i'd love nothing more than to unhinge my jaws so i can
capsule your heart mid-beat between braces born of
steel and ownership. i don't write love songs, i can only
shriek about how confused i am that you are for keeping

they always scream at me for playing with the kids in
the sandbox next to mine. "you break it, you buy it!"
i'd take a poem as a pestle and an aquarian jar as mortar
variety is the spice of life and i want your veins in my soup

i never really understood why you smiled at me that way
from the frosty shoulder to the halved heart, i assumed you were
sick in a way i could understand

wasn’t aware of what i was looking for when i showed you
my papers, my precious bitten bitterness. you said it sounded nice but
really i’m hardly a “genius with language”

don’t know why i dreamt of abandoned movie theaters.
we’d tear the chairs and make forts, protecting ourselves from a vast
emptiness but really i just felt trapped over again

a valentine’s machine. you wrote to me, “you looked just lovely”
was it hard to understand that for once i just wanted to be ugly?

often you become bored with gorging yourself
with chocolate fingertips, preferring much her hand in marriage
but you never ask whether it be a digit gilded or cut
or whether the risk is for taking (i say **** up or shut up)

you don’t know the bruises of an ex boyfriend,
nor the shorthand breakup message she got out of the shower to:
picked up the phone and feel the blood rising only to have it all rush
to her stomach and push her lunch up

“she” is not me, you can’t treat her like
a paper bag practice round this time. treat the girl like fine ribbon
that tears at the slightest snare and melts at the longest stare
be not aluminum. be concrete, deliberate and always

“rid me of the pain of being a beast, please”
the leaves don’t rustle even vaguely in my direction
since i fried them with a magnifying glass.
i wanted some sort of revenge to remind the soil
how it had given me the wrong body
with no claws and teeth plateaued oddly,
and no liquid through my oddly nonscaled hair

i didn’t mean to take out a missing piece on my own birth planet
but i can’t help but feel a bit wronged in this situation—please
drive me home now i would like to leave, the music’s too loud and
i drink drink drink myself to home and back but i’m always dry, i am

i have vivid visions always of birds with wings of glue.
whatever’s parasitic on me sticks to you:
you parrot back to me constantly, worms in your craw
with rhetoric unsightly and garishly raw

repeat the tele-v like a good birdie
does polly want a *******? have a drink on me
i pick your sort like dandelions puffed
ridiculously. i never really knew what death means
but i have an inkling
of a feeling

i don’t want to make art tonight.
i want to spray my walls thick
with blue, splattered skyguts
and beat my tears raw against my bedpost
(notch free because i count
with my fingers + toes)

love always happens by accident and i
never forgave anyone for stepping on my
red suede shoes just like my vinyl
told me to. the television is my real mom
the radio my nanny because i listened to
fake art all my life and now i dont know
how to not make it

i woke up gorging myself with whiskey and cheerios
i’m sleep-punishing again. mother will probably
threaten to call the doctor and forget.
dinner is on time as usual