carve the words
"right" and "left"
deep into your wooden wrists
backwards, if you want
just make sure you can feel them
so you can't forget
how many letters
went unopened
or how red the ink must have appeared
as it bathed the roots
of so many solitary trees

my mind is crazed
on cartoons and
my lungs absorb my own
existence in a cigarette.

i am perched on a roof
the green dusk sky stretched
out like a beach towel
above me.

thirty-four stories up
and i hold the moon in
a cradle.

Can't sleep, it's always the same.
I get to my room, exhausted, lie in my bed,
Close my eyes and the Sleepless Fairy
decides to take the reins of the situation.

Maybe if I go to my computer and surf for a while
I could doze off. Maybe I'll go out and have a cigarette
to calm the Fairy. No, this insomnia is different. I can't fix it
with simple solutions.

This wakefulness is not due to the anxiety of an exam,
or the diffidence I have for that one girl I can't get out
of my head. This insomnia is that small sparkle of
uncertainty that has abounded my mind for a long time.
That feeling of vagueness, of yearning. Yearning of what?
I don't know.

It is simply that feeling that I'm missing something,
whatever it is. I go around the whole day in my mind,
what am I missing? What am I forgetting?

During the day I'm acquiescent, lucid, happy.
But come night... time to go to bed.
Time to perform the daily check for recent events.
Catalog the occurrences with different feelings,
accommodated to their respective memories.

But there's something missing.

I curse the Fairy and its 1001 tricks that keep me
awake and conscious about that which is in the
subconscious.

Will the day come when the Fairy shows up no more?

As long as that feeling is housed in me, like a parasite
clogged on its new victim, the Fairy will keep visiting.

i am beginning to wonder when i started finding
imperfections so beautiful

maybe it was when i decided
i would never be perfect,
and that the only way i could look at myself in the mirror
was if i started with the ugly scars on my ankle
and made my way up slowly
past my knobby knees,
prominent hip bones,
too-small chest,
pointy nose,
until i looked myself in the
eyes,
taking in every abnormality or distinct deficiency
until i could convince myself they were unique enough
to be considered in someone else's eyes
"pretty"

i began doing the same thing with everyone else,
turning their flaws into something charming
so much
so that when i came across you,
i didn't have to think about it-
i knew from the start that you would be
perfect.