She showed up limping and my hackles were raised.
I know that limp.
I know that gaze; 1000 yards away.
...(what happened?)...
She could hardly sit down, kept shifting her weight side to side, unable to find comfort, even on a padded bar stool.

"He's a good guy," she said.
"I don't know why...where it came from...I tried to do everything right."

"Trick-***-**-*****!! Lucky I don't **** you."

"At least I've still got my teeth," she offered.

I listen with an open heart to her,
say it's not her fault.
She knows, but why does this keep happening?
I wish I had an answer.

She flinched as I touched her shoulder.
I see now that this, too, was violence.  Physical invasion.
Blurred lines of cruelty and concern, warmth and wickedness.

"No one will believe me...cause he's a good guy..."

I hear you and I believe.

Bored of beauty.
**** and ***
blizzard white teeth
insertable parts switched out like lego blocks.
Inching away from this faulty form
with which I was imbued in genesis.

Long live that junk, ******!
Gimme those thighs!
Let free that emotional magma
boiling up from beneath, ready to burn this world
or at the least leave your laces singed.

The tip of this iceberg will bring you all down
so ready the life-rafts.
Gimme that.

Don’t give me blizzard teeth, silent in a quaffed muzzle.
Be the jaws, the howl, the tender tongue on young necks.
Great stories don’t read “one day I was beautiful”
they say “the world seized me and tore off my limbs, and I toppled end over end til I came to rest between the legs of the Colossus

and that’s when it got interesting.”

Depression is a cage.

In the brilliant turning of foliage, a ripe green to a fervid red, a weighty dread follows close as a shadow
and grows longer,
tenacious.
I'll be cajoled into six sides of jointed aluminum
shrinking on the daily
until my lungs are flat and stiff as a starched collar.
My chest is concaved, a ******* wound.
I am prisoner to my elements.
Stockholm syndrome
And I can only succumb
to the unsettling security in immobility.
This cage provides my structure,
and I grow accustomed to it
Giving in to its indifference

A dismal awakening in
six moons
and the hatch door springs open.
I'm anxious and cursing the piercing golden beams for
my muscles have atrophied
and a faint memory of bipedal motion comes rolling in.
The cage disappears
But I'm weak, immobile still and
resentful of this freedom
and the work it requires.
Slowly I wiggle my toes, I turn side to side
and listen for the cracks and pops of my fragile frame, harnessing a solar energy.
Feeling returns, filling the concavity in my chest.
Im flooded.
Free now
but timid
My skeleton is dusty from disuse
I stretch and cry out.
Tendons, ligaments regaining their power
Breath returns and
I turn towards the Sun and exhale fully, sending sparks flying.
In respiration, though, I note that static fear, warning me that my liberation comes with a debt.
I am eternal animate obligation.

Yes
I'm a dummy
So use
my body
To send your message
All my words are yours
Since you've inserted yourself in my
cavity
Dumb and speechless
without you
I come to life in your presence
And alone
I'm stiff in a pine wood
box.

In truth you live through me
And only through these felt lips can your truth come
Intently tinged by this cynic, sardonic, wise
***
This piercing needle through your wanton
hubris
I'd turn this wood to flesh
But what would you have left to
burn for warmth
To use
And use up.

When I open my mouth
Someone else sneezes
The door bell rings
The kettle starts to call
And the sirens scream down the way

When I draw in my breath
A bus screeches to halt
The jet overhead picks up speed
The coffee grinder goes
And a dog sounds a sharp alarm

When I put pen to paper those noises ebb but never completely abate.
So, ever after, I'll be making myself hoarse, trying to get a ******* word in.

I want to build your high horse a stable
let it rest a while
let it lay down with mine.

I want to mill that hot air
see it put to use
turning wheels
blowing glass
warming the soil after a frost.

We'll skip stones across still ponds which once were cast in judgement.

See all that manure bring forth lush vegetation
so that winged beasts may perch and call to the spring.

It is hard to walk with only one hip.
The other is attached to my lover
and it feels like I’ve put it on layaway.

Week after week making small deposits to get it back
and yet to find, years later, I have only begun to pay down the interest.

I haven't written in a while, but today i find my insides anxious and agitated, banging on powder blue walls.
Each dawn I rise and wonder how much lower we've sunk into the ooze.
Denying the humanity in each other, even when you sit close enough to count your freckles in my inky pupils.
I drink rye, lip to bottle, and slip it a little tongue, as though the warm brown ***** will blanket me in calm and rock my heart to sleep.  I long for the cavernous burn of a cigarette, exquisitely gross.
The heat is getting to me now and I sit upright, my back speckled with rug detritus from an exasperated, sticky summer sweat.
I yearn for moments decades old, barely a feeling, just an itch in the back of my skull.
...Maybe if I dive into your life I can make more sense of mine, and view our reflection from underneath the waves.
Go grab my noseplugs.

Something howls through a dense, dark fog.
My body lurches toward the sound, and I am mindful of the tickling reverberation in the bones around my collar.
Would most in my shoes plan their escape?
Find cover?
Grasp to find a branch or iron, something to fend off an unseen attacker?
Perhaps.
But I lean in.
And despite a wave of neaseau echoing through my viscera, I mouth a wordless prayer that the beast find me.
Put his face against my soft flesh
and press hard with a snout, or maw, until I feel that canine dripping in excitatory salivation.
My own saliva to meet his
as I smile in relief, and am torn open for once and last.

Danger

It’s a trap

Don’t go in there

Beware the dog

Who both barks and bites

Brilliant steel overhead

False bottoms

Coils spring to life

It’s a trap

Fall in

My heart stings like it's been enveloped by wasps.
Or maybe I swallowed a ball bearing
and a magnet now summons it through the flesh on my chest.

My breath is a tidepool.
Fills up, froths over, but never quite empties.
My company are displaced, rooming in ill-fitting homes.

It's like I mourn for you
even as I hold you tight, and inhale the memory of my dreams.

Tapping into creativity
Is like tapping a Maple tree.
I'm not skilled at either
But I'll cheer when something trickles out.

I am a monster of my own creation, yet
Unnamed.
I'm the doctor and the beast he wrought.
My face is wan, and eyes sunken; Strong and capable, but fated
for destruction.
Come, wave your flaming rods and I'll run for the hills.
Find me a cave where I can sit in a viscous
black tar silence.
Ears to knees pulsing from
what adorns me
These fears
like trinkets, leaden filigree spell them out.

But fear is an anxious heat and a flirt.
I'm drawn into a seductive
reunion with the chilled ground.
If you're lonely you may visit and behold this undoing.
"More weight!"
I'll scream,
until my bones are white ash and my organs are muddy
puddles
and I can, at last, declare I've accomplished something.

If you're going to live with your head in the sand
I beg of you, inhale.
Otherwise
Take an ear
Turn it upward
And listen
Til your lungs scream and threaten you
Keep listening
Til your legs shake and muscles burn
Listen further
Until you start to loathe the sand
And you see the unpredictable open air as the luscious power it is.

We hear about ****** assualt more these days,
and yes that has happened; Me, too.
But we don't talk as much about the near misses.
The time when I said no
and he tried a few times and gave up
Or the times I said no
and he put himself inside me for just a moment before rolling off
Or the times I said no
and he put himself inside me
for a few minutes
Until I grew louder and pushed him off.
The time
with my boyfriend
when I consented
But half way through his mood changed
and it did not feel loving
Or respectful.
It felt vindictive
And cold
and he must have felt my body
Tense
But he continued anyway.
Or the times
Too many to count
with my husband
That I participated
because I knew resisting would
Lead to an argument
Or anger
and sometimes
Aggression.
Was that ****, too?
I don't tally it under the same column.
But it wasn't fun.
And I think about it often.
And my body feels fluish.
Like the sense you get that a cold is coming on.
But it never fully surfaces
So I can never fully recover.

Small panther in my house
His heart is as full as his dish.

They say I'm in for a year long trip. But maybe less.
a year, or less, of sea sickness, the kind of which no Dramamine will soothe.
I'm surrounded by water I can't keep down
and kept afloat by dark women in white coats.
This clipboard is my life-vest.

Better say good bye now because,
when I finally wash ashore, it won't be to the home I left.

My bed will look very different.
My lover, too.  It will be much longer than a year for her.  
She'll live a lifetime, again and again, with every moon and every sun,
Her body revealing the truths her spirit can't yet face.

Until then she'll stand by water's edge and throw corked bottles of brilliant green past the froth, invoking Poseidon's dominion,
inaudible over the ocean's orchestral din.

I am no more solid than a dense fog in a glass jar.
My borders and boundaries are defined by my container.
I occupy this space, bereft of internal orientation or direction, floating amorphously.
Without containment, I would all but disappear.
To free me is to destroy me; there can be no trial.

Those magnetic moments
leave me clammy with
guilt and yet
beading with the shame
of shamelessness.

Can we kiss out the heat between us?
as though passion
were a black plastic lighter
and each kiss burns
a "click" of butane, in hot
succession until just firefly sparks
remain.

No
this heat is doused with salt
water, inciting a satin catharthis.  
Unrelenting
these fat tears turn the flames
to smoke.
I am strangled, gasping for a hint
of sweet relief and
begging for the air I waved off, thinking it had
grown stale.

Some days I wake up with my neck slick
beads of sweat soak the pillowcase,
my hair as though I've been bobbing for apples.

Perhaps I should be.

I'm starving, I think,
for the kind of knowledge which is dubbed
forbidden or shrouded,
hidden.
Written in redwoods,
eyes like nebulae
and sandstone futures.

If I could read the Andes like braille, what revelations would
erupt?

I'm yearning to greet the haunts and beetles once my clock
runs out.
But I lie
awake
and am greeted by
no one.  
I'm frozen, now,
with molasses
feet
like running from the Golem in a January dream.
My fingertips leave damp, checked cotton, reaching out with an earnest desperation, and
I'm left sticky, swatting at vapors.

When my head was through the trees, soaring past the outer limits of our atmosphere and touching the winking star tips, those barely perceptible by the unarmed eye,
I peered into the redness and gnashing of the arbors.
They stared back. They gnashed and smirked, growing more eerie, more perilous.
I sunk deep in my canvas seat, and feared the dark overwhelm inherent within.
My breath grew shallow and pinpricks laddered up my neck.
The calm returned, with aid, in stories of t-shirts, family, middle fingers to power.
And I pondered if peace would follow once the me I was in that, or any, moment, made nice with the toothy demons.
"The darkness in me acknowledges the darkness in you."
We nod in effortless concession and pass all moments by, unhindered.

I'm not a poet.
I'm just ******* a lot.

I can't tell if I love you or
my ego does.

Life is an ill fitting garment
And I with no needle and thread.