These words are fingerprints;
A momento of the fleeting seconds
Where I overflow with emotion
Like a glass under a faucet.

True, these portraits are usually
A collection of broken mirrors,
But let me write when I am howling
At the moon in my car
As the man on the radio makes love
To his microphone
And the glow of streetlights light
The path home.
Let me write when the floors are clean,
Lemon cleaner and sunlight pouring in,
And I'm trimming the ends of flower stalks
For a vase that paints these walls of mine "home".

I am not entirely fragmented.
My ankles may weaken
And my spine my stiffen
And static might overwrite my thoughts
When the sun retires,
But against everything, I stand.

I stand.

The poles have shifted, the tide retreats from the shore!
Shanty lines revised and rehearsed
upon a crumpled paper covered with speckled dirt,
to make a lasting impact at the foot of the blackened hearse.

Does she hear me, this woman trapped in portrait?
The frame it yields and shakes mid rotation,
teetering back and forth as a compass without
magnetism, in circles as a ship lost to the starless night.

The painted woman with her knowing smile bores
her eyes into mine, her flashing irises projecting
from her world into ours, from her reality into mine.

My eyes blur and a vision dances for me,
a water color flow, with daisy tunes lost
in a shimmering and shifting mist,
swirling colors bear together, mixing and connecting,
rubbing and repelling, crossing my eyes in its intoxicating motion.

My mouth slacks and my shoulders sag,
lost in the trance of this melting scene,
and it’s dragging pull.

Excited I ran to show them, to show what I saw,
but they didn’t listen, to them I speak in gibberish.
I smirk and feel my face begin to melt, my ears drooping and my nose falling, the drops fall
and a puddle begins to form under my feet,
before dribbling slowly down the drain on the floor,
In a watercolor swirl.

maybe not looking like i would
             not sounding like i would
             not moving like i would
but
i am until
i found myself

in another life
i wear clay beneath my fingernails
and linen pants around my hips
fastened with a braided leather belt
rescued from my mother’s closet
one she wore in the eighties
when she met my father on the seaside of france
i carry flowers from the corner
down a gum-stained sidewalk
past the park i fell asleep in during one
slow sunday afternoon
there are cherry red stains on my pillow
some from my lips, some not
i’ve never been in love
but i’ve never felt alone
my nose is slender
and my collarbones flaunt themselves
beneath tanned skin
i am someone who drinks ***** and
orange juice while watering my plants
a longhaired cat licks its paws
in the windowsill
as i lie naked in the sunlight
reading tolstoy and kerouac
and obscure poetry introduced
by the neighbor in 4F
none of it matters
i am just like a cloud
like a creaking step
i share myself only through
spearmint breath and coffee dates
here are my sweaty palms
here are my uneven bangs
you will never know me

I don't look like that anymore.

I grew.

I grew tired
I grew a white collar from my neck
I grew to know you
I grew too close to cynics
I grew out of my skin
and into someone else's
I grew angry at my reflection
I grew tired.

I grew up.