I want to get on my knee
I want to make you mine

I feel more secure when you are tied

Put a ring on your finger?
Baby, I won’t be satisfied

I want you so badly
I’m obsessed, and you are hypnotized

Never a day I don’t wonder how we’ve got drowned in this love and crime

Guess that’s what people say
I’m your longing
You fulfill my appetite

I can only see love
Through your throbbing veins on your sternal line

I can only hear love
Through the screaming and crying

When you are chocked by the chain
When you are hopeless and frightened

I know I’ve loved you right

No one else matters
Nothing else shines
Your existence means more than my life

But baby
I’d only get on my knee
when you die

My sister Annick fixed me, locked me in, with cold, blue eyes as she sat down slowly next to me at the table. “I’m a surgeon,” she said, not quite casually, “a board certified surgeon.”

I give her a questioning look.

“I could take your steak knife,” she says, eyeing it, “plunge it into your neck - and oh, sure, there’d be a question or two but in the end - I’d walk away clean.”

“I don’t think,” I start saying…

Tears well to near overflowing in her turquoise eyes. “I came in - officer” she says, sounding stunned and surreal. “She was having a convulsion, she exhibited severe cyanosis, I couldn’t clear her airway, it was a classic tonic-clonic seizure.” she goes on, her voice rising to near panic with the diagnosis.

“You’d never…” I start to interrupt but she gently covers my mouth with her left hand while gathering the handle of the serrated silver steak knife, expertly, into her right hand.

“I attempted to perform a tracheostomy,” she continues in a traumatized but professional voice. “but as I began a transverse incision above the sternal notch,” a tear rolls down her cheek, “Anais suffered a severe generalized-onset seizure and convulsed, forcefully into the knife”

“IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!” I confess suddenly, as if under oath, in court.

There’s a moment of still silence.

“And WHEN,” she asked, wiping away the tear and turning the knife for a downward ******. “Were you going to MENTION IT?!”

“NOW! - before dinner!” I look around the empty room - for help - for a sympathetic jury. “It was an ACCIDENT! - I’m SORRRRYYYY!” I plead.

My sister slowly sets down the knife and says deliberately, purposefully - like a death sentence: “My Valentino sheer floral-lace top is STAINED.”

”I can FIX it!” I insist in a rush.

“Keep OUT of my room - and my stuff.” she grumbles, “And REMEMBER what I said,” she adds as she pats the knife before getting up and leaving the room.

“I WILL’” I promise to her back.

A second later, my mom sweeps in from the opposite direction.
“What’s up” she asks.

“Nothing” I almost whisper, head down.

Tell me please
does the grey granite faced
northern heather scarp
or the smooth enchanting
Carrara marble cherub
move you to awe?
Does nature only
wintered weathered
sheer and simple
eclipse the man made
man handled
alabaster angel?

Bleak beauty

Tell me my friend
does your head turn
as the high cheek-*****
short haired
practical passes
a flash of scarlet
lipped?
Or do you arrest
as a foundation creation
glosses across your horizon
loping on heels and too knowing?

Bleak Beauty

I must ask you
my brother
When you cause to sleep
does your angel
appear
and does
the gentle
perfection of her
supra-sternal notch
ever stay with you
til morning?

im here with a
risk of sternal injury
gripping and smashing
my heart through the
stripes of my ribs

i got a hole in my head
and a whole lot of ******* done
shoot me in the brain
in the chest for one
so i can think through my crotch

still enslaved to ***
a breed of breeding mass produced

I am ripping open at the seams, the tears are searing scars down my cheeks,
   One more paper to do, one more sentence to repeat,
Come on just take the leap, write something worth all that is bleak,
   Just need to power through, I was told not to retreat,

My pencil lead breaks again, frantically trying to get more,
   These lines don’t seem to end, is that a reminder for a test tomorrow?
I have problems to mend, and something for my teachers to deplore,
   Just one more email to send, maybe tonight is worth the morning hangover,

We learn about The Declaration of Independence, what about The Declaration of a student's financial dependence,
   And can we talk about the insanity that is the reality of a prison without bars, a prison with a few more smiles with test after test to test the aptitude of whatever is left,
And didn’t you know that the education provided is clouding over our personalities, ask us what we like, and we’ll freeze, we don’t know,
   There wasn’t an answer, there wasn’t a formula, this wasn’t on the SAT, it wasn’t in the textbook, it wasn’t in the notes, what do we do now,

And our words mean nothing, it all means nothing unless its in 12 point Times New Roman,
   Our opinions are pointlessly written out unless it’s all double spaced, it means nothing without a thesis, is pointless without a conclusion,
Our minds are sectioned in tests and notes, our identities are categorized the street smarts and the book geniuses, we are divided by the artsy kids and the jocks, we are divided as men and women,
   We have lost all humanity, all vanity, we have lost sons and daughters, we have all fallen into this insanity,

And these terms are swimming all about my eyes, craniocaudal, dorsaloventral, the digestion of sternal recumbency,
   It’s like these lines are never ending, my eyes are burning, the exhaustion is overwhelming,
How am I to remember something as complicated as this phrase that is screaming nothing but unneeded redundancy,
   But I must come through, I must finish this by exactly one minute before midnight, I feel myself crashing.

1 hour of mathematical curvitory, 2 hours of astronomical insanity,
   3 hours of burning scientific calamity, 4 hours of economic minority,
5 hours of silence and religious responsibilities, 6 hours of starvation without seniority,
   And 7 hours of work that surpases our intelectual and emotional capability,
  
We work and work and we work some more but we really never get to mentally explore,
   Due dates and deadlines, it’s like the quadratic formula and the mitochondria are the only things that are allowed in my mind,
We are trained to move like clockwork, with nothing but mechanical processing and memory stores to our so called searing core,
   These are our soul and self preserving guidelines that are set by the authorities that are supposed to be educationally kind to those who need just a little more time,
Just one more line,
Just 20 more words,
Just get it done, it doesn’t have to be an art of perfection,
After all, we’re only being timed on completion and temporary retention..