No one's ever died.

Everyone keeps living
and breathing
the same air.

No one's ever died before.
We just keep on recycling
their breaths.

she's never
known a man
that could walk
on water before.

'come on in,' he said
the water's fine,'
as he wades farther
and farther out into
a tided pool of nothingness.

'i'd rather stub my toe
against something sticky like a
starfish-
then feel nothingness
with you.'

she's never
known a man
that could
walk on water
before.

do you

I've begun to spot patterns
more clearly,
the brick homes that
set around this suburbia
have begun to resemble
the lovely spots of a
giraffe perhaps
because I have
become so used to ogling
their grace, I couldn't be sure,
but I've begun to spot patterns on me,
bold, odd, rectangular blocks
honey-ed to my thin skin:
People. They are all around me.
Yet all I see are those blocks
thatching to me,
I think they're in search of a
shorter neck.

why is everyone better at everything

Brown-Eyed Girl-
they say she is the weakest link
gone and sprung amuck
through clouded fields of poppy seeds
and cottony ******. they say she is a sprain
of chortling pain in the dumpling
maker's yeasting wrist.

brown-eyed girl seeing powdered
blues of glass-stained eyes,
he wore a plaid shirt, nip-and-tucked,
rat-a-tat-tat, and a silly looking bow-tie
slopped slightly off-kilter and to the right,
a frenchie little pear of a man. he said he liked her-
tie-dye thighs. she said, he said, she liked his
dumpling hands - and flakey chest.

they say she is that button-down clad-
sunflowers-printed kind-of, sad.
memories tainted, she said, he said,
she's the kind of girl you've got to love every night,
my kind of a woman. my salted oils, fried
and phat-  
                brown-eyed girl.

let's talk about his
peanut butter thighs
and his cashew eyes
his cloaked voice that
floods me when he
speaks, and his
big hands and thin
fingers. Let's talk about
all of his parts that make
him whole and makes
my eggplant legs go
bump bump
in the night.

(if i parentheses you)
this
(and)
that
(separate of the pillars that bowl past heavy tonsils
maybe it'd seem as though heaven was closer
and the nuzzle that triggers tiny slips and
flicks against the pulse of my fingers would come alive
behind large bulbs and very tiny eyes,
much too small to fully engulf mild realities wild
on the bottoms of tough poison, mulct philomaths'
raffishly spatting at loose tongues,
how dare they tell me)
this
(and)
that
(and never)
the other.
(if i parentheses you)
this
(and)
that
(would it count to you, dear scholar,
as a structured poem properly scrolling
down the braces of my spine?)

I can't erase you
now that I've felt
for you.

your hands
rush down
my legs.

'let's be
lonely
together,'
I said.

and you
kissed my
neck.

'let's be
lonely
together.'
I said.

and you
kissed
my neck.

It's a game we play
he offers me food
saucy ribs and a
mountainous heap of
of mashed potatoes
and a morsel of string
beans, he calls it a full
course meal. Dinner.
Meat. Starch. And veggies
but there's more meat
and starch than veggies,
actually. His serving size
is quiet hope and I don't
wish to break the silence.
I stare at the meat on my
plate until he finishes his
and begins picking at mine.
I leave the mountain and the
river of oil drenched beans.
I drink the water, pick the
yellow slice of lemon with the
curve of my spoon and
suppress my tongue.
He eats for him but mainly
for me. We have dinner and we
skip the desert.

If you're wondering how a
pretzel untwists its self,
it is not by the curls of a lover's
tongue—
nor by the might
of its self
but by the spine of a poet's
meek hands,
unlacing and
embracing
it's curves
and lines.

is your heart still breaking

you were the person I'd call
when the panic of tears
honied my lashes together
and sprung hot like rashes
down my luke cheeks. you'd
listen to my voice thick and
jarred filming through your
phone, slow like molasses
and think like honey. you'd
listen and when I fell as
calm as a clam, you'd
tell me, "baby baby,  it's alright."

i am certain that i am going to die young and no this isn't one of my cries for help or bargain-ed pleas, you all will-i-am certain- miss that years and years from now. i still have myselves in all of you, every ounce of me does not belong to me. i am in ownership of nothing but the curls of my eyelashes and the frame they allow me to recreate. this is simply my attempt at a lightly humored poem, but I am certain I am going to die young, very young almost too young to remember the day I was born and thus, first deceived and devirginized, even before my first steps on clay coated sand and became a constantly budding plant with razor bladed sides and a thirsty black vaping hole between my legs but Liberia ruined me with it's talk of this ******* thing called womanhood same as they brought me thought and thought again to salvation, i am certain i am going to die just like many thought i've never lived a single day in my life, I am certain,
I am certain, I am certain.
I am. i am. just not tonight

I need to stop. Writing everything down on a piece of paper hoping that it'll wake. Everything out of me because all I end up losing is. Nothing. And I am so tired of finding my words thick like fondue glued to eyes.

Dear Alex,
I awoke into this world with a broken heart, that's the problem. Not you. I won't ever remember  a day before because I've always been like this. Not fragile, just broken. I was okay with just ******* you but I won't ever be able to handle your feelings on top of mine. For the first night ever, I slept at a guy's house, didn't **** him, let him cuddle me even when I was sober, even when my skin felt like it was on fire, spent the day with him and listened to his thoughts and it made me want to cry or puke or cut myself straight down the middle and pull out my soul and replace it with someone else. Someone better. Someone more human. But instead I laid there curled into you and tried not to cry because you needed it from me. But I could already feel it. I could already feel myself sinking away from you. And my head. Oh my beautiful head. It kept telling me, "Don't do this don't do this don't do this." But my heart. My nasty heart. It kept humming, "To who?" Very still. Very still. But then you started tracing your fingers down my skin and it started to feel like it was crawling away from me. From you. And so I told my heart and head, "it's already done." And I left. And when you kept calling and texting and asking me I was ok because you cared, I threw my phone at the wall in front of me after sending "I am toxic." I can't handle your care. It's a bit ****** for me to say but I can't handle anyone's care. And **** I miss you. I miss getting so high with you that my head felt heavy but after I left you, I spent three days in the fetal position under a pink blanket trying not to cry. You took all of me that night. And you didn't even do anything. You were just there. Please don't hate me but dear god please don't love me either.

freckles are just shaded on moles
that are too shy to rear it's dainty heads.

I feel like a storm

I feel dead people. Their presence steams as would a boiling kettle without a lid. I just can not see them with my foggy eyes. I feel them sweating me.

don't choose parts of me to love

i hate him because he's always
swimming around and thinking things
but he never says any of them.

I wanted to hear the words echo and so I said them three times a day with a full mouth and a hungry ear: I love you.

I never knew whether to be flattered
by your care. Or suspicious.
I suppose now, as I stand back,
my weight pressured solely on my heel,
head turned up to the clouds, chin
puncturing out it's tears-
I know now-
that flattery lead you
everywhere your feet
wants to land.

i had a dream the other day that
a flashlight shone bright,
cutting between the ribs of night
and using my free hands,
i cupped it's ***** within my palm and watched in silent fixation as slight
particles breeched between my bleached out fingers, to aliken the feeling of exposure heating the sole of my hand to skinning rays of a full moon is a woeful plight. i'm not sure how i got here,
but i know it feels desperate to try to stay

and I often wonder
why I come back
to you like I do
when all you do
is get up
and leave
me like an
old wet towel
that's gotten
too many
stains and
rips and not
enough
fibers
for you to
use.

and now nina smokes vapes
on the quad with a new group
of friends that say things like,
do you have a dealer to every
dreaded black guy that passes by
and she talks really loud about
how fingers feel far far on the
inside and she laughs really
quiet at jokes that make sense,
and she never writes anymore
about how life makes no sense.

I hate him and his mouth
and the speed in which it moves.

I, of a slower tongue can not keep up
and so I imagine my door slamming shut on his lips and me jumping and shouting everything that I could not say.

Death by elephant:
they said I tasted
just like chicken.

we keep the house cold
so that we can trace life
out of the puffs of clouds
that hum from our lips.
as he skates off the bed
feet nibbling
at the floor boards,
arms drizzling
past his waist,
he sits on the edge of the air
changing what filters into my lungs
with each yawn that stretches from him-
his pale back angled to my face, I
stretch my legs towards him,
resting my feet on his back,
toes tucking into the brails
of his spine,
and we wait within
the beauty of those ripe days,
when everything fell
on our swollen eyelids.

and you feel the day slip away -

i lost my incredibly absolut day
to a wafer thin, cappuccino hued
boy who showed an infinity for
expressing his appreciation for
color and curiosity by outfitting
himself in raven blues and navy
blacks. and on his angular cheeks
and butterfly lashes, i caught the
honor of an absolut wink and a
flush of mischief. on the promise
of a full, absolute day, i felt my day
slip away as certain as his wingless
back held my eye and ducked down
a sunlit alley and i pulled my hoarsed
voice into whispering, "hello."

one of these days I'm gonna say something crazy like I like you and you'll do something crazy like stay.

elevators make me dizzy
and nervous to the
point that I lock my knees
and hold the silver walls
and hope they can't
hear me heaving. I hate
these walls. I hate these walls
and the way they move up,
so silent and unsure,
causing my chest to quake,
elevators make my nervous and dizzy.

it's sad how
easily
people can break you.

I am ever so simply a woman and so I liquify from the waist down and on the eve of a disastrous morning, I use the tips of your your lips as marmalade and marinade within the notion of you. If I was to ever go mad, it'd surely be based on the mere idea that you once knew me as certain as you knew the difference between a prism and a square, just additions and subtractions of necessary and unnecessary lines.

today i took a trip through the meadows to remind
myself of what the grace of auburn leaves felt like
to the pallet of my eyes.

i trip on the hem of my dress, a kind of cool skim reduction that dribbles milk down my legs and casts a white veil over your eyes. sometimes i swear i think you might just try to catch me one of these days, i wouldn't hold you past it but I will for the life of me try to keep me out of your arms for as long as i  possibly can.

I read his sentence as
a string of his breath,
the commas,
his pauses,
and at the period
is where
he ends.

Does it make you happy          - silly boys calling you       pretty?

i say yes
because
i don't
have
anything
to
lose.

i say no
because
i don't
want to
lose
everything.

on a long road stands a calm-eyed gypsy woman that has learned to tiptoe down a road that never ends, and at night she dreams of hazel eyes and sea legs that
float above water-the only way to travel

I watched him read
my little blurbs
no doubt seeing
whispers of his fingers
tracing its lines.

'it's not the
best thing
I've ever
written,'
I said.