We are quotation marks
and your arms are so warm.

"You are such a ******* child."

Nice try, my dear, but you can do better.
See, darling, those words mean nothing.
I am a child. If you asked, I'd tell you.

Can't you do better than that?

Don't you want to crawl under my skin,
set up camp in my head, tent stakes pounded into my brain,
keep me awake at night with a gnaw in my gut?

Try this, instead, love --

"You are a manipulative attention ***** who skips around wielding her emotions like an assault rifle without giving a thought to how that affects anyone around you. You've never had to work for anything, never once in your life, and the minute you do have to try at anything, you will fail. You'll spend the rest of your life looking for someone to take care of you, but you'll never actually let them and you will be alone."*

Isn't that better?

Weekdays - we wear cattle trails into the green-space because
They taught us the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
They told us to stay in school.
We made ourselves fit into the small boxes with bunk beds
Like the kind we always wanted as kids.
Now we nod to the cement snaking around the dorms - residence halls -
and erode the grass underfoot, single-minded.

Weekends - we stumble-snake on sidewalks because
They give us a straight line to follow back to our boxes.
They told us to get involved in the community.
We let ourselves spill outside our borders and backpacks
Like our cattle trails will fill out overnight.
Now we laugh at the cement moving in waves - or staying still -
and breathe on the stars, multi-minded.

We sit under the raspberry tree
On the deck behind coffee-purist haven.
The sky is grey and the coffee is black
And the raspberries bouncing off our heads
Alternate between new green and blush pink.

Blush like the cheeks of two people who held hands once in middle school
And meet again as 'adults' with cars and college credits.

The chubby boy from music class went punk in a hurry and smokes.
The loudmouth girl with a bowl cut read far too many books and fidgets.
Our paths diverged through no fault of our own --
Only to touch back briefly when the snow melted each year.

Yet there we sit in the raspberries and in the promise of yet more rain,
And fill the gaps in our lives with stories
Of times between summers --
Heartbreak, hobbies, tattoos, awkward kisses --
And there's one of those too, at the end.
A long-time coming, heart-stopped second between strangers and best friends.

if you KNEW yourself*
you'd be too simple *to exist.

I want to fight
                          - literally -
like the kind where I step in a ring of some kind
   and beat the crap out of a stranger.
I want to use this muscle I've done nothing to earn.
I want a mouthguard with my name on it
  and gloves with 'your name' on them.
The expert says they'll call me Mayhem -
  the dancer who fights, the cheerleader who fights.
I've never fought before, but a part of me knows
I was made for it.

First, if I am comatose for a while pre-death, don't let them call me a fighter.
I'm probably not fighting it.
It's probably the first time I've been able to relax in a decade.

Second, keep my death off the internet.
Tell my friends of my demise with handwritten notes delivered by white-gloved butlers with somber expressions.
Tell my enemies by sitting on their chests and poking them in the forehead repeatedly until they guess how it happened. It shouldn't take long.

Third, my friends from high school will immediately try to design stickers for their car windows with my name on them and a graphic of dance shoes or track shoes or my college mascot.
You are not to allow this.
A sticker denoting the death of a loved one will not keep fellow motorists from noticing that my friends from high school **** at driving.

Not permitted at the funeral:
Gerber daisies
poetry
blue jeans
any ex-boyfriend I refer to by something other than their name (i.e. "the fat hipster I used to hang out with.")

Encouraged at the funeral:
Hugs - everyone must hug
lots of appropriately sad, yet tasteful songs sung by my musically-minded loved ones (may I suggest "In Light of Time" by Phillip E. Silvey?)
And make sure they bury me in the blue dress.

Last, for every story they tell about me where I was kind or selfless or funny or caring,
make sure someone also tells the story where I got too drunk at a frat house and made out with a kid from upstate New York and then spent four hours passed out and/or puking on the floor of the communal bathroom in Ashley's building,
or the one where I punched Savannah in third grade,
or the one where I rolled a car for no particular reason.

Remember me as I was.

Guys with long hair have agendas. And if they don't, they're stoners and 'agenda' a really long word, man.

Guys with long hair are the poetic types with acoustic guitars and incense in their dorm room and they hold their hair back with a pen behind their ear and they use it to write in a leather-bound journal about girls who smoke too much and have soft ***** so they can pick up more girls who smoke too much and have soft *****.

Guys with long hair are the metalheads who sit in the back of class and use their hair to distract from the fact that they're wearing poor-quality ironic headphones that project Alice in Chains to everyone within a four-desk radius but no one's going to say anything because hey, that guy's a creep.

Guys with long hair are the classical types that play expensive instruments and have beautiful eyes that you can't see very often and have to keep ponytail elastics on their wrists, their wrists that never stop moving, conducting, tapping, curling, because Chopin slows for no man, no matter how long his locks.

And if you poured all these guys with long hair in a test tube and melted them until the agendas broke and forged and changed colors, you'd have him.

I found him in a smoky sweet basement in a house where everyone belongs but no one should actually live. I braided his shoulder-brushing hair without asking and saw his smile like a chunk of snow the size of your high school falling off a mountain, fast and white, huge and more important than anything else around.

I found him again in a different basement where only musicians belong. He invited me into the closet with the piano and it's like he asked me to crawl inside his head and hang out for a while. He casually mentioned his favorite angry bands while his fingers brushed keys in an order they seemed to know on their own, tendons and strings.

He says things that deserve to be handwritten in leather-bound journals. He holds your wrist with one hand when you shake the other because people have become desensitized to handshakes and don't feel the human contact of it anymore. He hugs to the right because you're supposed to hug heart-to-heart.

*"People are going to judge based on what they see anyway. Might as well make sure they're right, sort of."

You told me you loved me yesterday
but I understand if something changed.
I'm wearing the perfume in the gold bottle today
instead of the one in the blue
and I curled my hair --
but you always liked it like that, so maybe I'm wrong --
perhaps you still love me.

What?
           It's okay.
Are you okay?
                        I'm okay.
Why didn't you say anything?
                                                     I just wanted it to be okay.
Is it?
       It is, now. I'm trying.
I'm sorry.
                 Me too. Can you hand me the paint can? We missed a spot.

Study the stage, young women
Because the day will come when you fall in love with a boy
                                                             ­  who's in love with you
                                                   but your friend loves him, too.
And let's face it. She deserves him.
So do it for her - channel Dorothy's excitement at the Land of Oz,
                             Hello Dolly's kindly matchmaking.
                             Be the Nurse to her Juliet; keep her secrets.
Only at night allow yourself to lose character.
You can then become Eponine in the rain,
                                       Christine in the depths of the opera house,
                                       Maria watching her world torn apart.
Avoid the boy's gaze if you can, ladies,
Because he knows you're no Dorothy,
                                              no Dolly,
                                              no Nurse.
He knows and you know, but you do it for her.

Somewhere has my name on it,
            maybe everywhere does.

Like little strips of paper, fortunes from folded cookies.
Master Plan let them go in a gust of Great Plains wind.

I cannot hope to collect every
                                    single
                                                 individual
                              piece                            part
                                                   place                
                                         bit    
                                                     back.
I cannot live unless I try.

Maybe you work for one and he's finally retiring ten or twelve years after he should have
And you give him a card with boats or mountains or geese on it,
And you tell him thank you for being patient and for hiring you,
And he just nods and reminds you to submit your time sheet so you get paid for the month,
And you see the card propped up on his desk in his office when you leave.

Maybe your older brother is one and he found a lighter in your bathroom
And he tosses it onto your lap while you're reading and just stares at you,
And his jaw is a little off centered because he's trying not to grind his teeth,
And he says, "I don't want to see this **** again,"
And you know he smokes sometimes but you nod and give it back to him, hands shaking.

Maybe your dad is one and it's your senior prom,
And you're wearing a dress he paid for posing on the stairs so your mom can take pictures,
And your sisters are talking about your hair and your flowers,
And your mom says you look beautiful and looks at your dad,
And he's standing in the doorway with his arms crossed,
And he takes his hat off and puts it back on and blinks a lot and nods,
And his eyes are a little red,
And so are yours.

The chill iron nickel copper terror of a car sliding on black sheet ice,
so nearing destruction that ears are already braced for the screech --
it's just that, with gas.

With gas, with intention, my phantom foot presses proverbial pedal to metal,
completely aware of the impending breakage, pain, loss, guilt.

Phantom lips smile and laugh, bitter white,
because he sits in the passenger seat, trust blinding from the wreckage ahead.

I will hurt and be hurt, but phantom limbs feel no pain.

The poet sits across the table in the dimness
Toying with cigarettes, fingers, thoughts
Of a pair of collarbones like bumps in the road,
Reminders to slow down.

The poet falls in love three separate times in an hour,
Imagining more collarbones, eyelashes, lips
That suddenly ask if he’d like to order anything,
No room. No, he’s full head to heels of unspoken words.

The poet sips his water and we try to make him laugh because we are teenagers in a sports bar at three in the afternoon on a Friday and we just want him to be ******* happy, ******* it to hell.

We smoke at a house within stumbling distance of fast food.
                                                                            [Such a bad idea.]
I couldn't tell you how long we stay or what we talk about,
          ["Who's downstairs?"]
But I usually laugh so hard I run out of sound and air.
                   ["I want to say it's Matt, but he's right here."]
My eyelids gradually drift together until they're completely closed.
         ["Is she okay?"]
It takes me a while to notice, sometimes.
                  ["Of course she is. Look at that smile."]
I can't light a lighter.
       ["Seriously? Aren't you like a genius? Just watch-"]
I won't let them teach me either.
                ["Okay, fine. You're lucky we like you."]
It's the quietest I can ever manage to be.
       ["Look at that smile."]
I'm just sinking and floating.
                                                                           [Such a good idea.]

I shaved my head
the dead protein I suffered small talk
to stripe and style and now it shines
just like the rest of theirs,
the scalps of would-be conquistadors,
made into saggy stocking caps.
I tattooed my neck
with a dotted line
and 'cut here' in cheerful Comic Sans.
They kept the bottom part.
I took my extra bits
and slid them across the table in case someone needed them.
They slid them back--
but my left kidney won Best in Show
And my right lung was an honorable mention.
I sewed the ribbons to my chest.