i wanna write

write write write

right until its dripping for more,
until the paper is aching and begging and my burgundy guts
are folded and mangled across that pristine page

i want to be raw and obvious
the world a witness to my pungent feeling,
every wide eye dripping like my letters
are chopped onions
stinging

i want to make the world drone
with the mumblings of my soul

i am bleeding recklessly onto these pages
unable to stop:
punctured and petrified
with this passion, as the ocean recedes
in fear that it will simply steam away.

and then i walk,
naked, wet and bear ***** under
flickering fluorescent streetlamps that have seen
more ***** deeds than my own hands
i am merely a skeleton rattling down moaning alleyways
breath white and stark like skin freshly slapped
against the midnight of my mind.

i will write till i am disrobed, till it has rocked me raw
until the needle just plays static, until i am all shriveled like
dried mango and a lone sun baked chili pepper,
until it has eaten every piece of me, until the giantess of
my words
finds herself picking my own remains out of her teeth,
until i am consumed by this burning
                                                           this desire
                                                                          this raging
                                                                                        WILD FIRE

the isle of cut-throat
key janglers, the ones with 20s crumpled in their *******
and stale smoke as the aftertaste

i will wrangle your body
for an oil pastel set
so **** me drier than the Moab
and smear the colors around like a soft serve

chocolate and peaches

i watch rugged pirates like the deep colors
of winter
black and tarnished
they sail off with
barrels of slick dreams and human liquid fantasies
getting tipsy off my honey sweet whiskey

whisk me away

the horizon leaks, the color crawls like
gold drool
dripping of a godly
dog

run a finger down my throat, i dare you
it would be searing like mid-august pavement in california
when you try to walk with naked feet and
my guts feel like a frying pan
each of my insides are steaming

if i moaned, i'd fog all of the windows one by one
thats why when i feel passionate
when i touch myself in this tiny apartment
with legs as long as lady bugs, and a patience that wears as thin
as nylons in spring--
i shut my mouth.

bumps and bruises run across my vision
red scales like slick snakes and
a rumbling like pebbles after rain that when
you crunch on them, it sounds like a series of
small bones,
cracking
there is a certain sourness to my teeth:
dinner was pickles from the jar
johanna gave them to me after i dumped my
cigarettes into a flower vase.

"its an art project"
really its a self care project so my lungs don't have to
pop out burnt from the toaster.

DING!

i am carrying two stomachs
two hearts
and two minds to control it all
perhaps my mother was right.
perhaps theres a **** good gemini
ripping all my organs into pairs.

i feel a raging world within
the confines of my burnt skin,
split into two:
one suppressed and raw
one orderly and profited

i make bank, i solicit myself on my own
put togetherness

and sometimes, i want to delve deeply
and watch as everything collapses around
the sturdy bones that hold it all up
and the facade slowly melts around
the fact that i am something else,
writhing and squirming to be seen
just under the skin

"you are a character"
that's what he said to me before we fell in love

as I put old beach glass from Anamarie Island against his eyelashes
two infant pieces in front of each eye
and you've got glasses that can see into the past.
a yellow, buttery vision,
soft
blurred
simple
just like I always dreamed the world to be.

on a plane to thailand,
he told me
"thats why I'd like to travel someday--
because of you"
we were pretzels, trying to find a position to sleep
intertwined and drooling,
stared at.

and after brushing sand off of our relatively dry bodies
licking our salty lips with hungry tongues
he told me
"everything about you is special"
and we spent Christmas in the sea
watching as the sun got swallowed by the
relentless tide, feeling the current
push and push us closer
but our heads resist

I remember swearing to myself not to sink into his
arms and feel alright there
but every brush of his hand against
my leg, under the surface of the sea
dissolved my barricades
like a popsicle in July.

and now
I am afraid of the comfort
feeling like
it is pulling the character.

you want real ****** poetry
well cut me open

but all thats dripping out is coagulated procrastination
and I wonder

does the man living in the building across
see me naken from time to time?
what is his fascination with glass jars
I hear drunkards and bottles smash
from the windows downstairs
I wonder if he breathes smoke
and I wonder what he coughs up at night

my days last until 3 a.m.
my eyelashes carry designer hand bags
catching all that skin that
spills over

I listen to Claire de lune and feel like
scraping the itches off my scalp,
tiny thoughts trying to escape.

they'll never get far

some kind of nostalgia
in place of marrow
and every time I crack my bones
im shot up with
all kinds of memories

running in my rushing
canals of burgundy blood,
I see everything thats held
within the hands of this passing year
as clear and sharp as jangling
kaleidoscope shapes

I take a deep,
deep
breath.

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.

i feel

naked

but vulnerably so;

i don't want to let you in,
show you the deepest crevices of my soul
not for fear of embarrassment,

i'm just not going to let you break me in half
like that.

"leave before getting left,"

a motto for girls like me.
                                                             you don't know the frustration
                                                           when things don't go as planned.
stop saying
                  g
                    o
                      o
                        d
                          night.

please take me into the
forest, deep
with tall redwoods and let me feel the rocks like
swords under my callous feet.
where we can watch the sunset from
up above the tilting world, sitting on our thrones
made of Marlboro filters and sticks
on a mountain cliff.
we'd be cliffhangers
and thieves and vagabonds, painting ourselves
with the blue tinted night
like the deepest parts of
the
sea
far from the wandering grasp of
reality.
watch the stars with eyes like
flickering lightbulbs,
shining yellow in empty, echoing rooms.
bring along four bottles
of wine,
one for each of us.

we'll drink until theres wine slipping past our cheeks
like some kind of blood-orange sob,
leaking out our hollowed belly-buttons
rivers running swift through the lines of our
palms.
wounded from every pore with the blood of
our intoxication;
magenta tongue stained skin.

would you let me take your hand and lead you
through the empty, knocking dark
and sing to you in the soft moments of
before morning?
would you trust me enough to
close your eyes
and let me lead you in a bruised,
tumbling
drunken journey to the top of the
highest mountain?
we could lay in the summer blanketed wind
made of dancing sky and
burning earth.
close our eyes and stop the earthquake in
our minds,
wake up with the sunshine seeping through
every corner of our aching
bodies,
roses growing out of our jigsaw jaws and puzzle piece
crumbling ribs and lungs;
see through our sober fingers and
wandering eyes
a different world than it was at
midnight.

"how strange it is to be anything
at all"

sometimes i look
at my skin
and wonder why we have
branches growing out of lined palms,
and wonder why
our eyeballs look like galaxies
compacted

and i realize that there is no answer
but to stop thinking about it
and just
live
for ***** sake.

in the shower,
i pretend that the burning hot
water
raining down on my body
are your soft and callous fingers
warm and wet
july heat;
seep through
my skin.

i arch my back, push my ******* toward the
low hanging ceiling
and i pretend that the water
hitting my throat
are your lips
kissing my neck
carefully.
i pretend that the steam is your breath
escaping,
but then i open my eyes and i am
alone
and it is cold winter not the summer *****
of July.

"let me use the shower!"
someone yells.
i pull the water to a stop, and it trickles
as the feel of your kisses dwindle
in January
chill.

do you ever start chinking away
breaking, cracking the stone, hard mineral, steel cold
barrier of your heart
so it'd be impossible for someone else
to do it for you?

white wine pungent, soft
clinking glass against an empty chasm
sunlight
hard wood draped in sleeping veneer.

cascading drapes against
violet
         dark
                 stagnant bruised skin left alone and slowly freezing over.
smoke leaking through whispering
dry lips chapped with desert words
lack of moisture creating canyons
hidden inside desperate mouths.

it's breaking like a frozen over
ashy, navy, drowning lake.
my own fault,
i always start breaking my own heart.
my own form of life insurance.

it's fogged over like a magnifying glass,
cracking across the two foot surface because
the strangled fish can't breathe under all
the permafrost and ice.

i'm waiting impatiently for summer;
i hate this cold.

the funny thing is,
you think i'm still interested.

i don't fall in love with people who leave me
alone,
frigid, frozen
covered in a 9 o'clock night rain
with a piping cup of peppermint tea in my shaking fingers and
nowhere to walk except home.

you only ever touched me once
and that was centuries ago
when my lungs were new and fresh,
and i didn't come home smelling like ashtrays and stolen lilac
perfume.

i'm not a little girl anymore,
and i dont cry when red lights shine down
and people scream into microphones
with sweat sliding of the sides of their faces
cheeks shiny like stainless steel coffee pots.

i'm not attracted to you,
just like i'm not interested in your friend
that i ******
who tasted like american spirits and greed
because it's not worth looking at boys
who will never, ever satisfy you
or understand even the tips
of your fingernails
and golden brown split ends.

jerry's voice weaves a net
to catch my drunken skin,
sagging and dancing against
his cherry pie voice
warm and sweet in the dark of
the 7:17 dawn,
sun still sleeping behind a tall mountain range.

it makes me ache for open hearted
companions
barefeet wet from dew and black from distance
fearless,
unapologetic as they scream their throats out
raw splattering on the gasping earth from
the heaven high rooftops.

flowers poked through the pores
of ocean flavored skin,
peeling from laying too long
in the morning-faced
sun.

i wonder why people feel
so ancient, when their skin is still so young.
we've built this generation in the
imprisonment of fear,
the shrill avoidance of beauty,
we've forgotten what it feels to be living
free and loving
true,
and that's why you see so many young bones
crumble when their lives have just
begun.

you know? i'll stop being so empty sometimes. i'll fill myself with words, so they will be dripping down the carefully creased seams of my lips and dents in my cheeks. i am tired of margins and paragraphs to box in what i have to say. i'm ready to let things out like a destroyed dam barricading a swift, roaring feline river; distorted reflections of the day racing past.  i am a goddess with dripping hair and naked skin, you can't stop me from feeling. i feel with my soul i feel i feel I FEEL and i am alive. i am the start of morning, i am red tinged and purple, i am the end of the afternoon, dark skinned and starry. i am everything that this universe is made up of, and i intend to be that way till the very earth splits my bones and drills my skull, and my skin droops tiredly to the ground. i am whole, and i am divine. i am eternal, like the dust scattered across the milkyway, and *you can't stifle me.

i want to be touched by somebody
with burgundy blood on his hands;
red handed
raw palmed
legs strangled in maroon bedsheets.

a murderers kiss must be a rush,
blood exploding from every pore in my
bled out skin,
wounds opening willingly for his searching
hands to make
a sort of house out of my bones.
creating a home for something
wild
who has only ever met closed doors
and distant, fearful faces.
i'd prove i wasn't scared of
the dark eyes,
and hungry lips,

knowing at any moment he could push the
cool lips of a golden .45 caliber revolver
and splatter my ****** through the
wooden bedpost and the
flaking, collapsing drywall.

i've followed thrills ever since i was
in third grade,
convincing a boy to take off his clothes
and show me what "men" are made of
and sneaking behind my mothers
injured back
stealing things i wasn't supposed to know about.
i liked putting myself through the danger,
unknown
it rushed up my legs and
rendered me breathless and craving more.  

i've always wanted to hold
something shaking
and cold
and let them tell me stories
out of their biting teeth
of when when it all started:
they were small and rode their bicycle
so fast they fell and skinned their
soft pink cheeks on the black cement
and went crying to their mother with blood dripping
down
a mixture of tar and red.

i'll tell them there's some place in hell
in the beating, drumming heart of the earth
warm darkness compacted,
where you can buy cigarettes for
50 cents a pack,
and whiskeys in water bottles and skin is naked
guns are loaded to shoot down the moon
and eat it with crunching, crumbly golden crackers.
where there is no sleep
only midnight writing furiously on the stark pages
of a shredded journal
dawn walks down the lively sidewalks where
other sleepless figures of orange peel flavored darkness
and coffee bean stained teeth dance and laugh and touch
in the darkest parts of the invisible morning
sweat intermixed unrecognizably with tears
and people hold their belongings in
the drooping bags under their bright eyes,
where screams of pleasure echo in every
cavern and creaking limb you touch
to the atmosphere
and people make love easier
than they
destroy necks.

i'll whisper
"when you're rotting underground
with your teeth in a
waxen, strained smile with lovers flesh embedded
in your own homely skull,
and your fingers are feasts for writhing worms,

and i'm dancing chaotically as ever in the raging wind,
a desert flower reduced to
bright-eyed dust
thrown lightly into the sinking seeds of a garden
with flowers growing out of my decomposing
echo of a body
like an
articulate oil painting decorating the earth to remind them
of my eternity,
i'll sink all the way through the soil
and follow the heartbeats

i'll meet you there."

i am actually quite a raging hurricane.
i have things slew precariously on the cluttered floorboards
of my mind,
and i trip on things with throbbing toes
thrown into the caverns
of my hollowed bones
constantly.

i mistake "ie" for "ei" in
words i should know the meaning of,
and find myself gagging on the
knowledge of which way is left and which is right.
i lose myself in the dawn,
and then i have to find my way back home during the mornings
stumbling through the wet grass
and acrid manure
soft, strained yellow rusting on wilted daffodils
left cut on cement after a night of rain.
i have no sense of direction,

and maybe this is why i can't determine
right from wrong.

i have no built in moral,
just an empty piece of new-skinned, unworn brain
where my patience and good deeds lie sleeping.

the only thing i have to soften my
naked sin and lustful greed is love,
coursing inside my arteries
like a raging river of fire,
burning skin where
people touch.
i cook callouses with it,
give the sun something
to envy.

burnt ashes were houses,
and now they lay smothered and leaking
with dripping,
coal
remains.

i'm not a mess,
i'm just a storm.

we lay in the fields and on the dry hills
and smoked green out of a purple pipe and you kissed a boy who talked about crystals and rolled down under the stars
i shared my cigarette with soft lips and a strong jawline,
we all drew ourselves together on the hill that overlooked the world;
we we're the tallest, vastest beings ever to live, and the glowing lights that we're stuck like splinters in the palms of the sky we're mere reflections of what was within our glowing skin.

grey clouds bursting stark,
volcano
ash exploding
crawling
drowning
amber measures of coal black
lungs
back aching,
carrying newborn mornings.

sometimes its easier for somebody to see what's wrong
when they can't hear you sob like
a hyperventilating storm
--------
i know you want to tear out your organs with your nails,
but please hold onto your insides for me,
because you are enough.
you are whole without needing love from people
who don't matter.
and you can't forget it, because you don't need approval from anybody but yourself.
and i want you to know
i'll never forget that time when we we're drunk and stumbling
and i saw that you had white scars slashed on your legs too,
and knew that I wasn't alone
because we knew one another's pain and we loved eachother for it anyway.
you are kind,
remember it. you are strong like a steel whip in the cold icy
morning of a december winter, but you are soft and kind and you are warm
like strawberry vanilla popsicles dripping and summer heat sweltering,
and please
never forget to be kind
to yourself
especially.

--------
please try to stop ******* everything up.
you make things ******* yourself, and maybe if you just learned to let go
and accept that your problems are no more important than every other single living being on this earth, maybe you'd smile a little more. your smile is beautiful, and i don't think you know that. life treats you so well, you just have to open your eyes and
WAKE UP.
you have to escape your little world sometimes,
and admit that we're all breathing in the same atmosphere into our lungs.
you can get better so easily,
you just have to let yourself.
because i know,
you aren't letting yourself heal.
let that small peach tree grow it's roots.

--------
giving yourself away to boys who only care about your body, won't make them care about your feelings. drinking until you fall asleep wont make the world disappear, it'll just make your memories sink to the bottom; you need to filter them out.
don't be afraid anymore, be real. be who you are under those layers of flesh and bones,
be the soul that screams and hammers to be let out. you are so real.
and worthwhile.
so many people care about you,
you are something magnificent and
it's not your fault. to be free, you need to stop blaming things on yourself.
let it go from your clenched palms, because things are getting better just as long as you make them that way.
i feel like you forget how strong you are, how you have so much power in those long, pale fingers. how you can create and destroy with the mere movements of your tongue.
i don't want you to forget that what you hide inside you is something gleaming and vast, and you should pull away the blinds
and let the sun shine through.

--------
i feel horrible because i was the girl who taught you that feeling was a horrible thing to do.

that because you let yourself
get too emotional over the fact that
i was too unattached to love you in the way you wanted me to,
and every time we tried, i would runaway from your waiting lips
and laugh like venom dripping behind closed doors to hide
from your confrontation about why i never wanted to let people love me
and return it.
now, you walk with a metal shield up
i remember you said a long time ago
“now i know every girl will be like you,
and i don't want to try ever again.”
i wish you would still tear up to really good music,
and let your barriers down.
because it's not true, there are women
who will treat you right,
and love your bad jokes,
and not lead you treacherously into their traps of poison and bones.
be true to the boy you harbor so reluctantly in your tough exterior
because i can still see him in your eyes when you smile,
and he's beautiful.

--------
you think that the words you write have nothing to do with what you hold inside.
you're wrong about that.
you are the things you imagine yourself to be, but you have to release them from the fear tight in your chest.
you aren't damaged, but people will see yourself that way if you hold your body like that. straighten your spine, darling, and pierce their eyes with the knowledge that you are
beautiful like vines crawling up gracefully over a window
you are smart like the cinnamon colored pages of old books,
you are mysterious like the deepest parts of the ocean,
and alluring like the soft, midnight tide.
nobody forgets about you, you aren't small in anybody's mind.
nobody thinks that your ordinary, they think you're fantastic,
and you need to break all your mirrors
and with scarlet dripping from your knuckles like rivers
on ice
you need to admit that you don't need them.
it makes me so happy to see you slowly blossoming
into the wild rose i know you are.
take care of yourself,
because that is the only way anybody else will be able to care for
you.
your soul is huge like the
morning sky
let yourself feel it.

--------
find your voice, and speak clearly to people who are shaking your boundaries, and tell them to BACK OFF.
yell it if you have to,
stop letting them invade you and squeeze your insides like they even have
any right to.
scream into their faces that you are not weak,
and let loose your mean side a little bit.
never let yourself be taken advantage of.
look into peoples eyes,
and search desperately for their truths.
if they don't hold their vulnerability raw and beating in their palms,
then they're not worth it.
never expend your energy to make somebody else feel better.
you can share with them your happiness, but never give it away;
because you are not an empty girl.
you are a fulfilled girl bursting at the seams with things it means
to be completely alive
and laughing
and feeling.
don't hide that.
people think its nice to be hurt
and it's so mature and creative and artsy to be damaged.
they think its romantic when you can be
“saved”
by a stupid prince who wont give you **** but a plastic crown and sore hips.
DO NOT GIVE INTO THAT *******.

your eyes crinkle when you smile,
and you have small teeth that are like
waxing moons.

nobody wants to be happy
because they think it wont last,
because they think its not beautiful
but you my dear are living proof.

i put my fingers in my mouth
salty
honey soap tasting
i can feel the pulse in my upper lip
desperately beating

i can feel my pulse uneven
when i jab my fingers into my neck,
like a dancer slightly falling offbeat,
distracted with the smoke

or maybe that's just my imagination,
my father had arrhythmia,
so did my grandfather.

both of them abused substances
and drank irish ***
and black coffee with sugar,
both of them wrote about things
like "passion" and "sunset",
both of them had troubles with commitment,
uneven smiles
and
bad teeth.
both of them ate too much sugar,
and laughed really loudly,
both of them liked arguing
and letting stories fall from the caves of their mouth,
leading armies with their teeth
their tongue a home for dragons.

it only takes a skip of a beat,
the dancer to fall completely
for me to become
another carbon copy.

take me to the desert
lie me down on the burning shifting sand
dry my skin into creaking sheets
of golden leather
feed my guts to the wolves
bury my bones with the snakes under the land
where no man will ever touch them again.
stretch me out under the heat
hang my intestines
like party streamers
on the spikes of cacti

i wonder what would grow out of my flesh
if you buried me alive.

i've always wanted to **** a ghost
and now i suppose i've gotten my wish
but i look down and see
your insides exploding
with the wrong kind of transparency.

"i bet you're loud in bed."

**** right i am,
i'll make the plaster shake down on your
quaking body
and scream my pleasure so it fills every
empty space in our skin.

i'm not afraid to be a *****
because the only thing
quite as firm and unforgiving as my heart
are my legs.

bitter white pills
stolen from the nurses office
crushed on the rocks,
merciless shores
of my craggy, gnashing teeth.

swallow it down
with purple liquid and
gag at the crude
astringent taste
like a fine powder
of dandelion leaf
burdock root
twisted hell.

floating down the hallway,
words jumbled and crumpled
thrown away paper
lodged in the crevices of my throat,
hacking it out with a nicotine
kissed cough.

i've got four more pills in my pocket,
but i'm craving ten.

good morning*
i screamed to the burning sky
put your drifting fingers in my trembling body
let me *******
and turn me flushed and red like the morning clouds.

because i want something passionate to touch me
and your bare body with scratches of cherry jam
all across it
like the insides of a sweet and sour homemade pie,
steam drifting off its browned lips,
are all i have in mind

i want to walk naked in the cold,
with my ******* like pebbles rising from the
bitter slap of early spring,
legs bearing small braille letters
goosebumps in my golden flesh,
fearless.

are you blind?
i want you to read me with your body.

because i am so much more than this
earthly thing of flapping paper skin,
and bending silverware bones.
so please tear into me like a drill
digging into earth to ****** handfuls of gold
and find
my soul
because it's been waiting,
and i am far from patient.

i put daffodils in my messy hair,
and rub my calloused palms which have
embedded within them the scent of burnt tobacco
like old couches, and charcoal scattered blankets,
and then i pretend that each day doesn't push the sunrise
even farther behind.

i hate being ignored
but i do it to other people,
and
sometimes i just don't want to say anything
and when i do
i guess i say too much.

i'm mean and rude
and nobody want's to talk to me
because if they say something i don't like,
then i'll tell them
right away to stop saying it.

i haven't called my mother
in a while,
and people are telling me what to do.
i want to escape
and jump into freezing water

because when i come out i will
be extremely
numb
and i'll be able to feel the sun a little better

if you
call yourself cruel,
just imagine
how horrible it would be
when i tear your
jaws out
with my
teeth

i don't even know my own father's birthdate,
and sometimes i still think about
boys who never touched me
with fingers
instead he caressed me
with dark,
star painted
tall trees.

that life is behind me
and if this one is a temporary one,
then i'm not sure which one i'm really living.
is that why reality seems so
fragile?

i lose everything.
i take naps on winding roads
above mountains
and i even lose my dreams.

sometimes in the shower i pull
violently on
my face,
seeing if i'm real enough,
assuming that it will crumble in my hands
turn into a brown puddle
and drip down the drain.

my mouth feels dry and i
feel aching
where my shoulder meets my arm
and my clavicle is nothing but a stick
covered with a
man of flesh;
my body is making love
and layered upon one another in a
fiery bed of red.

the odd thing,
is i want to smoke
and sleep
and lose some things in my memory.

i wrapped myself in twirling circles
inside a redwood tree,
tall, burned and cascading all around
our shaking bodies,
a bundle of sage drifting through
patterns of golden
rain.

naked bodies swam in dark
water that slept under a drifting fog;
Newport filters made for tired fires,
driftwood instead.

emptied packs and emptied stomachs
threw themselves into
a waiting bed of blackberry brambles
scratched skin burned in
2 a.m. drifting shower steam.

now,
i am tired,
because i fed the fire within me
too much
and something is slightly missing,
left along with the charred remains of my
forgotten shirt,
on a riverbed that was once brutal,
but now held bare golden limbs.
it's probably lying somewhere
carefully disguised in
light and blowing leaves on
a dark forest floor,
but i haven't the energy to take it back.

bruised necks never swallow well.

can't you find any metaphors
that are original?
or do you like the ones
used,
holy and worn so your skin shows
through?

when you lost your virginity,
i remembered you were slightly glowing
a halter neck dress under a fluorescent
light.
i didn't have any clothes on, just a brown blanket,
and your brother's
anger could almost be tasted drifting in the air
like snapping crocodiles.
what we really needed was more alcohol,
but our vaults we're empty,
so we settled with three embers burning brightly in the deepening night
and the boy upstairs struggled to find his pants.

our souls we're much too big for our bodies,
it was bursting out the seams of our small limbs.

maybe everything started that one day
in seventh grade when we lied about what movie we were
going to see,
and we put up our hair in brown piles on top of our heads
and squeezed into pants so small we could feel our bones pressing against
the fabric.

when we walked into town,
miles from your house in the dusty summer,
with me dragging my skateboard along,
with the skull on the bottom
and you walking with you long legs slightly in front of me;
drunkards with
swiveling eyes whistled at us from
a green jeep and tried to cajole us into the car,
my small ******* was ****** high into
the sweltering air
"******* YOU MISOGYNISTIC *******,"

we couldn't get into the movie we wanted to,
so we snuck into a different one
filled with snow and dark
and twirling tendrils that reached toward us and
made our stomach crawl.

sometimes i miss the times desperately
when we would pack things into a small cloth
sack
food, knives
we'd trek in the forest for hours and
this one time we broke into somebodies pool, dipped our feet in
then got chased away by their livid dog.

we had left the gun we brought there,
you had two and we liked feeling it cold against our
empty fingers,
so i had to run back and get it.

sometimes i think about how if i had never met you,
my life would be so different.
i would have never smoked my first joint
with you on your trampoline
encased in large, fluffy blankets
under millions of stars that couldn't quite fit in our
eyes all at the same time.

we would have never pranced in
yellow drying grass,
and almost fell into your creek, with
your brother laughing behind.

i'm glad we wrote songs
together even if they were about
blood dripping slowly from our open carcasses;
we weren't the most optimistic kinds of
girls.

we had wills as hard as
hitting iron,
metallic in spurting bloodshed.

we were rebellious,
like other girls we're pretty,

and we fought like warriors should
in small, bland classrooms
with teachers who knew nothing of being hurt.

our voices were strong,
unwavering like something found in the depths of a morning sky.

we raised ourselves well, darling.

it's sort of funny how i can bang you like
a frying pan to the head
and *** all your cigarettes
until your pockets are empty
and so is the bed
because

i'll want to know what kissing the
boy who lives next door
with the green eyes
feels like too

****
i wish we could drop acid
on a rolling hill like earthly ocean
waves,
summer breeze swiftly rocking
us back and forth in the
twisting realities, and
folding, condensing, expanding
visions, exploding in our
open, wide eyes.

i wish i could kiss you
and feel flowers grow from
your lips,
my ******* turning into
opening roses
soft and voluptuous under your
persistent hands.

get grass in my hair,
and count each and every one of the
angrily pulsating stars above us
as we lay naked somewhere
where reality can't breach.

let me comfortably say after
that i have lost my virginity;

because it'll be the first time i've ever
made love to a god.

STOP
CALLING
PEOPLE
"MOTHER *******"

DO YOU HAVE ANY RESPECT?

WHY IS "*****" AN INSULT?
WHY DO MEN CALL OTHER MEN "GIRLS"
WHEN THEY ARE "WEAK"?

WEAK?
WEAK YOU SAY?

A WOMAN BIRTHED YOU OUT OF
HER ******* ******* ******
SWEATING AND ******
IN A BATTLEGROUND OF AGONY,
SHE WENT THROUGH HOURS OF THAT PAIN
JUST SO YOU COULD BE CREATED.

do you really have such small respect
for the STRONGEST CREATURES on this earth?

**** IT UP, AND LOOK AT YOUR POSITION IN THIS WORLD.

WOMEN ARE NOT WEAK.

if you really want to test the strength of a *****
why don't you kick a man and a woman's crotch at the same time?

you can guess which one will be crouched
and holding their nether regions, gasping in
agony afterwards.

STOP BEING
SO
*******
IGNORANT,
AND RESPECT
THE *******
BEAUTIFUL WOMEN
IN THIS SPINNING WORLD.

i wrote my first poem
when i was somewhere around the age of two or three,
singing out the words,
and having my mother write them down.

something about a rose,
and its devotion to the light.
i have it scribbled down somewhere.

then, the words took form in shaky
childs writing,
small words and sentences describing fantastical worlds
swirling vividly in my mind,
and then in elementary school drawl,
across colored construction paper,
then on my arms and legs in middle school,
in black ink scrawling across
golden skin,
sinking in.

then, books full
of endless pages filled with
flowing and burning inspiration piled on my desk
and by my bed
the most ferocious of inspiration finding me in all my
highschool classes.
a sketchbook,
or at least a pen always held close at hand,
i even had inspiration in the shower,
and sometimes ran out naked
if i forgot a pad and pencil.

my love of words started when my mother
used to read me poetry in the womb,
and play tapes of Native American
flute music as she fell asleep
to the small, but constant feeling of
my unborn lips inside her growing stomach
forming the outline of
words to be written and said.

i started writing,
and it became my addiction;
and i've never felt the urge to stop.

i want to learn french,
but i suppose i've learned enough because
cigarette
is a french word isn't it?

this night was different;
there were more moments spent looking back then forward,
panic always pulsating in the crook of our throat
like some giant, out of breath beast
waiting in the hollow sweat, and gnarled tree branches
reflecting black against the slightly purple sky.

it was too quiet to mask our
echoing footsteps;
boot on pavement
no rain to soften the blow.

we made it in thirty minutes to the gas station,
where we unzipped our jackets
and let the lace show out of our drooping shirts
blinking like a warning sign
to the drugged up cashier,
words mumbling over his body,
strings mixed up.

men entered and i saw that look
that i always see
in men who look at me;
its hungry, a type of lusting mouth with no
feeling,
**** trusted more than his heart.

the kind of look that says,
“i want you feeling my biceps in the back of
my truck,
and i want to feel your tightness all over me,”
the only problem is i play along,
pretending to be seductive
and then leaving with an agonizingly frozen stare, and
a quickened pace
just to show them who's actually in control.

a pack of Newports exchanged over the counter,
another lighter;
this time with a green and red flower on it;
dahlias of the night.
exoskeletons of black jackets and tights
like some shadow riding vagabonds,
inside guts made out of
swallowed cigarette smoke
and bravery.

we smoked and walked,
watching as headlights flickered toward our slim frames,
and men leaned out from trucks
with salivating mouths like dogs,
inviting us to their burning desire
in the cold, shrinking night.

under the layer of skin
that tells the girl beside me that it would be stupid
to heed to their invitations,
i admit to myself
that all i want is for a stranger to wrap around me
and kiss my smoke stained lips
with a different fury,
so i can whisper a fake name in the depths of their ears,
and show them that i will kiss
better than all the women that have
wrapped themselves in
their limp bedsheets,
and leave them wanting more as i disappear into the night,
leaving nothing but a longing burn
on the tips of their tongues.

but i don't give into my fierce desires,
and we simply turn around,
smoke five more cigarettes,
and climb up the fence
to **** her hand,
and run across the raging freeway
like the Klamath itself.

i don't like nice poetry.
i don't like fancy words,
or tranquil thoughts,
i don't like comfortable or smooth.

i like
R A W

i like poetry that rips you apart from the inside out
shreds your skin,
takes your oxygen and forms it into something else
unbreathable.

i like poetry that leaves you staring,
with watering eyes like whole oceans somehow slipped,
unlocked the bolted door to your retinas late at night
and slept cold, salty and drunk on your bed without an invitation.

somehow the love you made,
sweat staining the soft, greasy thin sheets
meant nothing.
and now the oceans lying beside you,
inside you
salt making you cringe, gag in the safe dark cover of night,
strikes you as positively
irritating;
their breath of tides,
growing small and large with every
step closer they take towards shore.

so you ****** your hands in the swift
raging waters of their
body.
you try to find its warped, used heart,
like a crumpled, empty cigarette package
discarded and wet after a war waging rain;
rippled and streaming in the
transparency of its quaking body.

you seek to rip it out,
and tiptoe to the open window,
vacantly staring at you from across the room,
every inhale it takes
letting more warm, humid air like
dead fishes breath
into the scalding room.

you wish to throw that pulsing,
helpless heart out into the night
listen for a couple of moments
and hear it splatter on the concrete below
the ajar window,
sure that cold,
wet
remains of the ocean floor would be scattered on
the sidewalk in the morning.

but you cant seem to successfully rip it out,
the tendons holding onto the ribs
like wild veins,
stubborn and clingy.
you pull and pull,
aching to tear it from
the body,
but the water around it is too cold so you
jump out of the
waves and weeds of under the sea,
and lie on your back listening to its breath
breathing still in deep sleep,
angry that the tearing on its
heart
didn't make it stir one bit;
just made your hands burning
ice and numb
purple in the dark.

so you satisfy yourself by gently
pressing your lips to its
throat,
sinking your teeth deep below its
vital veins,
stopping the raging rivers in its
soft neck,
pulsating with currents,
glowing with a sliver of silver moonlight passing
through it like a wrenching scar.

you crunch down violently
on its delicate
lifeless passageways
transporting fresh water
to salted sour oceans,
crispy like stringy celery
breaking uneasily in the warm cavern of
your mouth.

then you lie down, fulfilled.
the lack of its vessels
stopping the tide of its breath violently and suddenly,
carotid arteries,
jugular veins
and muscles
spread out,
spurting from its throat,
vast like twisted wings.

you ash your cigarette on the draining
wetness of its tongue,
throw the filter down its decapitated throat
and sit on the white, crusting balcony,
waiting for the rusting sun to rise,
picking sand out from your teeth.

you delve deep into the naked sunset,
only to emerge with the small
dying embers
of the sun
in the weak scarlet of your
palms.