The best truths are told with fingers tied
behind the backs of the greatest liars,
and for every time I've heard something too good to be true,
I remember this.

I remember fists,
clenched tight while wishing my body
would disappear in high school hallways.
While I fought against myself halfway out the door to homeroom.

I was “that kid.”
The one who sat with a half eaten lunch
where prying eyes couldn't touch
for fear of people watching me take a bite of what sustains life.

I wanted to be the emptiness that creates a star;
the friction of aimless atoms collapsing into one another to fabricate something beautiful.
People are unmerciful, because I’m still waiting for gravity to do the trick.

I’m still waiting to be worth more than a second pick.
I’m waiting for these shaking hands to stop and hold their fingers steady.

The thing about a star, I learned,
is that when we are staring at Orion’s Belt,
we are looking approximately 1340 years into the past.

I can only hope that my body can last
until I can see my own light.  
I’ll keep trying to force my spine
to sit in line with the rest of me;
keep trying like a lightening bug to create my own stars.

I’m cutting out the fat,
and its leaving so much
unused tissue.

Sinewy fragments ripped from what was once apart of me,
walk around the ground as a completely
different entity.

Its starting to really scare me
how distance can be easy.

How it is the light from here to there,
yet the horizon on the ocean.

It’s a summer breeze with nothing to say.

Often, I dream of
hands clasped tight.

A sure sign of a lack of faith,
according to the preacher.
“Indication of a closed mind,”
said plainly by the teacher.

My mother says,
it means I carry too much regret.
The psychologist states,
“Classic regression.”

My lover says,
he has to open me.
I think I need my hands held,
and not just my **** stroked.

I wanted to make love to you without touching your skin to mine.
An overflow of words spilling out from my mouth and coiling around you,
even Germans would envy the way they sound;
barbed wire unhinged from it’s post.

That’s the way language works.
The French don’t have any idea their language sounds like foreplay,
how their phrases are the moments before ******
suspended beyond reach by the speakers with hard consonants.

For just two hours I wanted to speak a different language entirely.
To have you understand what it means to be able to trace the outline of your body in a language you cannot fathom.
A dialect that does not leave our mouths sticky and at a loss for proper terms.

My molecular structure is failing me and
I’m unhinged on the precipice of
reckless and wild abandon with a quiet disdain for the lack of thirst I have for life

I’m intertwining myself among two different places and
I’m there and here all at the same time
but am I anywhere at all?
Am I everywhere like the ashes of my ancestors who got me here today?

Life seems self propelling while people lay relatively motionless through it all.

If we stand still, the world keeps spinning.

I never knew what a house on fire felt like
until i felt the bees in my bones rumble in full force.
Thinking of losing myself puts me in distress and sets
flames on a course unstoppable.

I feel like it leaves burn marks on my skin
or a rip in the seam of what holds my soul together.
Mirrors are out of the question,
even if they reaffirm existence.

They shout,
“You are here. You exist!”

They polarize
and objectify the things I cannot face.

I wish I could tell you why I’m afraid of the world.
Why when I was little I thought I was supposed to be a girl,
and how I grew into myself too quickly
while growing out of myself even quicker.

How I’m still growing but I’m not getting taller.
It confused me in catholic school when confessing to the father
that I knew far too much.

How he told me, “You are the sinner,
In life there is no winner,
and we have to roll with the punches God throws.”

Why does God have to hit us with blows
from a fist too big to
miss?

This “unbearable lightness of being”
makes me want to float through the ceiling.
And I’m not quite sure of what I’m seeing,
but it isn’t worth believing.