i wish i could
freeze
this moment
forever
save it
in a glass
like rain -
loving you,
so easy now
when i know
that someday
i'll need to love
the heroes in my stories,
the words on my page,
the tea in my cup and the
thoughts in my head
more than you.
i know that someday
i'll need them more,
and one of you will have
to crowd the other out.
and i don't want to lose my words.
i love you so much -
more than I thought i would ever love
anybody.
but i can't lose the words in my head.
i can't stop them bleeding onto pages.
i know you'd never ask if of me but
it would happen.

and i can't lose the words in my head.
i can't stop them bleeding onto pages.
not for you.
not for anybody.

i think by nature i'm a gasoline-pourer -
    i don't strike the match but
  goodamn it, do i set up that fire.

i am. i'm a gasoline-pourer and a poison-spreader
and i destroy fragile things.
i'm a gasoline-pourer and i'm afraid
      we might be the kindling.

you head-beckoning
soft-smiling deceiver.
you would have my heart again
(to break)
and i will not give it.

at the risk of sounding cynical,
you don't get to care now
you half-smiling
soft-watching deceiver
not even for the kindness,
the tenderness of your eyes today
(across the room, and gentling into mine)



vulnerability is a cruel thing
to play on

girl, you're pretty, but as empty
as the laughter
you ting-a-ling out for those hungry boys.
they think you're simple and so, so easy
(to figure out)

they're not worth
the dirt on your designer shoes.

girl, your eyes
are empty as glass bottles
and only half as green.

you crinkle them up in your pictures but your smile
is forced as your baby-blond act.

girl, your jack-in-the-box *****, bounding from
pretty boy to
pretty boy,
wears a little thin from time to time,
even
especially
for you.

you're not more than that, they'll say.

girl, you're pretty, but i am too.
my eyes are full as glass bottles, and twice as green,
and i laugh
with my whole body.
girl, you're pretty, but you've got to find a way to make boys' eyes burn
into something other than the back of your skirt.

girl, you're pretty, but sometime you're going
to crash-land into yourself
and realize that there's a person where you thought
there was only a porcelain-face
and an empty ******-inkling of a laugh.

we watched the sun spill the sky ******
and we painted pictures in the sand.
we watched the ocean i so feared wash the shells
a different color, ruder and ruddier than before,
duller with each passing wave
like blue jeans in the wash
or hearts on a string.
you were the moon, pulling me on and pushing me back,
and i was the sun, laughing at you.
we ran barefoot over reefs and rainclouds,
never minding that we tattered the hems of our pants,
and i had to remind you that there are still stars in daytime.
we watched white-black clouds over pink-and-purple skies
and we laughed to see the birds just wheeling.
we watched the ocean i so feared wash the shells
a different color, brighter and righter than they were before,
lovelier with each passing wave,
like stars in the night,
or hearts on a string.

hello, poetry.
no, no, keep your seat.
i just wanted to talk to you about
how i can't stop writing you.
if you could stop pushing into my head
and making my fingers itch
and my eyes wander,
and if you would stop showing up in the margins
of my geometry homework,
well,
i guess i just wouldn't be me anymore
(probably be doing better in geometry though).
so, i was going to ask you to stop.
but, on the other hand -
it would get pretty lonely.
just me and the margins.

i hope the world's just a little grayer without me,
and i hope soon i'll be able to see your hand on someone else and not think of your hands on me.
and i hope you remember me sometimes.
and i hope we meant anything.
and i hope that song makes you think of me
and i hope the world keep turning and my heart keeps changing and i hope this ends soon.
and i hope you don't leave forever
and i hope i don't leave forever either,
and if i do i hope to god that i come back.

i am the hookah queen

       and drifting in my hookah dream, i find
that i have no one else

  to care for.

i know nothing of their bitterness,
                           their wantonness, their greed,

i know nothing of that world,

    only me.

              and sifting through my hookah dream,

              colored with a hookah ream,


and pulled apart with all the careless shadows,

                                 i smile, (i the hookah queen) and contentedly i drift,

i am going, i am going, i am gone.

You gave me the hostility,
your ******* priorities.
I should matter more than that. I had things to say to you today,
things I will not know how to articulate tomorrow.
You gave me the anger.
It's no one's fault but yours, the way I look at you.
Your ******* ego,
you don't care what I have to say.
You're not busy,
you're indifferent.
I would make time for you. I have made time for you,
even though it was you who broke me wide open.
You have no excuse, none I want to hear.
We'll talk tomorrow,
like you said,
and it will be on your terms,
like always.
But ******* it, I will be ******* heard.

i built an ice castle around my heart -
it's hard to break, and even harder to melt
so i thought it would be perfect.
i put a sentinel outside the door
i gave him your face
and how your hands feel.
there's no way
you're getting in.

i built an ice castle around my heart -
it's cold, but it's still pretty
it appeases my vanity
and inside my blood gives eskimo kisses to strangers.

i built an ice castle around my heart -
and you laid the first brick,
so don't be surprised when i'm cold to you
when my eyes are frosty
and my words are short and sharp as shards of ice,
because you put my heart in an ice castle,
and it's sure as hell not melting

for you.

nothing bothers me more than people who say they have found god.
no one has found god.
life is not about finding god.
"GOD" is intangible and not something we can grasp,
but we pretend to.
people put quotes around his words
and then put those words in his mouth
they string ideas of her into beads and crosses -
what exactly are  you clinging to?
people don't know.
we are too small
and we are not wise enough.
god is the whole universe.
god is nothing.
god is a tree, a bird, a thought.
god is a little boy with a piece of candy stuck in his hair,
an artist in a garret,
a dog on a cushion,
a girl in an alley.
i don't believe that god has abandoned the church.
i believe that the church has abandoned god.
i don't believe in my catholic roots.
i don't believe in christianity.
i don't believe in buddhism.
i don't believe in islam.
i don't believe the bible.
i don't believe the priests, the shamans, the medicine men.
i don't believe the trappings we place around god
(our weak ideas of her,
our sorry attempts to define him).
i believe that god is people
god is rain, god is the sun
god is the night air
god is the words on paper
god is the paint on canvas
god is creating, god is being, god is gone.
god is here, now, and everywhere
and i only call her god because i lack another name for him.
it has no name.
i understand this
or i think i do.
god knows me intrinsically
or not at all.
god loves infinitely and sees to the depths of humanity
or else god is old, decrepit, and alone
curled in a corner of the world
trying to shut out the mayhem of his earth
(what have i done?).
god cringes at our killings
rejoices in our births,
or is vengeful, red, and full of war and death.
god is spring, summer, and fall.
he is the snow in winter, she is the birdsong
at my window.
she is multitudes and she is one
wildly insignificant
and all-knowing being.
she is the creator, the destroyer, the lover.
she is nature, she is earth,
she is people,
she is the industry, the tapestry, the travesty.
she is love, she is me.
she is loss, she is you.
she is life, she is them.
and i love her,
as anyone loves her -
if you can love an energy,
an idea,
the ungraspable concept that a grain of sand
is the same as the greatest mountain in the world.


but i don't presume
to know her.

i said, "i don't want to talk."
i said, "i don't want to talk."
i said, "i can't talk."
and when we talked,
it ended. and that's what it is.

If you gave me a thousand years
I would not be able to express to you
how irritating it is
   that I am not wearing this coat
     but I can feel it.
It' s just sitting
in the chair
behind me
scrunched under my back
and the ******* zipper
is digging into my elbow
     and it is the most bothersome thing.
I love this coat
because it's yours
   and wearing it reminds me that I'm yours, too.
But right now I swear -
I will destroy this ****.

you can't remove a piece of clothing -
        not a sweater,
  not a shirt,
    not a pair of ******* socks -
without thinking of them,
picturing them, you know?
like,
  not even in your bed or on your bed or anywhere near your bed.
      just thinking of them,
because you get to this point where it's like,
the whole reason you take off your clothes,
is so that this one person, who you love, more than anything
can touch you better
or see you better
or so that you can feel them with things that aren't your hands.
  it's ******, i guess. for some people. for me. that whole skin-to-skin thing.
but anyway
it isn't about *** - wanting people, i mean.
   it's just that you're doing something
   in their absence
    that you normally do,
      or sometimes do,
      or have done,
     in their presence
and it feels weird
and it makes you feel weird,
and then you miss them,
and you write poems like this one.
or whatever this is.

it's pretty embarrassing, as a cycle.

you got serious, talking about a girl
we both know.
you said, "she is not special," shaking your head,
and i nodded.
i fell in love with you then, the stars in your eyes
and the one dimple in your cheek,
the not-serious gravity
of the way you talk.
you joking
mischievous
and clever boy.

you look at me sometimes, thoughtfully
just looking
in a way that makes my hands shake
and my heart rabbit-tap against my ribs
(so loud, i'm sure you can hear it).

i am pining, i am pensive.

the next time i see you, my pretty boy,
i refuse to stand in the hallway next to you
while everyone talks about what a great time they had
or lay on the floor next to your chair while you explain
some war game to me, that you're not half as serious about
as every other guy on the planet.
the next time i see you i will plop down on the couch next to you,
shoulder to shoulder,
and i'll talk to you, lightly, about how
i'm not sure
if you like me.
i'm not sure
if you like anyone.
and i think you probably do like me,
and that i
definitely
like you.
"so i think,
we should hang out sometime
or something." and then maybe i'll get up and move away again,
or sit there with you.
maybe i'll plant a little kiss on your cheek,
or put my head on your shoulder,
or just sit there with you.
maybe when we leave
i'll smile at you like i always do,
but i'll also make my way through the ocean of our families
and hug you tight enough that they'll all finally stop bugging me.
maybe i'll do that.

ask me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10,
   and i'll give you a crippling number.
  an above-10 number.

ask me to look the boy who no longer loves me in the eye
and i'll shy away. i'll avert my own eyes.
i will walk by him as if we are strangers,
       and i will feel the seams on my heart pop open,
one by one.

ask me if i feel like breaking
   and hurting.
ask me about the emptiness in my chest
        and the grey behind my eyes. ask me if it hurts my heart to beat.
    ask me if my blood is still in the habit of quickening when he's close.
ask me if i regret anything,
and i'll tell you that i regret everything.

      ask me if i love him
      and ask me if i want him.
           for those, i won't have an answer.
           only silence. only thought.

ask me if parts of me hate him,
  and i'll tell you about the low burning in my belly,
         the hating-blaming-burning
and the ******-up way it makes me feel.

ask me if i miss him.
i'll tell you that i am hollow.
i'll tell you that my whole body, my whole heart, is nothing but missing him.
i'll tell you i might just blow away
   without his love to anchor me.
i'll tell you that i feel absolutely empty

and it will be the truth.

listen.
i haven't fallen out of love with you yet,
and i miss you all the time
and i want you so much i can't even make myself breathe.
but i am exhausted.
i am exhausted with not having you.
i am exhausted with the back-and-forth i've been having with my heart.
i am exhausted and i am done.
twenty four hours ago i was planning out something to say to you.
i thought i was going to sit down with you and tell you.
i was going to tell you,
"i want you to know
that wherever you are
and whoever you're with
there is someone
here
who loves you
and who thinks you are special beyond belief,
and who believes in everything that you are."
i was going to tell you,
"think about it."
i was going to tell you,
"i hope that you'll love me back, someday,"
i was going to tell you,
"i don't expect it to be
soon.
but it's important that you know."
that was how i felt twenty four hours ago.
now, though,
i feel angry and disenchanted
and i feel exhausted.
i realize, now
that if you and i were to be you and i again
i need to be stronger
and you need to be the person you're going to be,
because i love you limitlessly,
in ways that, even if i fall in love with someone else, will not go away,
but the person that you are now?
i cannot stand.
the part of your life where you can't love me,
it isn't over yet,
and i'm not willing to feel small
and insecure
and second-best
again.
when we're the people we're going to be,
that's when i'll love you.
that's when i'll try.
i'm not willing to deal with who you are right now.
right now you are a boy
who thinks he is larger than life,
who thinks that his cheap beer and his horrible friends make him alive,
who thinks he is above accountability,
above vulnerability,
above love.
right now you are in a post-high school haze,
and right now you are on top of the world.
and because i'm me and i can't help it i'll love you
and i'll think the things you do are forgivable
and i'll think the friends you keep are forgivable, too.
but because i'm me and i can help it i'll love other people, too
and i'll allow myself to be as free and as beautiful and as strong as i can be.
i'll allow myself to forget you a little bit and it will hurt, yes,
and i will fail, sometimes, yes,
but it will make me who i am going to be.
it will make me someone who is readier to love you
than the me who already has.
i will take a year.
i will leave the country,
i will live and drink and love,
i will smoke and laugh and embrace all of life that i can hold.
i will think i'm invincible,
i will write fearless stories and sing fearless songs,
i will write fierce poetry and make beautiful art.
and at the end of it all when i am where you are now,
when my life is ahead of me and i have learned more of myself,
when you have grown and lived
and when you have gotten college out of your system,
then i'll see.
i'll look at myself and i'll see if i do love you after all.
i'll look at myself and i'll know
that all the things i did didn't matter because they weren't with you,
or i'll know that i don't need you to live after all.
i will love you or i won't and i'll tell you either way.
corey, listen.
you changed my life,
and i've come to realize that i have a difficult time living without you.
but you made me small,
you made me afraid,
you made me weak.
i let you have all the power i had to give,
and you didn't mean to abuse it, i know.
you probably didn't even know
you had it.
i wasn't oblivious to loving you more,
to needing you more,
to expecting more of you.
i wasn't oblivious to your growing indifference,
but i think the ways we ended were wrong.
i think we have the potential to be more.
i think, sometimes, that our hearts are too much the same for us to be apart.
but i cannot want you anymore.
i want to learn, again,
to be confident, loud, fearless, and brave.
when i have relearned myself,
when you have changed,
when we are slightly different -
more mature,
more selfless,
more wise -
we will know.
when i have learned to love you without fear,
to open myself without expectation,
to trust things better,
we will know.
but i'm not going to try until then.
what i'm telling you is that even though you may not have known
that i was even holding on,
i'm letting you go now.
i'm releasing myself from you.
because i love you, ******* it,
i love you like you wouldn't believe.
but there are things about you that i cannot stand right now,
and i'm not willing to try.
you're an *******, corey,
and you're stubborn and self-centered and stupid,
and those are all things we have in common.
you're just a tool, i don't know how else to say it.
it's the least poetic thing i've ever put in a poem.
and your friends ****,
and frankly you ****,
and the things that have happened in the last twenty-four hours
make me disappointed and disgusted with you,
because i would like to think,
and i do think,
that you are so much more than any of that,
any of them,
and you are.
but you're not someone who acts like it, right now,
and that's okay,
but it keeps me from wanting to try.
not that you care,
not that you want me to try anyway,
not that you would probably even love me back, if you knew that i loved you.
listen.
i mean every single thing i've said here.
i've said it all,
i've let it out.
i'm taking a year for me,
for flings, for ****-ups, for whatever.
i want you to know that.
i want you to know that i still believe,
maybe naively,
that you and me could be more than what we were.
i want you to think about all of this sometimes.
i want you to keep reading my poems
and to read that letter i wrote you,
and to remember that you are missed, loved, and wanted,
but also to know that i am freeing myself.

have you really gone away?
my darling, won't you stay a day?
i brewed some tea for two and i have savings put on lay-away
for when we run and stay away
it mountains, fields, and day-all-plays
dreaming just to pass the rays
of sunlight, cup to lips.

well this is how it goes, this,
shattering of hearts.

a small tap to hear the tremor and then a STEPPING BACK
arms spread, for the awe.

your tap becomes a sharp crack and my heart,
well.

it breaks for them, for you,
a million crystal pieces at your feet.

well watch me, i'll pick them up with all the dignity imaginable,
a professional at this now,
look you in the eye:
"how was the show?" i'll ask.
"did it all
go like you planned?"

and i'll walk away,
piece it back together from those crystal-clear shards and i'll know it better then.
know you better then.

and i'll put it back where it belongs and i'll know me better then.

I remember you, in the night last September.
It was cold, and you tasted
of the alochol we had illegally sipped
Smiling at each other over gem-rimmed bottles

I remember when we kissed, for the first time
That night in September
And it warmed me to my bones, and I could have stayed there
with you
forever

I remember your hands, last September
Touching the burning skin of my cheek, hooked in the belt loops
of my faded blue jeans.
I remember your eyes,
How they found the brightest star in that starry, starry sky,
And how your voice, whispered,
"That one's ours."
Your fingers fluttered at the hollows of my hips,
cold,
because you'd given me your jacket, and you
were freezing.

I remember you last September.
I knew you last September,
And I wish I had known myself.

I remember how it ended, when it ended,
That morning last September, so soon
after it began, "I've been thinking..."
And I remember, last September


hating you.

this poem will be bitter,
the way i hate my tea to be.
it will be about all the ways i've let my father down and
    all the things they wish i was.
  it will be about every grade point i am away from perfect.
it will be about ******* my boyfriend in the backseat
it will be about drinking until i can barely walk
it will be about crying all my makeup off in a stranger's bathroom.
this poem will be bitter,
the way i hate my tea to be.
it will be about laughing over stupid ****
it will be about late-night confessions to my mother
it will be about my best friend and my favorite socks and my thousands of little things.
it will be about a boy who tastes like green tea and cigarettes.
it will be about all the things i don't ever say out loud and all the things i can't write down anymore because people find the things you write down and then you don't have anything for yourself.
  it will be about the time i made my stepmom cry
  it will be about the person i didn't think i'd be
  it will be about all the paintings i don't finish.
it will be the things i found out about my family at a too-young sort of age
it will be my three without-permission-piercings
it will be the poems (this one) that i'm afraid are too cliche
and it will be bitter,
the way i hate my tea to be.

let's hear it for
    these angsty
         weepy poems
from our broken hearts
  well
      maybe we should
pretty boys
      and pretty girls
we forget
   all of us
how fragile we are
     let's
         isolate ourselves
            in our feelings
(they hurt)
   when we forget ourselves
and love
    too hard
and miss
    too much
and want
    too suddenly
without knowing
   just how deep
we're digging ourselves
      when it hits, it hurts
our words
  are our
    defense
we mean them
i mean them
                   for you.
It's worth it, this
                       fragility
for our childish bliss
     in reckless, disasterous
                                                      abandon.

"and i thought,
'i'm doing the right thing,'" you said.

my brave boy,
you are.

my brave boy,
keep breathing.

two-years friends and lifetimes of knowing,
i've seen you, and i know now.
when you said the words,
the look of contentment you had -
the solidarity of self you had -
the knowing of heart you had.
who can say it's wrong?

the church who locks people behind bars of unhappiness
for who they love?
you are above them,
you and all your love.

my brave boy,
love like you do,
and love who you will.

"and i thought,
'i'm doing the right thing,'" you said.

my brave boy,
you have.

just now my heart gave two great
and heaving beats
that shuddered my whole chest.
i know this is just a symptom
of the cardiac quirk i inherited from my mother
but it felt to me like some sort of physical closure.
for a moment after it happened
my chest didn't have that emptiness anymore.
my body is healing my nonbody.
that's what it felt like.
for a second, anyway.

"bring another bottle," you tell me, leaning
against the bricks
hunched
in the rain -
your eyes, they glitter, out
your coattails are long, lavish, and filthy
and your hat
is pulled low

i can see the care in you
from time to time
i feel it.
"you ain't gonna leave me, nance?" you say,
and i hear the fear
the uncertainty,
and then i go to you.

filthy london, it's brought you down
and me down
with you.
the little boys, the old man, they have questions in their eyes
when they see me let you, lead me, away,
but they don't see
that under the grime of your crimes
and the filth of your sins,
there is a heart, black, patched, and wounded
but beating.
for this i love you.

your hands on me, my man
can be a thing frightening
a thing thrilling
when you beat me like a dog
when you kiss me like a lover.

your violence, my man, is a curse
because you would have better for me
if you could give it.
and your bitterness, my man, is deserved
for the low-life life
you've been given.

and i feel you,
how you whisper in the nighttime, "nance."
and i quiver, just to hear it
"nancy," you whisper, gruffly, after the alcohol's worn off, the ***.
"i didn't mean none of it, nance. not a thing of it, eh?"
you whisper, roughly, bowing your head to my shoulder.
"you're a good girl
for not leavin' me, then.
and i ain't never deserved you
a day in my life."
and i pretend to sleep
to hear it.

you'll be the death of me, my man.
they tell me so,
and i know it's so.
but first
i will be the life of you.

Come, then, to Neverwhere
A little piece
Of everywhere
Come, then, to be at home
To think your thoughts
To die alone

Meet me then, in Neverwhere
A quiet thought, of anywhere

Leave me be, in Neverwhere,
It's all the same, in rainy here
With stars and shadows
Birds and thought
Shape your world, from Neverwhere.

nora,
4 years young,
you lovely little girl,
let me thank you for the good
you've shown to me, the world.
your dimple-strewn sweet smiles
your shrieking raucous laughs
your wild unbound stories
(oh, i wonder).
you tiny little pearl
in the oyster of the world,
your mother's middle baby and
your father's only girl,
my darling and my laughter and the child i once was,
i wrote this and i thought this
all for you, nora-bug.

I remember when loving him wasn't so wildly painful,
and I remember backseats and whispered things
and I remember winter nights and tiny joys.
I remember when I fell asleep against his arm on the way home from a dance I hadn't wanted to go to -
I remember a kiss on the top of my head,
the gentlest thing you can imagine,
to wake me up.
I remember the thousands of tendernesses.
I remember the the ecstatic joy you filled me with.
I remember I couldn't sit still when you were close by -
I remember the electricity, the wildness
you put into my limbs and the rhythms of my heart.
And truth be told these are what I'd rather remember
and this is how I'd rather it be.
I'd like to hold onto the joy and the recklessness,
the love instead of the loss.
I'd rather remember our happinesses, because they were so many.
I know your fickleness and your faults,
I know that you are in a constant state of moving on,
that you do not hold on and that you probably don't remember
but you know that I do.
I carry things with me and nights like these,
they do make me remember. They make me want and ache and they fill me with things I don't have a name for. They make me breathless and nostalgic and crippled. They make me think, write, and love. They fill me with the same abandon that you did, only quieter now and deeper, but no less beautiful.
And it's an odd thing, to remember love without feeling it,
Or to feel love in ways you don't understand because they feel so odd and out of place, being only yours. It's a difficult game and an exhausting one, and I'm struggling, still, to find my footing.
Today I remember loving you.
Later I will remember missing you.
Later still I will remember remembering,
Or maybe I will forget altogether.

have i, then, ruined
everything?
am i such a betrayal to your picket-fence heart?
you
all i wanted
and all i want.

under the pink lemonade sky i left you.
not really, because you left me first,
but i left your memory there.
in the summer twilight i left you.
i left you for vast skies and glorious people
and pink lemonade sunsets.
under the pink lemonade skies i left you,
and under the pink lemonade skies i ran head-on into myself.