Wash your hands before leaving.
Every afternoon the television would have a woman in tears
Spanish dialogue, pastel colored sets
Tongue in cheek, modern romance sipping iced tea by the pool
The antagonist wearing a suit and three rings on each finger
Pause.
Soap bars are made of fat, the grease found in
Breakfast diners and sweat off a teenagers face
The lipids turning gelatinous and all I can think of is
Jell-o; the strange colored dessert that doesn’t taste like anything real
My hands begin to itch and I stand up
Wash your hands before leaving.
My hands have become open desert, dry animosity
The skin around the knuckles is delicate, one clench of a fist
I am sure that it will tear, like the skirt of a girl I once knew
But there are creatures lurking everywhere
In the handle of the bathroom door, in the shake of another hand
In the touch of a frame, in the grip of a key
Wash your hands before leaving.
The scattered murmurs on the screen remind me its 5p.m
The women are arguing with their manicured hands
Their eyes all having the same spidery lashes, spiders
I feel insects crawling under my bones
Termites clipping at my heels as I sit in this couch of horrors
I didn’t know the last time it had been washed
It smelled of the 1970’s and I want to go home
The babysitter is on the other chair reclined
Snoring, letting out bacteria through her mouth
At 8 years old I should be on the floor with a coloring book
My lips are dry, the screen is too bright, I can feel the filth everywhere I turn
So I stay
I hear the door knock and it’s my mother picking me up after work
My lungs sigh of relief
Time to go
But first
let me wash my hands before I leave

I'm obsessive and compulsive
I understand why no one wants to get close to me anymore
I am a mess and find the ugly in the most beautiful things
And I drag happiness through the mud so it looks more like
How I feel all the time
I am firestarter
I burn through people like they are cigarettes
I'm a smoker
I inhale all of my sorrows and exhale "I'm fine" with a smile and tears in my eyes

I can feel your hold on me
You grasping me so tight that;
I am too afraid to speak.
I submit to the thoughts of you,
Just you.
Because what else am I supposed to do?
You won't let go of me so neither of us are leaving.
Always I am repeating this
Except that you know deep down:
I never mean it.

Convoluted and contrived,

derived from the smallest transgression;

you believe you became my possession.


This is hard to bare, this mark...

a drama in which virtues and vices embark.

A senseless obsession,

propelled by

accepting divine presence to: "give all to love, obey thy heart."


Projecting bad relationships onto me, instead you leave:

leaving me faceless in your mind, without identity.

With your fabricated fears of the possibilities of infidelity,

widening the already literal gap - no empathy.

A single text to end it all - sufficed in your mind.

Possessions sometimes get thrown out without explanation.

It feels like history is repeating itself.


When words with meaning fall short of what I mean to say,

it's like the delivery of expression is caught between two chasms far apart.

Like two separate languages, two foreign tongues.


*These chasms are too great, too far apart.

Hi, hello, barging in
Peeking through
Confronting sin

Flushing, angry,
Visage blue-- it’s
The world from
Which you do
Eschew

Zooming fast
Zipping and
Ripping through
Brain matter

Negative neurons
Infiltrate and invade
Irrationally made
Usurp what’s real
It’s all surreal
In the most ****** up
Of ways

depressed numb compulsive
anxious clear obsessive

curtains closed, I sit in darkness
as I wait for you
if you don't return,
I will have spoken to no one all day

full of graceful accomplishments,
my river still runs dry
with the thought of sleeping alone
and waking with surprise
at the empty sheets next to me

every time, I sigh
and I hold back the urge to cry impulsively
distraught over a broken nail
as husbands die of cancer
in the hospital down the street

oh, how I'd cry then,
if it were you dying,
but you're just simply gone -
off to work, doing your duties

as I wait in the darkness,
and I think of you
please don't stay at your mother's tonight
I promise,
your little brother will be just fine