Don’t think about it.
The last place, finish line, pedestal, podium
The idle dreams of athletes whose sweat you’d never touch
Not even the bridesmaid, light-years from the bride,
Not the pity-**** flower girl,
And certainly nobody’s first choice.
No, don’t think about it,
Because there will be time enough
In that infinite second after you’ve spoken ill
When you do think
And think it for the thousandth time
That you, you crooked thing,
You are alone even in a crowd
That that was always your talent
Raised up for it like veal
Alone in a crowd
Alone even among those who love you
Or claim to
Or love some strange idea of you, half-made,
Rendered of your spur of the moment ramblings and
Whatever fancies cloud their own eyes
Yes, you belong to some circles,
And dance in and out of them like smoke passed mouth to mouth
You nominally entertain the idea of having friends
And then, in truth, are never there.
So, don’t think about it.
Don’t think about it
Until your face is up against the wall of the truth of it
Until stone scrapes the soft flesh of your cheek off the bone
And there’s nowhere else to go.
And when you do think of it,
Do it like you always do-
Look at it out the corner of your eye like a basilisk,
And then, lazily, avert your gaze
And go back to dreaming.
You weren’t strong enough to think about it anyway.

No one is ever going to know you.
You will die with your soul achingly untouched,
And you will not be special for it.
Every day, we come in and out of the world together:
Doctors cradle babies out of the birth canal,
Hand them to their mothers, wet from excision.
Grandchildren hold the hands of dementia patients
As they lay in their beds flickering like candles.
Yes, these are good things. Yes, they are done together.
Yes, still, we are all alone.
You don’t really need to be accompanied,
You don’t need pure wordless understanding,
Your soulmate never did and never will exist.
It is ok.
You will not be special for it.

Every time I speak, I hold a crystal lens in my mouth
And the light of who I am and what I say refracts through it
Blasts my innards onto the walls as sure as I’d been shot
Point blank range, and every drop of blood a slide in a projector
It’s an unbearable burden, and it’s the curse of hindsight
To know who you are to others only after the splash of rainbow light
Only after you’ve burned some Rorschach on their retinas
I’m so ******* upset all the time about it, it’s pathetic,
But I would hold your face in my hands nose to nose
As if I were about to kiss you roughly,
And I would open my eyes their widest and shine into you
Pure white floodlight high beams of absolute truth about who I am
Only the trouble is, really, even I don’t know.

Veins, cracks, and branches
Have one thing in common:
They live in our lungs,
Or how have you forgotten?
The tip of each shoot
And the tip of each finger
Have borne out a flower,
But Spring never lingers.

And the heart of a man is the core of a tree...
And the love of a man is so foreign to me...
Protected by bark,
An unknowable heart!
We could strip everything to find out what we keep,
But the loss of the skin is the loss of the tree!

I dream of red mansions,
I am a red pearl.
You fed me on teardrops,
And showed me the world.
And you are my mountain,
And I’m just a girl.
I dream of red mansions,
I am a red pearl.

I dream of red petals,
I puke them at night.
I gave up the medals
You won in your fight!
And you are my mountain,
And I am your girl.
A stone upon your tongue!
I am your red pearl!

A stone in an oyster...
I am a red pearl.
A stone in an oyster...
Forever your girl.

I live in dead houses.
Have never felt the breath and blood and bones of a structure,
And I think that to feel something like that,
You need siblings and babies,
A family.
The heart of a house…
I’ve heard it variously called
The kitchen, the living room,
The dining room, the bedroom, the hearth…
Whatever heart I’ve touched was always cold and stone,
Too long without contraction to be identified as a heart.
And I feel like a person who’s never owned a pet,
Never had a proper friend;
For I don’t understand the care and feeding of a house,
Or the give and take of a relationship with it.
And I think that just by moving in I shock it,
Shock it with my covered-over pit of neglect, so strong
It dies on impact,
And I make my home there in the carcass.
A parasite in the body it killed,
A scavenger taking shelter in the bones.
I live in snail shells in the garden.
I live in burnt, hollow trees.
I live in dead houses.

Some things must be allowed to die.
Like pruned branches and withered annuals,
You can’t sustain all of it, nor should you…
So say goodbye to some parts of yourself,
Wrap them up like baby teeth in an old handkerchief,
Fertilize the yard with them,
Watch them decompose and brew beer with them,
But you can’t keep them around.
They’re dead, they’re dying, no matter what,
And holding on can never change that!
Let them hang around too long and one day,
You’ll reach for it,
Some lost piece of yourself,
And only close your hand around soft putrefaction.

I do not know how to reconcile love with experience.
The people of the past buried their children
Wearing wreaths of ceramic flowers,
Armored greenery stiff enough to last whatever journey
Lay ahead of the child’s thin bones,
And every petal must have been shaped with love and only love!
For what else could convince an aging back
And aching spindle-fingers
Into laboring over finery like that?
This is one of those things that makes young women want to die.
Awake, alive, poisoned with the lust of others’ eyes,
We stare at the coins resting on the tongues of mummy women:
Just enough to pull a little something from the gumball machine.
Our fingers twitch,
And we want it.
We can only want it.