1909

                           on top of the dragon.
Marigolds whipping a tepid fug in this small room of stringy daylight.
That place where we fell in love. Where I dropped a hot cup of tea on my pants
And we ate sushi on the beach. I love the beach.

I am not ready for the ice festival or your new boyfriend.
He smells like bad disco and old people.
This piano concerto that I play before bed, before awakening,
I have your black dresser drawer in my bedroom,
It glistens of our days of Jasmine and Roses.

My mind blurs stories of you, her, and the other girl.
Rad violin songs, a friend from Argentina has introduced me to
Mystify me, I cannot hear straight or stand still. I have acquired
A gift for shivering. Still I can feel your talons raking up my spine.
*******! Where? Why? How did you do that thing with your mouth?

I count upwards from you and in my peaking hours of misfortune, I
Never come back down to earth's giant centrality of duel existence.
My gut expands into my chest, my nervous system and anxiety is
All of you, a lot of her, and none of the other girl.
I make half inch black markings on the wall, this curse of feeling and not forgetting
That never goes away.

Memory

     is  the birth of cool, it is rapture and ignominious spokesman unearthed. Packed into a slatted-wood crate, milking the obsession from cash-toting hands. Freeing itself from your bottom lip while life ticks itself away on a digital stock-exchange display. I am down and you are up, and you save pennies while I search for Chrysanthemums and vanilla-scented candles. Scent is my fifth grade spaceship,
     I hide it in my pocket and take it into the forest when the week is over. Adventure is the part of our story that's caught in between complaining about money and having clean sheets. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday my hands mend themselves back from bleach, their crevices cave under bright lights, I go to the garden strip and put dirt on my face, over my shoulders, and on my back. I make a altimeter from an alarm clock, and worry what will happen if your feet should ever touch the ground.
Relief
     is a sarcophagus, the satiny silk chrysalis I weave into invincibility. I make myself a small child with a demon-proof lair, no one comes in, not even you.  I see

     how drugs take out your heart and put you anew, fresh: orange, pink, ultramarine. A wave is a soft gesture for twilight, a slow walk among the greying statue towers, bliss extracted from person to person tedium. How you exclaim about **** music as if your temple home was unfocused by jazz or synth-electro.
     I forgot your room of quiet had no bells, no hope, and no notes of resolve. Tragedy was the desert of your six to sixteen, while I made an opus out of crystal glasses and Cran-Raspberry jars. Then it was the relief, Neptune's hands on your *******, red dots of ecstasy connecting you to a higher vibration. You felt it was time to start exercising. I didn't **** you for modifying your perception of color, degrading in a salt pool- I didn't own your ****** it was just a place I went into to write.
    
    Three years later. I was growing backward, I was sixteen, making you the muse in my doorway, a James Bond goddess unraveling my fingers on her silky skin, except your golden crown was really a turban of snakes, and instead of silk I was groveling underneath you. That was the sweat that Ryan Shultz said I garbled up into two pedestal doves, I aimed by eyes straight at the city of gold, and then inside me shucked out every piece of self-respect and vitrified my spirit, castrating my lips and my tongue for something to come to or come at, he said I lived under pointed stars and that lying isn't a good way to get over past phases of silence.

     A few days ago, it all game back to me, in a random series of songs on an iTunes playlist. One memory from an isolated beach outside a strawberry patch near Santa Cruz, a second, two hands cupped over the ears, my face closing in on her smoothed-out pink bottom lip on an over-exagerated car ride to the San Francisco airport, and the third was the mention of non-vegan banana cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, a birthday I celebrated several years earlier. All of them in the coda.
    
     Verse four unbelievable. It caught me straying from the next stressor at hand. What's next? I move my cold hands from a keyboard versing strange relapse of mind, or I tear out another page, whip across town, and peel stamps onto a postcard to send.
     They were all tails from a memory. A slowing ghost that cooed at me from far away, beating me up and down, pulling my eyes away from a scent I continually tried to remember.

You're sitting across a table, in the next room- and it's the month of July.
And as the beads of sweat chip off your forehead like a shank of butcher's meat, your dorcel fin peaks through the sand where my toes peak through. The picnic table where I write letters; post cards. I take photos, make reservations, and even after I'm canceled on for walking around downtown in my bright neon-pink underwear, I still roll to the left side of the bed sit up and drop the cigarette I fell asleep on. You're just sitting, first entry: Stardom.

I don't have room for you in the corners. The corners of this room, padded walls, shifty vaseline sway- the white cotton stick of a sucker pointing out of your mouth, its red numero forty dye shines in the specks of light flicking out of the horizon like a carousel ride around and around. I'm getting a bit dizzy, and even less honest.

If you want to see me spring, like the silly string on my birthday, yellow silly-putty; molding the monster face, I observe you through a kaleidoscope of dexedrine and morphine. Your catastrophe with Xanax, passed out in alien-green *******, at that party in the abandoned firehouse on News St., how you could lay trust on me after that(a daydream with sawing you called me) sixteen-year-old mishap of an afternoon. You bring it up mentioning the water in the cracks made by the cold sore in the corner of my mouth. Is it that time of the month? No. You don't bleed, it seems that being sewn up to your neckline your head streamed with a purple ribbon, you advocate freedom and being in the present as if practicing solidarity was a subtle thing.

Chewy, sewage tasting vitamins from GNC. Surgery moved to the end of next week. I wish that this sleep "thing" could bring sheep with numbers painted on their wool coating. I would make my virginity my first offering, than silently do my suffering. Lips held tight to your dew-drop forehead, my hands wandering, wondering. Fingernails marking you blue and black until you're *******.

Where in a sickening moment a black beast hovers above us. I scribble words into your left eyelid. A flutter. She, being your best girlfriend, does not interfere with this "thing" we're doing. Otherwise I'm vomiting, my stomach churning under a canopy three months later while we're pelted with rice.....my tuxedo, you're copy and pasted due to anxiety, and so I kiss my mother on the cheek. I leave, I go the beach. And I sit across from you at the picnic table. When rousing from our daydream I hear a moth fluttering, a child's mother whip his wrist the other way to drag him away- and the sun isn't setting, unrested I head in, and I bring my arm to my mouth, and with fifteen year old lips I kiss myself to sleep.