When i was eight my dad would bring me to a movie store, i was always curious about that back door, i didn’t know it was where they stored the ****, girls plastered on their backs and worn by men like casual dress their mouths all open in silent ****** and yet bets are they’ve never gotten that far and tonight i wonder where these screaming lick lipping girls are because I’ve never had one in me. And i think maybe most girls don’t because only men know that back door, that back entrance, where all the women love them on command, and real girls exist only as a figment of their imagination. When women’s pleasure is locked discreetly away you have to wonder whether men will ever taste chapped lips, touch fleshy hips, and love the bliss of a body on a body not a lifeless video hobby.

pale, windswept girl
with a tendency to accumulate
broken things.

but you, sir, are shattered.

your shell begs to me
in soft, raspy whispers
to try and pick up
the billions of tiny fragments
you so carelessly lost
within the vast confines
of temptation.

I saw him at work;
When he would visit the mangal
With a ***** over his shoulder.

He rolled up his pant legs and walked
Through the tidal wash.  Once he had picked a tree,
He hacked for three days to cut

The mud and the mangrove
Free from the surrounding forest.
He piloted his self-made island into the lagoon.

Shortly, he became mangrove crazy,
A disease he called Rhizophoria
In the notebook he had taken along.

With mud lobsters and tree for his only company,
Of course he had mangrove on the brain.
His life became an ellipsis—

The two centers were the tree and himself.
From tubular mangrove branches, propagules fattened,
And seeds nested inside them;

He would scribble notes with delirium as they fell
Plumply into the lagoon
And were pulled away by the warm current.

Each time the tree condensed its salt
Into a sacrificial leaf,
He would sadly add a tick

To the tally of the dead he kept in his book.
He once wrote:
‘The salt is burning my eyes.’

Late afternoons, with beer in our hands,
We would watch him from the beach,
Five hundred yards away.

Eventually, his mangrove island drifted ashore—
He lay by the suberic roots
With a crust of salt along his cheek.

I think
we all think
we're different.
I think
everybody thinks
they're alone
and nobody understands
and life is
so
*******
hard.

Sometimes I look out of open doors
take a cold sip of juice
and life doesn't seem so difficult
because it's easy to be sad.

The house burned down and I wasn't there to witness it.
I wasn't there.

Our bloodlines dictate how close we are, yet the body only reaches as far as the fingers could touch.
She whispered to me, "The house burned down and you weren't there for them."
It's true - I was not there.

We fell out of the same tree, but I think someone took a bite out of me too early.
A part of me stayed, but mostly left.
And this is what I get for being too ambitious.
I could not be there.

Had I travelled under a different moon,
had I have been another form of legacy,
had I have not been me.

But, oh, why wish when you could have seen that fire!
Its blazing tongue licking the limbs of its victims, yet undulating in dew of beauty.
And years that I've been gone was not blindfold to my past.
It is the unwrapping of my coexisting souls.

Oh, I wasn't there.

there's one thing I will never forget,
when a man tells you things like
"I like good clothes, fast cars,
whiskey,
and you."
run as far as your heels will take you,
hell,
take the first train to
some city in the middle of nowhere
shed your fur coat and fishnets
for some red flannel and boots.
there is nothing more dangerous
than the fancy of a man.

my mother always told me that,
when she'd brush out my taut blonde curls
into thin, sleek waves.
she brushed my hair that way until
my ******* grew humble and my legs
felt more like fins, slicing through the cold winters
and hot summers like a pair of scissor blades
dancing on the wind,
like my growing dreams, as a poet, an old soul, and a woman.

I remember the first time I tasted sin
was in the back of that old bar in Arkansas
taking shots of whiskey and dancing
in the hot moonlight
my summer dress slipped off as we fell
off the dock
two bodies fumbling through the folds
of icy water, your hands pressing mine into your stomach, screaming
crisply through the dark of night
"can you feel the beating of my heart?"

mama took me to church and washed your name out of my mouth
with song and scripture, tied me to the altar
and wouldn't let me run.
now I'm always running, running from her, running to you,
my legs more like fins, once again
slicing through hotel sheets, hot baths, and
my dreams, lord, my dreams
simply aged nightmares
those complex beasts await me here
one more whiskey, love,
and I swear
I will find you.

I found my place in words  
In which my soul is my metaphor
I choose to weave into verbs
I place my heart into the curves of assonance
to be guarded by the halting walls of alliteration
until their sentence has ended.
At one time being confined by
the simplest of minds, I
 released them in time, I
pleased them with rhymes
and became lost, then found
different meanings to old letters
taking simple elementary phrases and making them better
and then I finally found myself.
Somewhere against this world
I found my place in words.