There's something about paint
That begs to feel skin
Something about
How smooth it is,
How it can rise and fall in little dobs and smudges.
Sometimes when it's very late
And I am painting and my palette is a whirl of color
I press my palms right into the middle of it
Like a child
And I settle them there, making sure every ridge and wrinkle is covered.
When I pull back and see the design
I always like my hands much better than before.
And then I think
Why stop at hands?
I stand and strip off what clothing I'm still wearing
And look at my body in the mirror,
All white and shining in the dimness, a sliver of bone
And I make it different with my hands.
Handprints.
I have always wanted to do it with a lover-
To cover her in painted handprints and have her cover me,
To wear the evidence of every place we touch
In the colors that blend on our skin.
Alone in the mirror,
I place careful palms on my stomach, my legs, my *******, my shoulder.
I do it until I like the dissymmetry of myself.
I step back,
And wonder why I feel that I look more natural like this
Than bare.
A tumble of black hair, a sheath of white skin,
And on it
Crimson
Gold
Azure
Onyx
Fiery orange and icy blue
Poison green and violet
Blood red and blushing pink
All swirled and smudged, holding the shape of my fingerprints,
And I am more me
Than I was before.
Later it will dry and crack like clay.
Later I will shed it like a second skin, fascinated by its uneven splattering.
It will slough off, painless and mesmerizing, and I will be what I was before-
A sliver of bone.
But for now I am a canvas, and tonight, for once, I have not been left
Unaltered.

I don't want my life to be a novel anymore. A show. It's beautiful because it's sad, but it feels like it's for other people to look at. Look how strong she's been, look how hard she falls, look how passionate she is. They look but don't touch. They admire but they won't love. I don't want to be a pretty thing, I don't want to be a jewel you examine to see if perhaps you want it, deliberate, ooh and ahh but ultimately decide to set it back down and leave the shop. I am not a thing! I am not a choice. I am a soul that has been treated like a commodity, like a thing, I have been used up and bartered, but I have not been loved, not for long, and never well. And I am wearing out. Tarnishing. A lovely thing gone black with fingerprints but never truly TOUCHED. Every time I feel it. It gets a little harder to conceal the cracks, the dents and tears and scrapes others have left. It gets a bit more tiring each time to say
No, no it's okay, I understand, it is my fault for being what I am.
I believe it less each time. And what then? What when I have run out of meekness? What when I can no longer swallow my pride and hurt? Each time I feel it rising, a tide in me of suffering and outrage, an overwhelming question- WHY would you do this to me? But I know the answer. I swallow the answer like an ember every time it crawls up my throat and screams to be screamed. This is the price of loving a person. Human beings are not tame. They are wild. They come with fangs and fears and cruelties. They come with ignorance and stubbornness. They come with cowardice and pride. And love is defeated in their eyes, every pair of eyes no matter how lovely or how sweet, over and over. I am made too differently to stand and fight against them, and so I have learned to fall, because humans are addictive. These people, these souls. They draw you in and you need their light, their complexity, suddenly you want to comfort them. They are so fragile and so vicious. So exquisite. And so fascinating- for each and every one, no matter how kind, does the same thing with power. They must test it. Touch it. Use it. Their nature begs them to be predators, and they fight it inside, so gorgeously! And they fail so spectacularly! And I fall, wounded, the sacrifice.
There are fangs in me as well, you know. There is venom. Some part of my soul has talons and demands blood. But it, as all vicious things seem to be, was man-made. I was not born with this in me. It rattles the bars of my ribcage and so rarely do I let it see the sun because it has grown from these moments. It has nourished itself on every cruelty I have ever endured.
It says,
See? They are evil inside. They are too selfish to love you. Why do you show them kindness? Why don't you play the game, when you know I hold the power to crush them all? When you know I
Would win?
I shush it with fear and with awe. It is not me. It is only what drags me up when I cry on the floor. It is merely what has brutally, violently kept me alive for all these years and I OWE it, I know I do. I owe it my life several times over now, and yet it is so savage. So cruel. It is the monster that has shown me how to be kind. It rages inside of me and I change its hate into tenderness, and it curses me for my weakness, and we move through this world like a burning ship, sinking and throwing off steam. Moments like this it demands its freedom.
It says,
Take like you've been taken from. Bleed this world dry.
And I say,
I will love it. I will love it until I die of loving it.
And it says:
Congratulations,
*You will.

When you can lose your love with a shrug and a sigh,
That is when you die, that is when you die.
When you dispassionately let the whole world pass you by
When you conquer and don't miss your instinct to cry
When you are brought to your knees and forget to ask why,
That is the day that you die.
When you can abandon a place without saying goodbye
When your heartbeat is steady no matter your lie
When you stop failing at things and start failing to try
That is when you die, that is when you die.
You can wither away all crackled and dry
All elements of disease can you defy
Be a hundred and six and still limber and spry
But the day you stopped feeling was the day that you died.

How strange that even the strongest girls seem to dream of dawning the trappings of housewives and waiting on their men. How strange, and how disappointing: I will never be what you want if what you want is to serve a man.

There was a moment, on that last day, when we were playing with the dogs in my living room,
When everything just froze for a moment,
Me on one side and you on the other,
And I saw your eyes,
And just for that second we both knew
That everything was about to be over.
And after it passed we denied it-
Went on with our goodbyes and our see-you-later's,
But neither of us felt really right about it.
Something had happened.
I saw you decide.
I saw you decide to leave me.
And you didn't even know you'd decided yet.
But part of me knew.
In that one moment, we
Both of us
Honestly knew that you were going to run away.
But still, somehow, we were both so devastated
When you did.

(Watching you hold my hand
In that old photograph
Makes me smile with tears in my eyes
The self same expression
As way back then
When I treasured your fingers
Twined with mine
Knowing that soon my hand would again be
Empty.)

Do people often tell you
That you are beautiful
As hell?
It seems as if you ought to know.
I hope somebody tells you.
Has told you
Before me.
I hope people say it every day,
All the time.
I hope that,
Somehow or other,
You know-
And you must know, you must-
That you're enthralling.
It's your smile.
I was wondering what it was, earlier,
Thinking long and ******* it,
(Because, really, what else to think of?)
And suddenly it hit me that your joy is infectious.
When you smile, it lights up your whole face,
Your whole self.
Me, too.
Everything.
I've never met anyone who smiles like you do.
Your eyes dance.
Before I met you,
Before I even knew your name,
When I saw you smile
I wanted to cause it.
Because what perfection!-
To be the start of a laugh or a smile in you.
When you smile,
It gets under my skin,
And when you smile at me
I imagine I couldn't possibly stop myself from smiling back
With all the joy I have in my heart
Even if my life depended on it.
I hope people tell you that's beautiful,
That you're a beautiful way to be,
That you're exquisite inside and out.
I hope they say it on the street,
Passing by,
Strangers.
I hope they catch your arm and stop their whole day
Just to tell you how you brightened it with a passing laugh.

My poems. I didn't think that many of them were about you.
I suppose I shouldn't be shocked, and I'm not.
Most things are, when I really boil them down
And still I never seem to quite expect it.

I had a dream once that I was dying.
My blood was seeping out through an ugly wound in my stomach,
Angry red.
And I reached for you, in fear.
I asked you to hold me and lie that you loved me
And you did.
You looked at me with all the tenderness I felt for you,
And I closed my eyes smiling.
But sadly, I closed my eyes to open them
On an empty room, grey with moonlight
And a truth drenched world,
Grey with loss.

careful there
darling
you know what comes
of touching lovely things

I am logical and rational because one needs a knowledge of that in order to reverse it.
I have spent most of my life toe to toe
With people who do not live on that plane.
I've had to learn it so that I can learn to fight in worlds of others' creations,
Where neither facts nor emotions have any substance,
Where the only way to stay alive is to convince your opponent that they thought of your solution themselves.

People wonder why I think defensively.
It is because I have been forced to my knees by people so cunning they fool themselves,
So incredibly sure of their goodness
That they could slap you and make you apologize for hurting their hand.
And you'd believe it: you'd cry real tears.
You'd punish yourself for them.

I was raised by people like this.

I was molded to apologize when hurt.
And it has left me... Bitterly unprepared for the world.
But it has left me with an eye for mazes of the mind:
One needs to tread upon the ground of insanity to hope to hold one's own against gods-
For that is what people like this are in their lives: gods.
They make the rules.
And if you don't say yes to them you will never reach your goal.
For these people,
There is no possibility of "wrong",
There is no way to convince them to see a different perspective,
There is no flexibility whatsoever.
As illusions go, their worlds are rigid ones-
Rigid because one discrepancy could send everything tumbling
Like a failed house of cards.

And so if ever you need something from one of these people...
First of all, I pity you.
Second of all, you must navigate their fun house mirror maze full of trip wires.
You must simply survive their attacks.
The goal has to be to live to fight another day.
It has to be to shout truth over and over into the wind and weather the punishment for having thought it,
So that you may return another time and shout again.
The goal has to be to be so loud that they might remember your words.
Not today, not tomorrow, but maybe someday, if you scream and rave and
Fight hard enough,
Maybe one important, true sentence will break through and reach them.
And maybe they will allow it to exist.
Allow you to exist.
That can really be your only goal
With people like this.