i’ve lived along the wrong
traintracks,
half a chromosome off
from the abandoned ivy
school i would have
attended, had i been
led by what i’ve been
looking for.
nobody really knows me here.
it takes a special type of person
to read the tea leaves in
the bottom of the mug I
leave to dry.
and this still stands:
i don’t know how to share the air still
trapped in my lungs.
because air doesn’t mean much
if it is not being swallowed as a
last chance.
and i know i’ll be able
to leave isolation behind
and write a poem to
live in

Speaking of the kids in my hometown

we used to walk the traintracks obsessively

like they’d lead us somewhere

like they’d show us something

like the end of the summer was just a bookend parallel line with the river by the library card that promised if i only read enough books i could get out of there and over the moon.

just parallel lines, but they made as much sense as any other way out.

And the gazebo where the high school band played

and I swung on my first date

I write too many poems about my body.

but it’s the only house my spirit knows

and the only movement is my own

I could write you a love poem

or one about the way the kids in my hometown

used to walk the traintracks like they led somewhere

but i’m completely obsessed with this idea of entrapment

that i could be more than skin and bones that i could be made of

ink blotch shoulderblades

ribbon ribcages

clothespin wrists

and ruby lips

that i could abandon myself and get out of this cage

that’s too big or too small or whatever the **** they tell me this week.

A pounding
seizures and nausea
violence, fountains of cascading
mankind's bleeding, gushing
puncture wounds of wine
Dreamkillers out of their way to wreak
smoldering, rancid havoc
Epilepsy and ******* muscles spasms
Brain-tissue scarring from the rocking
between heavenhell and deathlife
Give me your soul and I'll
twist it into strands with which I
hang myself and make a tourniquet around your
neck
Dancing or slaying be one
I **** and lascerate the remnants of my
skin, my soul stretched across the
traintracks, waiting for pleasure
pleasurepleasure in gore and flesh
and wriggling maggots in the eyesockets
of children
Too bad
we all have to wake up come down
inandout of this horrific flying breathing fantasy
rapture of adulterated movement
Sin in all its glory licks the black flames
ashestoashes and dust into mud
blud across the vacuum

i know that
most days
the cathedral of your body
with all its dips and curves
forgotten staircases
and ripped velvet covers
on the splintered pews
is hard to love

and there are days
where you wish that your
body would have manifested itself
as a palace
made of ivory and bone
with great empty halls
that would host nothing else
but your anguished cries
and empty stomach

but these things
are incapable of filling you up
because it is hard to sustain yourself
on bitterness and past scars alone

so i say to you
my friends
brothers and sisters
my lovers
and those living in the wastelands
of themselves

cast aside these
things for you are not a church
or a palace or a temple

no
you are something
much stronger and vast
grow yourself into a forest

turn all the sleepless nights
and breakdowns and hospital visits
and suicide attempts
and those traintracks of scars
into the great twisting trunks of trees

grow yourself as big and bold
as you need to be
protect yourself
wrap up all your sharp and soft
edges and corners
into the bark of mother nature

become a forest
because
through fire and drought and storm
and flood
the forest always comes back
even the charred remains of trees
stand strong

so
i say to you
with your dark circles
and long sleeves
and chest hidden behind a binder
with all your scars
and imperfections
be a forest
because
a forest is unstoppable
it always comes back
it always grows back

and so will you

I was fifteen when you were sixteen, I knew you were trouble and that's what I liked about you.
My mother would hate it.. but we always got away with doing bad things.
Sneaking alcohol and stumbling down traintracks.
Tell me why I couldn't know you now? You don't exist in my world anymore.. your cashmere skin and eyes the color of some burnt thing. But yet so alive.
We would ride around in your mother's car, smoking *** like we shouldn't be..
Out after midnight like we shouldn't be...
having ***.. like we shouldn't be.
But we didn't care because as long as it feels right, do it, eh?
And oh did it feel right. I think you'll always be a memory to me.
One of the best memories.
The only memory I need, the only memory I have of you is warm summer thunderstorms and mischief. What did we know?
We were only in tenth grade... but like my mother says,
"you think you have it all figured out".


Maybe we did.

up the water hole


Ledbetters:
the waterfall which we yearned to
explore on our days
off. like a fresh romance, we wanted to know
each rock on her body and how it got there.
the raft guides and myself,
the master of whitewater reservations, most days
working (trapped) in an old stone house
grabbing phones, calls from pockets-full-of-cash families, boy scouts,  
seeking gorge thrills on full days of
sun and moody thunderstorms.

Ledbetters:
she sits down the railroad tracks which ran
through our cabin homes (and my little shack-barn)
traintracks that kept running next to its river friend, heading into
the town as a timid tourist train jaunt.

we’d creep on top of the rails, while sparrows sang their high-pitched
refrains, river rafters’ shrieks faded,
(i’d pretend not to hear the rattlesnake’s jingle).
the sun beat down ******* our shoulders,
but stopped its punches when we snuck off the tracks,
onto the trail, into the woods.
(then, the spots of sun shone only where trees told them to)

down the path,
past the wooden bridge where we played Pooh Sticks,
past the old campfire spots, the towers of rocks we crafted so carefully,
to get to Ledbetter’s legs: her huge rocks, the heavy flow of water, her blood.

i always slipped and fell as i jumped from rock to rock,
up and over cliffed streams. higher and higher we would climb,
until we reached her narrow water hole:
Birth Canal.

i’ve been afraid to climb up Birth Canal—
shimmy up and clench its slippery rocks with gravity’s water
working against me. i’m almost certain she would wash me away,
i’d tumble down all her rocks, crack my skull on wet rock,
more of a Death Canal.
when you can overcome your mind,
are you truly reborn?

You're in the clattered traintracks
And the static on my phone
I know you've found your heaven
But you're always welcome home

Something that stopped me in my tracks
was the weight of the air around me.
we're all sitting in traintracks on a baseball field
and we dont see the cars driving past
but we can **** well feel them
the balloon of pressure
air sprinting away from the grill of a two-ton hunk of metal
glass
rubber
knocks you back just in time to get hit by the train you never saw coming.
jump off the tracks and dive into my opened chest
the sea is swelling and it will swallow you whole
You're just standin there.
You look stupid.
Wonderin' why..
Why, man?
be the tide and raise these storm waters until they crash your levies
leveling your time-built empire
your stockades made of billiard *****.