i've taken the dismal descent
of every trap door set for me.

i've sank deeper than the titanic.

i've painted-by-numbers through a thousand mouths.

i've grinned horribly and thumbed my nose at god.

i've killed for men who've murdered me.

i've donned this macabre disguise
far and beyond too many times.






i've lifted the layers of bygone bandages.

i've been fixed
with two lips
and three words.

what's the point of buying a portrait if you are blind?
nothing i would see is worth my precious time—
just more metal, bad skin, and tired, jealous eyes

senseless sensibility is a cold kettle boiling,
nonsense steam fogs up the jaded glass.
draw a picture with your finger,
smile as it fades to apathy,
all that lovely water turned to gas.

i lick my palms to play pretend with illness,
stay in bed with the quilt kicked off-kilter,
crawling with the brood of the six-legged past;
they are eating the nests of the threatened, bitter future

change the cable channels in my brain,
but only stations two and five are clear,
and eight if a wire coat-hanger antenna
is bent at an angle from my dominant ear
so i can sit, content, and watch the weather

sneaking in exhaust from every orifice
gets me passed out stupid every time;
a coping mechanism,
coated **** between the gears,
and only this pollution left behind.

frantic antics rewire my brain,
almost as if it were never a brain at all—
circuits and switches and copper thread,
my computerized cerebellum, my inorganic head,
as biology becomes machine.

what powers my body,
this metallic monstrosity?
there is no plug, no battery—
only the cogs and gears of a watchmaker's fever dream
and sheer, dumb luck.

because, while they stood around
and waited idly for my parts to rust,
i was killing time in a vacuum,
ignoring the earnest embraces of air and rain.

and thus, here i rest,
with the sound of my own meek ticking
thrumming against these pink asylum walls

but because i stayed awake to tell the tale,
and to rub their sordid noses in the dirt,
i suppose my isolation was worth it.

i have no more room for these testaments.
their biblical proportions
swell
and strain the seams of my naïveté.

your afterlife glides past
with wings of melting wax
attempting to tempt me with tales
of a hellish heaven
and a heavenly hell

but i prefer a Floydian philosophy
for all i touch
and all i see.



death's crooked fingers reach us all in time



yet had i the faculty
fresh from the womb
i would have feared my birth
over any eventual demise.

you smile, and a person dies.
you smile, and the sun bows a tiny bit lower in the sky.
you smile, and two people are born.
you smile, and a note trills its way to my ear's tympanum.
you smile, and a moth finds its way to the dimming porch light.
you smile, and the incense stick accessorizes with a shawl of smoke.
you smile, and every vein in my cheeks dilates.
you smile, and there is a marvelous lilt to your voice.
you smile, and my clever anecdote is stuck between your teeth.
you smile, and our eyes dare each other to grin even wider.
you smile, and somewhere dawn breaks like a bull in a china shop.
you smile, and life roars.

the absence of a proper muse
incessantly plagues her
with an illness that can’t be cured
diagnosis: terminally blasé
side effects may include
being consistently reality-addled
and subsequently bitter.

the eraser wears down well before the lead.
words aren’t meeting each other in bars
and taking each other home
for one-night stands and cigarettes.
words are passing each other in hallways
and avoiding eye contact.

as a desperate effort
she’ll make herself write poetry
even though inevitably
she will loathe the result—
a loveless excuse for thought
and a brainchild praying to be aborted.