my diet as a young, unsuspecting girl consisted mainly
of the saccharin that crystallized in between
the glowing, smiling teeth of Disney princesses,
and the artificial-like aftertaste that
coated the walls of my mouth,
enchanting me with fantasies of formulaic love –

level-headed, perfunctory love that
feels like knowing the color of
your dress complements some manicured uniform
waiting offscreen until the waltz your costumes are programmed
to perform, indifferent
(as you are)
to the bodies
that fill them.

so I painted myself monochromatic,
spending my days planning, calculating,
and trusting, wondering
why it seemed that other girls never got too hungry,
(living as they did only on sugar highs),
or bored of the one color they had chosen to become, to wait inside,
but starving was easier than searching for
(or, god forbid, finding)
what I knew I was missing ––

"you are a passionate person,"
he says to me,
truth spilling through my rotting teeth into my shriveled belly,
all rich and creamy-like, as if
he doesn't know what the inside of my mouth
should taste like, as if
his mouth doesn't know
how hungry I am ––

I know
that passionate people
spend their days feasting.
they lie underneath black starry skies
and spoon their own moonlight-infused tears into
each other's mouths, and chew crunchy, fizzling morsels of poetry
along with fistfuls of shadow-drenched notebook paper, and
guzzle violet-tinged philosophy and insomnia until sunrise, but

still, unfortunately, love is what sustains us.

passionate people
are no better at surviving than Disney princesses, but
their bellies are too big and their palates too sophisticated
for light, sugary, level-headed love ––

so, in our wild, potent love, we cram ourselves with
these decadent and deliciously painful things,
and when time and distance and gravity make us still
ache with hunger, we swallow fire the colors of our lovers' eyes and
we burn like kaleidoscopic beacons,
smiling.

I know Father B came to our class more times than you can count, and
denounced all those mortal sins with a firm pointed finger and
one big bulging eye that glared at you in your stiff collared shirt and preppy plaid kilt while he spoke, as if
a white lie or one slice of pizza too many would
send a divine bolt of lightning straight through your chest or
a note home to your parents.

but I left the house once,
and there are some things no one else will tell you.

first of all,
when you tell a lie or eat too much pizza,
all you get is a nasty stomachache,
which feels a bit like a punishment, but you get another chance
and next time, you tell the truth and
eat just enough to fill your belly.

you don't lose any vision at all if you ******* and
people do it
a lot.

speaking of,
***
happens outside of marriage.

actually, I might be so bold as to say that MOST ***
happens
outside of marriage.

sometimes, people have ***
with people they don't love.

people marry people they don't love, too,
or grow into love or
fall out of it just as easily.

and sometimes people love people
they are not having *** with.

you can love someone so much that it physically hurts,
and you will put your tear-stained hand to your aching chest and understand exactly where the phrase "broken heart" comes from.

and sometimes you won't know
how you feel about other people or
about anything, really.

people aren't just bad or good like that –
there are some bad people,
and there are some good people, but
most people
are just lost and
lonely, and
looking for someone who will be the answer to the giant, crying
questions they have curved themselves into.
they read books and go to bars and get promotions and
wear framed glasses and make appointments and call their lawyers and buy apartments and make resumes and get married and divorced all like they know what they're doing, but
most of the time,
they are just taking shots in the dark, and
trying not to feel guilty about
the people they hurt
along the way...

you live under a rock now, and
one day suddenly it'll feel like you've exploded out and
into a hellhole, and honestly,
as far as I can tell,
there are no secrets to life carved into some mountain somewhere, or
arranged in the patterns of your veins, or
even written in a giant bible, but
the one redeeming quality of life is that we can
suffer together.

we're all tired and directionless, but
two warm calloused palms fit together so much better than you think,
and waffle fries taste like heaven at 1 in the morning with friends,
and staying up all night talking with someone and finding out they are just as tired and directionless as you are
makes you realize all of a sudden–– like
seeing the faraway glimmer of two little headlights
on a dark empty highway––
that it's okay.
and
you may be more lost than you can even tell, but
at least you know now
that you're not alone.

Embalmed in textured navy fabric space,
we float in vacuum silence, orbiting like stars.

With outstretched finger solar flares, we bridge
the space between us, puzzle over charts
and physics, piece together what we are–

in blazing convex eyes like mirrored spheres,
reflections question why they'd been afraid …

We curled up in our function’s minima,
derived the strongest force we'd ever seen
before. We hadn't considered, I'll admit,

because it seemed just so farfetched– absurd–
a conscious variable, god, or of the sort,

by whom our stellar glory was produced,
allowed, controlled. Because what universe–
inanimate and gloomy hunk of void–

destroys with prejudice, unless it minds
whose theories rest on hope and lovely lies?

there is nothing quite like being with you ...

sitting cross-legged on your warm crumpled comforter in dim amber light
with hunched backs against the white stone wall,
silently working to piece each other together,
merging thoughts and shoulders,
falling into each other's gravity and orbiting like stars–
we couldn't figure out
how to get any closer ...

we lived in shoeboxes then,
in ***** laundry and ramen-flavored freedom,
the soundtrack in our background
shuffled steps and muffled laughter through thin walls,
pencil scratches and elevator dings,
wooden doors and heavy coats,
cars in the snow rushing by our open windows,
hot cocoa, creaking bedsprings, and
singing–

I have been listening for the music in the things here–
I have searched in comforters, in stone walls,
in laundry and ramen,
in slippers and open mouths and pencils and elevators and doors and coats and cars and snow and windows and chocolate and bedsprings and everyday I try to remember something else I can dissect:
some texture, some melody, some pattern, some rhythm
where you might exist too,
but your music
is nowhere else.

we live in big empty houses now,
in hardwood floors and toothpaste-flavored loneliness.
I can still hear our shoeboxes
and feel the pull of our gravity
somewhere
fading ...

All this war and yet, there is nothing I would rather be.

I have grown to appreciate,
            as a nonpartisan–
            a silent sommelier–
the subtle earthy notes of irony with which
my deflated ego scolds my hollow spine.

I know my own hypocrisy, my instability, my naivete.

I have been raised in the midst of myself–
I carved and nailed these philosophies together to make trellises
around which my elastic grapevine limbs have learned
to wrap and coil and hoist themselves toward the sun.

I have built myself,
and I, alone, tend to my vineyard.

There are distortions in these wooden lattices,
and there are seasons when the grapes grow sour
or the vines do not flower
at all,
but the crop is resilient and the wood does not break,
and there is enough sunshine here
in the summertime to sustain
and to yield something complexly beautiful because it has been weak,
and it has known the cold.

I have built myself,
and I, alone, tend to my vineyard.

There are plots of land far more fertile than this one,
foundational structures far sturdier and more symmetrical,
grapes far sweeter and more robust of flavor,
but there is no wine I would rather have flood my veins;
there is nothing I would rather be.

With plastic crown atop his head
and draped in splendid royal red,

he arched his back and struck a pose
to loud applause from costume rows:

the pilgrims bowed and paid respects,
all masks and hats his new subjects,

the ghouls and ghosts saluted too,
and, standing tall, he liked the view.

When spinning 'round to win more cheers
from Mother who must be in tears

to see her son no longer small–
but as a lord, a god, of all,

he found that he was there alone
and where she'd gone he did not know.

Forgetting all his lofty dreams,
he felt unraveled at the seams–

the costumes then all came alive,
with teeth and blood and crazy eyes.

The king who once was lord of all,
lay crying, sobbing, feeling small.

A hand then pressed upon his back–
his mom had found the royal rack,

and wiping tears from burning eyes,
he wished he'd trusted his disguise.