For five months
you fed me cigarettes
You didn't know that
I had made a home inside you.
I was born tiny
and early.

For two days
I lie naked and incapable
****** and smoke ridden.
Drugged.
I'm a young woman
this time,
but still your infant.

Two days you let me rot
whilst other mothers
brushed their daughters hair
and soothed them.

I lay naked and sore
my hair too matted
for brushing.
My wounds too deep now
for you to soothe.

Other mothers were
checking closets and
under beds
keeping the monsters away

I had no bed
just bloodied carpet
and a monster
that did not hide.

And what is there to say
And what am I to talk of
But the crackers we ate
On the blanket in the park

And lips
Your lips, beloved
Crusted with ******* crumbs and gloss
Touching mine

And then we laugh and things brush
And prickles on my skin rise
RISE RISE
Until
I open my eyes

And I see the spider
In the corner or my room
Across from my bed in the dark
Alone in his web and his poison

And he crawls and he spits
And he claws until he bleeds
At the inevitable and damnable
Future of solitude he is, he is.

Shivers of moon wind
Brush the blinds and I cough
Sending the spider again, up
Hidden in the depth of his silk

And alone I sit
And alone I smile
And alone my teeth are white

I stand naked in the night
And the haunted air licks
Everywhere that it owns
For I am it's and I am Devine

Dry fingers pull up the blinds
And shhhh slowly slide up the window
And the moon above honors me
With a glance and in it's eyes I see hate.

So I laugh and fight the shiver
As hard as I fight the future
And I scream to Black
I am yours, beloved, and you are mine.

Hello and Welcome, parents and whomever else i think to mention.
Isn't it wonderful to be here for the graduation of the class of current year and school. Mention length and difficulty of time spent in school. Inside joke about a teacher that makes some students laugh. But seriously, mention pride you have in all your class mates. mention specific friends while lying about how you were friends with everyone. Corny joke, Pause for mild and forced laughter. Platitude. Platitude. Platitude. Overly long boring story. Obscure or overused quote. go specific school. Calmly sit down no longer having to worry about how much you were sweating.

A little haiku.
I wrote this one just for you.
It is what I do.

Look in the mirror. Let us both look.
Here is my naked body.
Apparently you like it,
I have no reason to.
Who bound us, me and my body?
Why must I die
together with it?
I have the right to know where the borderline  
between us is drawn.
Where am I, I, I myself.

Belly, am I in the belly? In the intestines?  
In the hollow of the ***? In a toe?
Apparently in the brain. I do not see it.
Take my brain out of my skull. I have the right  
to see myself. Don’t laugh.
That’s macabre, you say.

It’s not me who made
my body.
I wear the used rags of my family,  
an alien brain, fruit of chance, hair  
after my grandmother, the nose
glued together from a few dead noses.  
What do I have in common with all that?  
What do I have in common with you, who like  
my knee, what is my knee to me?

Surely
I would have chosen a different model.

I will leave both of you here,
my knee and you.
Don’t make a wry face, I will leave you all my body  
to play with.
And I will go.
There is no place for me here,
in this blind darkness waiting for
corruption.
I will run out, I will race
away from myself.
I will look for myself  
running
like crazy
till my last breath.

One must hurry
before death comes. For by then  
like a dog ****** by its chain
I will have to return
into this stridently suffering body.  
To go through the last
most strident ceremony of the body.

Defeated by the body,
slowly annihilated because of the body

I will become kidney failure
or the gangrene of the large intestine.  
And I will expire in shame.

And the universe will expire with me,  
reduced as it is
to a kidney failure
and the gangrene of the large intestine.

[Las Meninas, Oil on Canvas, 1656, Prado, Madrid]

I am the first proud pronoun I
against the fear of my invisibility
each morning rising from
minor nobility like my parents
(no son of a converso – lies –)
into the light of mastery;
now as a Knight of Santiago
- the king himself painted the cross
  you see in Las Meninas -
nobilitas is in the faces
royal with ancient lines
(you understand I did not
trade
am Moorish of Seville
and Portugal).

Not from the mind but back
into its expectation.
I see the work reflected
into the lens of sense
to supplement the work into the real
express itself by what
a slavish love of detail cannot supply
it was the power
to give them what they did not see
the scorn in lips
from ****** generations
bought by my brush
among them into monarchic trade
and what they thought as glory,
dwarves and all larger than life.
that painted me so high
those royal portraits by the score
keyed to the colour of fame
silvered and golden
mine.