When the whole world turn their back on you
Thats when words is your only friend
When the world decides to break your heart
Thats when words come to the rescue and saved you
When the world decides that youre not worth it
Thats when words is the only thing you can depend on

They helps you speak the unspoken
They bring you back up to the sky when youre deep down the earth
They are still there even after you let them see your vulnerable side
Because they are not humans
Who goes around deceiving each others

I write him in my sentences,
I write him in my diary.

I print him on pages,
I print him on stories.

I carve him on stones,
I carve him in designs.

I sketch him in my moans,
I sketch him in my mind.

I etch him in tattoo,
I etch him on woods.

I sculpt him in statues,
I sculpt him into the man he stood.

I inscribe him on ripples,
I inscribe him on the swirl of my wine.

I draw him in circles,
I just can’t draw the line.

Women sit, or move to and fro—some old, some young;
The young are beautiful—but the old are more beautiful than the young.

LET the crows go by hawking their caw and caw.
They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere.
Let 'em hawk their caw and caw.

Let the woodpecker drum and drum on a hickory stump.
He has been swimming in red and blue pools somewhere hundreds of years
And the blue has gone to his wings and the red has gone to his head.
Let his red head drum and drum.

Let the dark pools hold the birds in a looking-glass.
And if the pool wishes, let it shiver to the blur of many wings, old swimmers from old places.

Let the redwing streak a line of vermillion on the green wood lines.
And the mist along the river fix its purple in lines of a woman's shawl on lazy shoulders.

There is a body floating in the water of Lake Michigan again, but no one is willing to fish it out.  There is a body floating in the pond near my subdivision again, but everyone already knew that anyway.  
        I am sitting eighty miles away, overlooking a city that is not mine, thinking about how the moon outside my window is the same moon that you can see from down below in your partially frozen-over dirt bed.  I am thinking about the vampire that sits in his apartment, chugging two-to-three bottles of blood a week, and wondering if he is haunted by the same ghosts as I am.  
        It’s taken me eighteen years to realize that I was infected with a different variation of his curse all along—I am less human and more lycanthrope than I would like to admit.  I am not like you, I am not like him, I am my own breed and that terrifies me.  (There are black cats prowling in my heart and fragments of mirrors in my liver and salt that bleeds from my heels when I walk.)
        No matter how many rabbits’ feet I tie to my keys, how many dreamcatchers I put above my bed, how many cloves of garlic I hang over my door, I am never able to rid myself of the chill that goes hand in hand with the phantom you left here.
        Mother, I think I killed a man two full moons ago and I haven’t been the same since.  I threw his body into the lake and watched him drift out into the unknown, watched the kraken drag him down, watched the water spew him back up like a cork.  And now I need you to make your way back to the land of the living to sit by my side.  I want you to cut off my head and make me a trophy animal.  Create a rug from my fur.  Eat my organs and freeze the rest for winter.  Use me for your own survival.  I just want to be helpful.
        I want to be everything the vampire was not but my fingers are breaking from holding on too tight.

                                                               ­                                          I should let go.