i carry around bones from a dug up grave. i hold onto the thorns of burial flowers. i trip on the words scattered from my own séance. pray tell, where do i lay these down to rest, if not inside me?

i seal them in the dark. i seal them shut.

i am quiet as
an iridescent, swan paperweight,
sitting and melting on sadness —
on sheets and sheets of it.

maybe this entire time,
i have been on the edge,
lying like a sand angel
and wading through dead buttercups.
i write a premonition
and call it a poem.

if these walls could speak,
they would call me a resident.
an outsider.
a hostage victim.
a sorry sight.
a paperweight sitting
in the middle of misery.

i am quiet as
an iridescent, swan paperweight,
sitting and melting on sadness —
on sheets and sheets of it;
oh, how i long
to fall and break
into a thousand pieces —

one, just small enough
to be invisible
to slip away
and have
no trace of pervasive sadness —
it glistens in casual,
technicolored mockery.

and i am quiet —
oh, so quiet.

oh, how i long
to fall and break.

i.
find me
shedding away layers of skin
like leaves — like cracking tree barks
until i am a cold corpse preserved in the winter.
until i am what nature calls dead.
so long each restless movement,
so long, each ugly mark
so long, each metaphor stitched together
into a sorry imitation of poetry.

ii.
find me
shedding away layers of skin
a until i am a hundred sorrows thinner,
— a thousand sighs lighter:
a sorry imitation of a chrysalis breaking
and out emerges an anomaly
aching down to its very bones,
so long, each fleeing breath
so long, each exit wound.

iii.
find me
laying down this weary skin,
this dainty roadside silhouette
these trembling, purple veins.
as if an act of making amends.
maybe not.
these lines are
escape routes stitched together
into a sorry imitation of poetry —

maybe my entire life has been that way  —
a sorry imitation of poetry.

a sorry imitation of sanity.

so long.

iv.
don't find me.
so long.