You,
The experience
You,
Beyond the
Main five
Senses,
You,
Inside
Surrounding
Enveloping
Me

Two o'clock sober
might still be hungover
you're begging for my tongue while I beg for your love.
I never thought I'd love like this,
one-sided and founded on ever unstable lust. I shouldn't even call this love,
I think it's love and I think you're just in it for a ****. Writing
poems about you is "hard" because I can't admit
what I can't bring myself to say out loud. You told me your secrets
and I swallowed the seeds, letting your admissions
bloom inside of me.
How could I have been so stupid? I should have known
you would plant a garden just to leave.
Girls made of gardens wither without affection
I must not be your favorite flower. I don't think I ever was
but you keep coming around just to see my petals unfold
every spring and I let you leave dew drops all over me

We've done this before. Lines and rows of blooming pinks and red,
scratches, finger prints, bruises, hickeys, marks that fade
after a few days. No matter how many days it's been, weeks, months
we find our way back to the patch of wildflowers
where we first decided to make love.
There will always be changes to the scenery and
I can't think of anyone else that I would plant myself anywhere with.
One of us is always leaving but somehow the wind blows us back home.

I'm not religious anymore but the Ten Commandments
seared inside of my psyche flash
before my eyes and I hear myself repeating
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me"
while I make myself ****** to the pictures you sent me. One night,
I wrote everything about you that I idolized in big letters on lined paper
and ripped it into squares. I twisted the paper bits
into your godly shape and whispered
your name as I dropped you into a floral candle and let the flame
eat your tiny body. Have you ever felt crazy?
Have you ever been so in love that it makes you crazy?
Until you've made a lover into an effigy
and tried to force your passion for them to rest
by cremating their paper remains
I don't know if you understand how close love and crazy really are.

I swear. I swear, I'm done.

But I'm not done. I pretend to forget
the way your name feels for a while, I pretend to idolize
other things but when you appear
uninvited to my dreams I can't forget the things I've seen. You kiss
my forehead as midday sun
settles on my skin and a garden of roses
start to bud where you've planted love. You pick the most precious one
and when you cut the stem I **** awake, facing the candle
where I tried to destroy what I thought of you. I don't know
why I see you everywhere and I don't know why
I keep asking questions that I'll never have the answers to.

Once you're actually here my laugh bubbles
from my throat and chrysanthemums and lilacs and daisies
fly out. When you kiss me I swear I feel ivy
entwining itself into my hair and my eyelashes grow tuberose.
I bloom with you and when you leave I become winter, waiting for you
to tend me. Every day with you is spring
and I know exactly how fast the seasons change. "Thou shalt not covet"
but god, I want you
I want you to trust me with everything and I want you to sow more seeds.
I can't tell you the last time I read my bible,
I thought it didn't have a hold over me anymore but I want you
to choose me and I don't want
to feel like I'm setting myself up for heartbreak anymore.

I've been thinking
about touching you
for so long
And now that I am
it feels euphoric

Your skin,
as soft as
I remember it

I melt into your words. I catch the flame
flickering on my bookshelf
where I burned your likeness and look into your eyes
flashing my most devilish smile.
You're back in my room and you've covered my body with sticky honeysuckles
and forget-me-nots. You, imperfect as anyone else but I see you
like you're some walking god. You, human as me. Your hands
left prints of hibiscus on my skin and when you leave
I open my diary to the page where I pressed cherry blossoms and maple
leaves and they fall as I write about how happy I am to see you.

"I just don't think that men like you like women like me who have moonstone eyes and crazy day dreams, women who dot their poems with inky pearl tears, pressed poplar leaves and, well, I wanted to write you a poem but I can’t think of any creative words. I want you to read how beautiful you make me, how your eyes drink me in, how I overflow for you. I want you to feel the conflict in my heart... so rarely that I see you but every time we reunite we are even better than the last. I don't know if you want to read it but I want to write you a poem. I want to write you a poem that makes you cringe because I write with honesty. I want you to feel the rhythm of my words the way we feel the rhythm of our bodies. You should be happy to inspire someone’s poetry. You, you don’t love me. And that’s fine, because I’ll always look back at you and see sunshine streams on your skin."

My room is all white and pink, floral print and my African violet.
You look perfect in the rosy glow
of my feminine sanctuary and I feel so appealing,
I trust you enough to show you everything, I say, luxuriating the words in the sunlight.
I want to absorb this moment to keep me warm. When I lay alone
thinking of drifting to sleep in your arms, it is this moment
with you around me,
the way you kiss my face like I mean something to you
and this is the place I go, when I swear
all of this means nothing to you. Doesn't everyone want to feel home?
Maybe I think being with you feels like the kind of home
with a nice garden I want to live in. Maybe you feel it too.

Maybe I'm reading too far into everything
and not saying enough of anything
maybe both of us say nothing hoping the other will
be the one to admit the feeling
but you, as soon as you leave and I tell myself I’m done. Swearing
I've burned up the last of you, I’ll never do it again.

I can't stop thinking about you

And I'm back thinking about you, too.

between her palms
raw as a bleeding heart

******* the juice
from a ****** pulp
still beating throbbing

I pictured her tongue
******* a ****,
throbbing in her throat

The way she kissed
the soft flesh and
licked every red drop.

~Many people rely on the convenient, easy ways of living in this age of fast food, plastic packaging and rapid development. Most people do not care to see why they live the way they do or what it takes to live in such a way. Toxic pollutants leaching into our earth and water should not be worth the convenience! Third world women working in dusty, cramped factories to make designer purses for fifteen year old girls. Garbage is America’s biggest export and it ends up in China, on the coast of Somalia... anywhere that American citizens won’t be bothered to see it.

~What does it mean to buy a pack of plastic razors? Some metal, some chemicals, some plastic, more plastic for packaging. Use a razor a few times and toss it in the garbage. Somewhere, maybe at La Chureca, someone will pull the rusted metal and plastic from the landfill. They might make one US dollar per day collecting scraps of aluminum, glass, plastic and other scrap metals. What does it mean to wear deodorant? The plastic stick isn’t reusable. The ingredients are highly toxic. Aluminum-based antiperspirants have been linked to Alzheimer's and cancer. Soap comes in plastic bottles, coffee makers made of plastic, water bottles made of plastic… hell, my plastic shower curtain came wrapped in plastic packaging.

~Americans are lucky. Indoor plumbing with quality water. Green lawns and exotic flower beds. Buy and use, throw away and repeat. Big corporations pay off politicians to pollute. Industrial waste, land erosion, low air quality, pesticides. Why are we so quick to trust an artificial sweetener being promoted by a company that makes poison? They call you a hippy, a conspiracy theorist. They tell you that you only live once and to stop being so worried about it all. I ask them, how can you look away? Deforestation and destruction are all around. Those that profit are not concerned with what happens to the land after the loggers and miners have left the ground scarred and desolate.

~Modern living is a hoax. Yeah, you get around quick in your car but at what cost? Carbon dioxide, greenhouse gasses choking us and everything alive that lives with us and cannot speak. Can’t you walk to the corner store? Can’t you grow a few things in the garden or in the windowsill? When was the last time you saw a sunset and didn’t take a picture of it? Dairy cows packed together so tight they can’t turn around for your glass of milk. The disconnect is everywhere. Overpopulation. Overconsumption. People don’t care.

~They can choose. They can choose paper over plastic. They can buy a water filter instead of 20 plastic bottles. They can bike to work. Anyone can lessen their impact, anyone can think more deeply and live more sustainably. But we’ve made it so easy to be lazy. We’ve become so dependent that we’re forgetting to use technological gains to make the way we do things better. We’ve come so far that we’re forgetting what brought us here.

~

‘We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire – a crackpot machine – that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate.’ Edward Abbey

‘In the developing world, the problem of population is seen less as a matter of human numbers than of western overconsumption. Yet within the development community, the only solution to the problems of the developing world is to export the same unsustainable economic model fuelling the overconsumption of the West.’ Kavita Ramdas

‘Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.’ Jacques-Yves Cousteau

‘Globalisation, which attempts to amalgamate every local, regional, and national economy into a single world system, requires homogenising locally adapted forms of agriculture, replacing them with an industrial system – centrally managed, pesticide-intensive, one-crop production for export – designed to deliver a narrow range of transportable foods to the world market.’Helena Norberg-Hodge

‘Throughout history human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonise-destroy-move on.’ Garrett Hardin

The lust we share on cold midnights, lucid
and gentle but so passionate and rough
can keep me hypnotized. Translucent blue
eyes shine like moonstone, glinting bright with love
hidden from sight. I want to call you mine
but I know better than to pine over
a man up way too high, stuck on cloud nine
not planning to come down or to get sober.
I’ll let myself get lost a little while
in the forest of curls behind your ears.
I’ll wander your body concealing smiles
that give away feelings that interfere
with the promise to love myself before
someone else. I am who I’m living for.

First glance, I’m a good Christian girl. But dark purple flecks decorate my neck.
In leather and lace I forget to pray and let you do what you want with me
because pain is complex and melded with pleasure.

Do you know what they say about girls that enjoy ***?
They never dare to say it to my face but I can feel them staring from the pew
at the dark purple flecks that decorate my neck.

Your hands, more powerful than God, make the earth of my body quake
while I draw fault lines down your back with my nails under the broken
crucifix above your bed. The pain is complex and melded with pleasure.

Deep, growling voice shakes the dusty rosary on your nightstand when we ****.
Your handprints are left on my flesh and the hand around my throat
leaves the dark purple flecks decorating my neck.

Coffee in the narthex and I’m labeled a harlot. Sinner. Sacrilegious. Branded as freaks…
Brush it off. I know what you like and how you like me. God will have mercy.
Sensations blend because pain is complex and melded with pleasure

and I can’t have one without the other. To reach our peak
you leave me red, marked and breathless, gasping, “Oh my God.”
Questioning my beliefs with dark purple flecks to decorate my neck,
I know pain will always be complex and melded with pleasure.