He had bent fingers
She said they were the most beautiful hands she had ever seen.

He said they were broken
She loved that they were broken

From across the bar she tapped the mouth of the glass
He poured more in
She put her lips on its hard edges
Planted firmly against the cushions of her mouth,
From its bittered gates she spoke,

I’m old you know.
I know, he said.

Calloused lilies sprout into the cold air
shaking off their scales.

A moment of clarity, before they give birth again.
mercurial joy.
I find myself asking questions from letters,
gluing them into hexes upon myself

growing sentences and growing light
that hides and shivers and runs
before it can fully glow.

My stars prevail.
oh, that fleeting warmth,
I want to melt within the safety of the universe
and inhale the light

so close to the tips of my fingers
ever tipping
further away

A glimmer in the eye of god shown down

A perplexed bourbon laugh
my head on your sternum
felt like
home


You stared.
I stared back.

Torrid, you.

Shaking, blended...
I saw us. I saw me in your hands.

Sinking into this turning glass, I shiver.

deafening entrapment
bursting wings
through tight and suffocating epithelium
born into a beating prison
barred and trapped
clawing crying
out
if only these tears could melt through my body and sweep onto the floor like over filled bath water
to
sink into the earth
   where the turning ceases.
poached wings and a chalk outline
how can you fly without wings?
weighty
lascivious
odious perfection

I have this image of you and me tucked into the most precious corner of my mind. There we are, you with your seraphic face and dancing mind, me, round and brunette, more like my father with Japanese eyes and suffocating hesitation weaved into my DNA, a young five year old grasping your books in my hands.

That is how it began.

The same books I would read as years passed on. The books that watched from afar as everything changed. Books with dog eared pages, pencilled in words of "remember this" or scribbled lines and stars of inspiration, burnt pages from your cigarettes, warped font and wrinkled pages from your tears, my tears, my sisters tears. The tears that fell and fell until the three of us were drowning in that salty anthropomorphic ocean that started out a drop of pure rain. And on your lap, holding us to you, you told us how you built a boat to carry us toward some hopeful light house with twinkling lights and old wrinkled men in rain boots that would pull us to shore. When all along your heart was never our compass, we were drowning in your being. clinging to books in your library of the sea. tearing pages off in desperation.

planted in the sand soaked water,
inhaling the ocean into spongiform lungs
she delves

rusty spider leg fingers graze the keyboard
red dust and cracking joints
clip each letter and space
a dance of bones on hard plastic
pressing out each thought

how I wish to be the ocean,
to have already poured out each drop
of sweat
of tears
captured whole
an entity of its own
contained in freedom

curling smoke
           consumes fingertips
her sinking cranium  

an intent to glue

a beguiling shattered mirror.

she inhales splinters


in a snow globe of dust.

you're in the kitchen again
making coffee in the dark

grinding beans, grinding teeth
dark and bitter cups
cracked and cut

like her mind

that brilliant fogged mind

with fingers extended  
she grasps onto shards of glass
carving out
carving in
plummeting spurting crimson

crushing eggshells, the dusty pink ballerina pirouettes through space,
cobwebs are her constellations, candlelight her sun

in motion, thoughts quelled,
surrounded by sensation, she can feel.
each raw exhale a release
aching muscles tensed with bliss

her mind is quiet,
no longer numb,
she is free.

there's something about waking up before the world opens it's eyes
stepping out the door,
the resonance of each tapping footstep in a silent world
whispering that you are alone.

the world is floating on a continuous drift of sleep

and you are simply a dream

I am slowly learning that
perception of the self is a foggy image indeed
and that way we see, more or less,

is a distorted retinal image

created by
whispering synapses
that do not always tell the truth

I have this inescapable question mark stamped right on my forehead.

of glaring honesty.

I feel that it is so obvious and etched into my being
that everyone I encounter can see it
and that I have to coat it with whipped cream and bubbles.

As if I am a children's Birthday party.





weeeeee.

bubbles.

**** it.

sandy toes and muddled mind, piano notes echo through the waves
clasped hands and closed eyes, pirouetting feathers hold my gaze.
fallen down, gasping purple lilacs,
tactfully joining fragments,
once again
to create something original
                            an ever constant evolution of the soul.

I'm sitting here
drinking red wine
and feeling sorry for myself

I got a parking ticket.
(for the fourth time)

I'm feeling sorry for myself

when there are people that
are in utter dispair and alone
that do not have food
or shelter, or love.
They are utterly alone.

And I
am feeling sorry for myself
over a parking ticket.

pensively tipping, pentameter heart beats shimmer in my chest
inches from that corner of silence and
seconds from that blissful convergence  
bobbing on this current of
meteoric, delicious waves
of sterling lucidity.
I am falling
and,

blatantly,
I love it.

cobwebbed coffee mind, my cacophonous current,
oh, rusty heart you have played too long,
again to fall down the rabbit hole
in search of that brassy circumference
that governs your life and every breath that escapes your lips
propelled into the deep, dilation of your synaptic being.

tickled pink or tickled red,
lay me on the desk and read me like a novel
spike my coffee with your lips
and the tips
of your fingers on
the small of my back
where you can trace the words that no one can hear
but only I can feel
sinking into my skin
like raven words fluttering onto paper.

swelling mahogany love
no longer tinged red,
from this gaping solitude. 

take grasp of my soul in your hands and lift it,
oh lift it please,
because this grave it has sunk into is dark indeed.

hold me to your chest, emanate and pure,
foreign to ravenous hands that claw at me
and pull me apart, tearing bits and pieces,
pieces and bits
of everything I am.
 
spinning, swirling
break the glass and pluck the hands from their bed of time
maybe then they will cease to tick.

rather to hear the persistent ticking of metallic hands
than abounding silence.

***** windows open to frigid air,
hard wooden floors, cold black coffee,
mud caked on sneakers, filmy cobwebs lacing corners,
senescent Anne Beattie novels with yellowing pages,
stacks of mail, maybe if unopened will disappear,
dishes upon dishes, a pyramid toward the sky,
a dead Christmas tree,
no longer effervescent,
tinged grey,
incongruously picturesque.

1
the books are stacked one upon the other.
they look as though even a whisper of a breeze
could send them tumbling to the ground,
like birds being shot from the sky.

2
you say that when you look at me
you see blank pages you wish to let your ink sink into.
each flimsy page soaking up pigment.
ink so deep and dark,
like the sky before a storm.

3
does fragility amuse you?
life, a series of tumultuous waves,
attempting to open the darkest of eyes,
even yours
to view the sapphire ocean
that will put flickers of light
back into the tips of your fingers.

4
wake up!
when you touch, really touch.
when you breathe, really breathe.
I know this existence is melancholy,
but just open your eyes.
If you look,
just outside your window,
you can see a hawk floating on the wind.

Hands pressed against the cold glass window,
strange, I can feel the drops of rain
falling on the other side.

what would it feel like to always see in yellow?

dancing in tumultuous pigment…
yellow to green
green to
blue
blue into

black.

I have sunk into the darkness
just as canvas soaks up paint
to touch the stygian world  
with hollyhock eyes and dusty fingers.

A tunnel of black, and I can’t seem to find a flashlight.
(How can you possibly persist when you cannot see?)

blinking violet pearls that dance beneath my eyelids,

I tumble
to swim in yellow.

Such a pleasant daffodil lens.