your eyes are red like youve been crying but i know youve just been
trying to pour the ocean into your blown pupils.
you told me they were so dark because they were
burned from all the salt you rubbed into them.
you told me they were wide to find the
untouched valleys inside me,
virginal land, unsullied by
the eyes of man.
ha.
ha.
honestly,
i wish i could say theres so much more to me left undiscovered,
unknown by all those who  claimed to love me but, no, they
always discover the same
******* things
that arent even ******* there.
you discover that i'm broken,
a delicate flower of a poet,
whose feelings are gentle eggshells crushed by the hand of life.
discover depths of emotion safeguarded by an iron shell,
"discover" that i just want to be loved, 
is this some sort of sick ******* joke.
im not a ******* eggshell, im not ******* broken,
life hasnt shattered me. life will not shatter me. life has given me calluses hard as stone.
i will live to be old and crooked and sagging,
wearing a full suit of armor,
i will die old and withered.
when emotion catches in my throat,
i rip it out like multicolored scarves,
like a magic trick.
just because i dont choke you with the fabric
doesnt make it any less real.
i dont just want to be loved. i dont need
your love. youre not saving me when you look at me like
your favorite broken doll.
i don't just want to be loved.
i am already loved. i am overflowing with the love i have received,
i am full to the brim, my cup runneth over, i dont need you.
i don't just want to be loved. do you know what i want?
i want you to look at me and not see
the living embodiment of a metaphor,
a walking love poem, a verse in a poem you memorized and mimicked
instead of writing your own,
i could rip your lungs out through your mouth, i dont think you realize
what my body is capable of,
even if my mind is weak.
if i could stop thinking youd be dead on the floor
before i took a ******* breath.
i am not for you.
i am not writing for you,
i am writing to remember how to fall asleep without dreaming about soulmates-turned-strangers
and friends pulling out my teeth.
i am not dreaming for you.
i am not bleeding for you.
i am not for you.
i am not yours.

it is february, and outside it is twelve degrees.
in winters past,
you dragged me to the shore every day to see if this time,
the ocean froze, and we could
walk away from here together.
sometimes you stood in the water for hours.
[but that was long ago.
thats in the past, waiting to be forgotten.]
it is february, and this morning you asked when it would end.
it's been seven thousand days,
you told me it gets better in time. how much time do i have to give?
you threw out every lock in your home.
you bent to kiss the bonfire goodbye and your hair caught the flame like
a hand catching a moth, and now
every room is full of candles pressed wick-to-wick,
melted wax hardening on the floor like cooling lava,
or congealing blood.
aren’t you sick of being somewhere between a natural disaster
and an emergency room tragedy?
aren't you tired of being sad all the time?
arent you sick of wearing the scent of burnt hair like perfume?
aren't you tired of crushed wings in your fist and careless,
accidental strength?
[or perhaps this is your dream, god knows
i've had stranger.]
maybe you always wanted to be a terribly sad monster,
a giant with the blood of a thousand bulls,
a titan preparing to birth
the gods.
picking at the skin 'round your nails till you bleed. broken teeth
embedded in the wood of the stairs.
you wanted to be zeus,
wisdom bursting from your skull like a bullet,
daughters like grey matter,
but you're just a labyrinth.
you're nothing but a prison,
a maze with a monster in the middle,
swallowing children and thread.
were you made for the minotaur or was it born for you?
you've been gathering sickness like moss on cave walls.
you've been pulling up the tiles from the bathroom floor.
last night's dew froze and clothed the stairs in ice.
there's a body floating in the bathtub and you promise it isnt mine
[i don’t know if i believe you].
you are undoing every knot i tied to keep myself together,
you are looking for anything in me to prove that i care. i do, i love you,
i love you like an ox, i love you like a child,
i am bursting with the lymph of every mother in my bloodline and i care for you like my own, but
in your mouth,
"loving" and "mother" don't fit together right.
a mother is someone who has too many monsters in her bed to fight the ones under yours,
"motherhood" is a synonym for "natural disaster,"
and all you can do is try to survive.
at this point i'm inclined to agree.
you make me feel like my womb is full of crude oil
and the distal phalanges of both your hands.
ive been sleeping with statues and dreaming about metal bones.
the only love you know is the kind where your clothes crumple on the floor.
you're always finding someone new to be the minotaur in your heart.
you don’t want theseus to find his way,
trailing thread as he traces mossy walls,
kicking bones aside.
when the minotaur dies,
you'll be nothing but a cave.
you already feel hollow when it sleeps, you say i don’t know if if you’re my minotaur
or another sacrifice.
i say [i don’t know if i’m your friend or
the closest thing to a mother
you’ve ever had.]
you have broken every tile.
you have cleaned the mirror countless times but your reflection still shows.
drink some water. wash your passageways with floods,
you don't need the bones of every failed theseus
littering your veins.
i can teach you to live with a minotaur like
a bezoar in your stomach.

i knew from a young age nothing could love me.
i knew when everything began,
when elemental dust condensed into planets,
when life fought itself into existence
in the waters of a cooling world,
when the first being exulted in being
and i exulted too
and crushed it for daring to live.
watched it decompose in my palm.
rotted roses by plucking them.
i knew from a young age
that nothing survived my touch,
that nothing lived in my hands -

nothing’s the only thing
i’ve ever held without killing.

so see, we’re meant to be,
you and i,
nothing boy –

let me hold you close cause i can’t rot you through,
you with your lack of self
and meaning,
you with your infinite void,
impenetrable ether.
see, we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,
let me swim in your vacancy and you,
you can be my new universe
and nothing will be my everything:
i’ll worship you like an absent father
and love you like an atheist’s god.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,

i would **** 2000 statues to bring you to me.
i would slaughter a family of worms
to be crushed in your black hole.

i crushed the stars between my thighs,
left the triturated mess
like a promise to the world.
i crushed the stars between my thighs,
but i’ll be so careful with you,
nothing boy.
so gentle you won’t even know i’m there,
like a ghost sighing over your mouth.
so careful you won’t notice me
making my nest in your empty chest,
breathing for you,
pulling air to pool in your lungs.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy:
i complete you
and you empty me.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,
nothing doesn’t rot -
my gangrene heart can’t touch yours,
pure as it is,
undefiled,
unadulterated,
a vacuum of a heart as empty as an unfilled grave.

they say
there’s a black hole at the center of every galaxy,
in the center of a ring of stars
light drawn to the dark.
they say there’s a black hole at the center
and if they’re right
you’re the last good thing about this galaxy.
stars swarm round you like flies, nothing boy,
you who are made of their
dead brothers,
who collapsed into themselves with the weight of existence,
who imploded with the heat of their desire for you,
who fed their light to your blackness,
nothing boy.
you are made of dead stars and of nothing at all.
you are
celestial corpses
and nihilism distilled.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy.
you’re corpses and i’m rot.
you’re nothing and i’m
the final destination
the last stop for sorry living creatures,
pitiful things that can’t quite
delete themselves,
can’t quite reach you
so i embrace them and soothe their sobs.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,
i can hold you for more than a few
pitiful sobbing seconds.
i can hold you forever if you let me.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy.

i killed the world but you remain.
i crushed the galaxy between my thighs,
and you, impassive,
pulled the triturated mess into your event horizon.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,

you have no breaths to steal
but i’ll give you all i’ve plundered.
i’ll give you every last breath, last word, last heartbeat,
and you can empty me like
a bottle of cheap wine.
see we’re meant to be –

nothing boy and gangrene girl,
a love story for fatalists
and nihilists alike.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy,
starcorpse creature, nietzsche’s son.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy -
nothing never rots
nothing never dies
nothing won’t decompose
in my arms.
see we’re meant to be,
nothing boy.
let me hold you close-

you’re the one thing i can’t break.

just addicted to lovelessness,
i guess,
addicted to the feeling of something that could be
a distant cousin of loss,
but can’t be loss when it wasn’t there to begin with.
a cousin of loss and brother of bereavement,
a lexiconical gap
in the english maw,
a space where the definition slipped out
but the word never grew in.
a gap where a word should be,
a word meaning missing something you never had,
losing something that was never yours,
grieving for something that never looked your way
or graced you with its pain.
insomnia of the soul,
unable or unwilling to droop into the catatonic stupor
of love,
until my eyes ache with open,
and my heart aches with empty
and just beautiful aches and pains,
like stiff joints filled with sterling silver
or arthritic necklace clasps.
my tongue is tin because the argentine
is in my hands,
silver in the space between the carpals,
oozing precious metals
onto the page.
writing in second-best so that it’ll stay.
writing second-rate love letters
and pretending they’re real,
like the words i moan mean something other than
hello
i’m lonely
who are you?
like i’m not the girl who cried love
because the village had already learned
that wolves are lies,
and vice versa.
because faking it has always been my favorite pastime.
i’ll write love poems forever,
keep feeding my addiction for as long as it stays,
let my loveless track marks bloom cantankerous sores
on my ribs.
while i’m young
i’ll write poems of arthritis and weakness
and death,
because oh now i am immortal
invulnerable and omnipotent,
but when my bones are brittle and my flesh is loose
and my spine makes me bow to the earth,
my poems will be of life and strength
and god
because darkness is only beautiful when it isn’t
an imminent looming
future.
when i know i may die tomorrow,
i will write of bluejays
and of a love that never found me,
though it knocked on all the doors and called all the numbers,
waited on my porch while i hid in the closet,
nursing my ache
trying to fill a lexiconical gap
with bukowski
and insomnia.
supersaturated with emptiness
because all the words in the dictionary
can’t make up for the one that’s missing.
it changed the locks when it came,
shutting me out of my skull,
taking residence in my chest
and growing larger with each slow breath.
every huff of oxygen fed my
resident,
every injection of
late nights spent just writing,
every pill popped -
the lies that went down better
if i said them with a gulp of gin.
so my lovelessness cracked my ribs as it grew,
replaced my marrow with sterling silver
and i watched it happen like
a glacier devouring a desert
because i knew i would never survive loving something.
deserts were never made to run bounteous
with water.
just addicted to lovelessness,
i guess.
addicted to silver joints
and words that don’t exist.

her mouth was sandpaper.

her mouth was sandpaper
and she spoke like
a smooth surface,
words scraped into fluidity
like a wooden sphere,
turned over behind teeth ‘til all friction
is lost.
she spoke like the walls of a birdhouse
in the room of a dead carpenter:
pretty unassembled things.

her mouth was sandpaper
and every kiss chafed,
rubbing raw my lips
and tongue
crafting with each touch
drawing blood like
juice from an apple,
like sap
from wood already cut from the tree.

her mouth was sandpaper
and she told me
i bite my lips,
rip at
the inside of my mouth,
cannibalize myself cell
by cell.
bone saws in her mouth.
the only difference between teeth of jaws
and saws
is mercy
(and she swallowed her mercy long ago).

her mouth was sandpaper
and she spoke like a carpenter’s hands:
rough palms,
tough pads,
a utilitarian artist
a crafter of dead flesh.
a mortician for dryads
and kodama.
the art and the artist
in lips
tongue
and teeth.

her mouth was sandpaper
and i brought mine to hers
again and again,
her bitten-rough lips
opening like doors to
purgatory.
less entrapment than addiction -
returning once more to nails and hammers,
hell’s blacksmiths below
heaven’s painters above.
coming back home
to the space between,
to bone saws
and a carpenter’s hands.

her mouth was sandpaper
and her voice was carpentry,
her teeth bone saws
her words
birdhouse walls.
her mouth was purgatory
but her hands
were hands.

her mouth was sandpaper.
i held her hand
and chafed my lips raw.

you told me
you knew
we would bring each other down.
you told me the world was cold
and we would drown in frozen lakes together,
when hypothermia turns to terminal burrowing,
we could burrow within each other.
you told me i would **** you.
after that,
i spent 5 hours in the shower boiling off my skin.
you and i
will not sink in tandem, you and i will not
fall apart in unison,
clasping hands.
i am not your personal suicide pill.
i am not your romantic,
selfless partner
in helpless self-destruction,
you're talking like we'll die tomorrow but i have plans to live a while yet,
if you jump from lover's leap
then you will fall alone.
i think you think
i love you.
i think you think i value
your voice
more than the voice of my thoughts.
it is december and the sun is too bright
to look anywhere
but your feet.
it is december and you're waxing poetic
about the boy who broke his neck
falling in the forest at night.
you look me in the eyes like you're trying
to crawl through my cornea.
you make eye contact an act of violence.
[do you
dream about me?]
you ask,
you're trying to be poetic.
i don't tell you about when i dreamed
you snapped your neck
while we walked in the forest,
and i left quickly,
quietly,
lived peaceful and alone.
i don't tell you about when i dreamed you moved on,
or that reoccurring dream where you spread my legs so far,
they snap out of the sockets.
i tell you i don't dream.
i tell you i don't sleep.
i tell you
i wear boxing gloves to church
but jesus never shows, and really,
i shoulda known he'd run from this fight too.
i tell you
i wear boxing gloves to bed but i just end up
chewing on the laces,
boxer's fractures never visited me.
bar room fractures on the nightstand.
[i dream about you,]
you say,
and i take another hit.
you've been in my air for six months.
under my skin for five,
and it's been three months
since you stitched our veins together.
sometimes,
i fall asleep wearing your scarf
and dream of garrotes that smell like you,
dream of strangulation
and bruises on my throat.  
i don't love you like a motive.
you don't love me like a person.
you told me i had a clean heart,
you told me i was an innocent soul,
you told me you would corrupt me, don't
flatter yourself.
your touch doesn't have the power
to make me sick.
only i can do that to myself.
i'm not a virginal sacrificial saint
for you to build altars to.
lets see if we can cut our hearts out with our fingernails.
i bet that they'll look just the same:
****** and red.
the same size as our clenched fists,
guess it's not your fault
you never learned the difference between the two,
you keep trying to fight with aorta and arteries
while my knuckles bruise your gut.
here:
i taped my hands and i'll tape yours too.
this will be a fair fight-
don't break your wrist
when you break my nose.
i'll teach you i'm more solid than a saint.
i'll teach you i am bile and spit and ****.
i'll teach you to love me human
or not at all.

Can't focus
Can't cope
Thoughts blow your mind
A gun blows mine