I'M SORRY THAT I'M WRITING YOUR NAME ON MY FOLDER AND I'M SORRY THAT I GRIN LIKE AN IDIOT WHENEVER YOU TALK TO ME AND I APOLOGIZE FOR MY HEART THAT THUMPS LIKE THE WINGS OF GIANT MOTHS WHENEVER YOU'RE AROUND ME AND I'M SORRY THIS IS ONE WHOLE RUN-ON SENTENCE.
I'M SORRY I SAY "WOW" WHENEVER I SEE IS YOUR FACE, BUT IT'S JUST SO FANTASTIC. YOUR FACE HOLDS GRAVEL AND BUBBLES OF LAUGHTER AND INTELLIGENT THINGS YOU'RE ABOUT TO SAY. YOUR HIPS ARE THIN, BUT THEY'RE PRESENT ENOUGH FOR ME TO GRAB THEM. OH, DID I MENTION YOUR EYES? GREEN AND GRAY, LIKE CAVES. I'D LIKE TO KNOW WHAT YOUR CAVES HOLD IN THEM.

I'M SORRY THAT I'VE NEVER SAID THIS TO YOU, BUT THIS COUNTS FOR SOMETHING, RIGHT?

~~a.s.f.

I want you to take a second, and I want you to reach;
reach into the back, the way way back. back into the dusty bookshelves of your mind, and check out that book, that book that you've heard so much about, but have never really read for yourself.

Then I want you to breathe. To inhale all of the yellow-pigmented roses and the delicious pieces of life and the cups of coffee. To exhale the disgusting, black clouds of smog that pollute the place you occupy; the hate, and the regret, and the gross, and all of the everything that makes you less than what you are: rid it of you.

finally, it would be nice of you to just be; to just occupy that space, to read that book that your friends have been raving about, to breathe in and out deeply, and often, and to just....live.

Live.


**~~a.s.f.

He kissed me like the cure for diseases was down my throat; like there is a drought and the only water supply is between my lips.
I felt the ocean and the moon and the sun working together. I felt hurricanes. It was somehow calming, but maddeningly chaotic.
He looked at me the way he looks at someone spitting mad bars. Luckily, he looked excited and intreged watching hip hop.
He once told me that my mouth is a black hole, swallowing the dark matter that is his tongue. But, what I really think he meant was that things are always drawn to it, getting lost inside.
Helpless yelps of both agony and relief escaped his body. They became small echoes hitting the back of my throat.

I feel disoriented after I'm away from him.
I'm on auto-pilot. No thought involved. Just walking. In a daze. Not exactly thinking things through. Just movement.
He wanted to rip my back open like all of my secrets lived there. And I let his fingers graze the curvature of my back. It was a marvelous experience. I let myself go. I allowed him to let go in my embrace.

**~~a.s.f.

A Letter From Glasses to Girl:

****, girl. You keep me so *****. Don't you care about me at all? The things I have been through are not what normal glasses go through. Do you not want to wash the memories away? Some of them need to be discarded and forgotten and washed away. The crust on me is a constant reminder of how late you stay up to study night after night. Take me off and let us both have a rest.


Letter From Hair to Girl:

****, girl. You keep me so *****. Don't you care about me? Aren't you worried about how I look? I'm pretty sure there are bats or cacti or stars in me. He's into the unkempt, ***** look, right? I am ocean. People get lost in my wrath. Lookin' like some kind of natural disaster, tornado, hurricane, I am. Fix me the **** up, or don't, and get out of bed.


Letter From Body to Girl:

****, girl. You keep me so *****. Don't you care about me at all? You need to understand that I am trying to keep us together. I don't hate you; I hate what we've turned into. Stretch marks shaped like hands are reaching up from the bottom of your stomach, begging to be let out. I am a hollowed version of you. Understand that I am a skeleton without you. Give me life.


Letter From Hand to Girl:*

Yeah, I get it. I'm small. I'm dainty and fragile, but I can flip people faster than anyone. Don't let the lines fool you; I will ******* up. Listen, I have galaxies, and cosmos, and planets, and his back under these fingernails. I am so powerful. We are so powerful, you have no idea. Harness that energy and we can move mountains.


Letter From Girl to World:

I AM...afraid. Of you. I am afraid of myself. I have the potential to move mountains, though. I am a mountain, though. Humans are mountains. You know what? We are pulsating, living, breathing, alive. I can take you on, world. I can devour you, world. You taste of smile and pollution and gross and...flowers.

*~~a.s.f.

I am sad, Dad. EMPTY.
ELEPHANTS don't forget, Dad.
I'm an avalanche, a hurricane, a natural disaster; I crumble.
Hold the magnifying glass over my new car and watch it BURN.
YOU DON'T GET IT!
I traveled to another country all by myself!
Brick by boring brick, dad.
I feel a hailstorm coming and it's named after your daughter.
I feel like I'm blowing up like dynamite.
Understand, dad, stars aren't supposed to feel like empty sweaters.
Feelin' like a sculpture right about now...fancy, but not enough to be alive.
Dear ol' dad:

after the body has decomposed and decayed and is done being with being a body, the insects feast on the flesh, desperate for nourishment.

           1.  after: the close of
               decompose: to separate into parts
                decay: to decompose; to separate into parts; to rot
                 done: to be finished
                 feast: any abundant meal
                  flesh: the sweet, outer coating of a body
                   desperate: having an urgent need for nourishment: something that is necessary for life

First came the blowflies, then the maggots. They attacked you while you were breathing. They thought you were done: to be finished. They crawled in and out of your nostrils, through your gaping mouth, down your throat. Your body took the phrase "being eaten alive" too far.
          
             2. maggots: legless larvae of flies
                     attack: to set upon in a hostile or violent way
                        nostrils: holes in a face that helps a body: the physical structure of a material substance breathe
                        down: on or to the ground
                          throat: the part where insects run through and burrow and live in the not living

You're imprinted into the ground now, your ribs a perch for vultures to peck upon your carcass. Your skull is laced with sand and other sedimentary rock as a nice garnish. Bodies are strewn here, peppered with dynasties of dust, ancestry of asphalt.

           3. ribs: curved bones shaped like armor to protect the heart and other vital organs
                carcass: a human devoid of being
                   skull: the bony framework of a head
                      laced: the lightly draping of a thing
                       garnish: the supply with; to decorate; to lace: lightly drape a thing
                            ancestry: generations and generations of sediment forming into people forming into lives forming into experience forming into decay: to separate into parts


**~~a.s.f.

let me near enough
to touch you

i don't mind
getting cut
on your edges

It's so easy to slip back into old patterns,
like the floral quilt your grandma sewed that's hanging on your wall with nails or thumbtacks, next to the painted tulips much like the ones I searched many meadows
(grocery aisles) for.
It's so easy to forget the memories.
Block out the bad ones and reminisce on the lovely walks through the patch of woods between your brothers house and the street you ran down, the street I always promised to run down with you, the street I picked flowers from the ditches instead for you.
It's so easy to name the songs you always got stuck in your head.
Which ones you thought sounded prettier on piano and which ones you liked to strum to.
The ones that made me believe in angels because there sat one, on the bench directly in front of me.
It makes it easy to get stuck in my head.
It makes it easy to skip breakfast,
and lunch. And dinner...
And to slice yellow bananas for my peanut butter toast,
only to skip breakfast again...
It's easy to smoke a cigarette and think of the dock by the pond and how I never wanted to taste the smoke on your lips or the **** in your lungs and how I can no longer go a full day without the numb buzz in my brain.
It's hard to forget the memories.
Of swings and soft songs and snowballs and sunflowers.
Of screams and scary dreams and starry storms and ****** showers.

Please remember.
Don't you ever forget.
The sun shone brightly from behind your lids, and even when you cried, there were rainbows in the sky.
It's was never easy to love you but it was even harder not to.
It's hard to look back at and smile, but sometimes I don't even have to try.

Cemetaries with graves more comforting than my own bed and bottles of wine in Parkinson's palms
Industrial factory lights at night that bewilder and leave wandering wants and wondering won'ts and wanderlust
Abandoned rodeos with the perfect pair of longitude and latitudinal lines for a sunset view and dance floors of dirt and footprints in spirals and you
And bowling alley parking lots and songs from my adolescence and secrets spilling from our mouths
And the fairground park swingset and sparklers and nostalgia looming just above the grassy horizon
The 10th floor of the casino parking garage and the water looks curious and inviting,
and it's a long way down.

And I'm a long way from home,
Until I'm in your arms.