there is something waiting,
prowling
and
slightly hopeless within me.

i seek to find it
so i can slowly
destroy
it.

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

"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.

i drew mountains on my ribcage.
they grow with each escaping breath.
i enjoy being naked and i will not put clothing on for you.
i want a cigarette.
my head is pounding.
or is that my heart.

it's back.
I thought it was gone,
                but no it's back.
it took me only a couple of agonizing moments to remember that when you touch yourself like that, it leaves scars that you can't erase.
                 my mother sat there by the kitchen counter, dumbfounded like I had just slapped her across the face,
I wanted to yell and scream
I T S N O T Y OU R F A U LT
but it's not true is it?
that's the only reason is shower with the door locked, and I guide my lovers hands away from my thighs.
that's why I like kissing people in the dark,
so they don't see my past on my skin, rather than hearing it come from my mouth.
so my old friend is back.
                                           i wonder how long she'll stay this time.

we are nothing but skin and bones

filled with fact and fiction.

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

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!

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

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

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

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.

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

sometimes I wonder about how many poems were possibly written about us,
and how we'll never get to read them.

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.