I started dreaming in black and white.
you never seemed to
belong in this
technicolour drenched era,
an age of blood
carnations and sapphire Bomb Pops.
***** yellow cardboard boxes in
fluorescent refrigerated cases:
there are goosebumps on my arms and you
hated grocery shopping; I made the lists
and I made the buys; you made the
money, you made love.
we bought a Cezanne print for the
great room; it hangs above the frozen
hearth, grey sunlight filtered through
the cellulose blinds. there is a too tall
glass of scotch on the coffee table beside
a too empty scotch bottle and a too full
bottle of benzodiapenes: I haven't been
self-preservative, and you've been
self-prescribing.
we weren't cut out for this era,
an age of ***-coated lips and
onyx Benzes; we would've been better
in black and white, where our
color-saturated demons couldn't come, where our gem-studded cancers couldn't
eat us alive.

rivers of salt; saccharine silicon and
iridescent nightmares;
kids carve their names into trees
because their concept of forever is
three summers forward;
entropy demands a tithe, a
forfeiture of lives; decimate your herds
and still
no, it is not enough.
know it is not enough.

don't keep your sweet little mouth
open too long; sugar attracts flies,
and pretty soon your
teeth will be teeming
with maggots and rot,
streptococcus sanguis
cheerfully wearing down your enamel
like you wore down my inhibitions.
"it'll be fun," you said, dropping
one hundred milligrams
on your tongue, firmly grasping the back
of my neck, and applying your lips to mine.
one hundred milligrams
slide down my throat, and despite myself,
I laugh, because even when I'm scared
I want to be with you.

the Black Angel is God On Earth; she is
lonely beyond belief, and I give her a hug.
people forget that monsters have
feelings too, and
God?
God is the biggest monster of them all.

God is entropy, and she is
unimpressed by the pyramids
on your dollar bills; she will devour
the stars and the planets and newborn
babies swaddled in blankets,
and she yet hungers:
redwoods and sequoias and aloe vera,
microchips and inkjets and MacBooks.

we are crowded around the bonfire,
s'mores and cheap liquor, your hand on
my thigh; the heavens have
opened up, drenching us
in starlight: I have never felt more
beautiful. you raise my wrist to your
mouth, placing a gentle kiss on my
scaphoid and my lunate; you swipe
your tongue across supple flesh
before clamping down with your teeth;
I am seeing stars and feeling lovely
and I am so, so enamored with you and
so, so happy you are here.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it smells of drugstore perfume, daisies
mixed with something attempting
to be sweeter than sugar
when its truly salt
swirled together with
arsenic and my vapid feelings.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it feels like static, like the fuzziness
on television screens and the
sensation of the wires in my
brain snapping from this exhaustion
that was never there till i
gave up on the phantom innocence i'd been
clinging to in the hopes it
was still clinging onto the shreds of
clothing at my feet.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it looks as though everything has been
painted monochrome. it's a series
of hazy greys and blurry whites, but
it's mostly a black delved so dark
i can't see anything through it; it's
not transparent enough to even
glance at the stars blinking down
toward the earth because the nighttime
won't let me see anything but mysteries
and untouched memories.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it tastes like blood, so much
blood. there's metal on my tongue
and it's everywhere because there's no
knife anywhere, just this transpiercing
pain in my stomach and my lungs are
being sliced open and the gore of my guts
is spilling onto the tile floor and there's
blood covering my hands and my
face is cracking against concrete and
i'm puking rainbows again
and it tastes of heartsickness.

it's one o'clock in the morning
and it sounds like nothing. it's
the kind of nothing that
everyone notices: the breath that
stops when one gets the news
that their loved one is leaving
them for good, the nothing after
a performance that's left everyone
contemplating the universe and love
and whether i actually want to
live at all, the silence following
the coffin being shut. it's the nothingness
of sobs and heartbreak and
death. it's the sound of
loneliness - particularly mine.

the drops of dew cling
like petulant children
to the rusty stars of
the barbed wire fence

while below the sodden
ground is scarred with
the long footed imprints
of rabbit tracks
tufts of their fur can be found on the sharp edged
sticks of the fern fronds
that have been broken
by their hurried passing.

the sun light can only
be described as dappled
as it cascades in shifting
shafts of mote filled magnificence through
the slowly shifting leaves
of the gum tree canopy

and in the distance the bellbird peals
that clear sweet noted song
that brings a smile to my lips

in the underbrush a shuffling sound arises
an animal too wary of me
most probably a wombat
but perhaps something
more exotic, a bilby or
echinda, mayhap a goanna
i am destined not to know
as the sound recedes off
to the west....

and the kookaburras call
loud and raucous overhead

i walk on following the track
by the old fence...
so very aware, that,
here in the  aussie bush.
i am the indtruder....

you want to take a look into my self-image?
my mirror is not even cracked
(i would hate that symbolism)
but **** do i look distorted.
I'm always too fat and my acne is impressive,
my hair is too flat or frizzy or greased,
Every look there's something dissatisfying
but god, sometimes the way you look at me...

not even that, I guess. I don't need another's affection
to forget about my own distaste (though it helps)
but mainly it's just the moments I am smiling and with the right people
that I forget about the distortions of my body and my face

some nights you will feel
like there are a thousand galaxies
exploding in every inch of you
and you are burning too bright
to ever be looked at directly,
and some nights you will feel
impossibly small, like your
whole body could slip through
the spaced between atoms and
never reappear in this world again,
and some nights you will feel
like a paper doll, carefully crafted
and easily blown away, fragile,
too delicate to ever be touched,
and some nights you will feel
like each cell in your body is
made of the strength that holds
the whole planet together,
and that is okay because you are
made of stardust and miniscule
atoms and breakable bones
and the building blocks of
everything in the universe,
and you are too alive to never
feel anything more than human