I'll undress myself, undress all my coats,
undress all my fears, strip to my sheer.
I'll show you but will you want to see ?
what will your thoughts be to my naked, unadorned alive,
will you look around or will you hold your gaze,
as layer by layer i unfold myself,
strip myself down to my bare, undrunk skin,
will you still call me poetry as i take you on a tour of my anatomy,
will you explore all my fissures or stay gauging at the first shortfall,
will you understand the traces of my wounds,
the wounds not from battlefields but from gentle smudges of
unfinished love,
each covered with bandage, not healing just concealing,
trying to stop the pain from bleeding, covering my corpse in aches,
and so i keep my gaurd up, no strolling on passion boulevards,
for torment and agony were never printed on invitation cards,
but when the time comes and you compel me to,
i'll let my inner demons out for you,
and as i strip down to my sheer,
i wonder, will you peer or look away,
will your thoughts run astray,
will you love the bone and flesh just as much as,
you loved the carapace.

You and me,
we stand together smiling,
in the perfect lighting,
fine dress, pleasant weather,
momentarily existing,
momentarily loving,
away from reality,
just us and a sunny day,
I guess we forgot  
we were just moulded clay,
and when the rain came
we got washed away,
now you're just a memory in a polaroid,
tucked in an old book I tend to avoid.

I'm a casket of memories, drunk on your shortfalls
lying in my bed incarcerated by your laughter
a reverie, pink elephants in echo of your sublime
my bare bane
this abyss of remembrance that I have become
will drown my alive leaving my corpse barren
in aches with a craving no longer tasteful
with arms no longer holding you
with a long lost heart, you exhumed a while ago,
       two little love birds
       sitting on a wall
       one wished forever    the other took a fall,
you took a fall.

I stand amongst a crowd of strangers
Each feeling their identity is in danger
Laughing loudly but only when you do too
So many things that I want to do
But only if you do them too
I try to recoup my eccentricity yet it stays unaided
Every gesture well calculated
Never questioned never debated
Lacking what once was mine and only mine
Today I stand jaded, lost to time
Comforting myself by calling it all a part of the design

I stand amongst a crowd of strangers
Each woman wanting to change her
Widening waist size engulfing my poise
And my mind losing control over those petty boys
I’m told to love myself and rejoice
OH!  What a marvel is this thing called me
Yet I think of me as a fruit of some poisonous tree
It’s like a flea stuck on me
Funny how my arch nemesis
Is me, and how my inhibition’s genesis
Was me, yet I couldn’t keep it off my premises


I stand amongst a crowd of strangers
I call them my friends and my neighbors
We stay together and laugh each day
But in between all the laughs our thoughts run astray
Going places and times I prefer not to say
We stay so entwined in our thoughts, so confined
that how unnatural it is to find
It’s not just me who loses her mind
And yet every day I meet, sit and greet
Hoping one day someone understands my need
My need for the same two hands, same two feet.