if it wasn't for that pretty head ...

staring into my dark, lonely mirror, i feel my body
devour itself – my organs
twist and wring their tissue into thick dark vines—
capillaries converting into tangled leaf clusters on
two heaving baobabs,
the stomach flattening into a rotting jungle floor,
and without seeds or a plan or an objection,
an ecosystem erupts,
growing by night—

not the science textbook kind,
with turquoise estuaries and mangrove trees
and perfect clouds like pulled white taffy, no—

the water there is tar, pooling
at the tip of the cranium and
oozing through the brain
like a slimy pink grate, raining
over the dead and the deathless alike,
making misshapen monuments
out of pain.

the body is silent
as its inner kingdom declines,
and because it is a shell it
becomes preserved,
a petrified relic
of its old glory.

if it wasn't for that pretty head
with those bouncy brown curls,
that pale, almost blue-tinted skin and
your innocent doe eyes glaring into their own headlights like they didn't deliberately design the nightmare that lurks and grows behind them, like they never notice the sticky burning tears collecting in their corners, like they really might
miss their reflection
if it was gone ...

The poets
have staked a claim.
They are not always the type to decide
or declare such things, but
on the matter of the Season of Beautiful Death,
they have unanimously put their dissociated feet down––
Autumn belongs to the poets.

They plant their feet like roots and stand
with limbs like bent branches in half-hesitant salutation of
the low-hanging sun,
and of the wind that smells dangerously
like the citrus-salty sweat on the sternums of
lovers who have long forgotten them,
like smears of strawberry sunset-stained tears on
sticky steering wheel leather,
like caramel-amber irises that they could only then taste by
licking the syrup off the cursive characters
in their own love poems.

Here, now,
with these stacks of decades still decaying in the corners
of our ugly, cluttered crowns,
this is our ritual:
squinting up at the lavender-blue sky, we
concede that we are still broken – (alive, but dying) –
and reinitiate ourselves
as poets.

We breathe in this different kind of death, this
​beautiful
death –
our sticky strawberry reds and caramel ambers displayed like artwork on
these glorious twisted giants –
and we can
pretend we
believe that we
and our heartbreak,
too, are beautiful.

And we look on with aching solidarity
as they burst
into a fireworks display
of a funeral.

yet i stand again alone and cold
watching
an onslaught of angry wet bullets
pummel my peanut-shaped torso

if every midnight a new ghost
was born to loop again through my day
all my naked peanut-shaped torsos
would be standing here
too
all my red veiny feet burning a hole
through the white ceramic floor
and thousands of the same absent brown eyes
watching
– only a few
seeing

all my fingertips work in sync
rubbing face cream into
millions of layers of sticky skin
as our gurgling stomachs tie themselves into knots
and we record in our dejected minds like abused children
shivering in the corner of our skulls

the sickening feeling of
being both
perpetrator and victim

the alarm clock
in my childhood bedroom
has always been
fast by a minute or 2

every month or so i
realign the last digit
with Apple's universal truth

and every month it
slips
out of sync
again

it must be off by such a small fraction
of a second
i tried to calculate it once
0.00001 some-odd something
one brick so minimally out of place
causing the gradual collapse of a skyscraper

i havent found the energy lately
to practice this ritual
and today

my old clock
is fast by 3 minutes
neon green bars flickering silently
marching on
announcing fates to the unwilling and
making
rash judgements

there was nothing i planned to do
with those 3 minutes
and i knew it was
justified in its conviction

but i
realigned the last digit
and watched for 3 minutes
the green flickering rhythmically against
the black screen
climbing minute by minute
finalizing again
my execution

she finds that time is not linear
in the gospel-like gold and amber
that glaze the green poplar leaves
in her suburban summer evenings

what is she left to be?
she with a warrior's heart
but with legs in tired atrophy

at dusk the water ripples with silver-toned echoes
whispering mythical adventures and heroes
and the words churn and boil in her mythical blood
"I would rather be ashes than dust!"

what is she left to be?
she with a warrior's heart
but with legs in tired atrophy

every night still she stargazes through her ceiling
a coward's tears on her cheeks slowly peeling
courage like corn husks from her ancient soul
leaving her core shivering in the dust and dusty cold

what is she left to be?
she with a warrior's heart
freezes
with legs in tired atrophy

My loneliness makes me taste like toothpaste
because over the course of my shame-polluted day,
regrets pile up like grime in my gums, and she
likes to pretend,
(hundreds of miles deep into the night),
that brushing my teeth for an extra two minutes or so
renders me finally clean, and
forgotten.

She makes me use the peppermint that stings, because
it’s easier for me to picture the rotten remains of my
ugly, fumbled words losing their sticky grip
on the insides of my cheeks,
dissolving in fizzles and bubbles and fire as if in
flavored acid.

My loneliness tastes like hair and
skin pulled taut over bent knees
because she imagines that her set of
tired, unwanted bones fit together
like an awkward origami cocoon enclosing,
(shrinking)
my repulsive, obtrusive body.

And she folds around me
despite the sharp, stabbing aches
in my curved spine and knotted appendages
because we have learned that her skeleton
is the only thing that will protect
me.