i warned you about this
i told you, i told you
that loving a poet leads to nothing but heartache and regret
and ringing ears and fingernail scars scoring your chest
and you told me you could handle it just fine.
i warned you about this
i told you, i told you then
that a day would come when i would project everything on you
and you would feel the brunt of my emotional monsoon
and you told me you could handle some crying.
i warned you about this
i told you, i told you
that i hate you and your stupid ******* determination to keep standing even when the wind threatens to break your legs because the oaks that stand proud fall broken
and i hate you and your words that mean ****-all and actions that mean even less
and above all i hate you and your stupid ******* decision to love me because i hate me worst of all
and you told me nothing.
you asked me once before
why i listen to my music loud,
why i let strange men scream in my ears
and interrupt my rhythm with their own.
you asked me why i listen to incomprehensible words,
where’s the aesthetic appeal in
choked screams -
you asked why i let strange men scream in my ears:
it’s better than letting you whisper.
better than letting you murmur sweet nothings -
if the screams are loud enough maybe i won’t hear you anymore.
no lover can’t you understand:
“i love you” isn’t the right answer to “i want to be alone.”
no lover can’t you understand:
your love doesn’t prove anything,
except maybe that you’re dumber than i thought,
dumb enough to waste all your life on a straw girl,
dumb enough to breathe till death do us part into a ***** hurricane.
dumb enough to follow the ghost-lights into the swamp
even after they scream at you to turn back turn back before it’s all over,
but you choke on the swamp gas and the will-o-the-wisps
just scream themselves hoarse.
resolutions make you a better person and anything’s better than murderer -
this year i resolve to die like a sociopath
alone in my room with alcoholic  fumes,
fireworks like
twentyone guns.
this year i resolve not to **** you for being gullible enough
to love me.
i resolve not to **** you  for trusting me.
i resolve to choke on my own swamp-heart,
poison gas and roots.
yes i’m alive but i harbor death -
saprotrophs are my children,
scavengers are my brothers,
and i am just the moth too much like a maggot to be a
butterfly -
oh, but i’m an aurelian
you whisper soft because the screams aren’t loud enough.
pin me to the wall with your thumbtack thoughts
and wonder why i don’t come around anymore,
why i just sit with my back against the door so you can’t break in with your
butterfly net
and your light traps:
oh you know me so well,
a will-o-the-wisp seeks its own,
and my ugly moth wings seek self-immolation.
just leave me, just leave me
don’t spear my wings and preserve me forever.
just leave me, just leave me
don’t follow me into the ***** swamp.
just leave me, just leave me
i don’t want your help i don’t want your love i just want you to leave and save yourself cause i won’t ask you to save me
and that life raft can only hold so many words.
verses are heavy things and you don’t need an anchor where you’re going.
i warned you about this.
evacuate before you’re swept away
and the strange men scream in my ears.

can’t be sure.
can’t be sure.
can’t be sure that it’s dead until its heart is in your hand
can’t be sure that you’ve won until the competition is all dead,
hearts in your hands,
can’t be sure so don’t turn your back on the bodies.
can’t be sure(surety: n; the state of being sure
surety: n; certainty
surety: n; ground of safety
surety: n; is when it’s all over
when the moment is crumpled at your feet
and the guts of the present are clenched in your hands
like the trophy you’ve ached for since the past.
surety: n; is when it’s all over
when you bleed wax from the candles in your chest
and the ball ends so abruptly
chandeliers clinking over fallen dancers.
surety is when it’s all over,
the jig is up and the game has been played
and all the characters are dead on the stage
but the fool who gives the final line.
surety you’re sure,
because your hands have grown now so large,
rolling knuckles and long fingers
enough to hold all the strings
and now you know what they meant when they told you watch out for the puppeteer
[[it’s you, it’s you,
you’re the puppeteer and the malevolent god,
you’re the one that they told you stories about at night,
the one that pulls naughty children to bits
and laughs at the good children because how long will that last,
how long before you’re stealing and murdering and ****** and]]
surety you’re sure,
starving with a distended gut
the guts of the present too insubstantial when what you want is
to eat blind justice whole
surety you sure are pretty,
prettiest hangman i ever did see
a noose and a knot, we can waltz all night long,
sing me the convict,
the convict’s song
surety it’s sure to be,
surety it’s sure -
the universe has ways of getting what it wants,
has ways of dragging everything it hates
down to its gut
to rot and die at the bottom of the universe.
to rot and die in a pile of stardust.
survival’s a game and you’re losing fast,
but ******* if you’re going down you’re going down swinging,
you’re going down with cracking skulls
and you’ll take the world down with you.
surety you’re sure to leave
the world in a pile of stardust.
surety you’re sure to be
the killer in the operahouse:
the best and the brightest shot through the throat before they can sing the last verse,
because the end is always the worst part,
the conclusion where all the worries are ended because they never tell you how
the villain hung himself from loneliness.
the hero died purposeless with no-one to oppose.
so don’t end until you end it right
don’t end until you tell the ******* TRUTH.
death is not grand and ****** and beautiful.
death is the pathetic puff of stardust
stirred up by your last breath
as you rot and die in the gut of the universe.
surety you’ll show them how
the universe meant to die

and blind justice weighs your heart.)

i died just to haunt you
to breathe my smoke in your ear
and see if you remember me.
to follow where you walk
and hope to stay with you
this time,
even if the sensation’s one-sided:
can you love what you can’t touch, can’t hear -
[i know you can’t hear me,
but sorry if i wound you
with obscenities and broken hopes,
speaking in a foreign tongue of bitterness
and desire,
of the fickle fates
and fickler hearts of men] -
change partners as the fiddler changes tunes
moving with someone new,
who speaks your language
and doesn’t smoke like a dying fire.
can they dance like i did?
skirts swirling up time like water in a stagnant pond,
your winds fueling ripples -
how i cherished those lungs.

now i’ll blow my smoke signals in your ears
so maybe they’ll reach you
this time.
you ran to the plains while i tended the fires,
chasing something better -
but wild horses are only beautiful from afar.
harness them and they’ll crush you with their
meekness:
reins and saddles when you sought sweat
and wild rolling eyes,
eyes that never shut,
too filled with life to mimic death
even if just
for a moment,
wide while yours shut to block out the moon:

sometimes when you close your eyes
all you see is the sun.
[burning like a maniac,
like a man who met the devil
while drowning.]
sometimes when i close my eyes
all i see is red
red like rusted-over watches, red like
bottom-of-the-barrel
and anger,
and red like the wretched slough of time,
shedding seconds like scales.

[sometimes when i close my eyes
i imagine yours closing
in synch,
like a connection between us,
no matter how fragile.]

sometimes when you close your eyes
you find it hard to open them again.

don’t remind me that you don’t want me,
just give me one
moment
to memorize your shape -
hope you don’t mind my recreating you
from the scraps i can capture
in the meager light drifting from the sky.
smoke will choke it out soon enough
and you will be alone
with your broken wild things
and snuffed-out embers,

waiting for the tune to change again.

i knew from a young age nothing could love me.
i knew when everything began,
when elemental dust condensed into planets,
when life fought itself into existence
in the waters of a cooling world,
when the first being exulted in being
and i exulted too
and crushed it for daring to live.
watched it decompose in my palm.
rotted roses by plucking them.
i knew from a young age
that nothing survived my touch,
that nothing lived in my hands -

nothing’s the only thing
i’ve ever held without killing.

so see, we’re meant to be,
you and i,
nothing boy –

let me hold you close cause i can’t rot you through,
you with your lack of self
and meaning,
you with your infinite void,
impenetrable ether.
see, we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,
let me swim in your vacancy and you,
you can be my new universe
and nothing will be my everything:
i’ll worship you like an absent father
and love you like an atheist’s god.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,

i would **** 2000 statues to bring you to me.
i would slaughter a family of worms
to be crushed in your black hole.

i crushed the stars between my thighs,
left the triturated mess
like a promise to the world.
i crushed the stars between my thighs,
but i’ll be so careful with you,
nothing boy.
so gentle you won’t even know i’m there,
like a ghost sighing over your mouth.
so careful you won’t notice me
making my nest in your empty chest,
breathing for you,
pulling air to pool in your lungs.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy:
i complete you
and you empty me.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,
nothing doesn’t rot -
my gangrene heart can’t touch yours,
pure as it is,
undefiled,
unadulterated,
a vacuum of a heart as empty as an unfilled grave.

they say
there’s a black hole at the center of every galaxy,
in the center of a ring of stars
light drawn to the dark.
they say there’s a black hole at the center
and if they’re right
you’re the last good thing about this galaxy.
stars swarm round you like flies, nothing boy,
you who are made of their
dead brothers,
who collapsed into themselves with the weight of existence,
who imploded with the heat of their desire for you,
who fed their light to your blackness,
nothing boy.
you are made of dead stars and of nothing at all.
you are
celestial corpses
and nihilism distilled.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy.
you’re corpses and i’m rot.
you’re nothing and i’m
the final destination
the last stop for sorry living creatures,
pitiful things that can’t quite
delete themselves,
can’t quite reach you
so i embrace them and soothe their sobs.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,
i can hold you for more than a few
pitiful sobbing seconds.
i can hold you forever if you let me.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy.

i killed the world but you remain.
i crushed the galaxy between my thighs,
and you, impassive,
pulled the triturated mess into your event horizon.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,

you have no breaths to steal
but i’ll give you all i’ve plundered.
i’ll give you every last breath, last word, last heartbeat,
and you can empty me like
a bottle of cheap wine.
see we’re meant to be –

nothing boy and gangrene girl,
a love story for fatalists
and nihilists alike.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,
starcorpse creature, nietzsche’s son.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy -
nothing never rots
nothing never dies
nothing won’t decompose
in my arms.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy.
let me hold you close-

you’re the one thing i can’t break.

just addicted to lovelessness,
i guess,
addicted to the feeling of something that could be
a distant cousin of loss,
but can’t be loss when it wasn’t there to begin with.
a cousin of loss and brother of bereavement,
a lexiconical gap
in the english maw,
a space where the definition slipped out
but the word never grew in.
a gap where a word should be,
a word meaning missing something you never had,
losing something that was never yours,
grieving for something that never looked your way
or graced you with its pain.
insomnia of the soul,
unable or unwilling to droop into the catatonic stupor
of love,
until my eyes ache with open,
and my heart aches with empty
and just beautiful aches and pains,
like stiff joints filled with sterling silver
or arthritic necklace clasps.
my tongue is tin because the argentine
is in my hands,
silver in the space between the carpals,
oozing precious metals
onto the page.
writing in second-best so that it’ll stay.
writing second-rate love letters
and pretending they’re real,
like the words i moan mean something other than
hello
i’m lonely
who are you?
like i’m not the girl who cried love
because the village had already learned
that wolves are lies,
and vice versa.
because faking it has always been my favorite pastime.
i’ll write love poems forever,
keep feeding my addiction for as long as it stays,
let my loveless track marks bloom cantankerous sores
on my ribs.
while i’m young
i’ll write poems of arthritis and weakness
and death,
because oh now i am immortal
invulnerable and omnipotent,
but when my bones are brittle and my flesh is loose
and my spine makes me bow to the earth,
my poems will be of life and strength
and god
because darkness is only beautiful when it isn’t
an imminent looming
future.
when i know i may die tomorrow,
i will write of bluejays
and of a love that never found me,
though it knocked on all the doors and called all the numbers,
waited on my porch while i hid in the closet,
nursing my ache
trying to fill a lexiconical gap
with bukowski
and insomnia.
supersaturated with emptiness
because all the words in the dictionary
can’t make up for the one that’s missing.
it changed the locks when it came,
shutting me out of my skull,
taking residence in my chest
and growing larger with each slow breath.
every huff of oxygen fed my
resident,
every injection of
late nights spent just writing,
every pill popped -
the lies that went down better
if i said them with a gulp of gin.
so my lovelessness cracked my ribs as it grew,
replaced my marrow with sterling silver
and i watched it happen like
a glacier devouring a desert
because i knew i would never survive loving something.
deserts were never made to run bounteous
with water.
just addicted to lovelessness,
i guess.
addicted to silver joints
and words that don’t exist.

her mouth was sandpaper.

her mouth was sandpaper
and she spoke like
a smooth surface,
words scraped into fluidity
like a wooden sphere,
turned over behind teeth ‘til all friction
is lost.
she spoke like the walls of a birdhouse
in the room of a dead carpenter:
pretty unassembled things.

her mouth was sandpaper
and every kiss chafed,
rubbing raw my lips
and tongue
crafting with each touch
drawing blood like
juice from an apple,
like sap
from wood already cut from the tree.

her mouth was sandpaper
and she told me
i bite my lips,
rip at
the inside of my mouth,
cannibalize myself cell
by cell.
bone saws in her mouth.
the only difference between teeth of jaws
and saws
is mercy
(and she swallowed her mercy long ago).

her mouth was sandpaper
and she spoke like a carpenter’s hands:
rough palms,
tough pads,
a utilitarian artist
a crafter of dead flesh.
a mortician for dryads
and kodama.
the art and the artist
in lips
tongue
and teeth.

her mouth was sandpaper
and i brought mine to hers
again and again,
her bitten-rough lips
opening like doors to
purgatory.
less entrapment than addiction -
returning once more to nails and hammers,
hell’s blacksmiths below
heaven’s painters above.
coming back home
to the space between,
to bone saws
and a carpenter’s hands.

her mouth was sandpaper
and her voice was carpentry,
her teeth bone saws
her words
birdhouse walls.
her mouth was purgatory
but her hands
were hands.

her mouth was sandpaper.
i held her hand
and chafed my lips raw.