Can we just be
what we need
from eachother?
I know we are both
forbidden
to one another
but what is wrong
with fulfilling
every nerves ending
with euphoria?
Society would say
otherwise.

They enter my office
and I am their landfill
They take a cozy seat
on my blue heartbroken couch
They unload all of their garbage
One by one
a banana peel of tears
an alluminum leftover
of regret
and as their tainted trash
piles to the cieling
I take it all from them
with nothing in return
I offer them a clean towel
and an uncluttered
clear hope
And I genuinely
love them for it

I will take all of your dirt
and brown disgust
you've held in bins
all these years
once a week
as long as you want
my beautiful dears

I'm smiling as I write this
feeling a burst of bright
light up my insides
My hair is bouncy
from all the floating thoughts
of beauty
twirling throughout my brain

I have a smirky
quirky little step
and I  might swim up to the ceiling
in the ocean of glee
that surrounds me
the little fish
of freedom
will join on the journey
of joy

My lashes are catching
stars shooting from my pupils
instead of thick aligator tears of sadness
And I'm frolicking on cloud nine
a cozy little comfort of cotton

My darling it's true
I'm ******* finally over you.

I knew if I waited long enough
you'd call
every bone in your body
aching for release
every nerve ending
yearning for wrong
to be reminded
of my temptress ways
through my luring
soft voice spilling
onto your black and white world
bringing color back to your pupils
senses back to heightened existential
awareness
all of it makes you feel like a man
being reminded of my curves, my arched back
too much of a woman
for you to handle
I whisper "hello, doll"
filling up the dark empty space
of speech bubbles
that have been hanging in the air
for weeks
you and I,
cliche comics
trapped in the pages
of lust and illusion

Oh silly,
wandering,
pale,
petite
heart
you travel miles
from your owner
exploring
the beauty of the globe
without  
rib cage, torso, and body
you finicky
flighty
little thing
you annoy me so
you jump from
stranger's hearts
to stranger's hearts
lavishing in their adoration
and unusual beauty
you trapse around
masquereding yourself
as an authentic barer
of real love
a skilled actress
convincing
this world
that your owner,
me
is right there with you
all along
Oh you tormenting
rapid
active
amber *****

Here I am
always stretched
in two places at once.

If I were a poet
I would know the
perfect
word
to describe
how it feels
the moment I open my eyes
and realize
it was but a fleeting dream
I don't even remember what you look like
in this physical world
only a blurred image
residing in REM

If I were a poet
I could print the whispers
and wonders
and describe with diction
The raging burning battle
with my conscience
that created such
bruising and anger and irritation

the scars those thoughts have left me
They rise
with each moment of intimacy
even after forgiveness
has been mouthed over      and over       and over again

If I were a poet I'd
have the most beautiful acceptable
apology

But alas
I am no poet
or pious princess

Nothing ceases
It's always there reminding me
a personal private world
of pain

Shame
I beg you
Die with all of
last years deciet
do not                                         follow me.

Is it possible to be a self within a self?
When we whisper the over-used notion, "I would never do that."
Is that merely the hidden internal us responding in fear
in vulnerability
in sacredness, holding onto the hope
that no, we would never do that?

I would never flee down coast line to coast line
abandoning all
recklessly
I would never own a worthy
boyish love
holding it ransom,
giving not even a speck of pink back
selfishly
I would never cloud ridicule
over the individuals that love me and wreak grey
havoc on their hearts
so haughtily
I would never obsess over material
adornment and superficial success
vapidly
Hoping to control others with one look, one unreachable charm
I would never look like a Barbie doll queen
Platinum blonde hair
Golden olive skin
Perfect figure
what a cliché
what a ******* conformist
I would never lick up liquor like a dogged lush
tarring the black of the night
so pathetic
I would never weep in the shower
because of the way someone loved me too much
I would never have a disgusting want to be left lonely
So degrading

I would never let the world turn me

**I would never.

She dabs the ducts of each eye
with twirled tissue in hand
Sky blue eyes lost to oceans of tears
Angry waves never allowed to crash into cheeks
She swallows lump after lump
So that the black of lashes don't mix with blue
So that when she leaves my room it is as if there was not a drop of water
on this planet
in her body
You can see the longing within her gaze
when she feels the crisp cobalt threaten to release
Am I the gatekeeper?
To this tsunami of a girl
Tissue after tissue crumpled
smashed between cushions
Her soft small palms left to
catch raining tirade
Dabbing gently as to not expose a non-cover-girl-face
As to not expose the dark circling sharks under iris

100mph blinking
Tepees of tissues
blackened sleeves
Lashes sweeping lakes
of aches

You avoid eye contact
don't let me see the emerald
that creeps up with the hazel of your shattered sight

The divorcee sizes up my ringed left hand
The tormented parent sizes up my pristine smile
The assaulted lesbian sizes up my gender con-formative garb
The privileged heterosexual white male sizes up my rack
The elder sizes up my certificate

And that plush khaki couch of mine...
it's all that's left of me by the end of week
Stuffed with tears

Some of them shed

Hello,
nice to meet you.
Who am I? Trishanna.

I'm raw launching emotion
in a rainbow world
of  flurried dreams.
I'm a manifested awareness
of the tiny details
in every individual
I come across.
So when I go to repeat my name fifteen minutes after
meeting you
I'll see your hardened eyes
your questioning buttoned brows
and your soul that's aching
for me to ask all of the questions
that I'm not supposed to ask (the real ones.)
so that you can answer
in a non-civilized
un-socially acceptable way
In hopes to experience, for five minutes
in this god-awful church room
the feeling of being alive
pulsing with originality.


What do I do for a living?
I eat up heartache
and swallow down yearning.
I soar through the clouds of my mind
a thousand miles wide
towards every fiery vice.
I write with fierce passion.
I flood with tears.
I sing to the beauty
of rarity.

I'm a student. I'm a counselor.                                           Blah. Blah. Blah.
I'm this human, waiting for
a dialogue so much richer than this.

Your name. Your occupation. Your age.
They've robbed you of what you really want to experience with an introduction.

And as I cross among the stage
identical to the other three hundred dedicated
individuals
cap, gown, tassel
I can't help but hold on to my cap
Keep on this gown
and continue through the world
in students' skin
the only coat of comfort
I can find.

Oh to flee
to spider jump from one skyscraper to
the next
Holding the reflections
of the city panes
in my pocket
Electric energy a blanket
to my bones
Oh to flee
to dart through redwood
forests
until feet become fir
legs become outstretched
oak limbs
and arms become ascending jays
drifting higher and higher into a "v"
of vulnerability
Oh to flee
to swim through the heavy Atlantic
diving deeper into the open
and rest softly among the algae floor
to feel the schools of fish swift
weaving from my mane
braiding the space between my fingers
Oh to feel alive
Sweet sweet escape
I can taste your salt on my lips
I can feel your softness in the swing of my gate
I can almost hold your beauty in my hands
If I could only own you
and make you mine

There is nothing left of me
scattered bones for your choosing
you pick up the whitest of ivory
tangled veins and passions and smiles
thrown across this room
You wade through
like a thrifter
at a garage sale

The last of me is here
keep sake memory boxes
rusted and jaded
You can't bear to look at the letters
tear dropped stained
and restless within your heart

These are my remainders
***** hands
crossed legs
and a stomach well
of lost dreams
You cling to my sunken eyes
and spider web eyebrows
they whisper the secrets
of your longing lust

This is all that is left my dear
a tormented mind
filled with rainbow fantasy
drenched in clouded reality
A gripping song
that you flinch when you hear
it clinging to the walls of the starch room

I am nothing but a ghost
a fleeting scent
a mysterious movement
through the shafty
curtains of your aching presence
a graceless haunting

I often wonder

why some people

in our lives

swiftly enter

and land on our hearts

as if that beating *****

were a cloud of safety



and why

you had to leave

so quickly

I had you for awhile

my dear

you fed my hunger

you were my dessert

my freedom

my fire escape

my gripping emotion



I miss you everyday



I yearn for your hands

your widows peak

your long calves

your intensity



but this world is not mine for the taking

my love

it is mine to fall in line with

unless I will always be

a victim of your love

of my love

The second that the inanimate vehicle
was no longer mine to control
and I fish tailed out
like I often fantasize about doing among the sea
wheels, bumper, lights
battled
median, gravity, and hope
As the same air that I ****** in
flew my mobile above the median
I caught a glimpse of that beautiful mountain
of where I accepted I would roll and be at the bottom of
no longer a mermaid swimming in air
all I could hold was my hope in salvation
"Please let there be a heaven, and please let me in."

As a little girl I was told I was "saved"
and I remember so specifically dunking my body under water
and no longer did heaven allude me
I made the choice with  myfather
hoping that as he was submerged in that "holy water"
that he would no longer be addicted to the "devil's drink"
I made the choice to be renewed
Clean.
Reborn into new skin and better more brilliant choices

As the snow reflected off of the mountain innocently
I prayed that the holy water, my prayers, my altruism, my heart would allow all of it to be true, for me
Bouncing back off of the median
another thought snapped into my cortex
"I hope Alex will be okay. I hope this doesn't ruin his life."
I spun exactly 4 times, crossing exactly four lanes

On the other side of the freeway
I felt the vibration of the vehicles flying past me
shaking my damaged car
I was in fact "saved."

What would I regret?
Who would I have wronged that would celebrate my passing?
Would there be anyone?
Who did I right?
Who would have regrets in the time they made for me, or the conflicts that always arise in relation with others?
Who did I change? What have I done with this life?

At least I would be dying at a time that I started turning my life around
and at least I would be dying at a time that I sat with a woman alone in the hospital trying to make the decision to keep her baby or put him up for adoption.
At least I got to hold him, and hold her heart in that space. At least I did that.
At least I loved Alex the way I always should have in the last two weeks. At least I gave him that.
At least I finished that painting for one of my closest, dearest friends.
At least I spent a weekend with my family, truly listening, truly being present.
At least I got to connect with my brother in a way I never have before.
At least I was a good friend to the people important to me.
At least I went to Europe and traveled.
At least I stopped drinking so much, and started giving more.

I didn't get to finish that really good book
and I didn't get to bring life into this world
and I didn't get to enjoy my relationship deeper
or my incredible friendships longer
I didn't get to go back to Paris
or learn French
or do that water color workshop inFebruary
and I didn't get to swim in the ocean one last time
I didn't get to master healthy boundaries
or get work published
or recite slam poetry
or say "I'm sorry" to all those men I wronged.
I didn't get to heal and repair from how far my ego took me
I didn't get to meditate or do hot yoga one last time

Humbling.
I hated the whole experience, because it was so **** humbling
I'm not invincible
I am mortal
And I cannot be the fearless strong woman
I try to be
every second of the day.
I will die,
but it won't be my corpse on that day
at the bottom of the mountain
in those mustard cords
and messy locks
listening to Heart "Crazy On You."
two minutes after a conversation with Bri
about silly childish plans and
how she was doing better,
even after I had gone
how much she wanted to hug me
and loved me.

Not that day.
but someday
death will undo me.

I won't tell you
when I arrive "in town"
I'll lurk among the streets
that hold your name
in the pocket of their sidewalks
I'll crawl among the bars
that snicker with gross amusement
while I drown in ***** irony
I'll kick out the color
of the fallen leaves
That I fell with last week
for you
at the foot of your fashion-forward boots
I'll hug on strangers
that have that same
curled smile
and sad one-note expression
that you do
and I'll dance until every pore
is rid of the memory of your touch
and I'll swig every stout
until my thoughts can't even grasp
the memory of your name.

A need that twists
cabled and gripping
To be needed.
A war between
"I shouldn'ts" and "but I have tos"
Where am I in all of this?
The identity of a woman
with ten thousand strong hearts
and breaths
All of it deflated by another
Who appears to need oxygen MORE

Need need need

Kneed Kneed Kneed

until I'm contorted into a
better reflection of yourself.
Unrecognizable am I
I look like the surface of correspondence
Here I am!
Always.
I am
The soul mate
to your dreams and
descriptors and
hurt and
tears and
all that you've ever wanted to change in your life.  
And you'll swear on all that you stand for
that we are closer than anyone you've ever known
But if you were to recite one fact about me
The room would be quiet and empty.


A need to be needed.

I keep finding myself
folding your laundry
staring blankly,
my ach clinging to our empty walls
I keep finding myself scrubbing your pots and pans
grit shoved up into my fingernails
black as the lies and the vapidness
that follow me across the state
everytime I flee your side
I keep finding myself shaking my head at your reflection
forcing myself to say something kind
why can't it come naturally
like the salty taste of yearning on my lips

I keep finding myself trying to find you
and accept is as part of me

but I can't.

I sit on my sectional, a witness
to those vulnerable beings
pulling at scarves,
yanking at gloves
clutching at down jackets
I find great entertainment by this.

They have waited until November
When I have resided in frost
since last October
All       year       long
I held onto turtlenecks of impulsive irony
I bore
thirteen layers exactly
of self pride
I wore gloves religiously
that were knitted out of masochism
and egocentrism
And I drank from cups of hot cocoa
brimmed with whipped irony
during the month of June
I was far to eager

Now these glorious beings
surround me
clinging to warmth and long john material,
sitting closest to the hearth

All I can do is laugh

I searched for a shell
in June
I decorated a tree of longing
in May
I reached for a fringing
frolicking
frock
in July
that would
:gasp:
keep me warm

Fahrenheit resided in
pelvic bone
fingerprints
desperado
and seduction

None of it warmed my bones.

Lip skin synthesizes to a foaming mouth
Gritty
Rabie white
an open popsicle "ahhhh" tongue
Exposed a warm animal within
A savage
I cannot be a crowned blonde princess anymore                   neck
Fangs.                                                            of
Foreign vessels                           out
                            
                                     launch
                                        
I am a bomb.

Pull rubber grip with molars
I will blast away your DNA
so you never
ever
ever
existed

You slap my own name across my face
underneath my chin is a definition
to provide clarity for the ones YOU love
that are forced around me
I become a walking advertisement
for a cliché of
comfort in chaos
a dysfunctional reckoning
a ****** up difficult high sequence of emotive *****
You try so hard to shield the world from my exacerbation

Is every strange individual a stranger?
The ones I come into contact with seem to be immediate family

I refuse to surround myself by anyone
who is not exotic,
painted black and blue
Their own clarification by society
Painted on forehead
Their metaphors dripping off tongue
and pain licking up their eyelids
I remain solo these days

But within my own mind...

I seem too close to you, strange dearest sad one
I feed off of the cursed white
of your marrow
Filling my mouth with ***** residue
I pain to **** the salt from your fingertips
My beach is your body
A fiend for the folds of your sheets
I remain insatiable

If I could gift a mantra
to humanity
it would be

"I am worthy"

Is it wrong
that I am grateful
to have an aching heart
once again?

It feels far more natural.

my soul is a basement
flooded with un-choreographed movement,
rapid waters of words I never really meant
and empty fish bellied breaths
My heart is no different
just one big blue gilled vessel
aching
wishing for stars within black veins

Although you attempt to jab me
In passive backless form through
Exclusion and cruel bliss
I must remember...
this is all yours
Your ****, your insecurity, and your madness
It's your toxicity to wade through
Your shins laddened with black tar
Your words laced in spite
Your pulse can have a rhythm of vengeance
But I, I will stand firm and know
This is not mine to absorb
I zip myself up in thick skin
And know
I am confident and lovely and hilarious
I am beautiful and adventurous and stimulating
I am intelligent and courageous and healing
and I don't have to succumb to your demented seventeen year old white girl bully *******.

She should not be left alone.
starfish will form from her shoulders
Extremities become tentacles
each breath sprays an ink of green passion
her iris's become piranhas
her heart--a sea-like Venus flytrap
solitude will transform soul
and vertebrae is coral cuffed
her siren lips sync to fatale vocal chords
and you, poor sailor are brave enough to return
entranced, you can't help but look at what has become
of your love
Your remains
are gold skulls in sunken ships.

I yearn to shed my love
like my summer skin
It holds me down to earth
futile and forcing
It reminds me of the good I should be
the committed
constructive
civilized person I could be
I want to shed that dignified person
staring back at me
She looks so poised
So beautiful
and wide eyed
Arms wide open
I want to shed these form fitting clothes
and nine inch heels
and I want to cut off my big hair
and get rid of th

This may be the first time
I've let myself
Just be
listening to the blue calm
flow smoothly
through my veins
I hear my breath
shaped to the soft movement
of my lungs
This pearl energy
shifting
and comforting
the entity of me
Here I sit alone
independent from others
accepting
the

me.

The fire wreaks of crayons
Waxy surfaced juvenile spirit
And here I am bundled up like a burrito
In a tie blanket made for me in the 7th grade
And I keep on hearing the cracking and popping
The red and yellow licking up my yearning
The comfort of not having to respond to everything that was planned out for me
By only myself
I'm the only one to blame
I'm so grateful to have an environmental mediator
Get in the way of myself.

Eurasian roller birds
exist in the ecosystem
just as
I do.

When approached by perceived danger
Fight or Flight is feigned
Only remaining--wreaking self-destruction
Our wild flighty friends
Literally ***** all over their beautiful shells
in order to save themselves from suffering

Half digested disgust exposed on wings
arrests their blue beaming light

Eight years ago you climbed up to my nest
and held out your incredible love
Regurgitation immediately followed
Along with green abusive fear
I clung to my cloak of worms and saliva
You just laid down beside me
in digested stench

Multiple times you cleaned me up
licked up the pain
Accepting the disgust,
Realizing quickly
You could not clean a lover who aches
to be bent over, pale skinned, and protected

I fled from nest
and you did too my dear
we couldn't sit with the offensive smell any longer
My wounds were too porous
my pain, invasive

The foul smell that the roller exerts
is also meant to alert the parents to flee back to nest
and protect their blue babe

When I cracked from shell and entered the world
with slit eyes
There were thousands and thousands of threats
and the excretion was not enough
I did not get eaten up by the masses
but I did allow myself to become what I had eaten
infantile self-protection morphed into
Pervasive self-destruction.

Our nest kept singing back to us,
Our love entwined and weaved in with twig
Like haunted batty lovers
Pulled back in to vile

Finally finally finally finally     fin a lly
I allowed the digestion
of your love
There were my bursting blue feathers
Sterile and glowing
Our nest safe from
my internal predator
And you, finally safe in my love.

I'm a gypsy
Your eyes are pockets
filled with all I've robbed
from this world
I'm a wave lacking
pure
white foam,
lashing at sand selfishly
I'm malice disease,
ill derived and pale skinned
lurking on your final days
I'm your tasteless vice:
cigarette filmed cough,
pitch lined coffee mugs
repeated whiskey morning breath.
I'm an acrobatic enemy
wreaking of abandonment
and wretched demise
I'm a mummy
wrapped in ***** linen lies
all the while buried in your arms,
like a pharaoh


I have a gremlin heart
that will eat up your days
purging  a stainless course
I bare a scorpion back
whipping in reverse to sting your
heated holy heart
My python legs
squeeze your robust piety,
crushing regal goodness.

My wants are bigger than my mouth and tongue and words
And I am just a                           girl.

It would be a lot easier
if you

weren't beautiful

I asked you to sleep with your feet by my head
in order to rest my fingers
but then I wanted to feel your toes
then the ligaments around your ankles,
next the pads of your heels
Then we finally
gave up
and you turned back up to me

we never did sleep that night.

He steps outside
wading through snow, he exhales more
only to capture the white billowing cloud that forms
outside of open gape
His eyes are five year old wonders,
his hands fifty years old

The second the sole of his workman's shoe
crunches down on white carpet
The neighbors open heated entrances
To greet him

Embracing him warmly with conversation
Buzzing with words and news from the weekend missed
We arrive home to a repaired snow blower, steady and rumbling

The week before
The power lines got into a war with the wind
The neighbor I had rushed past weekly
offered
piles of stored wood, without a thought
keeping the both of us warm for days
in heart and in palms

His dimples are sacred accepting kindness
The words he shares so open and patient,
Curious and compassionate
Leaving our fences shared, not separated

Week to week I only
greet chamomile tea and scripted memoirs
Grateful to flee from humanity behind sacred front door.

Me: "How do you have time to talk to the neighbors?"
Him: "No one is ever truly busy."

Yesterday I was told that I was air
inventive and cool to the touch
offering oxygen and ideas to breathless souls

All I was to you was sea sewage
forcing you to hold stale breath
gripping onto other
floating debris lovers

And I was a shark circling
waiting for the moment
your weak grip slipped
the last of dry flesh would sink under currant
and there I was reaching for your perfectly
rainbow arched feet

I pulled you deeper and deeper until
finally I let you slip back into a world
where gravity was your enemy
and I, left alone as a sea monster
for ***** divers to gape at

And here I am sifting through the sand
trying to find purpose for our salty memories
Do I bury them and hope they convert into nourishment for the
algae?
do I let them float to the surface and offer light to your pirate pals?
Do I string them like pearls and adorn the humpbacks?
I could stuff them into the fisherman's cages and
let them surface back up to you
to **** from crab claws

But alas, captain

Until I find a purpose for all of our ****** up
suffocating memories

I'll scoff at being labeld "air"
and harbor those haunting pieces of you
like the mossy skulls I lay with
at the bottom of this dark ocean

I have floated above myself before
A blank faced sheet,  a fractured mirror
Self looking down on distant self
A Charlie, pushing arches against bubble fans
Burping up desperation
Grasping to be grounded

This morning the derealization was different

Winged above I saw myself in a dream
Grown up me
As I had idealized  
as a crimson heart-eyed child

Standing
in a cluttered room
Wrapped in silk, held in your wings
You tickling me, pushing nose into nape
It had finally happened
The first view
of the best version of myself
Unlike nothing else.

Stepping on carpet
(climbing onto rock)
We stare at screen
(I cast my spell...)
I CAN conquer man's demise.
Touchdowns
convert  to gazing into the scripts of our souls.
Stagnant and somber,
you are inches away
I am in floating in space
I sit on couch
(or sitting on active volcano?)
and stare at blank walls
(or cotton candy sunsets?)
And I grab your hand
and we float out the window
(much like Peter Pan and Wendy)
and we are Icelandic campers
we are North African monkeys grooming each other
we are Alaskan sibling salmon, swimming to the exact spot our eggs once resided
always against current
teasing the brown bear
we are slipping penguins
the sea lions watch our transition
from awkward wobbling
to graceful gliding
figure eighting
between icebergs
We have so much energy that the gulls
might bet on us melting the bergs
we are gas and light and air and water and mother moon

we are so much more than this cancerous room

I know it. You know it.

Instead we groan at fumbles
and pile plates high with lays potato chips
layered grief stuck between tongue and cheek

Goodbye my dear friend.

I know you heard me.

My body takes me places I do not know
Skin swims under your drumming veins
and twists around gripped clothing
My arms wrap around foreign limbs
Mind confusing them as familiar

Blonde tresses pulled and tangled
by numb fingers
Nose bitten by hollow teeth
lips ****** up of all their color
the red shoved in your bottomless pocket

Nape nestled and licked up
My head now rests on my shoulders
Those shoulders carved, pits of letters revealing your name
Poked collar bones distorted under your weight
Flattened under hungry bones

My body takes me places I do not know
Rib cage cracked by demanding palms
Heart removed, and poured into your thirsty inlet
******* swim into your hook, you feed off of them for days.
Eyes lost at sea

Ankles and feet shoved down to the foot of your bed
Boredom hits, and they are stuffed below
My knees sit between tongue and cheek
And that voice I had, caught in your canal
Inflection hanging in the orbit of your planet

My calves wander and brushed up
Painted against your gnarled spine
Thighs travel around your tortured torso
Asking for directions from navel
Lead stray

My body takes me places I do not know
Mind finally arrives
Body's tour ignored.

A rough surface of sorrow
forms under eyelids
when I see you
You strike it with a match of apathy,
Light your cigarette,
and throw fire to the burn pile of your life.
Flames flicker around
your daughter's botched haircuts
her eyes have the same longing yours do.
Violet heat swirls around questions, trapped in thought bubbles,  
that hang over your son's sweet hazel head
His prism tears make
everything go to ash

As I stand an outsider
Poking rod to ember
Even as I ****
I know the only thing I will find
is empty charcoal memories of how we used to be
Before the (w)reckoning  

How scorched it feels, how black it hurts
To lose someone who was there through it all
I could always arrive with streaks down my cheeks.
We could always be the kindling.

I guess all I can do now is say
Burn it all down, baby

There is a
Chuck Taylor black energy connecting  
Every one of my couch’s teens
But please don’t generalize a single spirit
And especially stay away from adjectives like
“angsty” and “misunderstood”
Never accuse them of such a cliché travesty
At such an age spotlighted syndrome  stage
The Sufjan Stevens song she brings in has the same yearning
That another’s canon snaps with trapped black and whites
That same shadow tangos with the forced-into-therapy-tween’s
faint scalloped smile lines
of times before, when she had not been hunting for her own identity
When she could spin around the willow
And not worry about her eyelet ******* peeking through
Then the cloud covered eighteen year old daisy
Drags amber strands across forehead while she murmers
Blame that oozes from her juvenile jawline, mirroring
The prior sweetheart that stormed out of my office at 3:00pm
Tawny strands across her wrist
And how could I ever forget the last string of fiber
Fierce and cross armed  
The last knot to the cat’s cradle of adolescent midnight string
“I know I will conquer my genetic hand”
She declares
Bubblegum harbored in fleshy cheek
Whiskers and all.

I hold sacred in my bones
The appendage I am in all of this
wide eyed need
And I let the walls absorb their sighs
Until, in awe I witness
the beauty in vulnerability  
Again

I will
go
ahead and
break my own heart
thank.you.very.much

Hand me clamp
Your clenched jaw
Waiting to chomp at the bit

You grip my hand,
introduce yourself
My aorta crushes your knuckles
Oh you can't let go?
What a shame
Beat you to it.
Broke rib cage
Crunched down on
beating
Crimson

All before you could tell me where you came from

Hell.

It didn't happen all at once
But it was an immediate awareness
A feeling rather
Is it an ending of something?
Or a beginning?
Or the sudden drop of the ******
Within my story
Just trembling and ready to head uphill again
Because my novel knows me too well
And so do the stars
A pro climactic rising
Is always around the corner
No it was more like an opening and closing
Or a cutting off of rotted midnight limb
And in its place a blossoming rainforest full of the woodland emotions that look a lot like
Furry clashing forces
I'm not quite sure how to describe it but
All I know is that I rescued myself
From me
And here I am
A floating thriving body on glass water
An ebb that quenches my pores Tiger fish that offer their scales for comfort
And algae that looks a little like sparkly mold from the moon
And the air I breath as I float is crystalline
salty renewal
And that saltwater taffy smirk of mine
Is real
Chew it between perspectives
The diamonds in my eyes
Have been authenticated
Go ahead and sell them at full price

Is it too late to shrink into violets at full bloom
Too early to squeeze into the round sleeves of the moon
Too inconvenient to consider the hobbling leg of a ****** love ?
Has my moment passed
to lick up the freckles that fall
From face to floor
Am I too young to slip my words into a box of dogma?
Too old to melt into serpents
And I'm sure you'll tell me
I'm too pretty to dry up in a wasteland of apathy
and too confident to dive into gaped alligator comfort
Too lost to soak in road map paper cut blood
And my brain is far too twisted to
wrap around your body
buckling and cinching
as armor
Of course my flesh is too toady
For your winter coat
I've been told
It's much too prosaic to embarrass the rising rays
with my black aggressive grip
I will reach out anyways and harbor away yellow
Every second I can.
That, that you cannot take away from the pockets of my soul

It was in the wait
The gurgling spitting surface
Where I found myself

The alone

The trembling affliction
I salivated and salivated on
until I could finally swallow

Everything has dissolved

Do not get this confused with not having memory
My body has anologues of dialogues o

I seem to only want to write in
the middle of the month
It's safer hugged between
the beginning and the
end.
Would January
please help release me
from December's arms?

Use me like you used to
I hold onto that same perfect feeling in my dreams
I'll wake up mid consciousness
REM sleep whispering
Reminding me 
Yes, I remember this rawness
Body taken as a target 
Like an old friend leading you 
Back to the womb
To the security and darkness. 
I rationed how much 
You
Could
Use.
Black ink blue ink 
What ink will you push down and out of me
Swiping my darkness on pure white pulp
Reading the words that were present in every pore
rubbing my pink eraser ******* between index and thumb
Oh but nothing can erase a night
And nothing will white out 
My moon or my tongue or my stain

I want to eat up fir trees
and your eyelids
and cupcakes full of doubt
I want to sip up sweaty windowsills
and your vowels
and goblets full of desire

If I were to tell you
expose my darkness
unleash my destruction
I know my ocean of black
would swallow you whole
Your eyes would sink into your stomach
and no longer would I be your shining prize
I would flee
and wreck even more that I own
And I would say goodbye
before the period even followed my sentence
I know I'm not woman enough
to see your pain from my betrayal
slip into the carpet
at my feet
So yes, my dear I will flee
I'm so much better at leaving
I don't deserve your concrete feet
and your purity
Commitment drenched in your every move
I've known all along
this time would come
When my skin would shed
my mask would sail
and underneath all that I've shown you
A ***** lush ******* unveiled.

When it first happened
Everything in sight
Taller than I
Seduced me
Urged me
To flee the earth

Western red cedar
Sooty brick chimneys
Rainier caps
You.

I could climb and clutter and choke and caress and cling
Oh to have a moment of solitude
With the blue
If I was vertical enough
Would the fever fade?

I could mutate into molecule
A drift of snow
An aphid eaten leaf
A maroon berry
Caught in a sparrow's beak
Would I be alleviated by elevation?
If I get close enough to God would I be washed of my sins?
I vow never to touch soil again
Tree limbs would be my salvation

Meet me there.

I was built from my fathers tiny bones
my umbilical cord circled with second hand rage.
I entered oxygen
with Raggedy Anne eyes
black circles of fear under stitched innocence
Paired with
my inside out jumpers on picture day
And the quivering hands of my mother
smoothing my tangled curls
I ended up being jumpy just like her
And I got your thick hairline and your breathless passion for music and your ****** up need to explore the darkest cracks of humanity and your avoidance of mortality and your charming sexuality to get exactly whom you wanted--an elite lover who deserves better just to have them in sticky gripped destruction and I got your restlessness and your love for the forbidden and your salvation in rain
and your destructive awful enchanting chaos

A young girl sat across from me and asked me what she should do about her father
and there I was with my dynamic response
she weeped
she needed someone to be without poetic movement and body language
Without vigor
She said it reminded her of her violent father
My mother giggles at how distorted I entered the
world
Dislocated nose
A cone head
and misshaped eyes
Didn't she realize my world was distorted before I even got there?
I have always been pretty good with empathy.

I want them to say I was obsessed
Crazy mad for the earth that curled around my feet
Tortured by my addiction to touch
Sinful for the hunger that knotted up the trees near your house
That led me to your walls made from
raw words and thick veins
That they would whisper that I was  
Desperate to hold onto the moon like a
healer holds onto mortality
I want them to find comedic relief in
how fortifying  silly colloquialisms are to me
sinking with me when
strangers called me "petal"
All of them would gladly proclaim
I died from drinking too much
from an aching well
of your words
That my bones were wrapped in silky sarcasm
My blood almost translucent in a carpet of
olive moss ,
whispering back to the cumulus
"why?", "of course, my love", and "me too"
I want them to describe my time
as a staunched storyteller
with ears for eyes
and an ocean mouth
I want it to be all okay
That I entered the earth soft and weeping
but left as
a bizarre beautiful form