strawberry vines are
creeping over my memories of
you, rose stained glass and jasmine
in my hair. I'm trying to
numb my thoughts of you,
but the pain of the needle buried
deep in my gums keeps me
******* crying, and I can still
feel my ******* face. no one
ever tells you,
falling in love is easy. loving
someone else is the hard part.

I only love you when I'm sober,
so I've been high for, about, I'd say
2.27 weeks?? wild, I know. what
can I say? I just
hate being alone with
the mere thought of you,
cloying and *******, ecstasy
in my endorphins. Newport on my lips
and nicotine in my system; emotions
encased in agar, Petri dish replicants.
sugar skulls crushed beneath timbs and
honey beneath my cuticles and
white wine in the freezer frosting up.
chocolate ganache sealing my tongue
like a sarcophagus and I'm daydreaming
about halcyon days gone by
screaming along to the radio in
your sunsoaked two-seater.

after tastes like aftershocks,
pineapple lips and papaya tongue.
sunshine sloshing
all over us like liquor and
your hair so like shale
soaking beneath the sun.
Artemis is goddess of the moon:
where did you think lunar witches came from?
xanax bar after xanax bar
laid upon the vanity, crushed
and powdered up, snowdrifts
in blue and white.
oranges and blueberries and mango
in your lap, juice
across your thighs and earth in your mouth.

I can see three skies
on the interior of my eyelids,
and I just got a text from
my friends at a party; it's
well past dark and it feels like
Genoa and Home and London
all in one. I keep
waking up and
dozing off again;
******* fits and
trazodone dreams.
I feel like I'm trapped
in a time loop; Groundhog Day,
but every day I love a new
person,
but you
always come around,
always on my mind
and I
do not know how to keep you
out of my brain, how to
keep you near me.

there's basically
no difference between
clouds and fog, and
thunderstorms and reduced visibility
have both put the fear of God in me;
loving you is all
pain and lust, interchangeable,
interchangeable. slippery
squealing synthesizers, aching
for your touch and
dying to throw these
LCDs and LEDs and private
snapchats into the Recycle
Bin,
and I am glittering in the dark, swerving
across the median, drunk driving
on the thought of seeing you just a little
sooner than never.

please shut up and let me pretend
that the streetlight shining through the
***** window is moonlight glittering
across my angel face, because
it is 3 in the morning and everything is
poised to break apart like
the ice on the Iowa River.

my mind is cyclical,
Battle Bot on Hamster Wheel
installation art soon to be in
Tokyo, San Francisco, New
York, Chicago: every city
I had the languorous pleasure of
kissing You in.
being unkind to me is terrible and
yet I love being able to vent
my emotions like so much
sulfurous smoke. [redacted]'s in
his bunk bed, 30,000 feet up and
only 1 girl is invited;
****** brain frizzed out, wasted
girls coughing kush while we
contemplate wasted opportunities.

I can still taste
oranges on my tongue,
tropicana from tampa,
extra extra pulp in my mouth.
The orange groves are
dying, frost encroaching, and I
can do little; I'm at the
supermarket searching for
coconut oil and lavishing
honey straight from the bottle
onto my tongue; empty
bears litter the linoleum and
the taste of your ***** still
evades my fractitious memory.

my whole mouth tastes like metal,
copper pennies from before
The Great Zinc Switch
filling my warm wet mouth.
cigarette smoke hazing
my sinuses like a frat rush
and I'm desperately in need of an Advil.
let me place my coppery lips
on your bronzed skin,
Amman to Atlanta,
nails like knives and
The Book of Biology
teasing hormonal touches and hydration.
iron oxide keeps flaking off my
skin, eczema and psoriasis in rust, and
the guitars in my ears are ******* furious.
and still:
sweat and *** in the sheets, your love
lingering on my palate like a
too sour wine; you fermented and curdled
in my mouth, and
to taste you now
is agony.
time is dilating around me in ripples;
I cough until the gas in my stomach releases itself; crystal abrasive.
it's all drugs and
tinder matches these days,
****** kids...
total sunbeam, in my opinion
there's still enough for
a couple more
hits, it's still rolling,
words cloud around my head like
so much weedsmoke, Storm clouds
on the horizon of my parietal lobe
and I feel fine.
I am fine.

liquid crystal display
glimmering salacious self-imagery at you,
your lips parted and breath
staccatoing along, flitting just
behind the beat, like your aunt's
first dance at the wedding reception (before
she's had enough to drink) or
her last (when she's had
too much)
she was in the passenger seat
on our drive homeward, leaning in
to the driver's seat conspiratorially,
oblivious to your beauty splayed out
exhausted in the backseat.
"she's my
baby niece, and you better not
**** with her
heart, you hear me missy?"
and I assured her I wouldn't as you
laughed and laughed, bell peals
in the backseat and church bells
echoing in my ear, past and possible
future, sodium vapor lights
slipping away along the highway as
your aunt slid back into the passenger seat.
"so"
"so"
"she's quite a
character," I say, bemused, and your
eyes crinkled at the corners like
newspaper redesigned during crumpling as
kindling for the fire, blue and blue and blue
in the backseat.
"that's true"
"just like you"
"just like me" you agree,
crossing your legs, legs that go on
for dynasties in thigh highs and
your dress riding up too high for my eyes
to focus on the taillights ahead of us when
paradise is in the rearview:
love is
cold lobster bisque
in a big bowl in bed in the morning,
two spoons and a carton of orange juice
arrayed on the covers atop our
entangled legs.

put your hands on me:
I'm squirming, *******
enamored with the thought of
your hands on my stomach,
my wrists bound to your bed,
my toes acurl in the sheets.
I love being naked for you but
I get so cold; you laugh at my
complaints, lay yourself
atop me,
whisper, "is this
better kitten?"
in my ear before letting your tongue
lap at my earlobe and your teeth
clamp down in their place.

I remember:

you, in black lace ******* and
little else, crushed close
by gravity,
weak winter afternoon sunlight
streaming in and out of your car,
HD Netflix in your backseat.
my fingers drumming insistently
upon your collar bone,
my mouth pressed against your shoulder
as I sing so softly in your ear,
a concert for one.
((only you're invited))
your hair all over your bare
back and black
lace wedged up tight against your
muscle. your lips are
cold against my skin and our feet
are ******* freezing and the heater is
all the way up but not nearly enough.
I let my fingers parse through your
vertebrae, Dr. Lecter planning
a meal; slice here,
cleave there, remove viscera, season and
cook: magnifique.
time and history are
mercury in my clenched fist;
my nails are biting into my skin, and
liquid silver moments gone by are
flowing freely from my slackened grip.

every breath tastes
rancid on my tongue;
fun fact, if all you eat is
raspberry yogurt and
hypersaturated strawberries,
your ***** looks like
Jackson ******* plus
Picasso's Rose Period.
has anyone ever told you
that drunk texting you is like
standing in front of a Caravaggio;
it's dusky and dark and sensuous and I
******* adore getting lost in
translation. Cezanne draws solely in
molecular geometry, tetrahedral,
trigonal pyramidal, octahedrons
scrawled across the canvas and doused
in living color. Thursday night already
seems so intangible,
a bad dream that didn't dice up my liver
like a ******* sous chef. Thursdays
have come and gone, the weekends
ever-beckoning, and the scent of Smirnoff
stays in my sinuses.

they're nothing alike, but they both rejected you in similar ways and that means that they're more alike than you'd like them to be. parallelism is everywhere and try all you want you can't avoid the syncretism of the universe, the constant assimilation and recreation, the mundane Phoenix, no ashes but still - rebirth. you know if you listen to drake right now, tucked under the covers and spooning the pillow like a lover liable to leave, you will be sad all night, possibly through the morning, bleary-eyed in chemistry and barely aware in rhetoric; you didn't do the assigned reading and haven't started looking at apartment leases yet. my roommate's shoulder is healing and mine is just now beginning to ache; parallelism is everywhere, and try as I might, I can never seem to outrun it.

how eager we are to forget
where we came from,
as though we weren't
dirt beneath God's
meticulous manicure mere
fractional eternities ago.
you stopped talking to me
just days ago, but
it feels like epochs;
time dilates in strange
manners, it truly is alien.
there are civilizations
that simply do not
measure time; things happen when
they happen, and that
is that. foreign concepts and
foreign languages slipping across
the tip of my tongue, while
foreign tongues work their way
into your every orifice.
I'm laying in bed, last night
was a bust, I drank a
little bit of whiskey but
not enough, it rained but
only briefly, and I
did not have fun but
I cannot complain;
at least I don't need
you anymore.

burnett's in the bloodstream now,
his cheap strawberry liquor
cheapening my strawberry kisses by
increasing supply in the absence of
appreciable increase in demand;
Economics 101, taught by the
professor in the tweed jacket
with the leather elbows.
you say you want to
practice black magic, and I'm
so down; god you're so hot.
I just want you to kiss my back and
cast a spell on me,
but you've already done the
latter, and you will
never do the first.

I am drunk and ensconced in
layers of
bedsheets and blankets,
delirious, dreaming of
You. if only-
if only You were here, to be
entangled in my
arms, constricted under the
comforter, searching your feelings for
love for me while we
use ectodetectors to
search for the ghost in the
machine.

we had potential,
-kx, and with respect to
x, *******.
we could've been
a masterwork,
Fields of Rapeseed, 1883, painted
in Prague, oil on
canvas.
but no,
you had to be
Mr. ******* Fantastic,
stretching yourself thin and
stretching my patience
again and again like
so much taffy to be made
palatable.
I have always been
difficult to stomach, even
at the best of times,
and you thought you could be the
Zeus to my Europa, whisk me
away and act like it'd all be okay.
but you didn't understand,
I was Europa, but
not the myth, the moon,
and I desired nothing more than to
drag you into my orbit and
drag you down to your demise.

I woke up this morning,
- well, last night, it's 4:30 AM so
where does that count - phone
on the floor where it rolled from my
sleep-slackened grip right off the bed,
sheets drowning in sweat; they smell like
me, and I am feeling nauseous.
my spine is curved around a
particular puddle of sweat, the
one I awoke in; it's still wet,
but it'll dry out; I have to
put these bedsheets in the wash,
use three times as much detergent,
maybe spray em with Lysol first.

but getting rid of the sweat-soak
won't get rid of the
nightmares of you.

hit my cellphone in the morning
and tell me you love me;
who else will love my
frozen skin at 6:15 AM,
my eyes glittering, awash in
LED bliss.

these fluorescent lights and
LCD screens are keeping me awake.
it's not the
thoughts of you; those are
just a byproduct,
because when I'm
awake, you're
asleep, and
on my mind.
my skin is so dry it might
crack in two when my lips meet yours but
I'd hazard the risk just like
I have so many times before.
so many girls and
so many boys,
like you and unlike you and
I like you a
little too much to retain both
my senses and my sanity.
I crave the
tsunami of sensations
only you
can drown me in,
******* my throat with sentiment as I
silently cry.

rivers of salt; saccharine silicon and
iridescent nightmares;
kids carve their names into trees
because their concept of forever is
three summers forward;
entropy demands a tithe, a
forfeiture of lives; decimate your herds
and still
no, it is not enough.
know it is not enough.

don't keep your sweet little mouth
open too long; sugar attracts flies,
and pretty soon your
teeth will be teeming
with maggots and rot,
streptococcus sanguis
cheerfully wearing down your enamel
like you wore down my inhibitions.
"it'll be fun," you said, dropping
one hundred milligrams
on your tongue, firmly grasping the back
of my neck, and applying your lips to mine.
one hundred milligrams
slide down my throat, and despite myself,
I laugh, because even when I'm scared
I want to be with you.

the Black Angel is God On Earth; she is
lonely beyond belief, and I give her a hug.
people forget that monsters have
feelings too, and
God?
God is the biggest monster of them all.

God is entropy, and she is
unimpressed by the pyramids
on your dollar bills; she will devour
the stars and the planets and newborn
babies swaddled in blankets,
and she yet hungers:
redwoods and sequoias and aloe vera,
microchips and inkjets and MacBooks.

we are crowded around the bonfire,
s'mores and cheap liquor, your hand on
my thigh; the heavens have
opened up, drenching us
in starlight: I have never felt more
beautiful. you raise my wrist to your
mouth, placing a gentle kiss on my
scaphoid and my lunate; you swipe
your tongue across supple flesh
before clamping down with your teeth;
I am seeing stars and feeling lovely
and I am so, so enamored with you and
so, so happy you are here.

I started dreaming in black and white.
you never seemed to
belong in this
technicolour drenched era,
an age of blood
carnations and sapphire Bomb Pops.
***** yellow cardboard boxes in
fluorescent refrigerated cases:
there are goosebumps on my arms and you
hated grocery shopping; I made the lists
and I made the buys; you made the
money, you made love.
we bought a Cezanne print for the
great room; it hangs above the frozen
hearth, grey sunlight filtered through
the cellulose blinds. there is a too tall
glass of scotch on the coffee table beside
a too empty scotch bottle and a too full
bottle of benzodiapenes: I haven't been
self-preservative, and you've been
self-prescribing.
we weren't cut out for this era,
an age of ***-coated lips and
onyx Benzes; we would've been better
in black and white, where our
color-saturated demons couldn't come, where our gem-studded cancers couldn't
eat us alive.

phloem in your veins;
your tongue curls around
the syllables of my name
erotically, and I'm
daydreaming about
your tongue curling around
my ******* while you talk circles about
calculus and chemistry.
woodgrain and
blood veins and
gun-splattered gore-brains,
the kitchen counter
saturated in sherbet and
awash in girl-***
while you writhe next to the
fruit bowl, in flagrante delicto.
we conquered the universe with a
steady stream of xenon ions, probing
deep into the velvety wet folds
of the galaxy, *******
to the laws of physics, *******
stretching you out.

it's not even noon, but
my thoughts are drenched with
***, bound and gagged.
you're dancing around the kitchen, clad
only in a pair of
lace ******* you paid
too much for at Victoria's
Secret liaisons by the
seaside, sand sieving through your hair:
all forms of metal-backed currency taste
like ***** on your fingertips stuffed
roughly in my mouth,
call me a ****
pretty please?
promethazine slathered over
watermelon sherbert and
soaked in Sprite; put a lid on it and
shake vigorously until well mixed.
Xanax exacerbated migraines mean
naptime for me, and I forgot to tell you
the Gatorade is spiked with *****
(or maybe tequila; I've well and truly
forgotten) and all of this
is just another means of
replacing you.
you're wrapped in an
ecru trench coat,
cinched at the waist over
concealed weaponry:
unlicensed pistol and wet coral *****
constrained by a black leather holster and
cobalt cotton.
you kissed me with
******* in your nostrils and
nosebleed on your lips;
you killed me with
contempt in your mouth and
venom on your nails.

poetry isn't just for white people, Vivian
isn't a girl's name, and I will
wear these white jeans past Labor Day.
we forget that we could
touch the stars if we *******
tried, but instead we are
here, drowning in atmosphere,
choking on our inhibitions.
there are ten pills tucked
in the very back of your desk;
you love them but
they're about to become a
crutch, and you are frightened.
I don't **** with that
new ****,
but it's not like you care.
I'm still the same *******
idiot, total trash, I
deleted your number
and I won't send you
snapchats,
I wonder if you
deleted my dickpics.
lost intimacy, windowsill
cacti, a Ziplock full of ******* stuffed
inside your pillowcase;
I went for a run, your
name traipsing about my
prefrontal cortex, smashing
memories, beheading roosters,
screaming incoherently about
subprime mortgages and
credit derivatives.
the government is lying about
9/11 but no one really cares;
the government is arming oppressive regimes in
Missouri but white people don't care;
would that I had such
willful ignorance, the right to
ignore the slaughter on our
front lawns.
my parents started from the
bottom, they survived in
America, decapitated birds on the doorstep.
I do not have their strength and I am
washing Xanax down with Gatorade and
refusing to apologize.

in time, you will come to learn that
you can remake God in your own image,
if only you are bold enough to do so.
this power is frightening. it suggests that
maybe divinity is
overrated,
that there are no answers.
in time, you will come to learn that
there usually are not, and that this is
okay, if discomfiting.
you will write treatises in your head about
everything: the meaning of an emoji,
what your outfit says about you,
what you'll do when you're rich and have
forgotten all about where we come from.
we forget our past because the present
is much sweeter fruit to partake of;
we forget our past is the only reason
there are sweeter fruits to partake of.
you'll learn to stop looking for love
because you don't think you deserve it, or
because you don't think it'll happen
to you; when you stop, you will be
happier, and love will flow freely from you,
and to you. you will drink too much
***** late Tuesday night; your
roommate will hold your hair back while you
*****; you'll awake on the floor with
chunks of food in the sink.
eventually, you will realize: this is love.

my *****-drenched Valkyrie,
you're a star, pirouetting around
Pluto, gamboling amongst galaxies, you are
terrible to behold, awe-inspiring in your
beauty and petrifying in the same.
a mouthful of liquor, and eyes
near-translucent; I can see your
soul, and I have never loved you
more. you are
silly when sober and
downright derelict when drunk,
a crumbling monument to
late nights and
later trysts; railed out
lines of Xanax
internalized through paper money:
this is the life.
this is what we wanted?
we aspired to more than we were, we
flew too close to the
moon, our wax wings
held up to solar scrutiny, but our
intentions
did not; we were
only kids, but that's
no excuse. just because you've
reached the
Age of Majority
doesn't make you any less of a child
of the universe,
scrabbling in the dust for a
semblance of meaning:
I am Sorry, you were Right, but
it doesn't matter now.
hold my hand.
please. I am
afraid to die
without you by my side.
with your fingers
clenched around mine,
I feel less alone.

merlot gnat bites
quivering from collar to
coccyx, a carapace of
swollen skin.
I rub myself
raw, aching for release;
is this
how it's meant
to be?
être, pas être,
it's all the same:
I am; you are
under my skin.

shuddering: throbbing head
mirroring throbbing sonics, floor
ashudder with stampede of
après-teen feet.
tonight you are
out of your depth,
not a fish out of water or a
drowning man, rather
an exercise-averse astronaut,
muscles atrophied upon return homeward;
you knew this was imminent, yet-
yet.
you weren't ready for
this, and there is sweat upon your skin and
tequila upon your tongue:
you have attained nirvana, and
a huge ******* to the Dalai Lama.
you are
self-immolating in your sorrow,
and no one can help you
because you won't let them.

reading ****** erotica at the
dinner table, dim lit,
dusk dreaming of you far too late
in the evening for thoughts
to remain chaste.
Drake's voice laps at my ears,
waves beating upon shore, pulsing:
it's your's.
my chapped lips pressed against
the base of your palm;
the gesture is
comforting, a reminder I
can absolve myself when
I am with you,
that I do not belong to myself:
it's your's.
I awake alone,
snared in sweat-soaked sheets; you are
long gone, not even bothering to
leave a note;
you know I'll be back.
after all,
it's your's.

laying in bed with ephemeral kate:
her hands are
brazen, fingernails clenching upon
my hips beneath the sheets,
her grip barely elucidated beneath
buttercream bedsheets.
her pale pink *******
cast aside hours ago,
and now the sun slants
westward upon her bedroom walls.
I laid waste to her skin,
ravaging her with lips and tongue and teeth,
and I am
sated, if only for the moment,
scent of her skin upon my tongue and
her ****** a badge of honor upon my mouth.
her bedsheets are ruins,
UNESCO World Heritage Site
waiting to be uncovered and reclaimed;
if it wasn't oh so lovely,
laying languorous limbs
asprawl, your stomach pulsing beneath
my thigh, her chest
rising and falling, rising and falling,
beneath my head; I always boasted I was
cutest when sleepy, and she always
murmured assent with a halfsmile;
that ******* halfsmile, playing
around the corners of her
endlessly kissable mouth,
lips glistening with a mix of
lipgloss and ***.
the sun dips down towards the horizon,
a girl hurrying homeward a minute after curfew;
her nails traverse upwards,
scouring my spine; my mouth is
pressed against her neck, tentative
words and laps embossed upon
the hollow of her throat.
she laughs, she sighs,
endlessly inimitable kate.

out goes the tide:
seafoam remains,
sticky white flecks caught on lips
of rock; how
sordid.
you traipsed on,
barefoot, undeterred by
pools of ocean-***
splashed upon every
cove afforded by
soaking wet sand.

the death
of self, exhaled, borne upon
wafts of
air, and
I, with my self-conscious
prose and pretensions
of intellectualism,
and I, dreaded I -
there is a beauty in
ideology; even wastrelism,
being the muck of the earth and
much reviled by Proper Gentlemen,
has its allure and adherents
those disciples of Dionysus,
bacchanalia becoming banal by
sheer repetition:
*****, *****, *****, shotgunned beers, and then-
TEQUIIIILA!!
crowed at the top of their lungs,
memory expunged by
hepatic-processed organic compounds.
of course, these mannerisms are simply
beneath you, disdainfully
catalogued by keen eyes:
no, your form of forgettance
is much more forceful, much less
fanciful and romanticized:
your amnesia is
absolute,
it required nothing less than
total dedication, mortification,
death of self as you
expatiated lusts, loves,
aught but ambitions remain,
and now, you have triumphed:
you stand solitary, skyscrapers
shining for your personal
pleasure, yet you can find,
none.

about to clamber
into bed when I looked out the window:
no moon hangs sky-side

the full moon was just this week,
wasn't it, and yet
I can't spot Selene
anywhere in the **** sky,
***** was supposed to be here
by 10:30 at the latest,
and now it's nigh on 11 and my
lunar lover is impossible to find.

cellular abuzz:
tragedy mixed with twitter
notifications.

the trees are rustling,
whispering welcome, aerodynamic
flutter shuddering leaves;
there is an insect
traversing my backpack,
up one strap, across,
down the
other; moss covered Buddha
staring serenely at me,
myself returning the favor and
silently scrutinizing him.
it is tranquility, dyed yellow and
dying leaves floating to cobblestone.
birds chirping: sonic reminiscence of
Migos songs played at too-high volume
in your car, riding shotgun,
screaming punchbuggy and
stealing kisses at stoplights.
my legs are folded like
a lotus, albeit less
colorful and more
awkward edges, bamboo
casting shadows beside
me. wait- was that thunder?
are those raindrops?
or perhaps a signal that
talking about you
and photodocumenting my life
aren't going to do any good.

women swilling white white in glasses;
remember when you took me
out to dinner with your parents?
your father peppered the
salmon to excess and the
sommelier to exhaustion:
what year? where were the
grapes grown? what would you pair
with this? what about with that?
your mother gave me a
knowing glance as he prattled on,
and you shook your head in bemusement.

I wonder what
looks she gave
you while I was distracted.

the forest beckons, eddies of
wind rustling leaves, whispering
"welcome, welcome."
(a kilometre away,
there's a lumber yard)
the branches are blown about by
the wind, a come-hither
I am loathe to resist,
and I am struck with memory:
you,
naked,
standing shyly at the foot of your bed
one hand upon your
thigh, the other
crooking a solitary
finger, allowing me approach
as you look at the floor, hair
burqaing your face.

I am watching trees
blur by train windows,
and I'm reminded of
the green of your eyes,
and the woodgrain veins just
barely visible on your arms.

"you may keep small electronic de-
vices on, but please make sure all
cellular capabilities are
switched off."
then they switch off the cabin lights,
and I am here in the dark, iPod assaulting
my eardrums as iPhone assaults
my retinas. this is
How It's Meant To Be

me and my ephemeral avarice, my
electronic yearning;
Bethany Cosentino is crooning, a
private concert for one, I wish
Allen Ginsberg was my boyfriend;
the other boy isn't like me, he's
prettier but that's nothing
new is it?

of course, Ginsberg is dead and also
forgotten, by and large; same for
D. H. Lawrence, Caravaggio, Joan d'Arc,
all those I drew upon for my Wilde
persona. there is only
me now, and I am
alone.

naked, sprawled across my bed,
flaccid ***** out of view, obscured by
flaccid technology, this impotent
old thing, 4 years old and
working perfectly fine for me;
lighting strikes.

there is magic, isn't there, in
the way she says your name
not unkindly when she is
with her friends and
without pre-alcohol inhibition;
lightning strikes.

I've been here for
hours, I fly out to
FRANKFURT in the morning,
routing through CHARLOTTE, NC,
cool, isn't it? how we conquered the world with
a pair of wings and some landing gear;
lightning strikes.

merlot gnat bite
quivering at my collarbone; can
hear kids screaming across the
intersection, me in my towel and
ankles still dripping with showerwater
upon plush carpet, crickets chirping
just out of view and fan humming
just overhead.

pity you aren't here with me.

you've been derisively labelled
"basic" before, but they had it
all wrong your acid tongue could
eat away at the
solid steel of the most
guarded hearts end
my solitude devour me
please oh god devour
me I'm so pathetic and
unworthy why are you still here
you should have left me
months ago and now months
have passed yet you remain,
unmoving, though not unchanging,
and I am unsure what to do.

the wind whips
at your back like a
slave master;
the water trots
at your feet like a
dog scorned;
the pavement shoves
at your being like a
puberty-struck bully.

this violence is what you
live for, the constant
back and forth, back and forth,
of man vs. nature vs. man vs. self
round and round and round
you go,
laps at the criterium, muscle memory
firing, lactic acid eliciting
yearnings of tranquility you
push yourself on
just one more, just one more,
never allowing yourself respite as though
you were fleeing
Death herself.

there are two types of girls,
or so I was told:
church girls and
bad girls, and my mother
said this with such finality it was
clear they were mutually exclusive.

of course,
you know this is
Not True;
you once characterized yourself as
"the type of 'church girl' to light a
blunt in the bathroom (just sayin)" and
that single quote says more about you than
all this fragile wording, this silica dust
heated and wrought into intricacies and
metaphor and conceit.
You
are far more than
a bad girl,
are far more than
a church girl,
will never be
my girl
and this is how it should be.
you are not
to be domesticated
a la Robin Thicke; you are
uncontrollable, your lust and
disdain for monogamy
twin hurricanes, destroying
New Orleans in a heartbeat and
rendering FEMA
impotent in the next.

there are two types of girls:
other girls, and
You.

you *******, with your
smirk and your bow tying fingers and your
****** classic fu-cking rock music:
who let you in here, to lumber
about the lambs like
Putin and Crimea ??
why do you bother
introducing sophomores to
Oedipus and pronouncing the
center O (like it
******* matters; linguistics are
more organic than
carbon-based chemistry) or
teaching seniors of
Two Vast & Trunkless Legs of Stone
standing alone in the desert,
artifice of arrogance just as
graduation and self-congratulatory
partying and revelry and diploma-framing.

I think I know:
masochism is your middle name, and
maybe, after all, it is worth it,
when a collegiate who barely remembers
your face and never remembered
the color of your eyes, or his homework,
name drops Hemingway and Faulkner
to a college professor, blossoming an
argument, and later, a companionship.

maybe, after all, it is worth it.

S-P-A-R-T-A-N-S
this chant has been
emblazoned on your prefrontal cortex for
years yet, and you'll bear it
upon your chest for years yet and
yet: you aren't certain
what it's all meant, whether it's been
Worth Your Time
and in this way, cheerleading has become
stand-in for
every boy who's let you down
month after month after month.

too bad you can't
unlearn their habits or
unfire the synapses they triggered;
too bad you can't
hop in a delorean to
unwind the time you spent with them.

but if you could:
would you?

paint on callused fingertips,
paint dyeing German beer,
paint flickering fluttering trembling
across bare canvas skin as you
finesse, ink and watercolor at your
whim while you work. you are no
Caravaggio, much more a Gentileschi,
but Michelangelo himself would be
awed by your radiance, the subtle
art of your face and
brushstrokes of your curves,
spine sinuous undulating while you
dance for him.

I've been begging for you
to tell me something new for
months upon months, to tell me
that you are not the same,
that you cannot stand me,
that "I love you" was the Great Lie;
but you will not no never
you're too good for something so
base as hate or someone so
base as me but
you're still here and I
love you
and hate myself for it.

you are a child
opening presents at 6:34 PST on a
Sunny Christmas morn in PASADENA, CA
while her parents look on in
feigned interest
razor scooter abandoned amid
crushed scrunched wrapping paper as you
tear apart a box of Legos
for the plasticky viscera contained therein.

you are a teen,
finding marijuana at 15:34 CST under a
bed in BOULDER, CO
while your parents shout at your brother
feigning sympathy
simply to ****** it back
and you are wrenching open ziplock
to swallow a chunk of his stash
and you find yourself
enamored with the aroma.

you are a woman,
fighting for equality at 10:26 EST wielding
picket sign (paint and sharpie on cardboard) and megaphone in
MANHATTAN, NY
while your parents
turn over in their graves,
uncertain what you are
fighting for.

oh
honey, with your
butter cup smile and your
butter pecan hair, you're
bound to make me fall
in love with you sometime.
too bad, because it's
evident that would be awful
on both sides. for me,
because you would not
reciprocate; for you,
because you could not
reciprocate; c'est
la vie, ma chérie, trop méchant
et n'est pas sympa
mais Dieu t'aide, tu
l'adore.