I’ve planted a garden of words in these pages
and plucked a few flowers for you.  

They are awkward and tiny; I only hoped
to make them right when they reeled
          drunkenly off my tongue.  
My mouth makes them ugly, brutish, plain…
speech that stains the air.  And I hope
for my mind to grow roots in yours
and make its home
together with you;
there will be time for every strange, beautiful thought.

It is not my favorite book
but it reminds me of things prickly
          and those things ***** my mind
          with flung dreams and stars.  

Do you think?  

I think, though I am
a paper cut-out doll pasted into
the clothes I’m wearing and scribbled over with inky stars,
smeared curlicues on the back of one hand.

My teeth feel funny to-day.  
They will rise up straight
like the hackles of a dog and
warn away people
of an anxious nature who flutter
with worried hands by the door.

I am not a good person.  I will not be good,
cannot ever be good, she who bleeds
midnight scribbles to an alcohol-stained notebook.  

I once had a dream
my greedy mouth

ate cement from a soft-serve machine.  

It cracked down my throat.  

I held jagged mirror pieces in my clenched fist.  

It squeezed blood from my hands and I ate that too.

The smoke curled in my yawning mouth
          and I choked.  I am clouding my lungs
and surely the poison is flowing

freely through each blue vein; this is merely damage control.  

It is not beautiful
or romantic
or tragic, or any of that horseshit.
It is business and impersonal and clinical.  
It is the art of dying slowly but it is not for display.

There were words---
          scribbled on your skin in blue pen
they looked angry and bruising; they sulked
under the sleeve of your loose black shirt.  

I drew lightning bolts on my notes
but the lightning flashed darker
in your eyes.  I drew clouds
          and raindrops
and they blurred from the storm
that broke across my face.  

Your ink makes me cry.

Coffeebooze does little
but make one shivery and shaky
          and full of regrets.  I believe,

after a long day of dizzying uncertainty
and tapping fingers,
that I am sober.