[Grayscale breath on a fluid...]
Grayscale breath on a fluid
field, with lo-fi
                 rainpatter—petrol blue—, . . .

She tries to turn
her thoughts into pictures
I just simply put
mine into words
Hers is all in color
Mine's a grayscale world
It's understandable why
you would choose a rainbow like her
Instead of the writer in me
But please let me go
I'm no longer her anymore
I'm no longer the artist
I yearned to be

I used to think that all of them were just bodies. She-figures, they came and went, facilitating infinite happiness and following with hellacious heartbreak, aorta explosions galore. They pass. I stay. She goes. I remain. We all take a trip, but she falls asleep while I follow the road, I sing the song, make the lyrics up as the 101 heads West, and I careen against the Pacific. I see silvery-white plumes of whale breaths spouting, they break the rocks of my rock and roll. When the levee breaks, we'll have no place to go- I'm going back to Chicago.

California. Line 5. Verse 1. She is born in Arkansas, in Denver, in New York City, in the back of a taxi cab, her parents waiting for a table at Earth Cafe, 1989. There are concerts, balconies, elevator shafts, and on benches. The gain rises, the volume up and up and up, I offer her a cigarette, I ask her if she likes my dress, I show up with two palms full of a flame, and I say hello. Browsing in high-definition, the water is warm, my feet are planted and I have everywhere to go. Classical emporium of light fill me with ease, greatness, and belief. She asks me if I'm gay. Every great confusion can be proven to be fortuitous with enough time on hand. I kiss in cars, in bathrooms, and barrooms, in hallways, on staircases, on beds, church steps, and legs. I touched a leg, ran my fingers through her hair, my thumbs curved to the height of two ears alongside a size B head. I love art *****. i burn candles, and I swirl the wax around until the walls wear masks of white. I check-in to a hotel. I stop to buy wild flowers on the side of the road, or to climb down a ravine, we open a page into an enormous patch of strawberries, wind-surfers, and the golden Palo Alto beaches. I am in Bronzeville, on my way to Bridgeport, I am riding the train, browsing magazines, and singing new songs in my head. My lips are wet with excitement and the musings of the Modern Art Museum and the gift of a first kiss; behind the statue on Balcony 2, near the drinking fountain, the Eames couch, and two lips meeting anew. Bravery in twos.

Chapter 1, Verse 2. The chorus is large and exciting. New plastic shining coats. Smocks patterned with the Random House children's stories that we played with as children. We didn't wear gloves, or hats, or pants, or our hearts on our sleeves. I was up to my knees in hormones and very persuasive. My fifth birthday was at the Nature Center, you chased me into the boys' bathroom and kissed me with your wet and four year old lips in the second stall from the door. I eased up maybe 2% since then. The speakers are a little bit fuzzy, it's like listening to the spit of someone's tongue cascade the roof of their mouth while they pronounce the British consonants of the 90s. Said and done and saving space.

I am saving up for Grace. A crush in the mid 2000s, black hair, long legs, and the only brunette for a decade before or after. We played doctor, with the electric scalpel we turned our noses red with Christmas time South American powders. A safe word for an enemy, the sun for an enemy too. You bolted out and took my early Jimi Hendrix Best Of compact disc case too. While we're at it, you took my Michael Jackson cassettes as well. I go mid-range, think Kiri Te Kanawa in the whispers of E.T.'s Elliot. Stuffed-animal closet party for seven minutes in heaven. Your family came with butlers while mine came with over-educated storage. A blue borage sky in the intestines of life, a splinter in the shanty-town of invincible daily struggles- both of us were born again in O'Hare Airport's Parking Level D. Too many nonsensical arguments in two-tone grayscale ripping open the packaging of a course about trysting in your twenties.

Your stomach's history is overpowering. It is temperamental, mettled by spirits and sleepless nights, borborygmus, wambles, and shades of nervousness you were never comfortable speaking openly about. The history of your ****** was privatized, in options and unedited films shot over and over candidly by a mini DV desk camera, nine months to read you wrong to weep in strong wintry walks back and forth from The Buckingham to the Dwight Lofts, Room 408 without a view. All of your secrets in a little miniature of a notebook, bright cerise red. You captured teardrops in medicinal jars meant for syringes. You tied strings to your fingers, named your field mouse Ginger, and introduced your mother as Lady Darling. Captain with stingray skin, the hide of Ferris Bueller with the coattails of James Bond, dusted with daisy pollen, and clearly weakness. You ate me like bitter herbs on Thursdays, and like every other woman I've ever met, on Tuesdays you always kept me waiting.

I have wings for everything. Yellow wings for a woman in a yellow dress, Red, White, and Green wings for Bernice from Mexico City, Purple wings for  Mrs. Doolittle the doctor who worked at Taco Bell, the Jamaican priestess who was traveling through Venice Italy- we smoked hash with the grandchild of James Joyce on the Northern pier against the aurulent statues of Apollo and Zeus, Cupids' collection of malevolent tricks, SleepingB Beauty's rebuttal in fending off GHB attackers, my two dear friends who were kidnapped in clothes, abandoned in the ****, and only remember eating chocolate donuts with sprinkles and the bruises and dirt on the insides of their thighs. Nothing clever. Nothing extraordinary. Everything sentimental, built to withstand soot, sourness, and early female bravado.

You know how to play the piano so you've said, but i only have the CD you gave me to prove it. I do have evidence of your addiction to men and *******. I have your collection of dresses with tags still on them (but every woman has some of those), there is the post office box in Kauai, the Halloween card from last November and the two videos I have stored on an external drive in a nightstand adjacent to the foot of my bed. You sleep atrociously, talk too quickly, and **** like your father abandoned you when you were five. Your talent for taking photographs is like your skill-set for playing the piano, but I don't have the CD to prove it. You don't believe in social media, social consistency, friendships, or hephalumps and woozels- with the exception of the classes we shared together in college, I've never seen you outside of the most glamorous of fashion. You hate flats, hats, and white wine, and for as sad as you can seem to be at times, I've only had you cry on me once. While we were on the phone, three days after your mother hung herself. That's when I last left California, and I haven't been back yet.

I love a Kristine, but once a Britni, a Brandi, a Joni, a Tina, Kristina, Kirsten, Kristen, and a Katherine and Kathryn too. I know rock stars who are my dearest friends, enemies who I share excellent taste in music with, and parents who've always had my back but show it in lashings of the tongue and of the belt. It's been two years and three states since I was two sizes smaller than I am now. I've never considered the possibility that I was the main character and not the supporting actor, but due to recent developments in antipathy and aesthete, reevaluation, and retrospective nostalgia. All of this is about to change.

I am me still evolving without my usually stolid and grim ****** features. i bare brevity to situations existing that would **** most or in the least paralyze a great many. There is one for every hour of every day, and one for every minute in every hour, second in every minute, and more than the minutes in every day. No one has a second chance, shares a different time, or works off a different clock. I have been called the master of the analog, king of the codependent, and rook to queenside knight. I share a parabola for every encounter, experience, and endeavor. I am three minutes from being a cadaver, one drink away from a drunk, and one thought away from being completely alone. I think upright, i sleep horizontally, and I love infinitely. I am the only finite constant i have ever known. I am the main character, the script, satire, sarcasm, and soundtrack are mine.

"I don’t care if you believe it. That’s the kind of house I live in. And I hope we never leave it.”
There's A Wocket In My Pocket by Dr. Seuss

I haven’t dreamt of you in ages,
Yet last night you crept in,
The product of some subconscious fever

I wish you’d have the courtesy to keep your distance,
Because although I miss you the way gasoline misses spark,
I still remember the impact,
Broken glass crunching underfoot
And sirens wheeling away my innocence

I remember colors bleeding away to grayscale,
Like a black and white film morosely painting a plot
Where the actors simply grimace at each other
Over grievances unbeknownst to the audience,
The denouement arrives to show us a lone chalk outline,
Roll credits.

The falling stars in this ironic night
make majesties
out of those cubicle-ridden New Yorkers'
routine Tuesday night daydreams,
where they make macabre escape routes
out of every perfectly-placed window
piercing the concrete sentences
that escalate from Ground Zero.

Your law offices,
corporate ******* headquarters,
are all bursting at the seams
with these drones,
the falling stars of the human race,
all composed of 14 different shades
of grayscale;

could've been
should've been
could've been shootin' stars
that year they were promised
lives of upper middle class incomes
and Lexus dealerships
bought to dent their status
on the neighborhood,
but that sparkle's been emaciated
by the truth,
the underwhelming spectacle of realization
accentuated by the clicking
and the clacking of company keyboards,
each little click
gnawing more at their patience
than the next;
the faceless brush strokes
gawk through that window,
their plans less hypothetical
over the calendar years.

"I can hear it calling me
from miles away,"
says Copy #90045280,
"see, they
SPEAK
to me, man,
tell me to transcend
the hurdle of the windowsill
and make my rendezvous
with an asphalt avenue,
to join the other casualties
of this rut-infested nation
in a life with the real stars,
falling and shooting
and jettisoning alike,
throbbing lights through dark sky silk
and into the hearts of even the most
robotic of this catalog culture,
and I frightfully,
excitedly,
must listen."

I am a helpless hopeless witness
sitting idle on a courtroom bench
as if in church
kneeling backwards beneath slanted
   stain                         glass
                     light
with my hands clasped tight
and pressed neat against my forehead
but there is
no
one
to pray to when
there is no faith;
I am invisible in the eyes of a clairvoyant god.
My heart beats rough
almost
p
  o
    u
      n
        d
          i
          ­  n
              g
straight out of my chest
to the beat of the grand judge's gavel.
"Guilty,
guilty,
guilty,"
they chant, and
"Selfish,
                selfish,
                          ­    selfish," too.
"We find the defendant cowardly."
They never even put me on the stand.
They will not sentence me to execution--
          for that would be too kindly.
I am destined to a life
of praying for death without parole
and                                     folding
a plethora of pervasive glances
tightly between the
         lines
         on
         my
         palms.
They shoot their looks from
                       all
    different
                                          angle­s,
                      and
even with this accumulation of grayscale smoke above my head,
I
can't
escape
it.
After every much belittled blink
they taunt me with another slice of glass
that scrapes off my skin cells
         one
                 by
                       one
and leaves my body hair in a standing ovation
pulsing with anticipation--
           but they never draw blood. A cruel
and unusual punishment.
At confession I can never find the breath to reveal
the heart I've taped to my chest to keep from f
                                                               ­                a
                                                               ­                l
                                                               ­                l
                                                               ­                i
                                                               ­                n
                                                               ­                g
or the soul in my hands that's been
              crushed
between sweaty fingers.
How can they punish me when I am already a walking jail cell
with skinny white lines for bars on my wrists?
I am to repent until I am no longer human, but here's the thing--
             I never was.
I am much

much

more.

I used to think that all of them were just bodies. She-figures, they came and went, facilitating infinite happiness and following with hellacious heartbreak, aorta explosions galore. They pass. I stay. She goes. I remain. We all take a trip, but she falls asleep while I follow the road, I sing the song, make the lyrics up as the 101 heads West, and I careen against the Pacific. I see silvery-white plumes of whale breaths spouting, they break the rocks of my rock and roll. When the levee breaks, we'll have no place to go- I'm going back to Chicago.

California. Line 5. Verse 1. She is born in Arkansas, in Denver, in New York City, in the back of a taxi cab, her parents waiting for a table at Earth Cafe, 1989. There are concerts, balconies, elevator shafts, and on benches. The gain rises, the volume up and up and up, I offer her a cigarette, I ask her if she likes my dress, I show up with two palms full of a flame, and I say hello. Browsing in high-definition, the water is warm, my feet are planted and I have everywhere to go. Classical emporium of light fill me with ease, greatness, and belief. She asks me if I'm gay. Every great confusion can be proven to be fortuitous with enough time on hand. I kiss in cars, in bathrooms, and barrooms, in hallways, on staircases, on beds, church steps, and legs. I touched a leg, ran my fingers through her hair, my thumbs curved to the height of two ears alongside a size B head. I love art *****. i burn candles, and I swirl the wax around until the walls wear masks of white. I check-in to a hotel. I stop to buy wild flowers on the side of the road, or to climb down a ravine, we open a page into an enormous patch of strawberries, wind-surfers, and the golden Palo Alto beaches. I am in Bronzeville, on my way to Bridgeport, I am riding the train, browsing magazines, and singing new songs in my head. My lips are wet with excitement and the musings of the Modern Art Museum and the gift of a first kiss; behind the statue on Balcony 2, near the drinking fountain, the Eames couch, and two lips meeting anew. Bravery in twos.

Chapter 1, Verse 2. The chorus is large and exciting. New plastic shining coats. Smocks patterned with the Random House children's stories that we played with as children. We didn't wear gloves, or hats, or pants, or our hearts on our sleeves. I was up to my knees in hormones and very persuasive. My fifth birthday was at the Nature Center, you chased me into the boys' bathroom and kissed me with your wet and four year old lips in the second stall from the door. I eased up maybe 2% since then. The speakers are a little bit fuzzy, it's like listening to the spit of someone's tongue cascade the roof of their mouth while they pronounce the British consonants of the 90s. Said and done and saving space.

I am saving up for Grace. A crush in the mid 2000s, black hair, long legs, and the only brunette for a decade before or after. We played doctor, with the electric scalpel we turned our noses red with Christmas time South American powders. A safe word for an enemy, the sun for an enemy too. You bolted out and took my early Jimi Hendrix Best Of compact disc case too. While we're at it, you took my Michael Jackson cassettes as well. I go mid-range, think Kiri Te Kanawa in the whispers of E.T.'s Elliot. Stuffed-animal closet party for seven minutes in heaven. Your family came with butlers while mine came with over-educated storage. A blue borage sky in the intestines of life, a splinter in the shanty-town of invincible daily struggles- both of us were born again in O'Hare Airport's Parking Level D. Too many nonsensical arguments in two-tone grayscale ripping open the packaging of a course about trysting in your twenties.

Your stomach's history is overpowering. It is temperamental, mettled by spirits and sleepless nights, borborygmus, wambles, and shades of nervousness you were never comfortable speaking openly about. The history of your ****** was privatized, in options and unedited films shot over and over candidly by a mini DV desk camera, nine months to read you wrong to weep in strong wintry walks back and forth from The Buckingham to the Dwight Lofts, Room 408 without a view. All of your secrets in a little miniature of a notebook, bright cerise red. You captured teardrops in medicinal jars meant for syringes. You tied strings to your fingers, named your field mouse Ginger, and introduced your mother as Lady Darling. Captain with stingray skin, the hide of Ferris Bueller with the coattails of James Bond, dusted with daisy pollen, and clearly weakness. You ate me like bitter herbs on Thursdays, and like every other woman I've ever met, on Tuesdays you always kept me waiting.

I have wings for everything. Yellow wings for a woman in a yellow dress, Red, White, and Green wings for Bernice from Mexico City, Purple wings for  Mrs. Doolittle the doctor who worked at Taco Bell, the Jamaican priestess who was traveling through Venice Italy- we smoked hash with the grandchild of James Joyce on the Northern pier against the aurulent statues of Apollo and Zeus, Cupids' collection of malevolent tricks, SleepingB Beauty's rebuttal in fending off GHB attackers, my two dear friends who were kidnapped in clothes, abandoned in the ****, and only remember eating chocolate donuts with sprinkles and the bruises and dirt on the insides of their thighs. Nothing clever. Nothing extraordinary. Everything sentimental, built to withstand soot, sourness, and early female bravado.

You know how to play the piano so you've said, but i only have the CD you gave me to prove it. I do have evidence of your addiction to men and *******. I have your collection of dresses with tags still on them (but every woman has some of those), there is the post office box in Kauai, the Halloween card from last November and the two videos I have stored on an external drive in a nightstand adjacent to the foot of my bed. You sleep atrociously, talk too quickly, and **** like your father abandoned you when you were five. Your talent for taking photographs is like your skill-set for playing the piano, but I don't have the CD to prove it. You don't believe in social media, social consistency, friendships, or hephalumps and woozels- with the exception of the classes we shared together in college, I've never seen you outside of the most glamorous of fashion. You hate flats, hats, and white wine, and for as sad as you can seem to be at times, I've only had you cry on me once. While we were on the phone, three days after your mother hung herself. That's when I last left California, and I haven't been back yet.

I love a Kristine, but once a Britni, a Brandi, a Joni, a Tina, Kristina, Kirsten, Kristen, and a Katherine and Kathryn too. I know rock stars who are my dearest friends, enemies who I share excellent taste in music with, and parents who've always had my back but show it in lashings of the tongue and of the belt. It's been two years and three states since I was two sizes smaller than I am now. I've never considered the possibility that I was the main character and not the supporting actor, but due to recent developments in antipathy and aesthete, reevaluation, and retrospective nostalgia. All of this is about to change.

I am me still evolving without my usually stolid and grim ****** features. i bare brevity to situations existing that would **** most or in the least paralyze a great many. There is one for every hour of every day, and one for every minute in every hour, second in every minute, and more than the minutes in every day. No one has a second chance, shares a different time, or works off a different clock. I have been called the master of the analog, king of the codependent, and rook to queenside knight. I share a parabola for every encounter, experience, and endeavor. I am three minutes from being a cadaver, one drink away from a drunk, and one thought away from being completely alone. I think upright, i sleep horizontally, and I love infinitely. I am the only finite constant i have ever known. I am the main character, the script, satire, sarcasm, and soundtrack are mine.

"I don’t care if you believe it. That’s the kind of house I live in. And I hope we never leave it.”

~
Lift the veil from a grayscale morning. Vividly imagistic. An odalisque no more.

Her shape beneath the gown is a foreign land, a series of quiet revelations. Its pattern manifests as pinpricks of light perforating the shirred fabric of his heart.

The preponderance of dream in her eyes becomes a call and response evoking purely imaginary spaces. The contained chemistry is beautifully insular, monochromatic.

And there her lips. Into claustrophobic kiss. This lower register of love comes in unadorned, subtle colorings like the darkest part of night.

One thousand shades of gray.
One single light of white.
And everything merges in the night.
~

To live or to die
To do what's natural
What's right and what's wrong
What's ******* and what's not.

A sense of self worth
Something I can't gain or lose
Something that's just gray
Not black or white

Folded gently in the thickness of the wall
Polar emotions surely will mark my fall
Until life is nothing, nothing at all

Imagine a world with peace.
Imagine a world with harmony.
There will be no wars or conflicts.
There will be no hatred.
Innocent people will not die.
Families will never be torn apart.

Imagine a world with happiness.
Imagine a world full of sunshine.
Everyone will get along.
Everyone will come together
As one big happy family
Like what we were meant to be.

Imagine a world of no crime.
Imagine a world of no destruction.
There will be order.
There will be trust.
There will be honor.
There will be no need for arms.

Imagine a world without racism.
Imagine a world without discrimination.
No one will be colorblind.
The world will not be seen in
Black and white or in grayscale.
The world will be a rainbow.

Imagine a world without stereotypes.
Imagine a world without a “mold” or a “model”.
We can all be who we want to be.
We can all wear our own shoes
And wear our own clothes.
We can be ourselves.

Imagine a world through our eyes.
Imagine a world through my eyes.
Imagine a world through your eyes.
If we can imagine the world we want,
We can live in that world.
All we have to do is close your eyes

…

And imagine.

Stringy hair
Sunken eyes
Greasy teeth
Rotten lies
Sweat soaked nightmare
Fueled with gore
Clenching teeth
Weak and sore
My mind holds this
An abominable leech
Perverting beauty
In all it sees
Polluting love
To twisted hate
Making resentment
Smear every mate
I cant look at you
Without seeing a ghoul
I dont see a goddess
I see a fool
Everyone around me
Sees the brighter side
I cant help but see
What the smiles hide

I tried to quit smoking last week. And my best friend died for eighteen hours. Such a deep loss has only been felt by rose hips, in the early winter, after the petals have fallen to the ground, like snow, like jumpers from high-rise buildings, like a maiden, after that last, fatal step off the plank, with swords at her back, and the horizon calling to her, the song of the Sirens drifting up from the ocean floor. Dropping, like petals, caught in a harsh winter breeze. The left-overs, the carcases of the flowers that were and are no more, watch with eyes of sorrow and hearts of lead, as each friend, companion, lover, even casual aquaintance plummets, to land on the already frozen soil of a dead, snowless, Colorado winter.
I died with my friend. My roots were tangled, and with each second that passed, a million axes took bites out of them, feasting on my identity. The axes were only gold-plated, it would seem, and not pure, unadulterated precious metal. Engraved in the paper-thin facade was a name, a face, and a hope, all of which were merely a poor excuse for an excersise in willpower. The cold, iron blade shone through the thin, gently curved lines of lip and ear and eye made of nebula. With each breath that passed between loosely parted lips, I felt myself fade, giving my everthing to the world (hope, name, face) that had, only moments before, murdered my closest companion.
My eyes grew steadily hard, increased stone-content. By 6:30, I had been staring into the eyes of my mistress, Medusa, for at least two hours, my head filled with love songs and daydreams, clutching straws and holding out for the one perfect moment that would shed a brief light on my life, which is, in all reality, the afformentioned pirate ship, but void of lamps, candles, or any other means of illumination.
Questions flowed to the surface of my disjointed mind in a stream, a river, an oceanic current of molten rock and sloppy second guesses.
(Will one hurt? Half? Just one puff? Why? Why? Why?)
And as I turned to stone, I finally found the courage to answer one of the questions that my brain shot itself with, injected into its own blood stream. The question was the sole bullet in a revolving, high-stakes betting game, the answer, the fourth trigger pull, with only two chances left anyway.
(Because... I don't know why...)
So stand up, go to the place you have thought about two-million times, and, yes, smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette.
As my friend rose from the dead, pushing aside the boulder blocking the entrance to its tomb, which everyone knew was just a temporary tenement, and we were reunited, we spoke of fascists. Well, I spoke of fascists, it listened. I spoke of the kind of fascists that exist in grayscale television commercials, spewing ingnorant words about the untimely deaths of beloved family members, who give me ***** looks in public, and have forced me into alleyways, across streets, out of sight, out of mind, to the back of the bus, as if non-smokers live forever, as if everyone can accomplish said impossible feat, if not for the evil plant, the evil spiritual plant that poses a threat to the well-ordered religious structures, pyres built for martyrs and long-dead saviors.
I have only begged for eternity once, and I was very young, with years of rocks and hard places ahead, only pink clouds behind, and eyes incapable of foresight. This boy ate apples, and drew on his arms with black pen every Sunday. Go into the church clean, bathed, come out with temorary full-sleeve tattoos. This boy was made of wonder, myth, and blind acceptance. No longer.
I have now gazed into an eternity made of open graves, lost loves, and harsh, barbed-wire truths, punctuated with sharp, jabbing exclamation points of brief pleasure that only seem to make the reality of eternity worse. I am a *******, and even I don't want that. A body can only function for so long without sleep before the motor wears out, the radiator breaks, the gasket leaks, and the marbles flee from the growing insanity of their owner. We all need to rest eventually, and in my secret mind - the one that grimaces with sick pleasure and only shows its teeth in the lines of a poem, slightly blurred by metaphor - I long for that sleep. I am tired, but the day is only half done. But each sun sets, and we can not deny it that truth, that sensation of finality that settles upon senile eyes like a cataract, that snuggles against warm, pink lungs in all its black, tar-like splendor.
Truth, like so many other things in this solar system, only takes shape when under the eye of a microscope, with a passive viewer sewn to the end of it, with the sole intention of passing judgement before shouting "NEXT," and repeating the process untill they either run out of things to judge (blame, think, guilt-trip) or die.
So, smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette. Puff, puff, puff it and let us hope they never get to either of us, old friend.

Ladies and gentleman!
Welcome aboard Life Air flight 493.
We are sorry for the delay - of 9 months - in our departure,
but believe me,
it's better in here
than in the outside.

Ladies and gentleman!
There is no safety instruction card in the pocket of the seat in front of you.
There are no guidelines, no rules, no help.
Life is chaos and it is cosmos;
Not black and white, but a blurry grayscale
No x and y axis values you can plot and predict
Just a weird steering wheel
and a lot of dubious buttons.
(it’s not as easy as it seems in action movies!)
For life does not come with a manual.

Ladies and gentleman!
In case of emergency, oxygen masks will drop down in front of you.
If you are traveling with someone, please attend yourself first.
Sometimes, you'll find people who you think are
more worth saving than you are
but breathe.
let the air fill your lungs, overflow.
until it reaches them.
You can't help others when you're drowning.
You can't lean on others when they're also on the water.
You can't love others when you don't love yourself.
Because when you take your last breath
you'll remember
you never got your own life jacket.

Ladies and gentleman!
Keep the shades on your windows lifted at all times.
Even though you are scared of what's outside,
pull up your shades.
Look at the funny-shaped clouds
and the passing cities below you,
Take close attention to all the tiny cars and tiny people
and the dollhouse sized problems.
because we will not be turning back.
Open your windows.
You will see tragedy and hurt and war.
Broken hearts that may or may not belong to you,
broken souls that you can not always cradle in your arms.
Oceans of blood, bright scarlet
contrasting against the otherwise beautiful seashores.

Ladies and gentlemen:
We will be taking off shortly. Please make sure that your seat belt is securely fastened. Thank you.

As i live in a haze
What a daze to be
This grayscale of life
What drag to my existence

Can i not alleviate
My mind
Will my life always
Be torturous

Will i always have
This agonizing reminders
Failures of my past
To leave me awake at night

Can i ever make it stop
I just don't know

You're a piece of art that I'm scared to touch because my fingers are bleeding and you're too beautiful for blood
So I'll pretend that I don't want the texture of you beneath my skin because I already know exactly how this will end

To the bone I am becoming,
losing track of what I wanted to be,
I'll find myself being pencilled in
with grayscale tones painted over me.

To the bone I am becoming,
break my fingers, my limbs and my soul,
you'll touch me as you wish, burning me thin,
'til I'm fragile - no parts of a whole.

To the bone, I am becoming,
even though I'm desperate to try,
because all I can taste is your hands on my skin
and bitter and dark was the fight.

To the bone, I am becoming,
I'm addicted to losing control.
My bedroom is littered with matchsticks and gin,
To the bone
To the bone
To the bone.

--painting by Chris Brodahl at the Seattle Art Museum*

Legs bent over the chair,
her pants wrinkle as she moves
rippling

My face tilts back and I close my eyes;
she bends her fingers over the table
like she’s playing piano.

Images cross over and I can’t keep track,
lost in eyes pasted over fingers
lips glued onto hairlines.

And still she moves,
staying silent but shifting
rippling

I had a dream the other night
of a farmland in grayscale,
black and white movies in my head.

My mother in her pink cotton nightdress;
bluebirds mocking me from their roost in a tree
And still this silent farmhouse, soft in its slumber.

But I can’t move when I’m asleep,
and she can’t move when she’s awake
We’re perfect in each other’s hands

I wait until her eyes are closed
and then I kiss her, her eyelids fluttering
rippling, as if to say hello.

His burning hands trace
spiralling trails across my body,
echoing my outlines
with fervent magma.
His fingers are magnets
drawn to my rough edges, cracked
hands of glass smoothing me over.
Try as I might,
I blink to the beat of his heart,
cry to the flow of his love.
I am no longer my own.
I was a girl
of the purest black and white,
living a grayscale life.
He is warming and heating me
to a vivid red,
eyes burning blue,
skin dark with desire.
He comes in colours everywhere,
purple joy, green mystery,
the sound of his eyes catching mine.
The reverberation of his music
is enough to stain my life
with colour more vivid
each time his hands meet my face
to pull it towards his.

i used to be
fond of that
light trickle,
that subdued
whisper
of rain,
the calming
sensation of
droplets,
cleansing
my spirit

i relished the
thought of a
grayscale sky
wrapping its arms
ever so gently
around me,
found comfort
in slick surfaces
and symphonies
in thunderous echoes

now, rain feels heavy,
cumbersome,
desolate,
feels like
i become
the bucket you
search for
when the
ceiling leaks,
like the air
is far
too dense
for my lungs
to handle,
like the rain
isn't really rain
when it
pours out of me

I used to be
fond of
rainy days
because they
remind me
of you

yet here,
now,
i desperately
long to be
dry

oh honey she’s too busy thinking of creative ways of killing herself to pay you any attention,
lying at night with her limbs hanging off the sides of her bed beckoning the monsters underneath to pull her under.
maybe then will she have company so that the demons in her head can take the day off,
so she can breathe without the constant weight weighing heavy in her mind.

the only patterns in her grayscale world are self-made, nah, more like self-inflicted;
there’s the cigarette burns that dot her threadbare skirt and the
the only smile she has is the ones on her wrists, but somehow i think the jagged red lines weren’t made with lipstick, no not this time.

there’s grace in her stillness; she's coiled like a python about to strike.
bite before you’re bitten, yeah.
an arrow pulled back in the embrace of a bow, she hardly quivers.
aim and point,
determination to reach her target is the only constant she can count on
slicing through the air with a trained precision,
all teeth and fangs and broken glass.
no amount of touch can erase those who tracked dirt in her house before you,
you can’t make her forget the kisses trailed down her thighs before you,
not when those lips were dripping acid and winters passed, even now she still burns.
the corroding is invisible to everyone but her.
it will take more than snow to erase all that you’ve known

House of the heart, these vacant arms
Spaces yawning wide and deep as cratered moons
A star-strewn grayscale and rainbow dreamworld
The pounding like waves and hammered cities
Soul drop-off box and doors with sunshine keys
Girls and boys drink feathered eyes and brainmusic
Machine wash cold, tumble-dry bodies
Slinking off in a frenzied tangent, doubled over
To cachinnate at **** men without faces.

There was a time in my life when I thought you could fix me.
The two of us were lost and scratching for meaning in a post-post-postmodern world,
looking for purpose and clarity,
looking for the black-and-white morality in our grayscale lives.
When fate left us reeling in a shared embrace,
I let my sorry *** believe you were the Big Bad to my Virginia Woolf.
Leave it to me not to learn from past mistakes.

There was a time I saw you as a hero, a martyr of some twisted kind,
willing to give back to me that missing piece that someone else had cut from my flesh long ago.
I saw your love as the highest I could ever earn,
and I was devoted to your work-- whatever that meant.

I never saw the casualties.
I don’t even know that there were casualties, but I look into your face and I can see--
blood has been shed,
and it was on your behalf.

You don’t have the kind of face that launches fully armed battalions.
Leeland says you look like a mall Santa,
but I think you make quite the lady-killer.
And I mean killer.
You may as well call me Lizzie Short.

And when your life or ours started to wane,
when I saw your empty promises for the broken vessels that they were,
I realized I didn’t know where I ended and you began.
I realized there were so many words in your textbook full of saccharine lies
and you were using all of them to keep me weak enough to stay.

Was I falling for it? Hell ******* yes, I was falling for it.
I wanted so desperately to have someone in my life
whose every word I could believe
without fear of betrayal or accidental abuse
that I chose intentional manipulation.
Better to know it’s coming, that was my logic.
Better to cause it myself.
Better if I’m the one who dips the cigarette in your poisoned blood and lights it.

You won’t end my life.
You look like it, you act like it, but you don’t outright **** anyone.
You just give people the means and method to end it themselves.
I’ve heard it said there are three types of people:
the type that lose to you,
the type that win and suffer the trauma for the rest of their lives,
the type that win and then become you.
I’m the third, and though you hate to hear it, I wish I’d been the first.

Some people are so grateful to be alive.
But not me.
Not anymore.
Not ever.

I pay no mind to the man in the doorway
I've been learned that he will do no harm.
I diverge my attention from the knife in his hand,
Though I feel like calling out an alarm.
I pay no mind to what I hear inside
I've been learned that they don't mean a thing.
I keep the shriekings behind the bars of my cage
Though they often dance out when there's drinking
I pay no mind to deep grayscale urges.
I've been learned to work to give a ****.
I have a head who'd never lead me that way,
Though it's become harder to herd all the lamb.
I pay no mind to the changing of eyes
I've been learned that it's purely of face
I cover my own as I try to ignore them
Though they see how they're planning a race.
I pay no mind to the battles I witness
I've been learned to accept all our world.
I turn off the screen and cover my ears
Though the fists of my hands each have curled.

I stood there with open words,
A blank mind and colorful slate.
Free of prejudice, the glass seems clear.

A cheer here and there, a successful move forward,
A journey almost satisfied,
A night out alone ol' Luna in the sky,
A trip into roses, of all different kinds.

Recovery and some blood, the journey has just begun.
With birds on heavy watch, guarding their sacred forest.
Closed words and filled mind,
A grayscale slate was left.

Dead rose stems,
papercuts from love letters,
and discarded gold

Grayscale summer memories,
the chill of a touch once warm,
and waterlogged eyelashes.

Yelling, screaming, LONGING--
voices with the chalky grit of sandpaper,
spitting leaden insults.


This is the end of love.

~

Walking into the unknown,
wavering trees hide new growth
as leaves collect in grayscale
piles of worried thoughts swirling

They float on gusty breezes
of the past, cold and chilling,
bringing shivers to lost smiles
that long for sunny days

Fears spill in shaded offerings,
as nervous uncertainty
waits in the brush for it’s chance,
lurking in darkened shadows

The path is long and winding,
like a serpent slithering between
wishful dreams and the frigid
nightmares gathered nearby

When another joins you,
bearing warm clothing of flannel
and fleece held in caring arms
wrapping around you tightly

It is then that you see something
in his eyes, a glint of those feelings
that so long ago disappeared
in the forgotten fog of sadness

And once more the world seems
safe as thick clouds retreat,
revealing blue sky promises
on forever horizons

Then as he takes your hand
you feel it, the truth you have
waited for, as love fills your heart
and you walk unafraid…once again

The black substance
fills the void within me
the way salt
dissolves in the sea.

Coming uninvited,
she befriends me when
the moon turns away
her pale, silver shine.

Filling my mind to the brim,
she filters my reality
with grayscale glasses
through which I see

everything around me
has become her reflection,
and she is no longer
anything but a part of me.

The black substance
fills the void within me –
and I am now
nothing but her sea.

Reluctant to share
Loathe to believe
Defenses worn thin
Weakened by saccharine kindness
Cliche grandiosity seasoned a bland bland world
Black and white, lost in shades of gray
Colorized emotions drip life into an exsiccated heart
A sunlit spotlight of warmth
Faded painted colors can never return to grayscale
Changed forever by a moment, if not by accident