this is the feeling of ghosting into rooms
watching them read your memoirs
slow burns coals to old news
swallowing loosely fluming cooled fumes
yelling “stop stop your interpretation’s skewed”

you didn’t get the bruise
you didn’t eat the apple
wish i could remove all the words
and ways in which we could
describe the truth. the sapling

but they do not hear you
grappling but slackening
traveling across the map
to watch it all unraveling
picasso pats you on the back
this is static, your hair only glows
in through window cracks
don’t have it

keratin, bear the din, see through
transient setience, the void speaks to
this is the illusion
you cared for
there’s no taking it back
you’re where you always were
infinite lines don’t
point towards the earth

this is lock jaw with no key
when you take all the attachments in your life
and smash them on the ground
without heed to the deepest reaches
the only way your heart beats
is in tune to the way the rain breathes
watch it wash away and exhale out
this is drowning in a sea
and being found face down in a puddle
laughed at on the sidewalk

he kicks you in
you don’t care but you did
this time you saw it coming
band aids are pointless

"you wanted to be everything"
you still cannot swim
and they’ve got it all wrong
she just wants to be nothing
but they say that’s negative
at least it’s something

this is me being realistic
this dream is ******* ballistic
and we find ourselves transistic
because were or weren’t we meant
to love and live through this
but this time it was you
you ruined the script

lost friends were barely the beginning
no holds barred a death grip bending
wonder "what if" brings the bold ending
another story of my half hearted glory still pending
the forecast is gorgeous with a chance of importance
miss muppet eats her porridge, facade painting waits for mourning
gorged til morsels turned to acid moons, her stomach waning spoons of poison
and then the spider climbed on down the chimney spout
he loved her with a death grip, couldn't bear to let her out
she slipped away limping doubt

i am never what you ordered, right?
less forward then when you saw my light
came in for the warmth he runs from night
as it fell he left burning for a fight
confused by simple misery
mistook for complex mystery
from porcelain skin to bleeding tin
she was a sordid sort of fantasy
the lemons in the leopards tree
crouching he protects and heeds
the bitter fruit he cannot eat
so long as he may wrap his limbs
round such a lovely sacred tree
they see succubi laced in leaves
a lovely sight with poison teeth
but wrong the masses stood, as always
a daughter of zion missing her wings
fought through mobs, yearning to be free
nuclear body in a derelict land freezing
the pure love escaped her at beelzebub's hand
replaced with lust and sacrament
she had no home, but hut in sand
she dreams of warm days soon arriving,
dry eyes, dry land
living light in tears just drying
the purest kind she's never finding
in her mind the road seems endless
she loses sight of truth in it's windings
sits in trees ******* pulp
from the vitriol
at night that came
to burn him down
the windchimes tinkling
the golden sound

she made a pact with the devil
the night knights left the bevel
he told her for a piece of her broken heart
he'd offer peace and settlement
and on the day the angels touched down
he watched her wings part, unearthly sound
puffed his chest, lest the ego deathed
to brag at the world what he had found
and asked in awe where he was to start
understanding all the fragments of her heart
she left in the morning and never came back
the gods don't like the selfish calf
the flaunting of deities, the crass obsessions
they want their daughters depicted
in inked diary wraps
preserved for life
he whispered to her ear
these men want nothing
but to consume you to death

i have broken three to six hearts
since i started to warp
showed the spiders my hands
threw down my arms, too tired to explain
being human is hard when
the ananse have more legs than cards
the only fable was aesop and his art
the cyclical change of a fractal of parts
i am not the same being
as when i started writing these words

have you ever felt a home in your bones?
safety in the way it cushions the weight of your moaning head
upon falling at it's thresholds
you want to know what tender feelings
you hold in safe places
but they
never question the way your severed vessel
still toes the shoreline,
roaming the foam licking at the crests
of crescent moons left in the remnants of crab shells
pressed into particle upon particle of scruples
unspoken in the weeks that forgot you

they rush ahead

and you stand stock stuck, still mustering
the guts of every animal they left on the beach
in the road, and you too leave them
for fear of that lethal touch
mistaking broken shards of beer bottles
for sea glass, some days you tried to remember
and forgot

they are savages
the agile hunger pains
gnaw at the bandages

but you still love, in nausea,
ad naseam, you study them, reverential
try to reference their satiation with fondness
still sunken in repugnance for your own likeness

you collect them like passengers
pieces of you and worlds unto their own kind
he says you are two of a kind
you think not, because he is one

each thrown to the riverbed below
becoming rocks filling up the moat
cranking down the drawbridge
over a river filled with sea glass
the true form of whom you have settled with
knowing you may never know

and in forgiveness you live with
the sickness of knowing nothing
and the sentience of understanding everything
and when you stand by the water
they tell you that your eyes have a brilliant glow
and you let them find you stunning
in a memory upon a time ago
you conceal yourself in the
minds of many

while the solecism in his praise
still rings heavy in your throat
two thousand
nine hundred
and sixty eight
miles away
from home

no,

i don't feel beautiful
but i feel dangerously effective

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout ******* and ovaries rather than ***** and *******;to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars - to be a part of a scene, anonomous, listening, recording - all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to ****** them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”*
-Sylvia Plath

all the streets i’ve walked become a neat little maze
under crete is a labyrinth
under los angeles is a cage
in my head forms a neat little map
cover your legs with your napkin
the monster in my head
says to cover my back

she’s looking for a sweet little life
she’s slumping over in her seat looking white
she may seem a little lifeless because she is
are you okay, are you okay?
are you?
no.

you put on a little periwinkle dress
you reign in your red hair with barrettes
now you shed the little periwinkle dress
in a gas station bathroom
to be less like a girl and more like
the smoke in your lungs
the pain in your heartstrings

you rip your red hair from the barrettes
it doesn’t feel good anymore
they don’t feel right
you go to goodwill and stare at the men’s button ups
in gaudy patterns and colors
shaken and sleight like your mind
some people’s eyes just chill your bones
you think it is safer to wear camouflage
in a city where pretty little girls
are devoured by minotaurs
when they wander out alone

don’t think about strange boys on the boardwalk
who are stuck in your sun glared eyes
the less you told
keep telling yourself it was wise
the lies you told
keep replaying through your mind
the wall rears it’s head
when he says the word *****
you ignore the warnings
you ignite the warnings
you forgot the warnings
hand him the lighter and watch them burn

they say they can feel your lightness
you tell them you are looking for a life full of light
and it lessens, as the sun drops
learn your lesson
they only want one thing
and you don’t want to think about it
but eventually they say what they really think
what they rashly think
what they readily think
the sniffing nose around the corner
you barely blink
the bull shows you the horns
you know you stink vulnerability

and you always get up to leave
just in time, the warnings
you disappear back into your well memorized labyrinth
your body and mind are warring
the minotaur is bearing down
the moments are fleeting but you carry the feeling
the moments are feeble but the fear keeps on teething

maybe tonight
you can do something different
try not to haunt
every place that you live in

the quietness of content
between two people
walking down the sidewalk
after splitting a pint and a crepe
is something new to me

the quietness of unsettled
emptiness in the dregs
of heaving lungs in a public toilet
is familiarly foreign
and suddenly unwanted

i occupy booth seats
instead of the space between
two metal dividers
and a toilet paper dispenser

i study the dimples of your cheeks
and the scent of your hair
i've become a student
learning the feeling of having
instead of a teacher of wanting

i do not see any crookedness
to your teeth or my own
i taste lager and nutella
strawberries on your breath
and don't ask
what else?
no sign of do not disturb
in my eyes
only, please continue
speaking

when i sway to the counter
and ask for the check
i am surprised by our obvious pleasure
when the waitress giggles
"oh i'm sorry,
i didn't want to disturb you"
i didn't realize we looked so happy
so together in a moment
shared over candles and two forks
on a coffee shop table

i admit it was
effortless

i see now that
food, love, humans
the things i made complicated
were

effortless

i like everything about you just the way you are as you are when i met you. point blank.

i don’t have any preconception of who you feel you once were but aren’t now, that you wish you still were. that person doesn’t exist in my mind. the past doesn’t settle into my conscious. it’s just faint musings of something that doesn’t seem real or tangible to reality.

the person you currently loathe, i adore. the person you pine after, i feel nothing for other than what i feel about you now, because i don’t see him and you as separate or different selves the way you do. you are you. no matter what you perceive yourself as being, you are yourself perfectly.

and yet at the same time actually, i see you as very separate internally, with the work you’ve been doing, even if you don’t totally see that yet, because i know if him and i met when he existed in that state of mind we have both previously occupied in loneliness, neither of us would have been able to make sense of the other the way we can now. we both would have been too lost.

if that makes any sense. self vs internal self. treading water vs being swallowed alive. together vs loneliness. you vs a shell of who you are now.

it’s such a complicated balancing act but i wouldn’t have it any other way. when we backslide we are betraying no one but ourselves, even when it feels like we’re accomplishing and internalizing something greater than ourselves. we’re emptying our lives with our bodies, and it’s not fair to the selves we’re struggling to keep intact now for us to do that. we have things to live for. you have things to live for.

i like you now, not then. even if you see things flipped around. i don’t see any see-saw or scale that tips or drops to equal self-acceptance, nowadays with this disorder, i just see an hourglass. i know. i know it’s not that simple. but you’re the only one who sees value in what was. the people who love you now don’t see that, only how it has hurt and tortured you for far too long, and how much the person you are right now deserves to be free of it.

we drove down pacific coast highway
and stopped to bathe in the light
the ocean illuminated like a brightening lover
lost over the ocean, staring at the earth’s eyes

my fingers fit between your knuckles
when you fold yours into mine
and her smile feels real and bright
so i take a photograph to stamp it in time

nothing is wrong tonight
we have nowhere to go
so we just drive
that’s just fine

nothing is wrong tonight
we have nowhere to go
but we’re together and we don’t mind
everything is alright

chocolate cake fits in my mouth
and melts on my tongue
dissolves in my stomach
instead of sitting like a lump

my head is full of cigarettes
we mull over the afterlife
it’s all in good fun
the air is alive

the salt water kisses my hands
sand peeks from the lashes on my eyes
my brain doesn’t sit in it’s skull
like a *** of mashed up gum for a mind

i’m filled but not too full
i sing at the top of my lungs
it’s all in good fun
it’s all in good fun

i’m filled but not too full
i can touch the edges of the days to come
i’ve never had such little an urge to run
such little urge to run