there is just.
So much.
To ******* say

because I am the kind of person
that forgives and forgets
all of my own sins
and never enough of your:
I swear to God nothing happened babe.
the chick's crazy.
excuses and so you went ahead and
left me though it should have been me
leaving and you staying,
I suppose we were both
just afraid of the same thing.
and so I forgot you though I
never really forgave you-
until I saw you with that crazy chick
at the market picking out orangish plums
and all you did was pretend not to see me
watching you and that crazy chick
pick out the same plums I had had for desert
just last night,
I suppose in that moment I forgave you,
if not just for my pitiful heart's sake.

I kept on telling him
that his hands felt like
clouds until he found
my lips and told me
they felt like pillows
and tasted of sugar
cubes scrambled
into grapplings of salt.
He held my face
with his hands and
I was sure for minutes
at a time, that I could
read through him, the
forecast from his wet hands.

I watch

video clips of rollercoasters

so that I can feel my heart race. Sometimes

I can't remember what it feels like.



And I never want to forget again.



Not for one second.

you've got a butterfly melting
on the tip of your tongue and the
crisp of your grapefruit skin
pores through the pours of my
sponging fingers and I had a dream-
starstruck and set on a milky night
that you came to me between the bridges
of a canopied lens, lungs pink with passion,
lips parsed and ready, I set my eyes along
the rings of your chest and waited for it's
plate to aliven, deep breaths heaving up
and down as my cheeks glow hollow,
I touched the rim of his golden
wire framed glasses as he wiggled the
bridge of his nose, struggling to
keep them afloat as they draped and I
asked him, "How old are you, ***?"
as I dusted the blades of my shoulders,
"I lost count," he said,
eyes dimming against the background
of the setting sun, "I lost count 'cause you see,
from my point of view, it feels as though
I've been alive for an eternity."

you don't need me anymore

he gave me that:
put on an old coat
and slip a hand in
it's pockets
and pull out a
wadded up
bill. had me
feelin'
all kinds of
sunny.
that
old-new
kinda
money

he used to tell me
I had the saddest
eyes, as though
eyes could ever
truly be happy.

everyone's talking about
believing in things and the
disbelief of things and
I'm just wondering if Lucifer
has time to play music in his home,
or if he even wants to remember how
to play and all of the things that
goad out of it.

we don't use
punctuations
over messages
because we fear that
we'll expose any feelings
that we'll stop any
questions with our periods
raise unwanted questions
with any marks,
we don't use any punctuation
because we're afraid that our
feelings will show through how
many words we use and how we
end our sentences.

separate entities, i split apart, douse my lungs with rubbing alcohol, spread powdered bleach beneath my feet and dab my skin with the petals that you shed as October’s winds rip and whip at my soul. i hang my head high, cosmic, meta, celestial beast breathing sallow i seeth-ever phased. caught in a new kind of a daze, i dream in a haze. my words spread like ash across your lips as my mind does dips and flips. caught in a new kind of a haze, i welcome this, i welcome this, this holy hell of a day that gloom’s and blooms hungry and ready.

he choses all of the soft ones for me,
because he knows I can't handle
anything thicker than the
consistency of pudding. Repeats short
sentences 1, 2, 3 times over and
slows his words down to the pegs
of my breath. He won't go faster
than I can handle.

he cut the tongue from between my lips as I tried to gasp, veins pulsing from the noose of your grip tied tight around my throat, I travel with my ability to lack, I tie knots 'round my new lovers' finger and I light them up from the string of my bow, I holler and jump 'round them, chest separating from my shoulders as my feet dangle above the crimson earth, my knees hobble and bobble as my elbows ash from the haggard wind rapping against my sand-made skin, I blow away like dunes, shaped and reshaped by the Sahara, I scream violet threats as you press me further into cellophane walls, you say, "destruction is sin." and then you remolded me into your paper girl, locked me up in a room for years and wrote me ****** until my mind filled with **** and then you found my eyes and started darkening them, they've slowly started to mirror your night's sky, a reflection of your skin, my sin.

Dear Dad,
When I was younger and I wrote you that letter explaining to you how much I hated myself sometimes.

When I wrote you that letter explaining to you how much I hated my skin

How much I hated my thoughts

How I lost all of my friends in the span of a month because I stopped trying to care

How much I just wanted to disappear

How much you'd be better off without me

How much it hurt all the time

When I showed you all of my poems

And you called my black tears on those ******* white papers 'talent' and ignored my cries

When you insisted that I was okay when I tried to explain to you that I wasn't

Did you really believe that I would be okay or did you just need me to be?

I'm not mad anymore. I just want you hug me and tell me you love me and just stop ******* hating me

you're breaking me and the saddest part is that there's nothing I can really do about.

I will be with you for as long as you will have me

a senseless **** is still a **** to give and to give of myself, so kindly, is the nicest thing I could ever do for anyone and sometimes I swear I feel the pulse of every evil thing a woman could possibly feel pulsing through the bulbs of my thighs and quickening the thrills of my braced heart as my mind darkens against the sun of you. the night your lips uttered my name, I walked back down every path I ever crossed to get to you and picked up every cigarette **** I ever tossed in hopes that you'd one day look at my will to pick up our past, no matter how ill we were, and still see the beauty in its uselessness. you'll always understand me as crazy baby just like you, and maybe that's why I'll always love you. it'll always be understood that my cigarettes will taste of Bourbon like my lips, liquid to your breath, like Vaseline on your fingertips. anyone with a certain blackness in their eyes holds my intrigue much like how anyone with a certain lightness to their feet trips up my heart, hopefully because they'll always leave me, most likely because they know I won't chase, definitely because they know I'll always want to.

the whole point of love is the heart break of it all. what a concept.

Reggie just gets a little
too excited for my taste
and so on most days
when he sees that I've
responded cordially
to his invites to
come on over at
two a.m. because
no, no he's not
just a little bit wasted
he just wants to,
idk watch a movie
at two a.m. probably
in his bed so that we can
be chill. and to all this
when I say no, he just
keeps on asking
night after night after
night, I finally grow a pair
and tell him that I admire
his persistence but not
at two a.m. because all
he sounds like at this hour is
sloppy and I like to know
that whoever I choose to ****
will remember me and how I
got there by morning come.
But I do admire his persistence.

If the moon had a pocket
he would not slide me in it.

I love the sight of him
the slight of him.

His consistencies
and insecurities,
only ever coming out
in the dead of the night,
is he anxious to see his lover
for fear that she may not be as
beautiful as the sun that replaces him
but rather as ugly as the
beaked birds that
pester and nag him.

Is that why he only sees her
in the wake of a hazy and lazy
dusk in newness of a short evening nap?

my skin can bare the bruises of you,
but my mind and soul are the ones I worry for.

I'm not completely sane
but then neither are you.

She's the kind of perky that asks
if she can have his autograph
instead of his signature,
and he calls her now.
Instead of me.

never
trust
the wind
to be
straight
forward
with you.

it is as
fickle
as a
premature
heart.

we only ever call God's name in vain.
everyone's just killing themselves
around here, and I'm just cursing
his name and the choir's just singing hymns
of his blessing in intermission and I'm
just waiting for them to take a break
so that I can put on a show, we only ever
call His name when we've returned back
to the show. everyone's just killing themselves
around here and I'm just waiting *waiting.

in the cracks of my mind
rests, bunnies fibered by
dust and flecks of gold.

It's been perpetuated. Archeologically timed, primed and adjusted. I am organically, a tartly steamed wallflower, hair wined from the petals of a dragon's breath, queen of ten sheets all blue and green like the nips of the Chesapeake Bay, tongue heavily cheeked, I am the bulb beneath the shrines of your muck, I am your weak-behind-the-knees, wallflower. The hue you pasted against the fours of your walls and only remember when your eyes trace your skies from the ceiling to your bedroom floor.

and so I bled like a wasted pen blemishes, down to the front seat of his pants. The stress of him rests in the nook of my shoulder blades and vibrates through to my chest. Blue dream and acidically-tinged hazes ripple against my reptilian skin and sheds me time and time again. I cannot grow old with you or young with you. We are alone an together, unmoving and polarizing. A few cool blue specks of light that never change but appear to mean to. We are in lust and stagnantly so, we will never grow. I climb on a sea of green and wade into the late night streamings, the abyss of you.

Maybe I'm learning but not accepting that the skies
don't have all of the answers, much like the ground
won't always be there to support my limbs

i spilled black coffee down the barebones of your thighs and watched as the paleness of you blush into ruddy-ness. below, i watch the tarred remains of me that couldn't stick to you spread and sink into the earth.

On a night like today, in a sea of shadows and whites, we ride thick on a camel toed carousel, tainted and unlocked, unkempt and hollow, we shake to the cores of your features, deep pallets of staining whites, we lay afraid and assuming, ready for something to roll deep beneath these  peppercorn brownie sheets. We dive shallow beneath assuming depths. Angled, silver octopus, arms stretched below your sea urchin ways. I wait infantile, an ever aging fetus floating through your chromosomes, very full and very hungry. This could be a stifling kind of like , but here I roam, free abd unnerving lushing down your spine

"If I turn down the music,
that doesn't mean that
I want to hear you
talktalk and talk."
I used to say to him
after he'd tell me to
low down the music
after hours of hearing
nothing but my music
blast the woes of other
human's souls.
I am convinced that we
as humans don't always
need to hear that voice
that constantly chirps
in our head, we don't
always need that.

the woman who helped me out of my car after my accident had a Jack Johnson tour t-shirt on and a pair of shades that she pulled off to meet my eyes, every time I lose faith I hum Good People and think back to her and her soothing, mother-like voice. I try not to think about the way her face began to fade the minute I stood before her. I try not to think about whether she remembers me, a solid year later whenever she passes the thrift store I was thinking about stopping in to. I try not to remember everything but her voice and Jack's as he sang me into a clear haze.

I'm trying to get
something together.
I don't know whether its
myself that I'm trying to
piece together and neaten
into a whole or a whole
bunch of everybody's selves
and affix it into what I'm told
is a little less unstable.

All of my friends are sad and trade
shades of grey like women in department
stores do pants. They don't listen to my
jokes about foreign policy and humanism
versus feminism. They listen to the words
I say about him as they shut me in and then
out, the women, they don't really care.

the image of Erin walking
by me surprised by the
alertness of my voice as she
jitters along terrifies me.
I wish I could hold her and
tell her that its okay to break.
I wish I could tell her that she
doesn't need some to piece her
back together every t i m e she
slides apart. I wish could tell
her that all she needs is someone
to hold all of her pieces and not
just some of them.

The image of frail little Erin alarms
me e v e r y time I close my eyes.

I don't know why these parents let their kids roam and wander  about these streets
sodden with heat and cold air, legs drumming against tarred roads with figure
stick legs, quietly breaking, but we don't hear the pop, us watch-and-go tapers. I don't known why these parents let their
kids wander the night balancing on seeds
of beads, eyes red-rimmed and hungry,
I don't know why these parents let their kids roam and wander about these streets