my pen threw up ink on the first word i wrote,
an ugly mark smeared
halfway down the thick, cream-colored page.
looking at that inkblot i heard
a reflection of myself,
identified as that smudge for
one reason or another,
maybe the fact that
my entire identity as a whole is
based off of others interpretations of me
or the fact that
i am always a mess;
when people look at my life from a birds-eye view
i am a figure only barely discernible
from the chaos
or maybe because
people only use me as a fun party trick,
like a horoscope, an arguing matter,
a novelty,
something that’s thrown away
and tossed aside
when its duty has already
been performed.
whatever the reason,
i think i am beautiful among the madness,
despite whatever it is you see
when you look at me.

give me that meaningless *******
sweet nothing nonsense
sonneting on & off & on again.  
everyday, all day
we were softer shades of comet spitting stars across the cosmos

I feel awful about feeling awful this morning. we were alone together in the dark
lost for the most part.

the sound of lights                
of day & of night inspire me
& I'd like to try to fly even though I'm
really really tired
&I; know I'd end up this
amorphous red inkblot
of blood & chunks of flesh
on the sidewalk.

just an absolute mess.

the fever broke then settled in &
I went the way
of the sugar rush instead.

I like you to death.

Folding on itself,
a childhood inkblot,
symmetrical map.
Neverland student.
Neverland syndrome.

Neverland client.
Neverland business.
Buying memories
with ageless coins in
fifty year-old hands.

Our city
of forts and malls and cinema halls
is littered with the filth of our minds
and our mouths.
We are lost; we are broken;
we are muffled and soft-spoken.
Big city dreams
of art and changing the world
slip away every time we wake up
on grimy beds we’ve never seen before
with soot on our feet, and our hands
bound with ***** hair,
backs bent under the weight of all they’ve left us.
The mud in our fingernails leaves us a mess,
in the shapes of the night's sticky, grubbiness:
a twisted Rorscharch inkblot.
We see it all replaying,
—flickering, as we’re swaying—
on grimy ceilings, where the light bulb
seems askew, and dangling
in an effort to hypnotise us,
left, and right, and left.
Every day is a repeat of the same,
—chai glasses, and cigarette butts
with redlipstickstains,
rickshaw rides (exactly thirty rupees steeper
than the rate on the meter),
cat calls that slap in one ear and slip spit out the other.
Our roads are lit by TV-light,
a muted glow that follows us everywhere.
Anonymous blankness follows blankness
and the dark dankness
of grocery stores and souls
that can’t recognise each other anymore.
Silly young things dreaming of bliss,
And new couches, and tiny feet
Instead hear only
"Scrub harder," "Needs more salt," and
"Turn over; come closer; be quiet."
Bare feet in splotchy grass
with brown and green ankles
are replaced by sore heels and push-up bras.
Pens scratching on paper
are replaced by knives slashing skin
and flesh and bones
hitting sharply so that the onomatopoeia
of the shlick-crack-crack
draws out delighted laughter
from blackened, smoky mouths
— and peals of screams that no one hears,
the afterthoughts of parking lots.
The fire of fingers leaves marks, scars;
and their tips grow spikes
into the goosebumps on our arms;
knuckles peel away skin,
everywhere they trace;
and fists clench
around our bodies,
that don’t belong to us.

But we know, one day,
our spring will come
and we will leave the heat on our backs
in dust.
We will go down with Persephone
and take our flowers with us.
We will swim upside down
so we feel like we can fly.
Every rock laying unturned, we know,
has a cosmic universe throbbing
patiently under it.
We will lie, resilient, awake at night,
dreaming cautiously, softly,
so no one hears,
but dreaming nonetheless.
Dreaming of our wings melting
over and over again,
when we get too close to the denied,
day after day, until
we can build wings strong enough
to hold the heat of the sun
inside them, and then propel further.
We’ll show them
— tell your sisters and daughters and friends!—
we’ll show them,
Because your sticks and stones
Can break only our bones
And not our minds. We are
Goddesses, even in a dimly lit bar
Or the back of a fast car,
Just as in temples. We are
Goddesses, whether we whisper in soft tones
Or shout it in the streets,
Whether we lie in strangers' sheets
Or break our backs bending
to ***** feet.
When we're beaten by a spouse,
Or changing tactic,
We'll be both your angels in the house,
And your madwomen in the attic.

Considering me a talented, aspiring shill
My muse loaned me a feathery quill
Brokering her wisdom, leasing her skill
With embroidered frills each barb with beauty did distill
Lithographer's vision, a graceful dividend to reveal 
Depreciating vane my artistic license to  bill
Hollow shaft gilded so her availing light could the vacuum fill
Inky reservoir with inspiration did instill
A deep well with literary devices did rill
Ideas streaming from strained cavity to the mind's tip with zeal  
Burnished hues, sharp tones aesthetic notions to congeal
A precision valve appended vagaries to swill
An automated inkblot defibrillating patterns to spill

Considering me a talented, aspiring shill
My muse loaned me a feathery quill
Brokering her wisdom, leasing her skill
With embroidered frills each barb with beauty did distill
Lithographer's vision, a graceful dividend to reveal 
Depreciating vane my artistic license to  bill
Hollow shaft gilded so her availing light can the vacuum fill
Inky reservoir with inspiration did instill
A deep well with literary devices did rill
Ideas streaming from strained cavity to the mind's tip with zeal  
Burnished hues, sharp tones aesthetic notions to congeal
A precision valve appended vagaries to swill
An automated inkblot defibrillating patterns to spill

Will I remember the reminder?
To turn on my brain again
I woulda thought I'd be kinder.
Dead red-eye at the day's end

Leave the silver in the sink
Let the dishes sit and soak a dream
Spot the terror in your rearview
So far closer than it may seem

Spot the drips drip dripping down
And I'm speaking like a black-white clown
Full of thoughts, but they're in your voice
Nothing better than a broken toy

This kid is churning like a big machine
Just like a cheetah on a T.V. screen
He's just an elemental, mental boy
Iguana man: search and you'll destroy

Make up a letter from the magazine
Pair of nail scissors and the short clippings
Nothing so near and dear and true to you
as how familiar smells the duct tape glue

You know nobody told the bumble-bee
And now you know that it was news to me
Strung out coyote stepping off a cliff
And he could fly except that he's scared stiff

You know I'd like to change my name
Into the curlicue, ampersand
So that I'll always stay an inkblot stain
Until the books all rot and turn to sand.
III

I will ignore all concepts of adherence and maybe, just this once,
be blunt about my fear;

I’m a stuck oriole in a window.
I’m a pedestrian somewhere in VV Soliven underneath the pouring rain
with my parasol jammed, won’t spread out.
The petrichor from the ground rises and like dust,
I settle and cave in, like an unsuspecting dagger making its slow crawl
towards the back of the next face I see in this deadlock.

They say when you stick it to the man,
stick it good, and whatever beating or punishment may follow,
face it like a man.

but what is a man to do to the higher man
when he has his guts spread on the floor like an inkblot
from a shattered glass?
this working classman status isn’t for the weak,
and it sure isn’t for the brave either – what will become of the fools
sitting atop our heads when we have learned to outgrow them?

Sooner than it is later, I will go back to the pit like some soldier
cleaning his Lee-Enfield in the endless snow.
I will be faced by inbreds, imbeciles, rebels,
dilettantes, proletariats who have their necks leashed, their arms
puppeteered and their voices mellowed down by some defunct ventriloquism.
I will crank open the mailbox of my home and see that there
are notices: some from the bank, the loans, and the bills – all of them screaming
pecuniary, all of them bludgeoning soul.

If this is what a man has to deal with when he comes to
learn that life’s no downtown street promenade, then I’m willing
to slit the throat of the next child that’s giddy enough and filled with life
to search meaning through the bleared image in front of him.
I see high-stake rollers and proletariats, bigshots, and darling boys
roll down their car windows and flick the smoke out in the **** freeway

while I am here, watching myself slowly rot in the cubicle mirror next door
wary of my somber entrails. I think of a pub somewhere in Magallanes, and I dream
heavily when I am awake. The beaded body of the Hefeweizen is waiting for me
like a paramour, but I have to clock-punch my way out first before I can reach
some sort of truce: as long as I have myself sign these contracts, as far as my freedom is
concerned, what keeps the ball rolling for me might be something I would
despise as long as I breathe in this disgustingly thick air of deceit and consummation.
There is no life in here. All of us are dead.
Buying things we do not need, doing things we don’t want, fooling ourselves
in the complete process, marry wives and husbands and breed children
who will do the same in this cyclically deadening circus. My god is filled with
cotton and the streets scream ****** ****** against the spring.
There are enough violence in the thoroughfares to cast me back to my
home and coil, fraught with unrelenting demand.

There’s no other way to look at it rather than simplifying the equation.
Some do it for worth, that’s your tonic.
Some do it for fun, that’s your senseless beating.
Some do it because they have no other choice: they are not looking far enough.
As long as you have yourself beaten to slave-bone and driven mad with
downtime, then you have yourself laid down on a silver-platter catching
the swill of such riotous rigor: to be shaken out of sleep and shove
meat down your throat and thank the Gods for a wonderful day when all I see
outside are streets blackened to the teeth with distortion and the automobiles
like limbless children leaving no trace.

Some take the easiest way out, but I am not crazy enough to bring
myself to sanity. I have other caprices to go with.
This is enough a suicide than it is on the other side.
Whenever I look at my superior, I see nothing,
and whenever I gaze at the surrounding scenes I see people
sticking knives at each other when backs are turned.
I see people swallow everything that is given to them without
the slightest inch of askance: to complain is the inability to withstand
the current situation – but I am no fool to close my eyes.
I have still the guts to face everyday like some old friend, death, in my arms,
singing blues from the 1980s. When this is done,
I will go back to where it usually does not hurt: in the silence.

where no faces bid me hello – they do well in their own discomfiture,
and I do not wish to see them any longer.
where no automobiles tear the streets and cleave the moon farewell.
where there are no sparrows outside, where there are no laughing children,
where there are no hollow men and women greeting each other tenderly
and blighting each other safe in the resignation of some dull home.

if I am mad, then what does this make you? better? privileged?
I’ve had other people look deep into me like some deepwell without
water and they tell me, “there’s something about you, something about you.”
and when I turn my back to search for some sameness,
I figure there is nothing else to find but the same trapping fate in this
burning cylinder of a home.

Waking up and filling in shoes and dressing up for nothing,
earning money and throwing it all at our own expense,
buying thrills and wasting away as time lounges like a cat
at the foot of the Victorian. If there’s better enough a fall than this,
I will sign myself to have my bones broken, my ribs opened

to let go of my famished soul while all the others
keep themselves clean, putrefying themselves viscerally.

I still search for you in the boys
I mistake for bandages,
The delicate deer I mistake for lions,
The ones with eyes almost the same shade of you,
With hair just like you lips resounding your laughter,
Resembling a wisp of your smile, but they aren't you.
I don’t think about them the way I think about you
And they don’t look at me the way you looked at me.
Look at me like a piece of dead meat for the chomping.
Sometimes I pretend you're dead,
Fantacise about all the deaths you could die
Because it's so much less painful
Than the alternative you left me with.
You left me to deal with all that’s happened.
My mom laid the blame at your feet
for everything that happened that awful year.
She was on the outside the whole time-
What a luxury, don’t you think?
A luxury like melancholy poetry.
Did you know I love Sylvia Plath?
Especially that really smart poem
Where she talks about expectations
And disappointments. Disappointing.
You'll never know that even now I think
Most of us are so selfish, we can’t help but
Always, eventually, go down Plath’s path.
Even you. Eventually you. Especially you.
Every version of you except the one I know.
I don't know if you still think of me
But, boy, I sure hope you do
Because God knows I remember you--
You’re insist on dominating everywhere I go
And you turn everything your shade of blue.
That blue haunts me in everything, everyone.
It's useless, no matter how much I try to forget.
No matter how much I just want to forget.
And the pieces of me so desperately want to forget you.
But how could I forget you?
When forgetting means forsaking
And I’m not sure it’ll be you that’s forsaken
Because erasing you might mean
Accidentally actually erasing me.
Because the worst part is I lost where we stop and end.
I was so afraid of you that I gave everything
Trying to make you happy, to satisfy that appetite for blood,
Hoping in response you wouldn’t hurt me so badly
But you burned the empty pieces of my soul
And you desecrated the ashes.
Did you forget me when the room went dark?
Because that’s when I think of you the most.
Because when I go blind is when I see it all
When I can’t see a thing through my tears is when I hear you
I can see you sitting there while I bathe in my tears
Your Cheshire grin and sick laugh bordering my thoughts…  
While I grimaced and wondered if I had yet died
Your deadly force overpowered all of my NOs like a joke,
Your army all prepped and primed and ready for the show
You made yourself the atom bomb, renamed me Hiroshima
So even now I'm up all night, licking wounds, crying myself to sleep
The will in my days no longer mine to have or to hold these nights-
I wake up in the middle of the night, you know,
Gasping for air and I can never seem to breathe.
The sound of your voice, the sound of your grunt,
The smell of your sweat, the smell of your hair,
The look in your eyes, the look of your mouth
They say time is this grand solution, but I haven’t been solved.
But this is not the way to heal, not the way to be whole,
Not the way to get revenge, not the way to get justice.  
Because something horrific happened and ignoring it can’t lessen the imprint
Because lo and behold, after all this, I’m still stuck here knowing how sickly
Your friends enjoyed the show, in fear. So stupid I can’t get it out of my head.
I wish I wasn’t, how you say, “just a stupid girl”,
Wish I wasn’t a ball your grins could toss back and forth
Until it comes time to- Stop, drop, and move on
I should have shut up, listened to the song of my dying heart
You all wanted to play and you all wanted to touch
But you don’t get to use me as stomping grounds
Even though you seemed to think NO wasn’t enough
Another moment closed are my sunken eyes
As the tears gracefully crawl down my face
My body is a deflated puddle of numbness
All it knows is the inkblot of mascara tears
On my skin- and surprise, what do you know-
It’s just enough to paint a dancing mask over
The scratch running dryly down my chest,
And- oh look- it complements the purple
Of the scattered map drawn through bruises
And to top it off, red paint decorates the scene
With a knot full of knots, I fantasize about
Swallowing just enough pills
To make my pain as numb as my (everything else).
I lost my mind as I lost that war over and over
You desecrated and disintegrated the fibers of my soul
Over and over as you forced your poisons deeper inside
The world slowly went dark from the fighting and pain
And still, I scream like the wind and cry like the rain.

I sit here now in a shadowed sanctuary
Once, blissful and exploding with fruitful colors
Now, a splattered inkblot blocking every path.

My map is a simple one
I travel from place to place with a clear head.
Now blackened from mistakes, I aimlessly wander through tunnels
Created by Dashing Demons.

Like Alice, I fell
Into the rabbit hole
I’m Timmy stuck in the well
No Lassie to save me

I failed her

No rope to climb
I burned it
No ladders
No steps

Just bare hands
Broken and bleeding from the fall
I scratch at the smooth dark walls
Slipping and sliding from the condensation
I start to sweat
The salt burns my eyes
I break
I die
Alone in the dark, my soul will stray
Screaming for all of the help
I threw away.

I entered the world like most of my kind – whitewashed and nameless,
faceless yet searching for a face
to nibble on corn mashed scrapings of my time and place,
just hungry enough to pervade ignorance and grapple at the ripeness
of a more fruitful
truth
acknowledged in a vacuum
where dreams rot and decay and suffocate the eyes,
where an echo reverberates a menacing shriek
that tastes foul and perverse – dried sweat teared in blood
but it stays with me and my kind
alone in the haystack by God and his word
silenced by the power of an unlicensed scripture
these conditions fixate me, us
as they fixate the man behind the whip
as they fixate the land, the family, the working stick.
but I unlike most of my kind
have choked on an inch, and spit up a mile
and wielded a pen to inkblot a trial,
a trial constructed outside the vacuum
offering light, air and room to breathe
in the tangibility of humanity.

Enlightened? Maybe. I feel where you're going Lady,
On these hazy, lazy days you end up trading,
thoughts for words placed on public pages.
Feelings trapped in cages, but you gotta let em out-
I know oh-too-well the way life goes,
Sometimes you just gotta put the pen to the inkwell,
And watch as your mind shows up in the inkblot,
'Cuz the colors separation brings more inspiration,
And maybe you'll learn a little more today.
Things 'bout your minds state, what happened of late,
Whether you'll get over it or want to,
maybe your interest wants you? Whether the shoe,
really fits or are you just winging it and afraid,
That people will know your true ways?
Don't get lost in Heaven chick, they got locks on the gate,
Don't get too sad either, Hell only really lasts a few days.
But all that matters, as you can see what I'm gonna do,
Is to treat each and every day, like it's New.

I’m sorry to all the people
I hurt while I was hurting.
I know my skin
felt like shards of glass,
and no one could get close
enough to touch me.
My fingernails were caked with blood,
and I am so sorry
that I don’t know whose it was.
I am sorry to those I broke
with my razor words,
they were my own regrets.
They were used to cut open
my own insecurities
when I thought I had run out.
I was lost
in a forest of my own doubt,
the trees were too dense
to believe
in myself.
The only way to find my place
was with a paper cut trail
leading to my home of denial.
My brain was shreds of late reports
and missed deadlines,
and I was just an inkblot of a person,
all I could see was my own skeleton in the pages.
I do not know how to send this apology
without it soaked in my tears,
but I am sorry,
I
am
so
s o r r y

The goddess wakes,
with purple nails and brittle scales.
She stands,
Knobbly knees like hairy trees outstretched against their seams.
Her steps veer,
Joint’s scream while needs poison her bloodstream.
Her reflection gleams,
There’s something vile about her denial.
She sees,
through a screen but the fog won’t clear.
Blind to her sunken cheeks and pale lips,
to the knives jutting from her back,
that leave bruises like inkblot fiends.
She doesn’t mind,
The constant shakes and extreme regimes.
She smiles,
Don’t worry it’s just a lifestyle.

I said

Come on! It's time to go to bed. Let us not be wandering through the internet right now listening to 80's songs that seemed right, oh say, 20 years ago. We can't be doing this! I'm tired, take me to bed, put me to rest!

then
I said

*******! Get the **** outta my head! Why do you bother me with your prissy little frilly consciousness then berate me with sleeplessness when I try to accommodate your whiny **** and actually go to bed! You torment me with images of that would be dead to me if you just let me load myself up but, no! You insist that I get myself up... and go... to bed... I'd rather sleep when I'm dead!

then
I said

Well what's the point of hanging around inside brain dead cyberspace keeping me thinking that I'm never going to keep up the pace and while your kissing PaULO4FuN do you stop to think that perhaps I may be done? Do you not feel that burning behind your eyes? The impaired vision is my doing! I'm trying to hinder you by disguise.... Come On!!!! I'm tired.....

so
I said

Really? Is that you doing that? Then why the HELL do I pay $12 per bottle of wine which I consume by the vat? And if you're so almighty as to be able to provide such a welcoming buzz why do you feel the need to hammer me while I'm trying to drift, cocooned, in a nice warm fuzz?

sigh
I said

Please, believe me, I say this with all honesty, your nothing but a drunken piece of lint that would not like to be picked out of a belly button on a good day but you're all I've got, and until you pass out I continue to see the rest of the world as just one great big inkblot... Go to ******* bed... for the love of Satan.... Please!

I said

I'm going already. Keep your shirt on

I said

Good! but I'll believe it when your gone

I said

Nasty *****, I better sleep well tonight

I said*

Drunken cow... if you make it to bed, I'll make it right

*I can only trust me...

I awake to the smell of concrete and rusted metal. Before the holes I call eyes open, the dank air embraces me. Fills my lungs like water and holds me tight as a forgotten lover. The tomb is silent but for the steady drip of water. A silent cacophony standing in stark defiance to the quiet that surrounds it. A futile display. My eyes flicker but do not open. Dark suns encased in a greater blackness. They're bountiful rays oppressed by the night that will not relinquish its hold. But a crack is made, and the dull grey of life seeps through. I am greeted by an empty hallway, forlorn and devoid of consciousness. A puddle has gathered in its centre, an odd and misshapen thing. A rustic inkblot that Rorschach would have been happy to give employ. I wondered if I could reach it through the bars. Touch it, and vicariously immerse myself in its freedom.  In its possibility. Suddenly, the grate of iron on iron filled the halls. The shriek of metal and old hinges joined the chorus, until finally, only steps remained. Calm, solemn things whose leisure exerted authority upon the air. My mind urged me to rise, but my body lacked the will to comply. Dark eyes like hungry fires greeted the stranger, dressed in fine dapper if not damp wear. His eyes were as winter, blue orbs of chipped ice. His lips formed a smile and in it betrayed their lack of sincerity. There was a violence to his gaze, an unsuppressed furry. His lips were moving, words were being spoken yet I could barely grasp a whisper. I forced myself to focus, to return from that inner retreat, and slowly, the noises of the world came back to me. His voice faded into being, a surprisingly pleasant baritone "... your arraignment is to be set a month from now, the retrial will commence shortly there after and you will be placed in a holding facility till the remainder of the trial is concluded. A noticeably finer arrangement then solitary. Any questions?"
A small part of me chuckled, the sound was hoarse, grim, more like the wheezing cough of a dying man than a laugh. He seemed to smile, a severity to the sincerity of the gesture. As if cruelty lay just beyond the border of his lips. They were moving again, morphing and contorting into different shapes. The noises they made were a blur though, fading like the sound of a car disappearing into the distance. Its slow engine purring out of existence.

James, you make my eyebrows feel so heavy.
To think: if I never find the one and one make too many empty glasses were broken in the mud-
dled my words when she asked for the time for bed –
All during my morning constitutional.
Take your ***** on the Mount and your Sin of the Farter
Because I know there’s nothing behind the artist except falling towers and furniture-sellers.
But can the deaf still listen?
Or should I care what’s inside a box I can never open?
And how many carriages will follow my coffin
And who will be my wormeaten neighbors
And which tongue will be employed to engrave the epitaph
And topped by what symbol or none?
 
In the beginning the first two words began to breed
And each generation issued reduplication
Evolving vestigial verbiage and new punctuation
All the way down to a young Poet-Hero-Creator:
Use illusory contours to paint the gravity between heavenly bodies, and use
The shared human experience of multistable perception to imply the gestalt of Dublin
(and be sure to use that German term).
We are the artificers of meaning.
 
Item: the location of the key.
Cat: things I should be thinking about but am not.
Item: the *** organs of strangers and acquaintances.
Category: things I should not be thinking about but am.
Item: the autobiographical component of Shakespeare’s later works.
Cat: things I need you to know that I think about.
Item: the possibility that my presence is not nearly as commanding as I’d formerly assumed.
Item: the increasing inebriatory similarities between myself and my father.
Item: the fear of losing my memory of Mother’s face,
as directly correlated to the expanding passage of time.
Cat: things I need you to think I don’t think about, at all.
 
Picture a symphony.
Hold the moment when the lights first fall and the cacophony of tuning
Floods into a single, synthesized vibrating tone. After the silence and before the song.
Write what you hear.
Write the chords in semiotic rhyme; transcribe harmony as memory:
Sing lived and unlived love and stride through on inkblot feet.
Now add the missing notes.

his chest was the ground caving in
in a matter of seconds;
it was the streets' sudden tremors
the wall cracks
and chipped rocks.
his gaze, hauntingly sad,
it was almost inviting.
and i was a girl,
all white dress and wide eyes
not really knowing any better;
steps, too careful
walks, too slow,
tracing the faultlines
misplaced on his skin;

it was an open field —
an open target for the lightning to strike
and leave its marks
and i was just a girl,
looking for poems
where they shouldn't be found;
on the palm creases,
and the curves of his lips.
i walk,
all tentative tiptoes
and a wrong step;
falling into each hollow,
each crevice,
each slit.

he was an earthquake, waiting to happen
seismic and sudden,
taking everything down.

and i — a nameless girl,
an inkblot for face and limbs
a paramour,
a secret,
all wrapped into one.

i — a doorstep kiss,
an uncertain touch,
a bedpost notch,
all wrapped into one.

and i — a jamais vu,
a face in the crowd,
a nameless casualty,

all wrapped into one.

i bite my nails to the bone
and when i bleed it reminds me that i am home
in a vessel made of stardust and controlled chaos
i am a tangled thought
a misrepresentation of misplaced passion
a piece of paper with an inkblot
made to diagnose a series of theories
about the distinction between them and us

A rusty metal drawing, a slow inkblot on a cold sky canvas

Hurls slowly in circles, carving itself into negative space

A copper ore is the blood moon

there always comes an empty dawn
when sorry doesn't matter
will not save you from the knife
or from all of the inkblot splatter

on the inside you are whole
and on the inside i'm a shell
and when it comes to caves and houses they don't
get along too well

and you said medicate or suffer was the only
ultimatum
all the simple things you said
strangled bruised it all verbatim

you inscribed it in your hatchet
put it there in chicken scratch
stuck in in the oak tree in the yard and said
you will come back

for it
i feel the time dissolving eating through the floor
as quickly
as my hands can pick up jacks, i cannot
throw them anymore

this is not a game to win
this is not another war
this is all my organs in a jar
for sale beside the door

and you were too afraid to tell me
you were too afraid to see
that the demons clawing at your back
were all brought here by me

and yet i never drew the circle
didn't call them up from hell
i was born with all these chemicals
and drowned inside the well

so put your orphans up for sale
pack up your house and leave this town
for if the dog is sick and dying, it's just
best to put her down

it's just best to put her down.

The death of a child
is not a solemn event
it's an event of crying
of shrieking
and weeping

Teenagers mourn for their lost friend
mothers stand and lay them to rest.
The unthinkable has happened
no words to describe
when a teenager dies
the world herself cries

Nothing to say
no words or prayer
nothing to hear this sad time around
her life will be celebrated
her death will be mourned
But still the hole lingers
where her bright life once shone

Among the living will her memories stay
her life of joy and inkblot in everyone's history.
She lived as one should
a child and a girl
carefree and loved
She roamed all the world.

And now she is dead.
And there are no words.
But teenagers crying,
And parents doing the worst.

I hear voices in my head
I hear them sound like dead
people on Any Given Sunday
an ungracious abundance
of other peoples’ voices

I hear them most
when other people speak
loudness leaks from moving lips
to say words that make no sense
that say something else
the Politics of Experience
unfold me like some geometric inkblot

I see Batman
I see Batman
I see BATMAN

Did you hear that?

It sounded like Batman
like a Batarang
catching some villainous cape
like a car door closing
on a Great Escape

it sounded like
                     two people
competing for head space
the one being said
the one being meant
the silence in between them
speaks volumes to itself
No, please say that again
in a sonorous tone
it snores my inner demon
to groan behind an asinine
slumbering inside each line
wound with reservations grinding
our hero chopped off from loose lips
to fit in the caustic grimoire of actual fact

I am the Bat
I am the Bat
I am the Bat

I hear voices in my head
that sound like conversations
an unwilling participant am I
by virtue of presence, my
lips unlocked never seem
                       to speak enough
though lips move more gratefully
than these feet that just want to leave
this place, to never talk again
sit behind a screen
be pixelated, a thinly
gleaming monitor
of the fun facts lacking
in a lark-full repartee
I check up on myself
look up the words that I doubt
check my bruises
from roundhouse kicks
split lips bloodied with small talk
sweet silence is
to stay home and smoke

I should stop talking

Did you hear that?

and when they play like they don’t know
don’t let them go
make them stay
to tell us what
they meant to say
#againandagain
#againandagain

I hear voices

Did you say something?

Alongside the girl who's a home where the heart is and a rooftop escapade all in one, I learned while wandering like a stray dog through a French chateau that old folktales believed salamanders were born of fire.

I’ve always felt as if fire is a cliche. It bites the hand that feeds it. Beautiful, but destroys. We’ve heard it before.

But, no one strives to be a cliche, and no one would like to be born of fire, either.

Too often, when we hack the head from the hydra of our family roots, another tragedy grows in its place. A salamander might have poison in its blood, and bloodline, ‘cause this family tree was uprooted long before I’ve ever seen it in its prime.

Sometimes, it’s hard to use the brimstone on your tongue for good when those with a right to be pessimists seem to drag you down, but think before you spit fire at the cinderblocks round your ankles, because even under a cockatrice’s gaze, they’re people too.

In those long weeks where high school looks like a desert, we somehow learn to never be more fragile than the skeletons, or the eggshells we're walking on. But I’ve since learned and swear by the fact that life and living are two very different things.

I can't make up my mind if this is all more apology or anthem, but if I can recommend one thing, it's this:

Allow the complexity of language in the simplest of words to forcibly beat your heart. You won't always hear the words you want to, the words that might keep a desert salamander alive, and that would do the same for you if there were someone there to say them. So grasp at straws. Hear poetic words now, and poetic words later, no matter how ragtag they may or may not be, intricate or beautiful, both, or neither, and everything in between and not. Plaster in the cracks of your atrophied heart from those nights where your mother slams every door and threatens to never come back, and dear god, make use of whatever words in this world there are that bring comfort through even that.

When the drudgery of life interrupts the sensation of living, presenting you with a rigged inkblot that just won't do you right, look, in the absolute worst of times, rather than up at a sky you've seen every day of your life, look down.

When the inconsistent blue that you've seen on every week of every month of every year fails you, do not search for life saving inspiration in what you've seen a thousand times. See the intricate patterns in the wood floors you walk on. I know it feels so often as if the beam from the lighthouse has already passed you by, but a crack in the pavement, a blemish, might just be the greatest joy of your day when you spot the flowers that still grow in spite of how they’ve been tread upon.

Then, scan your neutral horizon to see the little people. The unprompted kindness, the shy smiles, and the people who never quite know what to do with their hands, because I cross my heart and hope never to die young that they've felt this way too.

A person ought to mean more in life than in death, so for the love of your own self, feel, even in the darkest of power outages, for anything that's always out there.

And it’s true, autumn leaves cannot save your life in the long term, nor even will the smile of a stranger. But as long as you keep saving room for the simple joys that make your heart beat overtime, you'll have the first ounce of leverage it takes to save yourself.

An inkblot tarnish that bleeds through sheets
of work, an all-consuming blackness that eats
through my morale like acid through a petal,

that slow and steady browning tainting
the pure white of that spotless rose,
imperfect now, and damaged,

the bruise that seeps across capillaries
of hope until all thought of life is tender
and sore to touch,

false colours marking things that shouldn't be,
my failure marked in bold for me to see.