Do you know how beautiful it is to be empty ?
Hollow, -
Like a drum. -
When you touch me i rear your sound:
Irreplecable, new, bright.
I am your echo - the thought that spurs you
The art that haunts you,
The woman who cleans you.

I am afraid of the stench of death,
Rigor mortis,
The sound of my own heartbeat.

I am afraid of things that breathe
Things that can see me, and things that can be heard.
The roughness of my knuckles,
The warmth of my own neck,
And the movement of aimless leaves.

I am afraid of the howl a car makes as it starts,
The pitch of a human voice,
What is hidden beneath a lampshade,
And the sound of fake grass beneath my shoes.

There is no solace from turbidity
Nor respite from that booming entropy.
Leaves are always turning, corpses always rotting,
Dishes left unclean and toenails that go unclipped.

There are turgid limbs and dying calves,
Budding flowers that twist senselessly
Toward the sun.
There is the mist that infects the air
And the suited men who come to **** it.

Asbestos, saccharine frosting, ugly babies
and an unending parade of horrors which present themselves
in my dreams or in busy shopping malls.

So i clutch my heart, wear my seatbelt
lock my doors, count the unending corners,
mark the burgeoning rooms in a hallway,
wash my hands twice with soap,
and pray to a baleful god for my immortal soul and supple skin.

my breath smells the same as my sister's.
not our explicitly clean breath, nor our post-meal breath,
but the natural essence that diffuses from within that cavity.

our parents were the same so the germs- the bacteria
that populate our orifices must be related too.
twin tongues, the same undulating monuments of calcium
and cavity.

What can I say of a father
Who was too ill to notice my birth?
Whose gentle nature at once endeared him to me
         and caused me the greatest pain of my whole life.
And Dad, when I went to wake you all those mornings in vain,
Did you notice the fear behind my squeaking laughter?
Or the sound of my retreat?
Did your love for me grow when I sketched your sky
And folded the laundry while you were away?

I think of the slow droning burn of the days,
How my life was a struggle for power, a struggle for words.
I waged war at seven.
There had to be violence and noise and ruin,
For the tumult that surrounded me never ceased
And had never before been produced
By my own small body,
Though I believed I was the perpetrator all along.

Our finest chinas grew fewer as I grew older,
And the laziness of my household grew too.
Gnats swarmed our remaining plastic bowls
As the rooms expanded both in fullness and in void.
A lack. A lack of mom. Dad away in the shed, tinkering.

Sometimes, Dad, your face took on a look of health.
A health whose glow radiated unto me, your satellite.
And in those moments of brightness, i believed in god,
In everything, in your capacity, in your love, your promises,
In my own beauty.

I brought you my words and lavished upon you my art, my books,
My trinkets of artistic arrangement.
I showed you the house of my creation where there were girls
With blue shoes and there was peace within the six pink rooms.

The moon learns in time that there are passing phases
And that the constancy of the sun’s luminosity is illusory.
But i was too young to know of ancient cycles,
And in my beating heart it was unlove
and there was no trace of hope when you turned face
And eclipsed me.

A girl is but a girl.
Her skin is gilded with Truth
Her truth is covered in lustrous things
Like makeup, purity, and the Way of being Chaste.

A girl is but a girl.
The frivol of her day-to-day
Is the fascination of none who admire her.
She isn’t real, but a phantasm of Their charitable
Imagination.

A girl exists in Relation to other things.
These things are truer, in form and in function,
They may occupy the same space in the same fashion, but
One has the mercy of inanimacy while the other
is a lacy white lampshade.

Everything is alive.
The spirit of life is endowed in every
Material and immaterial existence.
Life is an unstoppable force.
Life is contagious.
Life begets life and propagates
Ad infinitum.
Life is desire itself.
Every thing yearns to be alive
And every thing that is fading
Desperately reaches out for the suckle
Of that elusive, all-encompassing elixir.
Life is transient. It is delicate and strong.
It is a force itself which does not move Time
So much as imbue it with Meaning.
Life is tumultuous, unsteady, and capricious.
It wants to “go” in an atemporal sense.
It occupies the past, present, and future at once
But its movement is linear and certain.
It can splinter and halt.
Life is miraculous.
It implies the incomprehensible Divinity
Of Being. It is Absurd.
Life is defiant, stubborn, and strong-headed.
It can Be when no one is looking and in spite of
The skeptical spectator.
Every thing respires as one. Life is unity.
Life is paradox.
Life is

You are the wheat, you are the marrow. You are wholesome and life-giving, where the disease takes hold and lays waste. You are dizzy like a wildfire, cut loose and vengeful. You have arson on your mind and crime on your bloodied lips. You speak in a contrived directness which is apparently an act. People find you sick when they love you. I wear socks around you and I am callous. You invoke the terror, beget the night sweats. I grow my teeth for you and clamp down on the nearest artery I can find. You think about French ideas and German systems. You meditate without much meaning. I don’t recognize your face when I see it. Yours is a disembodied voice which haunts me all the way to my echo chamber so that I may never be free from the resonance of it.

The world is at a dizzying standstill. All I can do is eat and clip my fingernails, while I grow and stagnate, expand and collapse, exerting energy in vain to bring the air into my lungs and grow eyelashes,  then pluck them off with heat. I have detritus, waste, bycatch, excess, growing and detaching, living and dying. I am a Monotony, a repetition of ****** functions which persist blindly, in spite of my sinking heart and my fleeting mind. I am dense with lint, heavy with lungs. I stand upright with my bones and gawk at the pallor which has overtaken my gaunt and plump adult face.

All language is euphemism.
We seek to convey our senses and intuitions
But cannot achieve this with words.
Every thing real is abstract,
And every thing simple is a farce.
A bastardization of reality which seeks to
Force a mass of energy into an envelope and
Send it away with insufficient postage.

We are desperate to be understood,
To communicate our reality,
To achieve our natural unity as
Lifeforms, forcing language to
Mean something particular
And devoting our lives to that method
Of exacting.

Language is the tragedy of human existence.
It gawks at us and splinters our already rugged tongues
With unmentionable tones, vibrations, and guttural utterances
Engendering a cacophony of false synchronicity.

We are left with a sense of profound emptiness
And alienation, setting pieces in opposition to each other,
and defining them by their self-imposed tensions.
The false sense of our clan, the necessity for an enemy.
We are left with a world riddled in misunderstanding and
Conflict.

I’m afraid of entropy. A thing so fearsome, it can only be alluded to with the letter S. It is haunting; it looms silently over everything, only expressing itself materially in the mess that litters itself on the edges of highways, in a crowded mall, in a subway full of disparities, in images of landfills. Images so foul and beyond our imagination, they look almost like artful depictions. We find beauty in them, abstract them to colors and shapes and assure ourselves in the efficacy of our ideology. Chaos surrounds us, makes a necklace around the circumference of the ocean and hangs upon the necks of its oldest inhabitants. The shell of a sea turtle looks like infinity. It carries the resonance of a pool of water, an entanglement of snakes, a rat king, a mangled mess of necklaces. Unbreakable chains. Putrid and infinite. The stuff that emerged from Pandora’s box. We yearn for boxes, we want to contain our sins, our sorrows, our shame. We look for safety within four walls, in the shadows of concrete structures, in straight edges, things we can count. But silently, we despair, because we know, for all our effort, it does not suffice. Everything around us builds in complexity and in inextricability, linking the mother and child to the predator and prey, holy things become impure, ugly things become common in our collective imagination. We try to filter out the horrid symbols completely, but they linger like an albatross hung round our necks. Our spines weaken, our postures relax. We feel the humidity and the stench of garbage follow us to the countryside. Poppies lined in gunpowder and pain. ***** tinged with the scent of blood. Products spring forth from the ground, but they aren’t the bounty promised by our ancestors. They are made of plastic and tin. They long to be recycled, made homogenous again, but that fearsome letter. Will always have its way.

The soft edges of femininity,
Round, *******, complements,
Heels, ***** of the feet, sockets,

Soft eyes, soft hearts, soft hands
Tinkering, thanking, crossing, legs.

Girlhood is enclosed in a silver box
With mute pastels and a heavy soundtrack of strings,

Strings which bifurcate, dissect, divulge,
Horrors, bells, instruments and lush melodies.

Girlhood smells of iron, hot animals, heaving,
Converging, pin ******, the sharp alacrity of Knowing.

Eyes are wet, armpits go black , round edges
Protrude into a potbelly, grow and stagnate,
expand and collapse.