Van Gogh painted the
Famous Starry Night
Through eyes blurred by tears
Because he and God
Both got it just right

Under shooting stars
I blinked away my tears
Because I and God
Cast away my fears

In the light of night
The moon will take your hand
Because you and God
Are co-authors of your plan

you knew
what you were
doing
with all that
slinking around
in
lingerie and
leather
it didn’t matter
to you
that I was
only
ten

you kissed
my childlike eyes
with an
open mouth
until I adjusted
to the
light in the
cave
of your
tongue and
teeth and
lips
you hot, ****
handgun

in high-heels
you were
dancing
on a primetime
table
hammer-cocked
back
turned sideways
for show

commercial
breaks were
the 75 cent
bathroom
vending-machine
condoms
that couldn’t
stop
anything

are you as
proud of
my glorious
fist-fights
as you are of
how
good you
look
with the right
lighting?

my gaze is
handcuffed
to the bedpost
of death
and light-
hearted
****** mysteries

because it’s
just
make
believe
so what, if
it is pretty
violent
after all?
it is
pretty
it is
violent

sure, I’ll
grow
out of it
or get
over it
if I don’t
grow
into it
or get
under it

like I got
under your
sheets
“all the better
to snipe you
with, my dear”

and
I haven’t felt
any of it

You aren't going to **** yourself tonight because, in one of the

spun sugar fragile sequences of the events in your life, it works

out. There is a place, somewhere amidst star stuff and cosmic

collisions, where you are not the problem daughter or the

biggest disappointment or the most regretted kiss. There is a

place where you sink into a desk in your eight a.m. class and

a boy with bags under his eyes and a hole-y sweater pulled

over his knuckles says, "hi." There is a place where your father

comes back from the war with sand grit in his eyes, blood

under his fingernails and lets you save him.  There is a place

where you live in India, where you aren't afraid to love, where

everything hurts less, where you stopped punishing yourself for

the faults of your parents. You are a girl. Not a dart board or a guilty

verdict or the final, desperate ****** of a sword through

someone's chest. You are made of the same stuff as Marie

Antoinette and Catherine the Great and Elizabeth, and you

can command the winds too. You aren't going to **** yourself

tonight because no one ever asked you about the scars on your

thighs but that doesn't make them nonexistent or unimportant.

You aren't going to **** yourself tonight because you've grown:

stronger in some ways and weaker in others, but you are still

a result of rhapsodies in violet and trees bowed to the sea

and soldiers with wind burn on their cheeks. Tonight, you are

going to wrap your own arms around your own chest and

breathe, swaying silently to no music. You are going to

memorize the sound of silence, and you are going to listen hard

for the even, jagged, pitter patter of your heart. You are going

to thank your body for waging war against itself, you are going

to apologize to your head for bruising your heart. You are going

to feel the roughness of the floor and the vastness of the entire

world and all of the eventualities spread before you. You are

going to remember that this is only one, that atoms and

molecules are flighty, whimsical, prone to selfishness and

longing for the promise of stability. You are going to press your

lips to your own wrists and know, as surely as Anne Boleyn

knew when she walked to the guillotine, that no one can save

you but yourself. You aren't going to **** yourself tonight

because you are not an accident of the multiverse. You are

purposeful and beautiful and young and reckless with your

feelings, but you are not a mistake. Listen to the trembling

of your heartbeat and breathe. You aren't going to **** yourself

tonight.

He loved her and she loved him
His kisses ****** out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she ******
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and Sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered  into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy place
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His word were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assasin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows  pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined  sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

I spent lots of minutes and a deep cup of coffee
with your sister, warding off the rain
and realizing that it was easier to acknowledge
that you've become someone I never met,
who wouldn't call me babesio and give me an Anthurium for Valentines Day
because they were sold out of Cactus's,
I decided it was easier to call you a loser
and laugh at how everything isn't working out;
Life's not what it should have been
for you or us
and nodding along when your sister says
'you're better than him, he'll figure it out'
because it was much easier than acknowledging
that I still only want to wrap you up in a hug
spend all day doing nothing together
and talk about all the grand things we might do someday

I'm okay
Really, I'm fine
But you're not
And that hurts me more than you will ever know