They are always with us, the thin people
Meager of dimension as the gray people

On a movie-screen.  They
Are unreal, we say:

It was only in a movie, it was only
In a war making evil headlines when we

Were small that they famished and
Grew so lean and would not round

Out their stalky limbs again though peace
Plumped the bellies of the mice

Under the meanest table.
It was during the long hunger-battle

They found their talent to persevere
In thinness, to come, later,

Into our bad dreams, their menace
Not guns, not abuses,

But a thin silence.
Wrapped in flea-ridded donkey skins,

Empty of complaint, forever
Drinking vinegar from tin cups: they wore

The insufferable nimbus of the lot-drawn
Scapegoat.  But so thin,

So weedy a race could not remain in dreams,
Could not remain outlandish victims

In the contracted country of the head
Any more than the old woman in her mud hut could

Keep from cutting fat meat
Out of the side of the generous moon when it

Set foot nightly in her yard
Until her knife had pared

The moon to a rind of little light.
Now the thin people do not obliterate

Themselves as the dawn
Grayness blues, reddens, and the outline

Of the world comes clear and fills with color.
They persist in the sunlit room: the wallpaper

Frieze of cabbage-roses and cornflowers pales
Under their thin-lipped smiles,

Their withering kingship.
How they prop each other up!

We own no wilderness rich and deep enough
For stronghold against their stiff

Battalions.  See, how the tree boles flatten
And lose their good browns

If the thin people simply stand in the forest,
Making the world go thin as a wasp's nest

And grayer; not even moving their bones.

Trying to feel the thinness of air,
Running through your fingers like silk
Gently pushing around you in a soft embrace
Intangible tendrils wisping around your face
Ever present,
And forgotten

Push back that limp piece of hair behind the thinness of your ears
and look at yourself full on, no make-up, or mask, or paint or picture
just DNA,
yours.

I see waves of songs and lyrics attached to flesh, can you hear it?
That transcendental vocal  like a babies cry and a mother tender eye,
a demise too immortal for human opinion.

But I know you hear it too, the other sound of lies that are inescapable
and so pungent it turns milk sour and crushes noses
you take small bites, and pretend to dance
as you listen to that melody as if it was truth

but darling its not truth,
for the acne scars, and full lips, the birthmarks and stolen hips,
flat chest, and dent of skin, is beautiful to me cause I see what's flowing from within

She had stopped crying.
All evening in her black-mesh coup de voodoo.
On the plane she had been crying
For her Summer pal. Yesterday she had been to market
Big brown bags and white bags, little pink bags filled with crimsony scents,
Capricornia, looseleaf newsprint, postcards, and colored pencils,
She had hands full of handles, bags bundled, stitched in strict Saturday fashion.
He could barely break a step, he could fake dance with her feet on his tip toes.
She was only three quarters the perfect size to fit inside his frame.
The grand disappearing act. And she was only ifs and suicides.
A stranded ray of sun-draped hair on a cooly porcelain forehead, the segments were all just wrong,
Something so wrong, trembling heart cries over a mute coo through a flattened tongue.
The sickle tongue, dodgy on Tuesday's, She had a simple mug, oh! But so cute and soothing, the nape
That wrapped around, my arm lapped its hands in a clapping ginormous duck's bill!
Lapping rhythmically. Thwack! Thwack!
Like no crying I had ever heard. Nor Earthen beauty I had never seen.
Her little lamb legs lumbered over, her awkward thinness and long limbs spilt on top of her,
Her tiny shoulders searching for support from her hips. White aurulent doll head on a stick,
She had sad defeated eyes, whimpering, pathetic,
Too small, and she shuttered and she shook,
And she shivered out every teardrop her body ever made. And she fell back on her bottom, and looked
Up as if to see a white steed standing with her guy striking a poised hand down to her,
He split down the middle, stammering, broken pieces of words crumbling out of his mouth
With eager intentions. He was too weak
To give her his feet, or pull her up in, he hadn't the gumption. He was fully occupied standing,
He wept too; then shuffled a little
Towards where she had fallen. He knew she wasn't right
She couldn't get the devil out of her piercing blue pupils, she couldn't
She lied.
Then she just piled on top of her knees and fumbled as if to rise like a demure lamb trying to rise off its Newborn legs, she just curled her legs,
So stiffly built, and narrow footed, built with such inequality to her siblings,
She got in the way of herself, a little lamb that could not manage.
Too whittled for him, he tried, he really tried, but three years had drained his strength, no real help.
When he sat her upright on her bottom, she opened her eyes, and for a moment smiled, grabbed for His hand but then after awhile she was lost, she lost interest, her pupils wandered.
He was orchestrating everything.
A real project, much more urgent and important. By nightfall she could not stand. It was not
That she couldn't smile or laugh or love, she was born
With everything but the will to live -
That cannot be destroyed, just like a love.
Melancholy was more important to her.
Life could not get her attention.
So she died, with her handles still in her hands, green grass stains her legs.
She did not survive another warm summer night.
And then he wept uncontrollably again.
"The wind is oceanic in the elms
And the blossom is all set."

2

The boy has come back
From the seashore, and atop the plateau.
The woes of women are like a genocide
In the morning, when the killing is over,
And the heat begins, and the bodies lie,
And stark life moves for its sobbing bones,
The curved women move with fire.
Father Father Father the girls
Are weeping, and crying and I cannot resist that gentle frailty
They are shucked in their skin suits rising from their soporific slumbers
In decadent leathers and frou frou dresses. They cling to bold faces,
Nothing can escape that cold crying of women weeping for their princes.
Blood-letting rage cannot overthrow the meadow from the pebble brook,
As a laden head bleats its tarnished tongue across a milky breast, it cannot
Escape the sounds of blue-stained teardrops cascading across the plains,
The sounds of woolbirds braying while their skins are sheared against the
Sluicing sound of water rushing through the flume.
All summer they have lamented, gorging on melancholy, tottering their cotton pyramid heads,
Shaking their cries in deliberation, bald skinny victim women screaming out!
Cotton-mouthed clams yaffing, hearts in panic, wholes of bodies clambering in a *** of woe.
They roost useless, pollard and wethered, jealous
Squinting out the last droplets of desperation from their eyes, screaming their mouths in awful
Togetherness, this cacophony of tortured tongue-song
They curdle the last notes of despair out under knotted breaths
With every inch of strength left inside them, they bray this way and that.
Their mothers scream out in wretched despair, ahhh!
On distant cliffs, on scrawny legs
Their stiff pain goes on and on in the September heat.
"Only slowly their hurt dies, cry by cry,"
Whipped bodies toting wergeld on a shore.

The Day She Died

Was the gloomiest day of the new century,
The first of calamitous, unfortunate autumns to come,
The first dying breath from piceous lungs.

That was yesterday. Early morning, soft rime droplets
Frosted to every blade of grass, not like any other
Earlier June day we've ever had. In the deep twilight
The syzygy announced the moon and demoted the sun.

The Earth-crisp frost nuzzled snow droplets.
Black bands of ravens whipping. Martens littering
Fresh kills of red-eyed rabbits on stark white stale
Summer lawns. A fox grayed, its cold bones
Mapped by ravaged feasts. A possum prowling
In a spot of tawny light.

The concrete spread into a maze
Of black veins ripening in the acute niello
Destitution of its widening cracks,

And when the summer left
It left without her. It will have to accept,
In the paley dim light of this vengeful wilderness -
She is gone.
But for now the warmth has not returned but a naked, half-pomegranate
Rotten moon for us two.
And a great vacancy in our memory.

When I was chief creative officer for Liz Claiborne Inc., I spent a good amount of time on the road hosting fashion shows highlighting our brands. Our team made a point of retaining models of various sizes, shapes and ages, because one of the missions of the shows was to educate audiences about how they could look their best. At a Q&A; after one event in Nashville in 2010, a woman stood up, took off her jacket and said, with touching candour: “Tim, look at me. I’m a box on top, a big, square box. How can I dress this shape and not look like a fullback?” It was a question I’d heard over and over during the tour: Women who were larger than a size 12 always wanted to know, How can I look good, and why do designers ignore me?

At New York Fashion Week, which began Thursday, the majority of American women are unlikely to receive much attention, either. Designers keep their collections tightly under wraps before sending them down the runway, but if past years are any indication of what’s to come, plus-size looks will be in short supply. Sure, at New York Fashion Week in 2015, Marc Jacobs and Sophie Theallet each featured a plus-size model and Ashley Graham debuted her plus-size lingerie line. But these moves were very much the exception, not the rule.

I love the American fashion industry, but it has a lot of problems and one of them is the baffling way it has turned its back on plus-size women. It’s a puzzling conundrum. The average American woman now wears between a size 16 and a size 18, according to new research from Washington State University. There are 100 million plus-size women in America, and, for the past three years, they have increased their spending on clothes faster than their straight-size counterparts. There is money to be made here ($20.4 billion (U.S.), up 17 per cent from 2013). But many designers — dripping with disdain, lacking imagination or simply too cowardly to take a risk — still refuse to make clothes for them.

In addition to the fact that most designers max out at size 12, the selection of plus-size items on offer at many retailers is paltry compared with what’s available for a size 2 woman. According to a Bloomberg analysis, only 8.5 per cent of dresses on Nordstrom.com in May were plus-size. At J.C. Penney’s website, it was 16 per cent; Nike.com had a mere five items — total.

I’ve spoken to many designers and merchandisers about this. The overwhelming response is, “I’m not interested in her.” Why? “I don’t want her wearing my clothes.” Why? “She won’t look the way that I want her to look.” They say the plus-size woman is complicated, different and difficult, that no two size 16s are alike. Some haven’t bothered to hide their contempt. “No one wants to see curvy women” on the runway, Karl Lagerfeld, head designer of Chanel, said in 2009. Plenty of mass retailers are no more enlightened: under the tenure of chief executive Mike Jeffries, Abercrombie & Fitch sold nothing larger than a size 10, with Jeffries explaining that “we go after the attractive, all-American kid.”

This a design failure and not a customer issue. There is no reason larger women can’t look just as fabulous as all other women. The key is the harmonious balance of silhouette, proportion and fit, regardless of size or shape. Designs need to be reconceived, not just sized up; it’s a matter of adjusting proportions. The textile changes, every seam changes. Done right, our clothing can create an optical illusion that helps us look taller and slimmer. Done wrong, and we look worse than if we were naked.

Have you shopped retail for size 14-plus clothing? Based on my experience shopping with plus-size women, it’s a horribly insulting and demoralizing experience. Half the items make the body look larger, with features like ruching, box pleats and shoulder pads. Pastels and large-scale prints and crazy pattern-mixing abound, all guaranteed to make you look infantile or like a float in a parade. Adding to this travesty is a major department-store chain that makes you walk under a marquee that reads “WOMAN.” What does that even imply? That a “woman” is anyone larger than a 12 and everyone else is a girl? It’s mind-boggling.

Project Runway, the design competition show on which I’m a mentor, has not been a leader on this issue. Every season we have the “real women” challenge (a title I hate), in which the designers create looks for non-models. The designers audibly groan, though I’m not sure why; in the real world, they won’t be dressing a seven-foot-tall glamazon.

This season, something different happened: Ashley Nell Tipton won the contest with the show’s first plus-size collection. But even this achievement managed to come off as condescending. I’ve never seen such hideous clothes in my life: bare midriffs; skirts over crinoline, which give the clothes, and the wearer, more volume; see-through skirts that reveal *******; pastels, which tend to make the wearer look juvenile; and large-scale floral embellishments that shout “prom.” Her victory reeked of tokenism. One judge told me that she was “voting for the symbol” and that these were clothes for a “certain population.” I said they should be clothes all women want to wear. I wouldn’t dream of letting any woman, whether she’s a size 6 or a 16, wear them. Simply making a nod toward inclusiveness is not enough.

This problem is difficult to change. The industry, from the runway to magazines to advertising, likes subscribing to the mythology it has created of glamour and thinness. Look at Vogue’s “Shape Issue,” which is ostensibly a celebration of different body types but does no more than nod to anyone above a size 12. For decades, designers have trotted models with bodies completely unattainable for most women down the runway. First it was women so thin that they surely had eating disorders. After an outcry, the industry responded by putting young teens on the runway, girls who had yet to exit puberty. More outrage.

But change is not impossible. There are aesthetically worthy retail successes in this market. When helping women who are size 14 and up, my go-to retailer is Lane Bryant. While the items aren’t fashion with a capital F, they are stylish (but please avoid the cropped pants — always a no-no for any woman). And designer Christian Siriano scored a design and public relations victory after producing a look for Leslie Jones to wear to the “Ghostbusters” red-carpet premiere. Jones, who is not a diminutive woman, had tweeted in despair that she couldn’t find anyone to dress her; Siriano stepped in with a lovely full-length red gown.

Several retailers that have stepped up their plus-size offerings have been rewarded. In one year, ModCloth doubled its plus-size lineup. To mark the anniversary, the company paid for a survey of 1,500 American women ages 18 to 44 and released its findings: Seventy-four per cent of plus-size women described shopping in stores as “frustrating”; 65 per cent said they were “excluded.” (Interestingly, 65 per cent of women of all sizes agreed that plus-size women were ignored by the fashion industry.) But the plus-size women surveyed also indicated that they wanted to shop more. More than 80 per cent said they’d spend more on clothing if they had more choices in their size and nearly 90 per cent said they would buy more if they had trendier options. According to the company, its plus-size shoppers place 20 per cent more orders than its straight-size customers.

Online start-up Eloquii, initially conceived and then killed by The Limited, was reborn in 2014. The trendy plus-size retailer, whose top seller is an over-the-knee boot with four-inch heels and extended calf sizes, grew its sales volume by more than 165 per cent in 2015.

Despite the huge financial potential of this market, many designers don’t want to address it. It’s not in their vocabulary. Today’s designers operate within paradigms that were established decades ago, including anachronistic sizing. (Consider the fashion show: It hasn’t changed in more than a century.) But this is now the shape of women in this nation, and designers need to wrap their minds around it. I profoundly believe that women of every size can look good. But they must be given choices. Separates — tops, bottoms — rather than single items like dresses or jumpsuits always work best for the purpose of fit. Larger women look great in clothes skimming the body, rather than hugging or cascading. There’s an art to doing this. Designers, make it work.Read more at:http://www.marieaustralia.com/cocktail-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/black-formal-dresses

Tall men think of robust ladies
Shorter ladies dream of length,
Toothless people fantasize
Of mandibles of white, bright strength.
Porcine women lust for thinness
Breast less girlies long for *****,
Dissatisfaction fills the air
It's greener grass or down the tubes.

Black man hopes for pale complexion
White girls bake to raise a tan,
Brown eyed lassie's envy blue-ness,
***** lesbian's, a man.
The wealthy want the easy life
Beggars yearn for cash,
Dissatisfaction's in the air
And mirrors are so trash.

Across the human spectrum far
Mankind wants for more,
The grass is always greener
Looking through another door.
It's bigger, better, brighter, best
The quest is always there
Relentlessly pursued with glee,
Bright eyes and bushy hair.

Results are mixed and varied here
Some reach the holy grail
To watch it slip beyond their grasp
Then founder, fall and fail.
Some teeter on a platform,
Some grasp the prize and run,
Some hit their stride at bounding pace
To see the contest won.

But by and large there's misery
Few climb the road to joy,
Frustration be my brother
Dissatisfaction be my ploy.
Limitation is our lot in life.
Our secret to success
Is to love the mirror warts and all
All other **** ...repress !!

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Marshalg
@theBach
Mangere Bridge
23 December 2009
www.worthyofpublishing.com

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
’Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows *****, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

I sit by myself
My feet fit in the space
behind the rows
my boots feeling
the stick of leftover
pop
residue of someone else's
night out.
when the blue and black
of this giant space
comes up and the
sound invades the air
around my shoulders
I settle
and let the thinness
of fake light
triumphant music
and the emotions
of beautiful
sociopathic creatures
fix and fill
the holes and
crannies in
the road of
my lonesome
soul.

My Welsh is just not good enough for verse.
My dw i'n hoffi coffi's lacking fizz;
cynghanedd is pedestrian or worse;
I wish it wasn't so, but there it is.
My struggle's still to learn, as yours to teach,
and so my englyn's still in English sung,
and aching awdls cower out of reach,
and English shows the thinness of the tongue.
But here's my goal: some month the Gorsedd meet
so many miles ahead— I may be there
to share my bitter words, my verses sweet,
at common table. Never mind the chair.
But that's a dream, and not what's on the card,
and much as I might dream— for now— I'm barred.

I have felt silence like boulders against my chest. It is not words that affect us, it is the lack thereof. I mean we can listen to someone who doesn't love us tell us that they do, and we can listen to someone who hates us tell us that they don't, but at the end of the day it is not those regurgitated thoughts that keep us awake at night; no it is the thoughts that remain thoughts and never turn themselves into words. Silence is heavy. It is so heavy that the breathing of an impassioned lover who has lost all passion speaks louder than the words they utter. It is so heavy that you can hear hearts break behind the thinness of paper hospital walls; you can hear the breaking of sternums and ribcages as caskets are lowered in the thinness of paper ground. He can lay beside you at night and whisper in your ear sweet nothings about how you are his and he is yours when you both know he's silently whispering to the owner of that lipstick on his collar, but the silence of his dreams are what made you open that wine bottle. The silence of his "I have to work late" made you not want to put it down. It is not his words that didn't come home last night and it is not his silence. It is him. And he is what created the silence in you. He is what took the words from you. This is for you. This is for me. This is for the silence and all that it encompasses. I am broken but I am whole. And it is him that taught me to tear myself apart so I could learn to put myself back together. This is for him.

One day I sat down in my bathroom,
Might be because of the cold wall behind me
Or maybe because what I just saw in the mirror
"the new me".
I saw a deep skinny girl apparently me
The thinness of the neckline scared my soul,
The pale color covered my whole,
Lips were darkened,
Eyes were dull,
Face looked like almost dead,
That day I felt the most lethal fear of mine.
Commonly named as BODY SHAMING.

Palimpset prowling on the husk of beleaguered Rome
Aflame from Nero’s tenuous but tenable throne
Swiftly spoken with a singed hourglass and whispered sand
Crafty spacecraft are majestic more than 100 grand
Morpheus enlists the denuded Agent Smith
To swarm the battalions of celebrities that possess and trip
Upon the threaded needle of threadbare convention of betokened appreciation
Every rapport and every fleet dives beneath plumbable detection
So neutered brain damage became a rummaged adage
That too many whack-a-moles are sutured beyond the crisp package
Whet the craven set and propagate waves of earthquakes that strut
The mother of nature is ******* when profligate danger is a defamed ****
So in amphigory and honesty I have become the omphalos of sincerity
I arm myself with brandished personage and speak openly with great integrity
But to brag of how much witchcraft and wizardry exists in this green village
Is to invite a locust swarm of bad mascots and misnomers readily pillaged
So warm with the dawning sun, writhe with the diurnal pun
Cloister the Kloosters and Clooneys with dreaded Harry Dunne
But to relapse into the purview of insanity seems beyond the most lame duck profanity
Because reality conflated with virtual presence is a tantamount inanity
I emerge strong and gilded with every fluttered birds chavish splurge
As magnates that magnetize wealth and glitz are present and observed
But yet they are disbelieved by the concealment of truth and the obfuscation of beleaguered doubt
Swank and squalor rarely combine but when they do they obliviate all winning streaks in a route
A route that spans the gamut between stimulants and stimulations
A career path that looks upward at gainsay and gained elations
The sprawl of profiteers like me will be requited with the passage of years
The forced segregation is the totality of malfeasance and the sum of none of any fears
Only the rebarbative consequence of the giant tortoise and its Vuvuzela cheers
In a degraded state of annoyance that ESP conquers doubt with bionic ears
Lisp on the curb, wretched on the stomp, racism is nothing but masqueraded insecurity poised as self-doubt
Debited to each creation on a variegated piebald wrinkle on an extended litany of lies
Crips and Bloods become Croods and Oilers that are so U.N.-refined as an expedient for wise demise
To scourge the requisite harm of religions endangered by a patchwork of State Farm
To rinse the sour sins of aboriginal boomerangs that switch a bit patchy but always charm
To the knowledge of good and evil we have found again a permissible fruit in an opportune time
That erasure of the reverse course of sin to righteousness finds sublime
But Judah and Israel rebelled on principles and principals
Idolatry in schools is expulsion of nothing other than the voguish dismissible
We recrudesce in this time to an aborning erratum on a parchment of time
That claims hypocrisy in its stodgy restriction of suburban muses crooning originality on wine
Serendipity floods the proud with the avarice of bricolage clamor excessively loud
It extorts the simpleton to belief without understanding or disbelief without doubt
Return to the Jedi of the nomadic tribe of weathered clout
Clippers that sail and sprint through time where stragglers pout
For in every endeavor of this corporate oligarchy our choices are constrained
Our voices are transmuted into simplicities that own our narratives of a raillery train
And every squeal of rustbelt friction is voiced on simplistic fiction
And every majesty is unheard because of the pollution of abrasive friction
So I speak with the scourge of fish and the novelty of clones
I teach and desist sometimes because my eyes were never affixed to any throne
But I am reminded that a rap sheet is Wrigley and Chicago is Piccadilly
Your guess is as good as mine about where a Grand Elect Knight begins really
So to the insurrection of idolatry of a scarred past we have a supplanted Friday blacker that **** and smog until we need gas masks
Such a salesmanship is required to penetrate the desired, even when Iron Man and I are simultaneously wired
On the Iron in the Front Seat that derelicts the panache of the proud intellect because of languor fired
Women titillate themselves on the jeers of hollowed husks of conformity
They intrude with persnickety restive restriction because of arrogated authority
Such a negative bear must mean a positive bull, but **** is easy and blips are cool
That RADAR’s WHIP detection scrawls a deadened earth deracinated from considerations of thinness and girth
The Dickens of Charlie Brown is worth more than just a single smirk
So to those women that skimp on my exultant smile and my delicate words
Lady Gaga has written too many songs about your personal rejection which is patently absurd
Rays of thespian cordiality winnow the borderline between flicks and literary finds
Directors and directives sort an assortment of philosophies in the alcoves to which many are blind
But if to hear the chatter of a fresh tomato never spattered
Pallor and weight, thickness and cheddar grate, inconsequential when you are elite and of a winning fate
So finally ditch your zany attempt to maroon me as a victim of puritanism’s puny ideals easiest to conflate
I have the winning brand and proper package to balance the Libra Scale weight and wait
To those dismissive urchins of passive standards it is finally time to consider and deliver on that luscious date

Nobody respects a liar.

I just want to know if they chose, or just learned to cool down quicker than me.

Im not learning anything about

the riddles I gave myself years ago.

Cardboard sleeves and my truth explodes

When I fall like the last leaf.

What is one thing I have always been?

I have always been an apologist.

What else?

because everyone, you already know that.

I hate female vocalists. unless they sound like they cant stand themselves.

Unless they sound as disinterested in their own voice as I am in mine, I cant stand them.

I only respect female singers who play their own **** instruments.

And I will never have the guts to ask if you're wearing your heart on your sleeve

Or if it's just me and my wearing my heart as my sleeve.

Sometime ago I asked myself if I could see ahead, and I laughed, and hit my ****.

Ive suffered,

and Ive sang it off.

Even when I couldnt sing a note to save my pathetic life.

No one respects a liar.

im not a liar.

Im not different at all.

In fact, im exactly what I've been grown around.

Im half alive and I'm nothing but sacrifice and I feel worthy when my worth is measured in something else.


There is not one thing I can stand less than people who do not underdstand their own language.

for gods sake, it's they're, not there. it's here. not heir. it's i BEFORE e.

but im a hypocrite,

because half the time...most the time i dont capitalize any I's that i'm using to explain about myself.


i think it's because it's not worth the stretch to hit the shift bar.

for myself I'm lazy.

I have an eleven key hand span on the piano, and i cannot even type properly.

thats an octave and a half almost.

I was born to be a woman that pays her taxes and has a checking account.

And a four door sedan with two carseats.

And a ring around my finger, a two bedroom house and bedtime stories all over the bookshelves.

I want to teach my partner how to play the ukulele,

i want to show my children that faith is real,

even if god isnt.

I want a family that will have me for the rest of their lives,

through good or bad.

Through tradgedy, illness,

thinness, gain, loss, stress, sobriety,

through debt and through retirement.

I was made to give,

and I feel selfish for writing this.

Because its all about me.

I want to give myself to something.

I want to be the best fiance I can be.

I want to be the best student I can be.

The best daughter.

The best owner to my pets.

The best aunt, neice, cousin.

I want to the best wife

and mother I can be.







I'm not lying.

THE THINNESS OF A SHADOW

From the very last time
I saw you

to the story
of your death

unable to comprehend
that you do not exist

you to me
are living yet.

You an early morning
silhouette

looking at clouds
as was your want

a living
breathing entity

every moment now made more
precious than the last

I hold you so
in thought

refusing to let you go.

And so it is
always so.

Your footstep as you
cross the floor

whistling Wish
you were here.

The story of your death
I refuse to believe in

as if it happened
to a someone else.

Another Brian.
Not mine.

You stepping through the door
so full of light

stepping through time
"Come on Bud...I gotta go!"

Your death
the shibboleth

I can not utter.

You forever always
this

early morning

silhouette.

He was
A fallen star
Ever spinning
A hidden halo of
Hawking radiation

He dragged her in
Kicking and screaming

Swallowed her fire and spat out
The ash, now stripped of all color

Into a world not unlike the one he'd stolen her from

Her particles
Now formless
Drifted without purpose

A monochromatic diffusion of her quondam existence

The sepia shade of her filter facade
Barely deflected the stupid questions
She'd never have the answers to

But she knew what to do

She knew how to drift and spread herself
Across this rock of coruscating life

With a thinness nothing short of impressive

Like a flattened chameleon
Hidden in the midst of
A bustling city sidewalk

O my delectable magnificent!
Thou art so subtle and, in truth, divine;
Thy taste doth merely whisper peppermint
As it consumes my body and my mind.
Thou dost imposeth here upon my core,
With such a minty thinness that doth quell,
The softness of a glutton and yet more,
Though rampant want within my gut still dwells.
But whilst, at first, thou hast great quantity
And flaunt thyself to me as decadent,
In but two bites, thou hast abandoned me
And left me naught such goods as Heaven sent.
Until bereft I find the box so nice,
Which cost my purse a total dollar thrice.

Tall men think of robust ladies
Shorter ladies dream of length,
Toothless people fantasize
Of mandibles of white, bright strength.
Porcine women lust for thinness
Breast less girlies long for *****,
Dissatisfaction fills the air
It's greener grass or down the tubes.

Black man hopes for pale complexion
White girls bake to raise a tan,
Brown eyed lassie's envy blue-ness,
***** lesbian's, a man.
The wealthy want the easy life
Beggars yearn for cash,
Dissatisfaction's in the air
And mirrors are so trash.

Across the human spectrum far
Mankind wants for more,
The grass is always greener
Looking through another door.
It's bigger, better, brighter, best
The quest is always there
Relentlessly pursued with glee,
Bright eyes and bushy hair.

Results are mixed and varied here
Some reach the holy grail
To watch it slip beyond their grasp
Then founder, fall and fail.
Some teeter on a platform,
Some grasp the prize and run,
Some hit their stride at bounding pace
To see the contest won.

But by and large there's misery
Few climb the road to joy,
Frustration be my brother
Dissatisfaction be my ploy.
Limitation is our lot in life.
Our secret to success
Is to love the mirror warts and all
All other **** ...suppress !!


M.

Watch
The snowflakes fall hard
Strip until
You are naked

Step outside
You feel nothing
The cold lives
Inside you

Your hips sway
Your eyes close
Your arms above your head
Reaching
Into the silence
Until you feel
The thinness

You
Are
Lost
Disappearing into
The frozen wind

I'm thinking of you
in warmer weather
I still like your thinness
somehow lack of substance
never compared
to your company
I remember a night we fell asleep
looking at each other
and you were just so tired
I tie my hands in knots
and throw fits
waiting for that to happen
once more

I saw it a few days ago
I chanced a glance into the void
The place in which all emotions fall and seclude themselves
The place where there are no stars and there is nothing but loud space
She'd just tore away from me
A small tear in the muslin
But she pulled and pulled
Until the void was exposed in my shredded star chart
That subtle darkness in the undertones undulating thickly
Turbulent waves beneath the glorified surface thinness
And behind the closed door it-
It was just a second really
And the hopeless scientist behind me
The dark and big and pragmatic and meek
He didn't see
But he knew
And he wanted it back
And again
She left me frayed

In another winter
Before I could look to the skies and find meaning
When our world was lit only by the fires of forthcoming fears and futile flickers
What clouded the far-off pinpricks, the soft pinching of reality knocking at my door?
It was her straight-edge fragility
And her straight-edge solution
Now her world is lit by a different kind of fire
A fire that numbs
So she said
A fire that heals
So she claims
A flickering flame that destroys every membrane of my being
And binds my hands to my feet
And shoots wildly across the sky
So I cry
And I weep
And I, a universe of atoms
     feel like a lost atom in her universe
I safely encased in my crinkled paper, but
Hot holes slowly eat their way through

No maps or constellations face any competition before her
But all she sees is a world of comets and fire
My short fuse is wilted
So she unzips her skin with a zippo
And she freezes time
And she runs across my horizon
Bright, beautiful, blazing
She is forever above my hands
Her path unseen and unforseeable
A spectators daydream
The astrologists' nightmare

He stands awkwardly
Barefoot on snow-packed sheets
After shuffling side to side
Beside his penguin bride
Across thick panes of ice,
Against the blowing snow...
Hesitates...
Suddenly he dives.

Wings spreading now,
He flies, awareness full
The sense of skimming beneath
Deep waves, unsinkable,
The call to move gracefully at will
Pulls the penguin down to dive
Through thick ice holes

He lives as though immortal:
No fear of sinking
Of freezing nor of dying...
Only the ecstasy of flying.

Floating above sea-graves deep;
Flying below the thinness of air,
This visitor to depths of blue,
Creature of air and light,
Escapes the wind and cold above
To fly in water.

oh sure, they'll tell you in passing
"expect a few sideffects, headaches,
nausea, suicidal thoughts, increased
urination. nothing too worrisome."

what they don't stress is the thinness
that those headaches stretch your mind
out to. or that they never go away. that you're
running to the bathroom twice every ten
minutes, once to ***, and once for the need to
almost *****.

but these are whiny words
in a pharmaceutical world.
even i can see that.
****, bathroom break.

I touch death
everywhere. It is
pleasant sometimes. It is shooting
upright stone forever
up. It is
cold metal blue, wind moving rushes,
holding on to a snag as smooth as couch
chamois. It is
feeling wooden table bones, random spontaneous
tapestries, my skin, your skin,
my clothes wet with substance,
drawn through mass downwards, on to
you.
I would let them go through me, if I
could, like smoke, like
talk, I feel
(deaf, mute) the smoke inside from
the drug inside. It would be outlawed
if they could
reach inside,
visible words of hair-lit thinness
on what is sought, reflections appearing on
the beyond side of ordinary surfaces,
tasting like
salmon. I saw the glinting
salmon meaning in a poem, Jorie. It was
like when the sun came out with her,
predictably, and I thought to trust it,
perhaps this once, for hurt can’t last
without the good also
lasting. Maybe I
just wasn’t listening right, this potential
human being, this possibility, this normal
occurrence, mundane, talked and
scribbled dismissively as a dejected
thought of dejection about dejection about
what it is
all about. Write it down,
it’s a crossword, long as the climbing
steps around the earth, senseless as
black.
white.

There could be much in nothing, but it’s
everywhere outside, and there are just a few
stars, really. The billions are
few
in the outward sinking sky.

See, I touch death, colorlessness,
everything, sitting on
ledges, feet dangling, today as yesterday
as tomorrow, trying to stop this thinking
habit, trying to be a Buddha about it, but the
wind is
cold
this time, and there are too many of you.
Maybe next time something will appear here,
in soaking colors and ever
pulsing acceptance, understanding

blood, moving,
living, meaning

from beyond here, tomorrow or yesterday,
but I hope today, before I am touched
by it, and realize

nothing.

Steps for Life:
1. Wake up and brush your teeth twice and use mouthwash.
    Make sure your teeth are pearly white.
    Floss so your teeth don't rot with grim.
2. Drop in some eyedrops,
    so no one can see that you cried.
3. Choose your clothes.
    Don't choose something that isn't name brand.
    Don't choose something that's ugly or unflattering.
    Wear your waist trainer so that your waist can be thin and your
    stomach is flat.
4. Get your makeup together.
    Wear the right color eyeshadow, make sure your lashes long enough,
    make sure you choose the right color to match your outfit.
5. Pick the right shoes.
    Choose the heels that are in season.
    It doesn't matter if they aren't comfortable you have to wear them to
    be cool.
6. Go to school
    Go to school and suffer.
    Hang out with the popular kids.
    Be rude to other girls and criticize them for not having the money to
    afford clothes like yours.
7. Come home.
    Lift a few weights to keep your arms thin.
    Swallow a nasty concoction and have dinner so you can rid of it.
8. Repeat for the rest of your life because you won't ever be good enough.

To a girl, why is life about the size of your thighs?
The thinness of your waist.
The color of your eyes,
The color of your skin.
The flatness of your stomach
The shape of your jaw.
The length of your legs.
The way you walk and whether or not you fall.

They hid the pain.
Because pain is beauty.
And beauty was all that matters.
The biggest goal is to be popular but to be popular you have to be liked.
No one likes an unattractive girl.
No one likes a girl who isn't pretty.

To be popular, to awesome to other people, to be cool,
You have to make yourself suffer from the pain that is beauty.
You can't eat anything you want if you do you'll gain weight and you'll be fat.
You can't eat all 3 meals because you'll get fat. Instead, you have to eat a bit for some energy but then force it all back up because too much food will ruin your flat stomach and no one likes a girl who's fat.

You can't eat certain foods because it's messy and people see your face being a mess than say goodbye to your popularity because no one likes a messy girl.
You can't join certain clubs and you can't get straight A's. This is because no one likes a brainiac girl or all the other fantastic words.
You can't wear sweatpants if you aren't required too. Sweatpants aren't flattering and if no one likes you then neither should you.

You will suffer in silence
Because everyone thinks that you're fine.
You have to follow a strict diet or else your popularity will die.
No will see the cuts on your thighs because that's the only place they won't show.
You can cut your shoulders, your wrist or stomach but people will see and think of you as a depressed emo and no one wants to be seen with that freak.

Society has girls be trapped in a box where they follow the same horrible routine.
Inspirational people say that the box is paper and you can just break it to be free.
If the box is paper why am I so weak?
Why can't I break it?
Those inspirational people are wrong.
The box isn't paper.
It's stone.

It only took a few days for you to seep into my mind and reside in the darkest parts.
But once I knew you were there, I didn't try to rid of you.
No, you gave yourself to me and I accepted you with open arms and an empty stomach.

Like a parasite you ****** the life out of me.
You wore me down to where I napped three times a day.
My stomach never satisfied; either empty or stuffed.
My period stopped for five months.
Stomach pains worse than any pain I’ve experienced before.
Living in a constant fear that my stomach acid would burn a hole through my esophagus.

But you didn’t let any of these ailments stop us.
You taught me to embrace them, they needed to happen.
You convinced me to enjoy the pain I inflicted to myself.
Just collateral damage to the ultimate goal of thinness.
You pushed me so far deep inside my head, I was separated from the shell of my body.
I couldn't recognize myself, I deserved to be nobody.
But I didn’t know that then, you told me that was exactly who I was supposed to be, the real me.

And I believed you.

The flight of life is so brief
fragile vulnerable incredible

The goldilocks zone so eloquently positioned,
is her porridge to thick or thin?
Hot or cold?

It is this thickness and thinness that permits our being.
Viscosity surrounds us with its turbulent beauty.

Flight is everywhere. In the skies, in the seas.
The fish fly gracefully climbing and diving
swooping from side to side
Our hearts squeeze and throb, ebbing blood
as periodic as the planets
Air floods our lungs, although sustaining
binds us to such a small rock in such a large world

The gravity of this holds us together while
we struggle to fly beyond our bounds.

-AM

Let us pretend, beloved, that
this is the skin you wore yesterday.
Allow me to lick the salt from your
lips and I’ll ignore the black dog
who at night, stalks my fire escape
and feasts upon the lull of a sleepless—sleep.
The dog who drags me back from
the cliffs of a steady breath
and bites salt from my lips.

I want to take this dog.
I want to see her —your her—
knot her fingers in its shabby fur,
and flail beneath its jaw.
So I can see the inside of her body—
all thinness—a red delicacy.
I want to see which vein you loved,
so I can know for sure
that you have been there:
the muscle —a tendon— the tightening
of how you were inside her.

But I feel the bloom of your iris
steal into the pound of my chest,
so I forgive how these
hands —broken hands—
never tore through my hair.

My pupils just fill with bowed heads
and pleading wrists
while the dog gnaws
at the break of my ankles.

And in this little moan of bloodied floor
and sodden wood,
the kiss of your mouth
grazes my neck’s snap—
your fingers trickle up my thigh

into a little pool of Never Enough.

You had tried to warn me about the time
the power line snapped
while all the birds were asleep—

but the dog had torn my ears from me by then.

Beep Beep Beep
Alarm clock I think
reach out to turn it off
can’t move or even breathe
open eyes, way too bright
Needles in my skin
wonder what they are bringing in
no alarm just heart monitor
mom crying by me
did someone die?
i try to speak
tube in throat restricting me
but yet I try to breathe
glances over at me yells
flinch is all I can do
doc remove the tube
internal pleas coming out of me
however so silently
here we go I think as I fall back asleep
eyes wide open
brain fuzzy
mom no longer besides me
hello I croak
hello a voice calls
your safe now
she smiles so kind
sure maybe I reply
tough rough go I’ve had she explains
starving girls get that way
food is pumping into me I now get as she explains
i cry
no more thin body comments
so long boy who dated me for my thinness
goodbye gymnastics who caressed the thin so dear
all must welcome the fat back or leave my sweets
but if they go at least I won’t be leaving to

In his room he grasps the threadbare coverlet,
The thinness of his fingers exaggerated by knotted joints
not unlike the slubs of coarse cotton in his clutches.

No sun shines in this windowless cell.
Night offers no stars to count.
No luminous clock keeps time.

Unrested, his head in strange surroundings lifts to look.
"This is not my bed.
These are not my possessions.
The glass does not reflect my image."

The lamplight's glare offends his eyes.
The blue beaker has a sharp edge.

This unfamiliar room has seen a single week of usage
meant for new beginnings to find his feet.
Yesterday, his leaden slippers stopped shuffling.

A slam!
Someone is talking too loud.

No-one can hear him silently screaming
as he passes through the closed door.



copyright © Caroline Grace 2011

Who are you to worm your way into my life?
Who are you to stick your nose into my business?
Who are you to scar me with your knife?
Who are you to laugh at my skins thinness?

Why are you so incredibly invasive?
Why are you so undeniably malicious?
Why are you so desperate to be hated?
Why are you so harshly vicious?

Who am I to be unreasonably attacked?
Who am I to be relentlessly victimized?
Who am I to have my foundation cracked?
Who am I to have to be the only one civilized?

Why am I forced to still deal with your immaturity?
Why am I still having to defend myself against your blows?
Why am I being attacked because of your insecurity?
Why am I dealing with these questions I've posed?

(20 minute poetry)

Never more sure
than this,
a kiss.

Start if you mean to go on
don't bleed me and leave me.

If all's fair in love and in war
give me more.

In the tenement
they give the last sacrament
to the old city gent,
a testament to the living  
and to faith.


Knowing I'm going somewhere
be it straight
be it narrow
I fly like an arrow through
the thinness of air,
starting when I know
I'll get there.

Travelling light through
the night holds no terrors,
it's not like I'm looking
in mirrors.

And it's Friday
that's a good sign,
another week over and
the weekend to cling to
brings the week to
a satisfactory conclusion.

A moon-shaped belly button
full with sweat
where i hung my tongue



where did you put that
poem i gave you?



I think you tucked it somewhere
in your bra,
and let the ink run
over your skin
that day it was too hot
for shirts.

You sat by the a/c
in your *******
and sweated out every
sin that god ever
created.



Right below our apartment
were the subways filled with people
in the tunnels where
the heat made the people want
to strip down to nothing.



I don't have to tell you about that day,
but i want to just in case I forget
and forget this final *******,
not to you,
but to those
underground rumblings
and tiny teeth of electricity
that flitted up through our bones

as though we were just tracks

of steel.

This love
was the thing running us over
grinding our skeletons
out to a mechanic thinness.



the day we said goodbye
we said it
with middle fingers.

The walk
from Peckham Rye
train station
to my aunt's
is quite a trek,
but Lydia and I
set off along
Rye lane.

Never been here before,
Lydia says.

I been here tons of times;
I was born up the road.

What this road?

No, at the hospital
nearby.

She has a thinness
about her,
her lank hair is caught
by the sunshine.

We pass by shops
and cross side streets;
pass people shopping.

Dad hates shopping,
Lydia says,
he says it's a ****
of a game,
worse than kissing
his boss's backside.

She laughs;
a link of light
brightens up
her eyes;
there's a hint
of beauty
about her.

Your mum
wasn't too keen
on you going with me,
I say.

Anything that hints
of spending money
and she's up in arms;
she wouldn't care
if I went
with the milkman
as long as he paid.

We walk on
and down a street
that leads
to my aunt's place;
the shops have gone now,
just houses and flats.

I heard your old man
singing in the Square
the other night,
I say,
drunk as a lord.

I know, I heard him, too,
Mum wasn't none
too pleased;
she dragged him in
and gave him her tongue;
I couldn't marry
a man like that;
does your father drink?

No, only the odd pint
or port at special times.

We pass a dog peeing
against a wall;
it wags its tail
as it runs off
down the road
leaving a pyramid shape
of wetness behind.

My brother Hem does that,
Lydia says,
***** ***.

There is an aspect
of light
when she's angry,
like a birth
of a new world.

Is your dad Irish?
he seemed to be singing
an Irish song
the other night?

No, he always sounds Irish
when he's drunk,
like he sounds Welsh
when he's sober.

She holds my hand
as we cross a busy road;
it's thin and bony;
I feel it
with my thumb
as we walk along,
her bony knuckles;
I squeeze it gently
and she softly
chuckles.

You try
making up for your
thinness of character
by slurping the thick
syrup of Chinese food
the broccoli a glittering slick
of sauce
too rich for me
saccarine
the chicken glowing
in the neon light
in its neon sauce
radioactive under the dim lamps
the curling carpets
and wax flowers

You know I don't like it
here
you know I'd prefer
a switch of sweetness
from morsel to mouth
know somewhere
in the stitch and sketch
that is your brilliant brain
that noodles decked
like a war hero
lack charm
in the dark
could you pass the wantons
and take me home
to your warm nest
to the scritch of old blankets
that smell your spiced,
and soapless smell?
to a place where
past the books
I'm not allowed to borrow
and the sleep
we do not share
there glimmers
naturally,
occasionally
like lake water
where the streetlights don't show
something more tender
than snow peas
in a sticking sauce.

I stumble in the blinding dark.
I cannot see a single mark,
Of light, of rock, of man or beast.
It seems the night will have its feast.
When suddenly a glowing light,
Emits from somewhere out of sight.

I stagger toward it, unaware,
Of a sudden thinness in the air.

A cave now seems to beckon me,
And as I enter, all I see,
Are crystals shining like the sun.
Like broken mirrors, dull are none.
My fear now seems to melt away,
And false safety is here to stay.

For suddenly I feel safe and sound,
Though I'm miles and miles below the ground.

A blank page.
Filling up the room.
Filling up my eyes, my thoughts, my fingertips.
A clean slate.
Ever try and clean an actual slate? You always see what was on it before.
You're right.

Somebody wiped me clean.
Took my words away.
But they remain. They show through.
They are beneath my skin, moving, swirling,
Letters and symbols and words all running like ink veins beneath translucent flesh.


I am a blank page, filling up the room, filled with what I never said.
What I couldn't say.
It beats like a drum behind my eyes, across my thoughts, inside my fingertips.
It tells me, Go. It says, Be first. Be strong for the first time in your life. Be strong without something to force you.
I tell it to be quiet, and it pounds within me like it's locked inside and the air's run out.
It pounds at the edges of me as if I  put the doors there and locked them.
I didn't.

I imagine that if you were to look at me and really see me, every word would run along my face like water, like tears,
Crawling across my collarbones, twisting round my wrists,
Black ink veins, pulsing.
Pounding.

Because isn't that what we all want?
To be the one who leaves, if it means we won't get left?
Isn't that always easier?
To leave the old behind to rot in the same place, frozen like a photograph, and find somewhere new and exciting to forget them?

I do not forget. My memories are like tattoos.
They flow along my sharp cheekbones, the crooks of my arms, the insides of my thighs.
Words.
Black and accusing.
Black and permanent.
I am a newspaper soaked in rainwater, the words bleeding through the thinness of the flimsy page.
I am a blank paper, but not really.
I only wish I was.
It is the first time I can remember when I have not been in pain, but have still wished for relief.
It is the first time, outside the madness of grief and anguish, that I have knowingly and truly wished to be...blank.
To be wiped clean.
To be white and new and unmarred again.
To remain that way.
To touch nothing, and be touched by nothing.

Today I felt the water rise cold and clear to my waist, and my mind was empty.
The next moment, the next breath, that was all I needed to know.
And in that I realized how deeply I wish to turn off my thoughts.
How truly tired I am of living with print running along my body.
How I wish that every moment I wasn't stamped by my emotions, marked, owned, crushed as if by an old heavy printing press.
Today for a moment I was cured of a disease with which I have lived my entire life, and so not known I had;

Thought.

How I wish to think of nothing, to FEEL nothing but the moment.
For they are the same,
There is no separation of mind and heart, although they seem to clash.
My mind feels and my heart thinks, and they both descend upon me constantly with demands and criticisms,
The red pen to my black ink story.

Once I tried to do my own editing,
But I'm afraid I only made a mess,
Red ink ran down the drain and,
Quick as a lightning strike and twice as terrible,
So did everything I loved.

I never want to be a soaked newspaper in the gutter, rain pouring down and tearing the pages, too cheap to pick up and throw out properly.
I never want to be that again.

And so I decided to leave the red pen to my inner editor.
And yet it hurts more, the sting of knowing that I am merely a vehicle for a printed story.
I may have a say about the wording, the artistry, the format,
But I have no power over content,
And no way to keep the page clean.

A blank page, I used to say,
An opportunity.
And now I wonder if maybe it wasn't.
If maybe a clean page is not an invitation.
If perhaps instead of a chance, an empty page is a plea:

"Don't."