I write what I want because
****
what I write doesn't have to be
right

greasy fingers, (that mornings flat bread) mismatched socks (that morning's rush) and a habit of
sleeping in class
actually a habit of drooling over textbooks
and then finding them again as little dried up lakes.
my education was the ****** Dead Sea

we were constantly looking for a chance to misbehave
to valiantly deny any order received like
small picket fences, stubborn and straight,
and I never knew when to shut up.
it got us to suspension from English,
and dangling our bare and smelly feet over
the brick wall that separated us and
everything else
(except not the dust.
the dust is always everywhere.)

I remember smelling like
my sweat and his *** and my insides
and feeling like I held the best secret in my *****
and every time we glowed like two small mandarines
orange and bright in the afternoon sun
after we ran back from the abandoned bathrooms on
the tallest floor
(studying of course)

I love the way he looks left and right
out of the dark corners of his light eyes
his eyes follows his heart
(always, the tendons of the eyes do not have the ability
to differentiate lies from reality for these men)

his hand on the small of my back
his hand tracing patterns on my
navy leggings
as I push away his hand under the stern nose of the
bulbous and vulture-like librarian

(I stole almost 25 books last semester)

I remember when I tiptoed in very fast on that last day of May
with a laundry bag
full of literature that I didn't even read most of
she just smiled and said what a good girl;
and I walked back outside in the sweltering heat
and walked on those
burning bricks
back home.

there were tiny lights visible,
an insomniac city with deep secrets that
we shoved within its busy guts:
that night
on top of concrete,
on top of you
shivering as the concerned wind
raced against our skins, in a hurry to push us back inside
telling us to forget,
but our bones resisted,
the moon and her stars were in cahoots with our desire
mumbling distractedly at the wind to settle;
everything held its breath as all creation watched
as we melted slippery and dripping into one another

something in the middle of the night,
a psychotic urge to talk to you
on the roof
alone
hundreds of feet over a city that we fought with sticks
in the ***** streets and
pushed against wild, raging crowds
sweaty, sticky with marigold petals
stark against the sea of navy blue
like a second skin.

our hearts tangled in one another ribs
a perfect mirror to the Indian electric cables
in the middle of a dusty Delhi alley
webbing and weaving and terribly tangled,
an interwoven mess
but the only thing that works.

there was something hungry inside of me
and it leaped every time I laid my eyes on you
with a twitch of a memory of your
grabbing hands and
the smooth part above your eyebrows
I was craving like a gaping fireplace after
a long summer
ready to blaze and burn and devour you

I stare at your picture
its embalmed in my mind, a soothing
cream for all the burns that I have inflicted upon myself
realizing my fire is not something to take so lightly

"you're a little bit of a chameleon
you never quite dress the same
you always look a little bit different"

that's because I shift my skin every hour or so
I live on the constant brink of what I could be
French music at 5 a.m.
and tom waits at midnight
Rodriguez in the shower
and silence in the dead
quiet of an October snow fall

I gave up smoking and took up
chocolate pancakes at 2 p.m.
I live naked in my room made of
red fire and velvet

someday if I squeeze into
that domestic skin with a floral dress
and bulging *******
with instant coffee breath
you have to promise to build me a sun roof
the kind that I can watch the mountains turn purple as
the morning shreds itself onto the hills
and

if I squeeze into the skin
that I have already known
one with pressurized headaches
and a complex for falling for
strange men on the roadside
and an obsession for the occult
and cinnamon flavored, spine tingling
gum
a hint of violence
promise that you'll leave right away

if I want to push myself in that shrunken skin
of a small brown
tornado
tell me you won't try to run after as the
debris collects

every day I decide which skin to wrap around my spine
trying in the meantime
to scrub anonymous fingerprints off the majority of them

my hands have been cold for a while,
no fire making me sweat
no heat making me writhe
and I stopped writing,
I stopped that engraving of my pen
for a man.
his purity swallowed what I felt
was all of me
and there I was
scraping at my insides trying to make something,
shape something out of my nostalgia
for the burning in my throat and my cold sunrise toes
where the ****
WAS I
where is that force behind me
that I felt destroyed all other things
where is that tenacity to be completely rough and raw
dripping
dripping
drip
I was swallowed by that man
and my love for his ****** soul
so I put careful gloves
on my ***** fingers
and he never knew

the soil in my nails

as I slowly extracted his heart
in a maneuver to revive my
passion

maybe it's because you're older,
older men draw me in like some sort of musk
a scent, a magnet that i follow
craving more every step i take closer.

it's your eyes that really tell me
-green and lazy, almost dreamy without the fantasy-
they follow and i watch,
and sometimes i imagine they're directed my way
but it's like trying to make out truck headlights from
miles off
i can't tell if their coming or going.

you have lips that i imagine are soft
gentle enough to balance
a tobacco rollie on their shoulders perfectly
yet strong enough to form around words,
singing into a night already full with
your strums.

i ache to be strings
to have your fingers spread over me,
plucking my edges and
making a lullaby out of my limbs--

you speak foreign things
arabic and soft,
and i want you to explain what you mean
into my mouth with your hands
gentle around my waist.

b.h.
parched lips tinged with
sunset,
you knew i was escaping before
you even held
me
and said goodnight;
look me in the face next time.

a.d.
maybe if you were
the sun, i'd be the moon
floating on a little boat,
miles beneath you, melting through
the wooden splinters and rusted nails
bathing in whiskey seeping from leaks
and late night tiptoed desires.

r.m.
you barely moved, still but shaking in
ecstasy like a fallen leaf
balancing on a current.
i wanted your hands all over me;
i'm not sorry i made you angry and livid
like a rabid dog,
but i regret crying over you because
you were
never worth it.

b.b.
*** and **** stain
the memories like an old carpet
they're so far back in my head,
we were such different people
that i wonder if it really counts.
it doesn't,
but i'm glad you we're there.

c.m.
i only recently noticed
we have the same initials,
and that probably explains
the way i kissed you.
your touch started after my birthday,
your hands sculpted my bones as my cells
we're replaced,
like they will be every other 7 years.
it feels so far away and vacant
and i guess you always really were the
Nowhere Man.

m.g.
your lip bites were like the ravenous cold,
on top of spanning roofs
when the moon was heavy and ripe amidst
the cotton field clouds
my long skirt draped like curtains over
our secrets.

a.f.
*** in a leafless forest
trunks naked and bare,
dwindling at the tops, skinny and clueless.
you whispered the lyrics into my
cascading hair
and i sang along.
chocolate skin
against golden,
i could smell the burnt wood
embedded in your pores.

j.r.
you should have expected me to lead you on,
get bored and flee before you ask anything else from me,
even though i've taken all of you.

a tip: never again trust girls with equally brown hair and eyes
because they use both
to strangle and drown you

you have a kind heart,
and i hope you got the mud stains out of your clothing.

j.w.
nicotine bitten tongues
wet and slippery
your fingers dug deep
and you held my hair as i spilled
my lust all over you.
i fell asleep to your soft, drunk snores
and woke up to a fresh cup of piping hostility,
i wish i spilled it on your leg.

n.o.
you have nice eyebrows,
but maybe i should have read your initials.
i'd never let you touch me again;
too frantic, and you we're panicked because you
didn't know how to touch
a woman.
i could feel it on your breath,
like you we're afraid i'd dissolve right there
on the bed.
i'm sorry you wasted two mixtapes and a
broken cigarette
on a girl who doesn't want to be anybodies.

d.
you tasted faintly of bread
and ***** chaser.
i still don't know
what you look like
exactly,
i only know you we're twenty four
and liked when i spoke Spanish
because i have a very skilled tongue.

s.a.
a bathroom floor
tiles dimly illuminated,
skin soft, whispering
it probably would cave in
and leave us falling
under all our temper and temperature;
we'd crumble like a house of cards
in the plumbing and winding pipes
below.