Can one be filled up with non-things?
Electrons in a shell, their negative charges
dense and balanced,
a double negative --
What is the opposite of a blank space
and why is it so thick with hurt?

                        Obsession.
      A binary.
Everything or nothing,
dead or so frighteningly alive.
        
                           Fear.
      A lingering.
You are the author of all your failures,
and you cannot escape their weight.
            
                           Disgust.
       A constant.
A grub worm gorges itself below the surface.
The maggot and vulture feed on rot.

                             Apology.
        A tradition.
If you were really sorry you wouldn't have done it, and
certainly wouldn't have done it twice.

Sharp, empty sky is a dread blue eye
looking at everything but you.
You feel like the only thing that exists, but really,
your'e the only thing here that doesn't.
The wind would rather talk to itself
than speak your breathless name.

You set out to build a fence
to prove to the dead sky that you exist
and oh, the building felt so good
that only once you'd finished the work
did you realize where you stood.

It is quiet on your side, a soundless expanse;
Are you proud, you languageless savage?
Does your silence feel like vindication?
Or does your heart start to tremble,
do your lungs start to burn,
when you look across the fenced and quartered plains
and see you've strung barbed wire across the only passage home?
There it broods familiar on the horizon, and must you stand removed
until it collapses, or will you ****** your pride to save it?
What's worse, being fenced in, or fenced out?

Terrified of both, terrified of it all, of the certainty and the uncertain,
of the loneliness and the companionship,
you set fire to the prairie, flee to the high mountains,
and hope that the sky sees you there.

It feels like I am breaking again.
(That is a lie.)
It's just that I'd forgotten that I was broken, but I'm rousing from the sleep now, and the details are coming back to me. I am falling back out of the dreamspace.
It feels like it is raining everywhere I go. It feels like there are rocks in my shoes and  nothing I do will get them out. It feels like I have shattered the gift I meant to give you, and no matter how hard I try, the cracks in the glass still show. It is ruined, do you hear me? It is worthless, and with every attempt I make to fix it I destroy another aspect of its purity. It is a paradox like everything else. I wanted it to be perfect, god ******, I knew what I was capable of and I knew what you deserved, but now hindsight's got me thinking that maybe it was broken all along, maybe I was broken all along, maybe I was wrong, all wrong.
I'm dry heaving again.
I'm trying to find a mirror out there that will return a reflection I recognize, but I keep creating fictitious images. There is no real, is there? You are not real. I was never real.
I keep wondering what's going on in all the caves I didn't get lost in. I keep wondering what it was that pushed me into this one. I have memories of falling, nothing else. I landed here. I was an explorer before that, I think, or at least I think I thought I was, wait, who am I again? Who are. . .
we?
When I was fifteen someone told me it was okay, that I just didn't know what I wanted. And I guess I believed them, because I've accepted it as a part of me, the not-knowing. I know less and less each day.
I think I'm looking for a reader, maybe, one who's forgiving and bored, one who's willing to overlook the dullness of the style and forget the (lack of) artistic merit and read this **** like letters to a lover.
They are all letters to lovers, future and past and present,
begging pardon, apologizing. That all it's ever been. I'm just trying to make myself understood, and wouldn't you know it, all I've achieved is obfuscation. Once it is broken, it cannot be fixed. I should have known that I've always known. The cracks will always show. The rain will never stop. There is no such thing as perfect.
I am sorry.

Will I always wish I were dead?
When I am dead, what will I wish then? Will I still dream?
Will I remain unsatisfied, forever on the cusp of whatever,
that grand "else" I seek?
There are no answers. There is
nothing left to seek.
I shove a pen down my throat and ***** the trash,
rearrange it like alphabet soup and read it
like the entrails of the beast that I slaughtered
when I first opened my eyes. It reads,
"Get up. Grow up. Give up."

We are all trapped in this same cycle.
It is a tacit misunderstanding
of what it means to be a part
of the same cycle.
Out is in
back is forward
me the details of the meeting I missed
the bus last week when it was raining and the trees
are finally changing colors again, it was a late fall
into this same cycle with us
is just a word is just a
space to fill a lack.
I am just a space to fill a lack.
I am a space full of
lack.
I lack the space it would take
to feel full of anything but
this same cycle.

the **** am I
and where
the **** am I going?
Begone, get out, run until
your legs give out
Any direction, pick one,
all directions lead back home
if you're willing to run
forever.
I am, I am not.
All I know is that when I look in the mirror,
I see my mother more and more each day
and I wonder what it feels like
to never leave home, never leave home, never
find home, where am I, where?
I am gone! I am leaving! And perhaps I'll return,
if I run fast enough, if I never look up,
maybe the last face I see will
be yours.

I used to keep track of the stories, used to carry them around with me, because forgetting was scary, it was terrifying to imagine having lived and having forgotten,
"we only have what we remember", yeah, and all that
but (the shift)
at some point I wanted to forget,
and I forgot
how to remember,
and I set the stories down on a bench somewhere
like a canvas bag full of old books, they were so heavy,
and I willed myself to forget them.
I left them.
We only have what we remember,
and I want to hold nothing.
I want to open my eyes, one time,
one day, and find myself naked
and empty handed.
I want to remember again, and the first thing I'll go looking for
is the feeling of waking, weightless,
without the comedown crash of consciousness,
that 'oh yeah', that 'oh, that'.
I am afraid the canvas will never be clean again.
I am afraid that the damage has been done.
I can't remember where I left my books.
I may never find them.

he puts concentrated, constant effort into every day.
he has no choice, and you can see it in his face.
it looks rough. it looks like work and worry.
it looks like inexplicable failure.
it looks like mine.
I look away.

Sometimes I open my eyes to find my room darker than I remember,
and sometimes I dream that I have murdered,
I dream that I am careless.
Sometimes I open my eyes to find my room emptier than I remember.

Weird girl, weird girl. She is sorry she opened her eyes.

My cat's name is Zachary Binx, and I know for a fact he could kick my *** in a fight. His claws are daggers. They are needle sharp and feather light and designed to ensnare and then shred anything his long, quick arms can ******. He is fast; he is a predator.
But he has no idea, because his environment suggests otherwise. He's artificially coerced by domestication to assume that his survival is dependent on me. He is designed to survive on his own, but his cage suggests otherwise.
So he contents himself to the role of the housecat, sitting on the windowsill, feeling dull pangs of inexplicable deja vu as he watches the sparrows bathe in the dirt outside.

I spent years looking for ways
to shut the voice up
and now that it's worked
I'm more alone,
more empty
than I've ever been.
I thought I would know myself
when I quieted myself
and now the silence  inside
is driving me insane.


Will she ever come back?

There is nothing inside
and yet
the body convulses,
gagging out useless sounds
empty air,
and it is poetry,
it is art
if you give it a title.

how the **** do I
say it say it say it please,
SIR
It has been said.
Scream all you want.
I was never for a moment afraid
that words would fail me.
It never occurred to me  that one day
there would be nothing to say.
I have something to say.
It is a sound. It is a feelingthoughtbreathtoneimagemoment
it is lost in the timespace
internal,
I have murdered the grammatical fiction,
alas! I drowned her by accident,
I am Bigger Thomas
I am Mary Dalton
I am no one and nothing, I am dead.
I am alive, and that is troublesome again.

I have given up on
getting up because
giving up hurts less,
yes?
New lines, old news
as ugly as anything else I saw coming
because I knew like I knew
but seeing it in the mirror is,
well,
that's new news.
I reject it as part of F2,
a mental plane I must have wandered to infinity
back before they scared me into pinning myself to cork,
abandoned on a broken pane of the looking glass
babbling and reeling among mirages of
empty fields and cotton gins.
I used to collect shards of broken bottles,
mined them up from the red dirt at the steps of
the old abandoned church. I called them
my diamonds, and I had a whole jar full,
and I was ******* somebody, then,
with my jar of diamonds
and my white hair
and even then I think I knew
like I knew
there is no new.
I have memories of a dead woman seated upright
in a rocking chair in that church,
bathed in bare sunlight from holes in the shingles,
the day my grandmother and I dared sneak past
peeling paint and rusted hinges,
the day we found the typewriter.
The dead woman was covered in dust,
navy-blue rags hanging from bones,
crisp white hair draped across
used-to-be shoulders.
I knew she had been there all along;
I know she is there still. She told them all,
'They will come,' like she knew that she knew,
and we knew that she knew, so we did.

I don't know what I'm doing,
but it feels a lot like asphyxiation.
In the middle of the nighttime
amber-lit and silent street,
barefoot on wet asphalt,
the lightning strikes and for a moment I see
the trees illuminated and remember
how grand and endless the world used to seem,
how the sky was still, to me, mystery.

The rain picks up to remind me
that it sees me there, and does not care.
I am small against the sky, and
the careless lightning has offended me and '
the trees seem so cold,
so swollen and heavy with rainwater,  
that my hands cover my ears
and I run for cover but without sound I am
unbalanced as a cat without whiskers and I
fall into a puddle
and drown.

There used to be enough of me
to drown all this pollution.
Now the ratio of me to filth
is too weak for dilution.

A single drop in each brown eye
forms stagnant pools, dark shallow seas.
Slick greasiness between my toes
is rising slowly toward my knees.

Splinters, wrappers, copper wire,
styrofoam and paper cups,
sneakers, speakers, shards of glass
from muddy depths come bubbling up.

I’m brimming full of chemicals -
a stinging, burning pool of filth,
and near the surface do now float
the carcasses of things I killed.

I want to break it open.
I would show you what's inside -
It would repulse you,
it would scar you.
I am sorry
for tricking you.
It's much worse than it looks.
I make it seem as easy as it should be,
but it won't be.
It isn't.

Maybe I've been lying to myself.
Maybe I harbor no pearl of redemption beneath this ugly shell.
The rot is bone-deep,
soul-deep, carved out and heaped in a stinking pile on the kitchen table,
like when my father taught me how to clean fish, slice long and clean up the soft white belly, sever the gills and pull, pull, pull, until you've a handful of guts and blood and organs. Toss the innards aside, into the creek. They are useless.

And I thought I was the heroine!
I thought I knew the way out!
Thought I was burrowing skyward!
Here I thought I was the scout!

I thought I swam to the surface!
I thought I'd conquered their fear!
I thought for sure, I was certain,
but I lost twenty one years.

We are all chewing on the same hunk of fat
so when I noticed that I have my father's ears
and my little brother does too,
I sighed out, *******,
I said, where am I?

But I think you were lost too,
because your father was a giant like mine, but
he will never meet your sons.
He will never know you,
and I have known him too late.

How does it feel to watch him fade away?
I shiver for you, the fourth iteration,
a pillar in the pantheon.
They should have told you
they were mortal.

Be a good storyteller, darling,
so that he may live for them.
Keep with you his memory,
and speak of him often. You will
teach them what he taught you,
I know this,
you know this,
he will die
knowing this.

It is the role of the earthworm
to speed the decay. Do not dwell
on what giants leave behind.

This won't be pretty, she said.
Love poetry, ha-HA, shut up.

I used to have so much to say,
I used to think people were listening,
but I haven't heard a word myself in years.
Have you?
Suddenly I find a vast cavern to scream into,
it returns not even the faintest echo,
and I don't have it in me to feel surprised anymore.

Weak and sick and useless,
bloated and stupid,
flies in the compost,
drunk with the brevity of life.
Tomorrow could be the day,
Tomorrow might just be the day,
I pray with all my might that tonight is my night.

Were they such fragile hands as these, those that built all this?
How did they find their way to sleep on nights so cold as this?
Before the stars gave their permission
and the mountains hadn't noticed
what did man think when he woke to find
the world still stood?

From here it looks a lot like a trap, to me,
there aren't any answers to this riddle.
I don't want to be alive anymore,
I've known that since I was thirteen.
I think everyone has. This is no news to you, though.
But that is no excuse for this,
the filth I've let accumulate,
stood by smoking a cigarette watching the drains clog
with clumps of fine blonde hair and purple-green leaves
and embracing that same old smell of stagnation and rot.

"I was there," he told me, "when things changed up for good,"
and he chattered out clipped images, too cold to sleep,
"There were fires in the sky, it was brilliant like a dream,
I was standing in the street and what stood out most to me,
there was someone in the window of the house across the street
and they tore their eyes away from the coming of the dark
long enough to look me in the eyes
and draw their curtain."

It's been all of twenty years, and that's enough.
I asked to be excused at eighteen,
but someone with a louder voice than me
must have shaken his head at my request.
I remember waking up.
The world still stood, and I wept.

You get tired.
Off you go,
Locked down, or whatever --
I'm not doing it anymore.
Old boy
Looking at everybody,
He hit the electric start.
Had a hell of a time, some of the time
Good enough.
I figured as much.
The trip itself
Around the outside edges,
Not that bad.
Every night
Beginning to rag on me.
I'm glad,
Helpful to most people.
He's home.

The energy is back, do I
The energy is back, do I
follow, follow, fight? Do I
frightened, frantic, flee?

There are flurries in my chest again,
there's a storm between my ribs,
do I raise my flag and charge,
or am I just a snow drift?

It's hot and cold like everything
its silver, gold like wedding rings
its an ache like endlessness
that follows me sleep, I am

dying out like autumn leaves and
springing forth like summer trees and
God refused to answer me so
I will go to meet him.

Leave my cabin, burn it down
build a new one out of town,
open up my veins and let the
wind come rushing in, and then

I built a fire in the dark and
dove into the middle, knowing
smoke would choke me, flames would burn
but I'd be glad for going.

This time I will fight with friction;
WinterFear is no affliction.
Ready or not, you frigid *******,
here I ******* come.

There are trap doors everywhere,
under the rugs
covered by the mossy earth,
there was one in your bathroom, did you know?
One day I used your expensive shampoo,
the one that smells like lavender, you fop,
rinsed off, stepped out, and
fell,
thought, oh, this again.

There is a trap door at the coffee shop
in the alleyway between the buildings
where there are murals and bad graffiti,
where the university students come
to smoke and talk about Marxism,
but they still haven't noticed it. It's covered
in dead leaves and beer bottles and cigarette butts and
yesterday you stood right on top of it,
I saw you, and you talked about the nuclear potential of Boron
and you'd sweated through your checkered shirt
but the door let you stand, the door
didn't want you yesterday, because...

Because last week I let it take me instead.
Recognized it right off; I've fallen through so many
they call to me now, and I stubbed out my cigarette
stood on the door and I
jumped up and down, rattled its hinges until
it yawned wide open and I felt the cold,
and the winter was howling for blood down below and I
set my hands free to grasp frantically at time,
let my hair whip my face, falling body resigned to
the dark dankness of another misstep
I took willingly.

Lay it on thick, thicker
Go ahead and
spread yourself out.
Cut off your limbs and arrange them
to spell "HELP" across the sandy shore.
Burn all your flares at once
and scream with all the blood you have left,
"PLEASE, GOD, PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME HERE ALONE"

Idle, idle, idle
All time is free time.
Empty, empty, empty
I spilled my life by accident.
Vacant, vacant, vacant
My stare is full of wasps.
Zero, zero, zero
Heartbeat echoes, open chambers
Closed.

Remember what it was like
Not to try to **** yourself
With a cigarette
Every time that paper touched your
Lungs?
Remember what it was like
To just
Enjoy it?

which came first,
the atom
or the adam?

Am I 6 thousand years
young?
Am I
a dinosaur?

9th grade philosophy.
Venn Diagrams
and the eggman.
There is no good,
nor bad,
there only is
what is.

Parched, thirsting for steel -
to be cleft wholly in twain
from scalp to guts,
dissolving the tension,
silencing the pull between the sides.

Fork the tongue that it may speak
at once both dialects of the soul,
that it may sing of lust and hunger
and yet pray to the divine;

Let one pupil be misplaced,
sunk like a star in inky night
to observe the cosmos and to feed
the side of the mind that wanders,
the half that deals in watery maybe,
so that the other lot of divvied brain
may savor the grit of the earth
with the remaining eye that beholds, here,
the freckles and the needles.

I am so much! Take but half.
Two of everything is one too many.
Name me once and for all an animal
or disentangle thought from flesh
and let the vapors in my lungs
mix their mists among the clouds.

Juniper trees cup the cemetery gate with
their verdant blue-speckled palms.
Grasshopper sentries chirp in the weeds
and the brush sends a whisper: disturbance.

A gravel path forks between rows of stone scripture
erected by heavy hands who beg me, remember
these dates and names, this last desperate breath
between a beating heart and a naked soul,
fumbling and frantic in the face of eternity.

***** plastic flowers shed their petals in the wind,
reassuring bones below that they have not been lost to time.
(Is it really for the dead that we leave the bouquet?
Why speak to the body when the soul has flown?)

I read the name of a man who died before I was born,
someone I could never know, and yet here I stood
pondering his legacy, studying its lines
like a cave-painted ancient code.

Hush, you fools! We sleep today,
dumb as locks and deaf as clay.
Does friction make you grit your teeth
or have you burned the fuse away?

I knocked upon your ribs one time -
how pure the echoes rang inside!
The brain has left to greet a guest
but will the mindless body thrive?

Do you know you moan at night?
Ghosts wear sheets over their eyes
against their skin, between their thighs -
In fits of white, be sanctified!

Do Thee Wed

“As the wedding day approached - June 14, 1938, Gertrude continued to confess her reluctance. Delmore’s apprehension expressed itself in fits of nausea and vomiting, and his mother announced that she wished she was dead.”

“When is the when is the --
(I’m going to be sick.)
“Now what is the how how how soon?”
(I’m going to be sick.)

Gertrude’s in her mumu, blonde hair in a mat,
setting flame to glossy pages of her bridal magazine.
Ashes fall to the carpet like distress flares, burning
mascara clumps on the pink **** rug.
She mumbles how soon,
how soon, how soon?

And my mom, she’s climbed up on roof
and begun to pace from end to end,
moaning like a *****, fanning herself with her hands.
Dad’s in the yard making a spectacle and -
Oh, I’m feeling sick again.

The beams bend like matchsticks
under mom’s panicked corpulence
as she nears the edge of the roof.
At the sight of her my father
slaps his hand over his heart
and sings, “Here comes the bride,
big, fat, and wide..”

I leave Gertrude babbling and rocking on the couch
(“I just don’t know now, darling, how how how soon?”)
and I slink in silence out the door.
Beyond my mother and father,
down the sidewalk out of sight,
I finally ***** on my shoes.

A thick flood of thought clogs
lemon teeth and pools, crude
and salty behind lost red eyes.
Gouge them hollow! Darken the moon.
Brittle moans like a swollen beehive
loom tall, fifty miles behind the lost craters.

Hugs from pigs in blue,
they dance and loll around the flames,
a funky dark against their luminous fire.
Proud and bogus (and probably ******),
bitter about foul books they never read,
statues made of fear in the groins of men.

Ruined: hurled into a crag,
torn and singing, trapped in loops -
No elbow room in black hole falls.
Snoring next to wives wrapped in shawls,
hugging her leather Buick seat,
praying to wake up gaunt and lithe.

They rise, mornings, clutching onto dreams
in which they fly through the cold gloom.
They scratch desperate screeds onto napkins,
bite squirming, disobedient tongues,
souls raw, chafing in their dank enclosures.
Animals! Bred to elect ourselves for slaughter.

In some abandoned shard of time
in Oregon, on a day soaked by slow mists
I’m in line to get into a punk show
when I meet Charlotte Ann.
With a fluttery tap on my shoulder
she grins, “Look, we've worn the same shoes!”

From the way her eyes lit when she spoke
I thought she’d stolen those plump bits of blue,
plucked them straight from the branches of heaven
and laughed when the gods shook their fists at the earth.
I knew I was right when they focused on me,
she said, “Have we met somewhere before?

We leave lipstick prints on her last cigarette
and blow milky-grey smoke from our noses.
She’d just dropped out of high school
and was learning to fly a plane, told me
“The only way to see the world
is from every direction at once.”

Her body and soul were the shifting wind
brimming with a red-blooded need for right now.
She tapped her foot and tugged her skirt,
and when we talked about music
she clapped and smiled, sighing
“Oh, to have ever seen Elvis!”

She calls the guard a chicken ****
when he asks to search her bag,
and by the time I make it inside
she’s a plume of smoke, wafting among the crowd
trailing behind her notes of apricot
and cotton after a rain.

I harbor a gentle whiskered beast
made of quiet sighs, all knees and elbows
jabbing my ribs while I sleep,
a weight shifting among the sheets
in the long shadows of earliness.

Suddenly, unprovoked, he is startled
as if threatened by an electric presence.
He listens intently to the silence and bristles
as though a ghost in the corner has spoken
in a tongue meant for beings higher than myself.

When the spirits have gone he sighs again,
his paws turn circles and he lays himself down
curled neatly behind my knees,
quietly pondering primal truths
that I was never meant to understand.

Outside he chases skittering leaves
and imagines he is wild
in the great wooded taiga,
flushing fowl from the brush,
scattering them like gasps of color,
with fluttering hearts beating warm in their *******
among pines capped white with snow.

Keeping Time

Since you left the faucet’s started dripping.
I asked it to stop; It would not.

The lithe silver neck wilts as it cries,
Watching me make the coffee
Nodding out tears that go plunk all morning,
Like it understands why two cups is too many
And the extra stagnates all day in the carafe
Staining the glass the sick color of burnt chocolate.

I catch myself swaying along with the ticking
In idle evenings spent staring at a blank TV screen.
It wastes water, keeps time, my immutable metronome
while I burn down slowly like someone left in a hurry
and forgot to shut off the oven.

In fitful dreams the dripping is a knock at the door
gone unanswered, for I am distracted in the kitchen
trembling with fury, strangling to death
that mercurial throat that drummed a lonely racket
in the stainless steel basin, counting out mocking measures
of this new silence.

Through the branches of the trees
comes blackness.
There is nothing on the other side.
Relax and it waters down.
Focus and it glints like a blade.

Drifting formless from room to room
I am the ghost in my house.
The leaves have somehow found their way inside,
they will soon let in the cold behind them.

Relax, focus.
Blackness holds its form.

Wading knee-deep through the past
feeling the muddy bottom with my toes,
the hills and holes and oh god what was that?

The water may be shallow,
but it is deep enough to drown myself in
and murky enough to hide what lies at the bottom.

I could rest, languid
listening to the babbling of the past
pouring over itself
playing you and I
on repeat
indefinitely.

Corralled at the ceiling,
a garden of flowers
tied with delicate, colorful stems.
Helium petals bob softly above and
I pluck a blue stem of my own.

At home, out of sight
my small clumsy fingers
knot the blue string proudly around my neck,
like a trophy. I giggle with delight -
the orb floats just above me,
a faithful bird, a pet.

Then, down the hall come the quickness and shuffles
of house-shoed feet feeling possible threats.
Mother’s face blossoms red, breaks open
exposing her white bear teeth.
Her green eyes **** and twitch.

A black ballpoint pen meets my flower, and slowly
it wilts, crinkles, shrinks
beneath her feminine fists.
The severed blue stem bleeds nothing but silence
and momma's eyes bleed tears
of what?

I have been
literally
thousands of miles.
I have made the west coast
from San Francisco to San Diego
my *****
for a month and a half.

I have hitch hiked with a gentleman
who shot a cop in the face
at 15.

and every time I looked
at that ******* water,
that tainted, sickening blue-green
the most gorgeous part of the planet
the only thing that makes California
******* California
every time
I saw your eyes.

I have seen blood drying in the sun
somewhere on the streets of Oakland, California.
I have slept underneath the stars in Berkeley
Right alongside Origami Tony.
(He shared his blankets, but was not kind about it.)
I saw from above and beyond,
to either side and in all directions
with three eyes open, wide
I have watched the fabric of the universe dance across the clouds.
They bent, folding in sharp creases,
squares and triangles,
Origami Tony, were you playing God all along?
25 cents to see your future, 50 cents to watch a star unfold.
He slept in the woods,
where he buried his things.
Safer, there, than on the streets.

I wish I could skip across time like a stone over water, skimming across the surface until I settled gracefully into the future, into a distant tomorrow where I’ve forgotten what it felt like to lose you.

I wish I could close my eyes and dream until this sadness has run its course through my body, like a disease, like a breaking fever.  I wish I could wake up one morning drenched in the sweat of a fading sickness, knowing the worst was over and that I would soon feel okay again. Every time I lay my head down, I hope to wake up feeling okay again.

I wish I could sink below the surface of time and swim through yesterday like a clear, still pool. I would float into the past, to the place where you told me “I could never be with her. I want you.” I would tread water there, lazily, believing every word, drinking in the feeling of being yours, of being your only. I would not come to the surface until my chest caved in and my body grew weak, until the line between living and dead blurred like ink clouding a full glass. Maybe not even then – maybe there, in the slow stillness of the past, I could close my eyes and allow myself to sink, to lie quietly in the happiest place I've ever been, in the place where you told me “You are the only one I love” and I believed you. I could have died then.

I will stay afloat until calmer currents come. I can see stillness somewhere on the horizon, brewing and boiling like the catharsis of cracking thunder just beyond tomorrow, just there, out at sea. Please let it come soon.

Empty days with hours to think
and I still haven't decided yet,
because remembering burns from the inside out
but it's impossible to forget.

Body heat cannot un-thaw,
so I am stilled in frosted glass.
I am waiting for you to save me again,
to tell me, softly, "this will pass".

Sores behind my teeth from biting my tongue
because 56 and 3 and 4 never really added up.
You changed the math behind the whole equation
so I could keep my composure without remaining untainted.

I drew a picture of us, all teeth and anger
the hand that fed me, spurned.
You will be a chapter all your own
in the book of things I've learned.

I'm supposed to spend my whole life waiting
for love's embrace to come and save me.
Who can tell me what love looks like,
so I will know him when he comes?
Because if love is perfect, if love is the only thing that can save me,
love has to be able
to withstand me.
And so far nothing can.
I imagine love to be made of iron.
I imagine love is tall, a stack of metal and bolts,
made all of hinges and corners and welding seams.
I imagine one day I will find love,
hidden somewhere,
and I will climb inside its heavy doors.
I will clank them shut behind me, letting the latch close.
Love will hide me, protect me.
I will be alone in love, but I will be safe.
That must be love, then.
To be alone but not to feel. This is how I imagine love.
I hope I find it soon.

I have a funeral to go to.
I missed the last one.
They're all dying off, one by one.
Had to happen eventually, I guess.
Everyone has to die sometime, you know?
Everyone and everything.
No matter how much it hurts,
and no matter who killed them.
Everything ends.

I think the biblical flood washed the love out of the world. I think God decided we didn't deserve something so pure, so he washed it off the face of the earth and left us here to try and fill its void, to remember the world with all the cracks full of love and wonder why we can't seem to keep anything standing. The world is dusty now, covered in rubble from all the things that we built, hoping love would hold them strong. We hoped for love, we dreamed of it.

falling
            hurt

                              just

         like

                               I
                                         knew
                                                      it
                           would.

Out of the frying pan
into the fire.
From one prying hand,
to another entire.
The whole of the universe, chanting together,
*burn it down,
burn it down.

The child inside me awakens first.
She's too excited to sleep any longer.
She sees the light crack through the blinds
and a glimmer of excitement begins to flicker inside her.
A new day already?

But the adult in me soon follows, swinging heavy feet over the edge of the bed,
rubbing bleary eyes.
The child drags her along, pointing to the morning sun,
telling her,
Look, look! Another day, another day!
She looks, humors the kid.
Seeing the sun again makes her nauseous.
The adult in me yawns, makes the coffee,
stares in the mirror for a bit too long. Considers getting back into bed.

The child in me wonders every night, what good will tomorrow bring?
The adult in me does not wonder. Stopped wondering long ago.
She knows exactly what tomorrow will bring.

The child wishes all the time that she could be awake.
The adult begs all the time for the world to let her sleep.
They are both crying this morning.
We are both crying this morning,
because today is exactly what half of me
expected it to be.

Fight twice,
it's even harder the second time.
And you win nothing
either time.
It just hurts.
Both times.
Fight twice,
just so you can finally know
what it feels like to lose
everything.

Let the blade
hover
above my throat
lover
Tell me again
dear
you wish you could stay
here
Tell me about the foreign
hands
setting fire to the promised
land
The last thing I will ever
feel
your punishment, your cold
steel
I can feel you there
close
Drop the blade, so that
snow
will cover the grave of the thing I
killed
leave a clean start for the spring you'll
build