we are all in the same state of vulnerability when we sleep, as anyone else, and i bet that's why we all got together all those thousands of years ago, to not be scared when we sleep

can you imagine having a house with so much warmth and brown and wood and little things in it, kitschy and beautiful. paisley print and filligree. and you paint fruits and flowers on walls and paste up paper printed with wild animals and roll out thick rugs that your feet sink inches into, the edges rolled gold and the innards designed with leaves. and you live there forever and use the same chippedish dishes forever and the same blankets and embroidered pillowcases forever and you know every step on the staircase that squeaks and every nook where the spiders like to cob their webs. can you imagine the potted basil in the window.

i love teeth and bones and feathers. i love little left-behind bug moults and snake sheds. i love snail shells, i love clumps of old fur. i love shed antlers and trampled flora, pawprints and hoofprints left in mud. i love shrieking foxes and mourning doves. i love slugs and toads. i love the smell of decay, i love the smell of rotting leaves. i love the smell of petrichor, of fed earth, wet soil just after it rains. i love muck and puddles and grass stains and burs stuck to my pants and sappy fingers. i love dewdrops on the grass, i love roly-polies under rocks, i love worms seeking rain. i love the earth and grass under my bare feet. i love the sun on my back. i love the wind in my clothes. i love the heartbeat of the earth. i love how she breathes.

i can't wait to be old. i can't wait to be wrinkly oma with silver and grey hair. i can't wait to have spotted, gnarled hands like tree roots, hands that have done so much: built, cooked, fed, felt, created. i can't wait for time, age, nostalgia, to wrap me up in a soft shawl, to cloud my memory and vision with rose. to look back on my life and see the follies that pain me so much now merely as soft missteps. i can't wait for the winter of my life, my autumn over, my life finding its silence, its peace. i will live a life vibrant and at my end i will know i walked as best as i could, until my legs grew too weak to carry me any further. at my end i'll become a young star and a button sewn onto the coat of time worn by all those i've known, the little waves made from my life neverending

i get home every day and hang my skin on the hook and take all my muscles and set them in my dresser and put all my bones under the bed and close my nervous system in the cupboards. i move around in my home just a pair of flexing lungs and a bunch of veins and a pulsing heart. then i put myself back together in the morning.

your bones are sweet
and sharp.
milktooth, my teething heart
all 32, white candy
sugary and nibbling me

gently rough hands
your throat in my ear like some big thunder
rumbling through, a hum
undoing me and undoing me like shoelaces, undoing and undoing me

warm coffee, coffee dripping onto my skin from your mouth
your darker caresses pulling flesh back and
dropping the grounds from your lips and
onto my bones

you eat and eat and eat of my fruit
and big monsteras grow from the empty hollow of my stomach
twining through the ribs and
swallowing the marrow of me

rosily underground
hiding
farming wax

******* dirt for minerals
biting your nails for tea

slimeish, vapid brain
grew legs and left
walked on away

skinny little skinny little skinny little pig
two wrists in one loop
uncoiling own intestines for jump rope

you and i are like cats
how we twine together then
burst apart
sandpaper tongues and hooking claws and
romping and rapture

i find you every day hiding between my breaths
watching my hands and eating my thoughts
do i live there, too?
in the front of your mind or
maybe the back or
maybe not at all

honey, honey
soft and runny
bones and sulfur
acting funny

some day i will be more than a kid bruised inside with aching eyes and a burning stomach and dry dry dry cut lips. some day i will love another and be happy and not want to make myself suffer and cry out silently i always cry out silently. i never make a sound.

i want me
i want you
i want us
in an embrace painful
our bones fuse
and flowers grow from the notches between us

i want me
i want you
i want us
teeth touching close
they click together
and sparks alight from the enamel

i want me
i want you
i want us
nails digging
any whichway
and i unravel

to feel the touch
of your hand
would **** me
and birth me
all the same

(to cease upon you would be the apex of my life)

somewhere i have a mouth and
in that mouth are teeth that
bite and hurt me
in my softer spots like
my lips and fingers and
my heart i would
take a bite out of it
if i could

nocent talon, gruntlefooted thimbledrinker
the time you cut my palm
and those smooth liquids met

i do not miss you, gaumy goblin
you bit too much, you scratched
and all the acid posthumous

now i sit in a seat most high
his bitten fingers in my hair
my twigs in his

drawn and quartered, honey-cut
my diary dog-eared
but not your pages

hurt me
and i dont mind

calloused hands
a scrape of teeth
a cutting word
a cutting eye
a push
a bruise
rough nails

hurt me
and i dont mind

in the spaces between seconds
in the pulses of blood
and quiet stutters

somewhere foreign to me
somewhere unseen
unheard

that is where you live,
watching it
the little thing behind my sternum