in placating distraction
or hand waving while i'm
hemorrhaging from the
butchered wound in
my abdomen out of which
my secret shame seeks
to excrete that pheromone that
warns approaching creatures
that i am still
a wounded animal and
could snap at any moment
see red
then nothing

you can only help
a person so much when
every time they run
to your waiting arms
bleeding and broken
begging for absolution
or perhaps simply an
intercession for their muteness
and sutures of salvation
how do you help a person
who stands from the alter
with the transcendent certainty of
a religious experience
and yet still
pulls out those black wire stitches
while passing the last of the
empty pews
and the flickering flames
sending prayers up to an
empty firmament

i am the headlights on
the cars that follow in
solemn silence behind
the police escort
and the hearse
from church to finality
and a place in this world for eternity
a hole just my own
where peace is blackness of nothing
and the endless chatter
the bile whose acid
eats away at my brain
dries up and in its dessication
flies away in the arid winds
of terminal acceptance

you say you want the truth
but you're not like me
and you can't hide the pain
when i
hiding my fear
tell you that i need you
to leave
when all i want
is to keep your body pressed
infinitely close to mine
world without end
but my words fight to hold
the front line
and my canvas face is pulled
that much tighter.

i've been the other woman
before
i've listened to those words
like daggers to my heart
hollow empty promises of
impossible futures that you
never actually see transpiring but you
whisper in my ears like
sweet nothings because
by the time i realize that you're
full of ****
you'll be long gone and i'll be
the one bleeding
the one left to pick up
the shards of myself i'll never
piece together into a
coherent self
again

but you aren't married
anymore
you don't go home to another woman
your first choice
and hold her in your arms
reach for her when you
wake in the bathing light of the moon
you aren't with a wife
who has your heart and love

yet she still hold your heart
captive
you aren't legally connected to her
but i still pay the toll
stopped on the freeway of my life
because you see her in my eyes
and will i forever be forced to
pay for her transgressions
will you always see me as
the same
as the woman who shattered your world
erased your ability to trust
the ***** who seeks
to be ******
the hurricane that destroys indiscriminately
though how could you ever
think that me
the one who loves
the one who tells you i love you
would ever do that

if anything it's you whose
motives
and intentions
should be questioned

i'm tired of being the other woman
to my boyfriend
who isn't legally married
but is still irrevocably tied to
the pain she tore into him
pain for which i must pay the ultimate price

how could such a horrible
vile woman
ever be loved by him
and what does that make me
the one who can't be
doesn't that make me
even more contemptible
than her
doesn't that mean that i'm
a ***** piece of trash

i wish i'd never met you

i wish i could disappear
or go to sleep and wake up
to a brand new world
without you
because at least if i'm alone
i don't have to constantly feel
rejected by the person i love most

i hate you
but that's a lie
i wish i could hate you

but i'd rather tear myself apart
slice myself to ribbons
***** my insides until
all my vital organs have been expunged

i'd rather die
than live a day
without loving you

there was once a brick hearth
and my skinned kneed,
wild flaxen haired,
innocent self would sit there
to feel the fire’s warmth radiating through the stones.

there were ghost stories told
on picnic tables at state parks where
the calloused barefeet of my childhood
struck the dusty ground as i ran towards
not away
when i followed vitreous streams
with frigid soaked clothes clinging to my skin
all the way to the  river who now holds these memories
for me.

there was a sprawling old mimosa tree
whose diaphanous flowers would float
feathery petals
to decay on the ground.
How that tree must be a part of me somehow
from the scrapes my soft infantile skin
endured while trying to clamber up its branches
not for a moment tainting my insatiable appetite to explore.

there were steaming hot afternoon thunderstorms
a quotidian race home from the bowels
of the verdant green forest
dodging heavy raindrops
pregnant with the weight of coming years.

those years were the smell of fresh lighter wood
the acrid feel of smoke in the back of my throat
popsicles in the pool
and warm sun-kissed skin.

those times were blanket forts at sleep overs
the salt on sunflower seed shells
cracked in the dugout at softball games
they were the lilted drawl that curled comfortably
around eternal southern colloquialisms.
bike rides to get skittles and coke
at the gas station at the end of the street.
the wind in my hair as I careened down
what will always be known as
Thrill Hill

at some point my bike rusted
when was that?
the pool sat alone and unused
and evergreen forests became a passing image
in a dream
scraped knees turned to razor slices.
but my body will always carry the recollection.

to most you say
a day
24 hours
and it is that simple
24 perfect little steps
to lead the way
and guide humanity through
an astronomical phenomenon
day and night

to me
a day is not
24 hours
nor is it 1440 minutes
not even 86400 seconds
i watch the milliseconds
the femtoseconds
speed by faster than
the photons that drive
the herd inhabiting this pale blue dot

how could they sleep through
the darkest moment of night
when the cool that
you thought couldn't be
on that cornflower blue
summer day
lazily flows across your face
and you feel the longing
that the fingernail moon
must carry for the sun.

how could they appreciate
every single exact color
as the sky brightens
lilacs running like chariots
from the sun still submerged
give way to effervescent
pastel pinks
like a gift for every baby girl
born that moment
until finally the sun pushes its way
out of the grasp of the horizon
and bursts like a blonde from a cake
bathing the world in its
mourning song for
the moon who always
slips just out of his grasp.

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.

you say it to me all the time
so quotidian
it simply falls off your
carefree laugh
and do i see the remnants
of a fear
clouded by memories of another
woman you loved
who brandished knives on your bed
carving the evidence of her inadequacy
into the skin your fingers caressed
the body whose every crevice you had
explored for eight years

you must see some of me
in her
a peppering of her in me
like the seasoning that the creator added
as a dash of spice
to the primordial broth from which
we both crawled
spoon to his lips and a
contented smile turning all his features
up up up

you blow it off
but she must come to mind
every time you hear
the diagnosis
the label

"Oh, she's bipolar?"

the explanation for every
single
*******
aberration in our behavior

but you know it's not just
a "Hello, My Name is _" badge
it is days without sleep
paranoia-fueled delusions as we
diverge from your reality
and exist on a plane that
you cannot access

we go to Away.

but you know
that somehow we are eerily present
at least to you
from your perspective
when inky black voices
scream terrifying bile
and a bloodlust builds in the center in our chest
and we can smell the metallic whiff
of every single knife
each nectar-sweet blade
in the entire world
and you want to be there

you want me to call you
so you can see me
writhing on the floor
unable to rise from bed even fueled
by that insatiable hunger for
my blood
to die
to not die
to not be

can you live with a ghost again

if words are life
then are all their
permutations
all 77
different words for fear
just shadows
smoke
of memories
which have crawled
out of me
and found a life in the mirror
with its gilded frame
tarnished
with the trail of destruction
bodies
piling up and up and up
towards the sky.

having these shadow creatures
living in the mirror
coming out to play
tic tac toe
eeny meeny miney mo
better let that razor go.

at least i’m never alone
smoke always caresses
my face when
i find myself
living in the mirror too.

a sweet touch
cool yet searing
calculated and wild
silk of broken mirrors.

will you still think of me
when the winter’s snow
like ****** needles sticking
and pricking me
slamming your smack
mainlining your masochism
melts to pastel pink mornings
and pregnant dewdrops
gravity propelling them
down flower petal water slides?
will my taste loiter on your lips
will the memory of my touch
my ghost fingers
still leave erupting goose-bumps
your hair standing on end
my unalloyed current
sparking into the night of kerosene.
will the fire bring me to mind?
my face engraved on your memory
like a holy icon
to which you run when the flames
rage as far as you can see
the orange haze of ******
and the hoard of children running
blistered skin
and their screams piercing
gouging
each wearing your face.

and i struggle to find the words
when normally they grow
like weeds in fertile land
choking out the crops
the sustenance to feed the frenzied masses
calling for blood
and crucifixion of an idea
they don't understand.

and then the words are too much
they fall in torrents
raindrops bigger than beach *****
patter like needles onto my head
each one an explosion of liquid
courage to feed my disembodied mind.

and i fly.

i sometimes find myself
thinking about time
and its ability to shrink me
to a singularity in space
and remind me of my unimportance
my insignificance in the face of
a marching army intent
on mowing me down
and splashing their leather boots
in the puddles of my blood
that runs through the fields
and waters the crops
takes a part of me to nourish
from east coast to west coast
to the heartland
and beyond the sea

sometimes i think about
how time takes history
into its sanguinely stained mouth
silver spoon held gingerly
in a vice grip in the
hand of a grandfather that
knows all my secrets
and my shame
he swallows them
masticated to a grey mass
whose form has been lost
an amorphous ball of
unspeakable words and
dreams that had until recently
lived in the pit of my stomach
burrowing into my bowels
trying desperately to escape
to break free from the misty world
of 'if's and 'maybes'
of 'hope'
of reckless abandon

if the words escaped
somehow
the infinite gravity of
time's death grip
could the blind masses comprehend them?
gathered around the
burning wreckage of that
shooting star that fell
from the wide open
obsidian sky
they speak
but they do not understand
they hear
but they do not listen
and my dream
my desperate words that
condensed until they both
imploded into a vitreous glass
of transparent delusion
and exploded to burn
and consume the world that
they have neglected
as they gather around
my message
and their own Tower of Babel
where they've lost their words.

waiting in the queue for heaven..
dying for the moment
sweet bliss in the
waiting
clouds of white in roads of diamonds
raining ecstasy
blue tabs onto the damp of my rough tongue
eyes closed
sensing the quiet and the stillness

waiting in the queue for heaven...
angels passing by
just regular people
and jesus walking his dog
waves pink sweet colors
onto the requiem for a dream
lost on the back of my eyelids
forever

waiting in the queue for heaven...
music playing
just the silence of a circling record
magical
rich in its fullness empty
whilst i'm waiting in the queue for heaven.

i want you
constantly
when you scornfully declare
that you think about me
all the time
i bite my tongue
and clench my jaw
to keep back the gushing torrent
wild white water mustangs
my words tripping over each other
tumbling into the stony
barrier of my teeth.

how do i explain
or attempt to reconcile
that desperate
gaping
magnetic longing
when as your trusted
calloused hands
twice the size of mine
to protect me even when
i'm raging to be left bare
and ruined by myself
when those hands
seeking my supple body
those curves that keep you
returning unto the temple
that is my very self
and you peel away the rind
of my vestments to expose
the fruit waiting inside

and i cry

heavy searing tears
sliding like fire down
the rocky cliff face
and the barren planes of my
freckled cheeks

i close my eyes
and shake my head
feeling the repulsive odor
of my looming shame
radiating off me and
strangling the want
the need
for you.

i miss you.

you say that you will
one day
mold me into a clay being
who spins on the potter's wheel of this world
and sees the beauty
and intricately woven cloth that
cradles my effervescent soul
your alchemy seeks to
transform my crocodile tears of shame
into a joyful well of infinite
contentment
in your arms
whispering reassurances that
perhaps one day
will not pass uninhibitedly
through my skull
but linger
and loiter in my cerebellum
sewing themselves into
the sides of my cerebrum
greeting my grey matter and
simply becoming another
wild flower in the
meadow of my thoughts.

i fight as intensely against
your tendrils of hope
and ropes lashed to your vessel of refuge
as i do contrary to the
barbed binds digging into
the flesh around my wrists
and wrenching my heart with
realizations of my own inadequacy.

i don't want to be fixed.

do i want to fix myself?
and the question echoes
through the empty
barren halls of that secret
wherein reality has become
a comforting quagmire of
delusions and a time
delineated only by a
flashing number on a scale.

you haven't seen the blackness
though you've glimpsed its shadow
looming in my wake
when i leave you knowing
in my mind i'm already
doubled over
head buried in the toilet
how to pull it out
and curl my flaccid tongue
around those syllables
those simple six letters

H E L P M E

written like braille across
my forehead and
carved
branded
scarred into the sacrosanct eventuality
of the black hole salivating
to consume
to the end of all things.

i have never been sick enough
the immutable darkness has never
dipped temperatures to
absolute zero and
terrified the entire world
stopped in its orbit to marvel at the
girl disappearing.

i wonder why you worry.

i must have let go too soon
the ride hadn't come to a full stop
though i felt as though
the ground beneath me was
hurdling at the speed of light
oscillating with such intense frequency
that it didn't move at all

like your face where typically
i can see the movements of
the corps of your features
and the play of the light
with the uncertainty dancing in your eyes
watching me watching myself
following the face that is mine
the razor sharp features
that not even time
can erode
and dull

spinning in fields
or a whirling dervish in my
bedroom by candlelight
when my grasp on reality
is at its weakest
and i relinquish any tie
that anchors me here
swimming with the school
of bait fish who inhabit this
geological prison

i let go too soon
and now i'm flying
my talons rip chunks of your skin
and my beak pecks at your
resolve and erases that
image in your head
of me
sane
grounded
real

blinded by my assault
that you welcomed home
like a weary war-torn soldier
deplaning onto the soil
of his homeland
there's something intoxicating
about watching a fire burn
cracks and whips
flames licking at my ankles
as they burn me at the stake
but the joke's on them
because i'm already on fire

and you can't burn what's already smoldering

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.

i can't rip myself to shreds
and then wonder why you look at me
like some sort of miasma
of pity and misfortune
that your sun couldn't melt
and congeal into something
recognizable
something human
i wonder if you see just a beast
an animal whose only chance
at survival is
fight or flight

i see white and
your face burns away
bubbling in the heat
of my nuclear explosions

i bury land mines in my own backyard
and play games
leisurely strolls
blindfolds
and a racing heart
exploding from the center of my being
praying to ignite that
chain reaction

you tell me not to be stupid
not to do anything stupid
but stupid is a relative planet
orbiting myself
and eclipsing truth that
to the rest of the human race
is divine prophecy
and absolute reality

i'm alone even in your presence
because i'm not there
and can't you see it written
like neon braille across my face
and branded with a white-hot poker
into the blue green of my iris
why do i need to live when
this life is just as
construed as a dream
and as tangible as a nightmare

i'm lost

and i can't find your hand
as i ***** in the darkness
to lead me back to life
and sanity
but you aren't looking for me
because i'm standing right next to you
even though i'm gone.

i miss the dancing
and the unextinguishable lightness
of neon taffy sun rays
their barbed tails dripping
with honey as skates
flutter their wings in harmony
to stir sand and silt
and muddy waters
shatter crystal crysalises
cast shadow on frozen aquatic scenes
sandpaper skin
camouflages cartilaginous confessions

there is no dancing
in suspended animation
cryo-tanks where duplicitously drumming hearts
are stopped cold
atomic vibrations not buzzing
nor breathing objects
calling vivaciously to be consumed

tear me open
release the sensuous siren
whose diaphanous frocks
whip wildly in her
placid pirouette and
caresses my face like
a mother’s hand wiping away
tears which released the pain
that constant inescapable pressure
lance my skin
and bring forth that vile contaminant
slice the membrane around my heart
and in my crimson blood
in my metallic olfactory orchestra
separate dissonance from coalescence
and understand my conundrum
distill my banned message
and decode my heart.

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.

I know the world like no other
the centripetal force that
catapults me into the concrete wall
at my back which leaves
lashes of gravity
and welts and wounds that
remind me
the tides will turn and
I will careen towards
a blackness not even I can comprehend.

I know no middle ground
I live only in extremes
no gradations in my existence
leave me no steps
to descend the sheer cliff face
that I toe ever so recklessly
tempting that gravitational force
whose mere presence
fills me with righteous
distilled
rage.

There is no grey here
or is it gray?
-ey
-ay
I don't even know the orthography
well enough to describe
how the two sides of
me
the wraith and the goddess
could perhaps be intertwined
effervescent power
the cream swirling
in inexplicable patterns
until the coffee is a
calm
warm
and no longer bitter
on the tongue of those
whose life is not lived
only on the fringes
the afterthought
of a leather jacket
fallen out of style
decades ago
and yet still worn
as a reminder of the days when
I danced until my movements
fell in sync with the Earth's and
I stopped being able to
distinguish where
my root feet ended
and the moist midnight soil
began.

I know black
I know white
I know wintry obsidian nights
the darkness so thick
that even my sharpest blade
could never penetrate its
foreboding mass pressing in on me
I know truly endless summer days
when sleep is a forgotten virtue
and sunlight pouring through my window
warms me
and I photosynthesize joy
take all my nourishment from
the ambrosia of the sun.

In extremes there is no need
but want.

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.

she tells me that we’re coming from the same place
that you are equally blinded by that
white hot
scalding terror
whose fingers wrap sensuously
around my neck and
choke out any semblance of hope
asphyxia hallucinations of
your back as you walk away
and the image is burned into my retinas
as if i foresaw it from
the moment i laid eyes on you
as if the entire story of our relationship
was written into the chocolate profundity of your irises
and i knew you’d disappear into those
bottomless pupils
that i can’t read but can
taste the fear like acrimonious premonitions
of inevitable abandonment

i don’t think you want to hurt me
you don’t intentionally impale me with
the flaming sword of my own inadequacy
more likely i throw myself upon
that funeral pyre
but what else am i to do when
you won’t trust me even though
i’ve laid myself bare
and flayed my skin off the bone
to prove to you that i’m
open
and all you’ve done is ride in on your
white ******* horse
and remind me that
****** never win the prince
and am i forever tainted in your eyes
for a past filled with
all the attempts i made to
rid myself of nameless pain?

i never thought i’d see my 21st birthday

and do you know how it feels
to live knowing when you’ll die
a best used by date stamped across my forehead
reminding me that
nothing really matters in the end
eventually the pain will melt away
and i’ll float into a warm nothingness
the world will go on spinning
but i didn’t want to spend the ephemeral time
here on this earth
in agony so i
stared that pain in the eyes and vowed
to destroy it
and when i realized that was hopeless
i had no choice but to destroy myself
for i would never be able to extricate myself from
that anguish
so i wouldn’t give it a vessel to inhabit
i would starve it away
purge it away
cut it away
burn it away
smoke it away
**** it away
but in the end it never really mattered
because i was going to die anyway

you don’t know that life
my life before i met you
and you’ll never realize that all my actions
were incarnations of my loneliness
and desperation
me groping in the dark for a light switch
or a bullet hole
to take my leave from this
terrestrial prison of perpetual pain

you don’t realize that i never thought i’d meet you
that the world i inhabited had
no room for you
or even the idea of you
because the thought that things would get better
only made everything hurt worse
and it wouldn’t be so easy to die
if the potential for better days to come
lived inside me

though my loneliness was my pain
i couldn’t bear to not be alone
to open the doors to my heart and
let out the musty still air
and light a fire in the hearth
a light to ward off the
obsidian nighttime world i call home

because knowing what it would be like
without the pain
basking in the warmth of the sun’s
glorious acceptance
would only make the night darker
and my loneliness colder than the
absolute zero of my past

you can’t miss something you’ve never known.

it's called falling in love
but it's more like
the sudden stop
at the bottom

the *****-jarring
slam into
frigid water turned concrete
turned freeway
leading to the purest pain
and immaculate agony
of vulnerable viscera
and exhumed faith

and aren't i still a believer
when i spout blasphemy
like gagging bile
choking out your breath
erudite acidity of alacrity
from verbose confession

and didn't you warn me
of your limited vocabulary
when words have always
been my companion

how can you take their place
if you've never wrestled
an angel like Jacob
to steal a word from beyond
this holy of holies
grasping and groping
mute in darkness
still wet behind the ears

i still don't have the words
to quell your fear
of that one that lingers
on the tip of my tongue
threatening to jump out
and betray my cover

but you always see right through me

surgically slicing
to the heart of the matter
how is it not written
all over my face
when i've tattooed it across
the back of my eyelids
so i never can escape your face

who needs a sun
when in my core you've ignited
my own fission reactor
whose critical mass
is a capacity to love
and be loved
that you found splattered on
a highway
emotional roadkill
carrion long left to rot in
the baking sun

but who else would feed the raven?

the loneliness that gnaws
at me persistently

he'll never love you like that
like a three day weekend

and i'll never be like them
changing costumes more
than a washed up
Vegas showgirl
as used as my bones
and as looked at as my
naked body

people don't change
though you'll never admit it
until there is already
spaghetti on the wall
a broken dinner plate
and a shatter that reverberates
into my past and future
they're all the same
after all

but i think if i hadn't met you
if i hadn't loved you
i'd never know the weight
of four letters
to grind me to dust.

how can you not see it?

when you envision the
bubblegum pink
rose petal future
whose softness you seem to
automatically expect
that i am certain is
a razor's edge dripping
with my inevitable blood
sanguinely falling in
pregnant dewdrops and
slicing my heart out of my chest.

cutting you out of me
snipping those meticulous stitches
weaving you into
my entire self and
consuming me with a
balmy warmth that i
fight against
balk at
because it cannot last when
i am an emotional
bull in a china shop
and destroy everything i touch.

i will eventually burn you

that fury and blinding pain
that lives in the pit of my stomach
and rises like refluxing acid
when i remember my own weakness
when i come back to reality
and realize the magnitude of my
inadequacy
the breadth of pain i inflict
a festering
oozing
wound red at the edges
neglected purposefully
for i welcome any pain
that reminds me
i deserve to hurt
suffering is not optional
when i am as disposable as
the receipt the cashier forces you to take
at the supermarket checkout
i bow to the wind
paper doll girl
waiting for a flame
my spontaneous combustion
seeing white
and then nothing.

i want to be better

for you

to somehow take myself
and mould the clay figurine
masquerading as
my authentic self
into a shape that fits
perfectly into the hole that
i sometimes see
when you let down the
veil concealing your
holy of holies
even just for a moment.

i want you to feel whole

to feel safe when you
wake in the night and find me
pressing myself ever closer
to you
even in my sleep
wanting you near me
the palpable reminder that
i am not alone
though i feel the inevitability
constantly.

i won't forget your precise smell
the feeling of
my bare skin against yours
or my head on your chest
even if you leave

which i know you will.

i must have been born twice
upside down and back to front
from the maternal matrix
and the cold institutional plastic
of a pill bottle
the afterbirth of steel
sliding across my skins
in fits and starts
contractions trying to push out
the festering sore
the infected bile that stench
close up the hole
that vile creature that slithered out
keep back its faceless compatriots
like unopened boxes of razors
calling from beyond
a heartbeat dutifully pattering on
the coagulated blood
icy
congregates in my veins and
screams incessantly for relief
for freedom
i must have been born a million times
each time the blade pierces my skin
another mute wordless infant
comes forth
unsure how to cry.

how can you know a feeling
if you've never felt it before

realizing that
it has finally absorbed into my pores
overthrown my body
and taken up residence
in the oceanic depths
the Marianas Trench of my heart
now holding the reins
a nameless shadow living in my chest cavity
and eating away at the resolve
that has shackled me
and driven me on slick black asphalt
into palpable darkness of
a world i've never seen

how can you feel
when you don't have words

holding a dictionary to my heart
and praying to the gods
Merriam
Webster
to provide me with the
mixture of letters that might
shatter my muteness
and provide
permutations of syllables to
intercede for me
and finally give me
a label for those ephemeral tendrils
i feel protruding from me
and reaching
reaching
for you

how can i use a word
that is merely ink on a page
when this inundation
has flooded the streets of
my hometown
swept me away
and the only anchor i can find
is the chocolate profundity
of your eyes
that you lower in
what is that emotion
another word without meaning
that lives more as a
crushing pressure
grinding my bones to dust
shrinking me to a singular point in space
and time

time

you tell me to go slow
slow down
but how can i when my foot
is glued to the accelerator
and i am driving full force
into the brick wall of
more emotions i can't
touch

always just out of my
groping hands
calling your name and
the only word i have found
that seems to incapsulate
this churning rapacious feeling and
exquisite pain that
needs simply a word to
help you understand
because you can't feel what i feel
though i would allow you
to vagabond through my cerebellum
and maybe spend a night
in the absolute obsidian night
of my cerebrum
where that unnameable emotion
is the only thing
that can keep me warm

i'm an alien without country
without language to
communicate with this foreign world
where i have latched on
to you
your remora
for you most certainly are a shark
circling your prey
and i wait to be devoured

i welcome your destruction
the fires that rage from
the tips of your fingers
as they trace the lines of my
enemy body
ready to explode with
that emotion you urge me
to put away
to repress
and wait for another day
to inform you that
i love you
even if you don't love me back.

take me to the river
and let the water rush
in torrents from the
tear ducts of the source
the spring gurgling up
with a frigid message
ground water from
aquifers of secrets and the
memories that you swear to me
don't exist anymore
yet play in the crystal clear
blackness of your
eyes
when your pupils disappear
and blend into the river
of your mahogany irises.

walk me to the water
with the lead around me
and the bit of your attraction
burrowing between my teeth
as i bite down and
grind my molars to the
pollen that leaves a yellow green
sheen on the
surface of your watering hole
pull me as i fight
raging against the magnetic force
that shackles me to you
and leads me to the light
at the end of the tunnel
even though i'm lost.

you can lead a horse to water
just like you can tie me to you
sew me into the
secret place of your heart
and incorporate me into
the intricate web of your
ecosystem
fed by the endless supply of
that water which
digs its claws into the sides of my throat
and coats my stomach with
a poison
that i welcome.

you can lead a horse to water
but you can't make me drink
you can move the mountain
and dry up
snow drifts that drip and
melt into a
band of wild horses running
downhill to tread upon
my ticky-tacky heart
but if i drink then i'm surely lost
the sutures between us
cut out to reveal
the nascent pink scar
puckered at the edges
that represents our connection
how easily it can be
torn asunder
and leave me bleeding
on the banks of your shore
while you float away
one with the waves.