Tongue-tied, he holds his breath
Inhaling the air like it's crystal ****
Tongue-torn, he bleeds it out
Love stains on his mouth
His heart bleeding for her
His glass eyes stop and stare

To him she's his only way out
From himself and his paper skin
Cause these tears are wearing him paperthin
His love, his heart he's lost control
This love, this heart he's lost his soul

I caught a glimpse of you
Behind the wall of tinsel
And a thousand words exploded in my mind

You stood there so eloquent
While your eyes told me fables
Though your gaze I could never find

Like a distant rainbow
I kept debating within myself
"Could I ever catch you if I chased you?"

Was there a *** of gold?
Or just me playing the fool?
Unanswered questions burned through and through

I was whisked into deep daydreams
Where my hands would set sail
Across the ocean that was your skin

Your lips met me softly
There was a hunger awaiting birth
The fabric of bedsheets between us, paperthin

Then I cursed reality for its unwelcome return
To exact revenge upon my conscience
And you disappeared, fiancée closely in tow

I should have disconnected
I should have burned the prologue
But happily ever after beckoned me to say hello

Fidget.
The longer I sit here
as a victim of the flowers,
their moony faces
peering at me through
stupored goggles,
the more I want to
decapitate them
petal by false petal,
watching them fall to the floor.
Fidget.
The longer I am chained
to the dry ***** pipes
droning through the November air
dry paperthin hymns,
the stronger the urge to
rip them to shreds
then dipping them
one by one
into a vat of emotion.
Fidget.
I am a prisoner of the podium
and of the pew;
of the carbon-copy prayers
devoid of actuality
of love
of meaning.
The words echo endlessly
through dried-up wells
that sobs no longer seek
for solace.
Empty and stale,
they roll off your tongue
without a second thought.
Does no one mean anything anymore?
The microphone passes
from prophet to false prophet
sighing sympathetically
before returning to the leader-
even he reads his love
from an index card.
My head throbs in my hands
bursting with a burning question
and my legs sink like lead weights
under my black tights.
The ***** resonates
but I stand.
Nothing-
not the boy to my right
nor the best friend to his
not the whispers
nor the final words that
FINALLY
overflow with truth and love
not the sickening plummet of shock
from a glimpse of the honored one's face
can stop me from running
down the aisles
out the double doors
leaving petals and music notes
strewn in my wake.
What will my funeral be like?

I can’t be delicate,
small, sad-looking and innerly folding,
my legs will never oragami-fold themselves
over my tired tired fat chest   .

I am blessed to be big, though
my *** is a curse, how it juts and forces
itself to be known by peoples’ eyes and
rudely introduces itself to chairs, knick knacks,

anything unfortunate enough to exist
within its gargantuan wake  .

I am blessed to be huge but small,
I am blessed to warmly ******* and spill
my flesh over everything I touch & taste;

I am forced to give myself up to
the world, to give my huge body up as
comfort to the multitudes of humans
I love and crave and want and dream up

because they will never find me small and cowered,
will never offer their bodies
to comfort mine, assuming instead that
my huge warmth can sustain its
own flame .

My own body can’t contain the
sad swells and lovely lakes that surge
and bash against its own hide  --- - ---

that’s why my stretch marks
leak and tendril their way
around my arms,
my belly folds,
my underloved thighs,

and I wonder why we both want
to tender my fire
to a low smolder
and let it fade out

do we
think that trees with thick
lush, curved and pink
foliage are somehow
whole-er
than trees with paperthin leaves?

my bark still craves
the sun, which sometimes
comes in the form
of human flesh

Ragged breath
pushed through  lips
paperthin and dry

Clouded moons
in once sparkling  eyes

Skin of face
folded and creased
by years of laughter

Age has wearied you
beyond repair

Your first foot treads
heavily upon heavens stair

And in this pastel room
the reward for a life of care

As we come to usher you away
to your final, hopeful jubilee day

All have come, none have missed
the opportunity to thank you
for, the gifts you gave...

One word of kindness, from your lips
ripples through the lives you touched
and all your students learnt well
to live, love and give freely,
of caring humanities touch.

In this pastel room, we stand,
touching one last time,
the gnarled and giving hand

And when we leave, we do weep
for loss, but also joy....
knowing your soul does keep
to the pieties of love.

So in the days to come,
know your grace will live on
through lives and generations
your teaching will be the yardstick
to which our hearts are measured
YOUR WORDS, YOUR LIFE,
REMEMBERED AND TREASURED

everyday starts at
273.16 Kelvin, 611 Pascals
my body still unsure what it wants to be
-no, scratch that-
still unsure what other people want it to be

1. with my parents
the temperature drops and the pressure rises
while they yellcriticizedemand
and suddenly i am ice
solidfrigidhard
stubborn as hell but ten thousand times colder

2. my best friend is the fire
sparking excitement in dark parts of my soul
and as we heat up together
i become free as air
the earth no longer able to keep me together
or hold me down

3. i am fluid around everyone else
freeform
shapeshifting until all they see is their own reflection staring back at them
intangible
slipping through hands like an eel that will shock anyone who gets close
and quietly destructive
slowly eroding the paperthin walls of their hearts and leaving behind nothing but canyons in my wake

solid liquid gas
common science says that it ends there
but you
you always remind me that there is a fourth state of matter
because when we touch it is like i can feel the electrons of negativity jumping off my skin
and when you kiss me
i could swear we are the plasma that the universe and stars are made of

we haunt outmoded roach motels
tacky hermit-drab shells
ready to burst

in all the random, lonely corners of the universe

and coroners
wander stodgy corridors
and remote old waysides

as we rot,
filling the ground's vacancies

tangled up and diaphanous
flaring up in the wind and burning

the godhead ached
and his stomach growled
and time had ran its course
as we wandered next door

left to idle, awkwardly
to savor the flowing ennui

in dirtied decorum
fearful, molten paradoxes
waxing ecstatically
at the moment

our distance dangled in spacetime
it was plastered on the front window
of the dusty, remote, old dollar store

on crabgrass he fell
Charlie horses galloped, tenants of seashells cried out
as it was always much easier to recite
dull, signifying nothing
while determining everything

we're wandering, bleary-eyed individuals
in the loneliest location in existence

relinquished in internal fisticuffs
crumpling the paperthin walls, as the
****** of a moving tire whines outside
and the living backdrop blurs, falls away
and the universe hastily reroutes itself

Eye can taste
The musky dusky dark
Of a raven on a windowsill

Eye can smell the Witches
Brew, be it stirred or
Be it still

Eye can feel the pain
And sorrow of man
Trapped in shadowy cave

Eye can hear the cries
Of Homer's sirens on
Rocky shore and mystic wave

What you see is what you get
Never has there been
A cliche so obvious
And yet a truth so paperthin

We've stranded in paperthin madeness
Longing and fighting With love
Faith had moonrigged sadeness
The empires are build from above

The mind can convicted anoutheR soul
As you remember unborn signals

i am a bible of verses
a scripture of curses
how many sins can you find
staining my skin
i bleed paperthin and only when i take the time
to drip instead of flood
but i suppose we can't all build arks to save ourselves
from drowning unexpectedly
on a trip to tennessee i learned what it means to tell a girl
how i feel and not care what the
reply would be
it turned out better than i had hoped and maybe it was the unexpected
that caused me to stay afloat
but i've got poison in my veins
a river of remains from every last person that's tried to save me
she got lucky
caught herself just before the cliff gave way
saved herself from the damage i keep hidden within
she got out
alive
so why do i feel so horribly convinced that i'm going to die
why do i feel so horribly unsatisfied
i'm too terrified to even touch her
know that my hands have become live wires set to shock
something fatal
i'm
something fatal
and now that i've got empty palms and a bleeding heart
i understand what it means to fall apart
i paint myself black and blue
terrified of fading translucent pale
terrified that if i don't keep the colors in my skin
if i don't remind myself how to bruise
i'll disappear
into the waiting arms of my ribcage
never has my body felt more like a prison
than when it keeps me pushing
at all the wrong bars
keeps me rushing
at all the wrong guards
i'm breaking myself in two
thousand pieces of mismatched shards of glass
that were never meant to be collected into something beautiful
i'm the leftover scraps
of finished pieces and i guess maybe the pieces that are missing
are the ones i allowed her to keep
she's gorgeous in her entirety
so maybe it's worth
this feeling of shattering

I AM IN A STATE
OF URBAN DECAY
FALLING APART IN FRAYING
STRANDS OF LAST STANDS THAT
NEVER SEEM TO BE THE END
MEET ME ON THE BATTLEFIELD
BECAUSE WE'RE BOTH TOO SHARP TO BE
AT PEACE ON OUR KNEES
BUT TOO RESTLESS SHAKING ORBIT
TO NOT COME TO BLOWS
WITH OURSELVES
SHATTER EVERY INSULT YOU'VE SEEN
ECHOED ON MY FACE BECAUSE
MIRRORS DEFLECT AND I HAVE A TENDENCY
TO BOUNCE BACK
ON TUESDAY MORNINGS I BLEED PAPERTHIN
THAT WAS THE FIRST DAY I KNEW HOW TO
LONG FOR YOU
AND I HAVE EVERY DAY SINCE
I'M METAPHORICALLY BOUND TO WRITE
THE THINGS I WISH I'D SAY
YOU WERE NEVER MY LOVER
BUT I HAVE LOVED YOU EVERY DAY

patchwork girl dreaming
piecing together the scraps of silk
frayed ribbons of broiderie anglais
the tears of velvet darker than midnight
squares of sackcloth hessian made to scrape
against skin both thick and paperthin

patchwork girl sewn together
with a golden thread and a needle finer than hate
embroidered edges with floss spun by spiders
from clouds of dreams, flower thoughts, starwonders
and fragile pockets of maybe hidden beneath morning dew
stitches all lose, then too pulled too tight

she is together
she is all fallen apart
the soft shape of a doll
the tender shape of a girl

hold her, not an armful of scraps
     but something precious, one of a kind
          couture

BLIND. a cat
in a flashflood
of head/tail lights

frozen as a
deer in the
middle of a
highway through
midnight woods;
once upon a
time
once upon
the frozen
air.

do you think
YOU know?

how does it
FEEL?
how do THEY
FEEL before
they D I e?

(do you know where i was going?
do you know where i've been?)

do you say
your names
when you pray
with lifted hands?
do you think
the rain will
wash the muck
down your body?

muck sliding down
your paperthin
skin

your candlewax sins
melting your
shell
showing the
core of
your being.

true colors.

make you feel
pure and hallow
make you feel
like a saint.
make you
feel like
you own the
world.
make you
feel like
you own
me.

find me
flat against
the road
on thick
asphalt;
find me
inside
an empty
takeaway
cup like
red unwanted
slush
rejected.

bury me
under your skin.
bury me
in the emptiness
of your mind.
bury me
in the hollows
of your sinews.
bury me.
i was
never well
half-alive, anyway.