Should have never been born at all
Not born at all is way
With this face
And this name
Don't cry inside your paper house or
Your paper hours comes crashing down
More than what my mother said
More than just a doll to dress
More than just an empty head
That couldn't ammount to less
Am I

What little I know about myself
Is piled high upon a shelf
Waiting for my mind to realign
And find that I've been
Starving my ego
Having conversations
With the skeletons in my closet
Making fun of their
Feeble spines But realizing
So is mine

Still too proud to apologize
I tried to write a poem
But ended up with a full waste bin
And a dull safety pin
Yet I don't mean to jeopardize
The precision of your perfect lies
Oh humanity I've tried
To define myself with a dictionary

Leaving fingerprints on the obituary
The fabric scraps in my closet still
Send me guilt from my grandmother
In patterns from the sixties

Oh one day when day when I'm dead and gone
And know that life is much too long
To spend as someone else
My poems and my fabric will become
Vintage pessimism in a shoebox
Glowering down from someone else's shelf

I collect my soul
Though never whole

When the pain of the past
Leaks into the present
Unpleasant resentments
Tighten in my throat
Seeping out like cold smoke
Through the splintering cracks
In my veneer

You spend your days
In drunken haze and try
To use the liquor to excuse
The things you do
Suggesting I was only
By your side to
Fill the space between
You and your next high

Realizing
A child in its mother's womb
Is not unlike
A body in a tomb
You say you don't want to waste a life
But you can't suppress your appetite
It seems a familiar thing because
It's what you always do
Avoiding truth
With out hesitation
Or sense of self-preservation

Forgive me if
I forgive
But I do not

Tell pretty little white lies
As insincere sorrow pools in
Wide brown eyes looking up guiltily
In vain
When there was never any fidelity
Just cheap substitutional remedies

Every note
Every word

Penetrating like a sword into
The wounds you leave
When you deceive
The injuries you inflict

Objectifying her
And her all too human needs
She cleaves to you with all she has left
Needing only tenderness to keep

Her roof from caving in
Never saying what you mean
Because her life is strung up
From the ceiling by thin

Knotted strings
Each thread to be
Tread carefully as not to shake
The limb upon which the nest rests

You don't seem to know her anymore
The muted throat you knew
Before has learned to counter
Whilst still hiding from

The uneven voice that
Spurns justified unbelief
Beyond the sum of inability
To combat or rather to retreat from

Bigoted obscenities which do not
Quite fly overhead instead
They are spat with no discretion
And blatant direction

From cavities in prejudiced faces
Into the ears of one whose self
Is bottled up in a medicine cabinet
Next to the antidepressant

Falling into disrepair
And sinking deeper into despair

Our souls were like
The eyes of children
Long before
Careless hands stirred the
Dust that settled in the
Bottoms of our hearts.
Out of sight is out of
Mind but
We have consciences for
A good reason.
We studied our plain
Reflections in the pools
Of our tears mixed
With the morning dew
Until the glittering turquoise
Water made our
Countenances look like
Gemstones.
Our greedy lungs
Grew tired of oxygen,
So we sunk deep into
The bottomless puddles
And inhaled deeply.
We soothed our throats
At the expense of
Our lives, but
Sometimes we ****
Ourselves father than
Endure painful betrayals.
Follow  me as the
Watery stars lead us
Deeper into darkness,
For they will purge us of
Our prosaic existence
Right before our eyes,
Which were once as
Pure and lovely
As polished chalcedony.

"My heart and lungs
Are like songbirds in a cage,
Compressed so they
Can no longer function,
Weighed down by
The poison in the air
And in my blood.
Break my ribs and set them free.
Set me free."

I set down my pen. Poetry comes easily
to me but today I am stuck. That
terrible, gnawing feeling in the pit of
my stomach is back, the one that seems
to say to me, "Your words are useless,
you can never truly express the
complexity of emotion through
something as imperfect as words. You
were never very good with words
anyway."

There it is, the truth. Words and I have
A complex relationship. Most say I use
them well because they do not know
better. They think that I have mastered this,
that these combinations of letters serve
me like a goddess.

They are quite mistaken, for I am
powerless against them. Words are a
mystery to be left unsolved. They are
my only useful tool.

I cannot speak, I write because I have
time to ease the words into a
cooperating mood. The voice is hard,
cutting and swift. There is little time to
craft something beautiful from it when
our imperfect human mouths
spontaneously spew whatever thoughts
make it to the threshold of our minds.

Though all these things are true, all I
really wish is for someone to listen.
Listen to only what is important. Do not
bother your ears with my voice, because
my voice is flawed. My voice is cruel,
and will hurt you , and will tell you
things that will lead you far from what
I am really trying to convey.


No, all I wish is for you to listen to my
written words. Though your ears my
not hear much but the scratching of a
pen, I hope for your soul to hear my
masterpiece, this symphony of only
half-conveyed thoughts.

I wish for you to listen to my songbirds as well.
Hear my heart beat softly like a
pulsing flame, and hear the wind
whistle through the echoing caverns in
my lungs. This is the sound of life, and it
is in the trees and the water and
the earth as well. This is what perfect
words sound like. Nature has
learned to speak perfectly. We could
learn too, if only we could stop and
listen...

And so I write:
"Listen, there are songbirds,
I assure you.
One is drumming along,
His beat muffled by human flesh,
And the others are whistling while
There is still air for them.
Can you not hear?
Unlock the cage,
Oh, break my ribs and set them free
Oh, set me free.
Then they will fly from my
Bloodied chest,
And their song will be clear.
I will listen
And learn to sing this
Bittersweet melody too."

Wasted.
My soul. My time.
I spent all my days
Chafing my fingertips
To make the rope
That would eventually become
My noose.
But had I not done this,
The world would have
Laid me to rest on the road
Where my blood would be
Spilt--
Ground into the dust
By the heels for
The armies that march
To wage war
On our innocence.

Wave your solemn goodbyes,
And sink deep into
This murky clot of my
Broken memories
And messy past,
For you've chosen that as your
Dwelling place.

Is there such a thing as a beginning?
I refuse to believe it is so;
There are only endings.
Even this poem,
A safe outlet for the tension
In my mind to come forth into a
Half-sleeping existence,
Did not begin.
Before I wrote this line,
There were more, and before the
Very first of them,
Before I even put my pen to the paper,
There was a thought.
Even before that thought came to be,
It was a memory:

A memory of an event
And the events before then, spanning
History from its first breath
To its culminating heartbeat.

Shall we neglect the technicalities
And philosophical musings for a
Brief moment
And return to the single drop of water

Not quite yet, I rather enjoy confusing
My own mind.

Do you ever wonder why I
Tend to cleave to you now?
Because when one has nothing and
Gains even the most trivial of things,
It becomes infinity.
Everything in one's world becomes
Filled with the
Essence of what was once so scarce.

Give me a grain of sand
And my world becomes a desert.
Give me a pebble
And my universe becomes a mountain.
Give me a raindrop
And my eyes behold a waterfall.
Give me a seed
And my feet take root in a forest.
Give me nothing
And I shall remain in darkness,
As I was from the start,
But never from the beginning.

You dare give me your affection?
You're dealing drugs to the addict.
My empty life becomes a
Panorama of your love, and what more
Does humanity exist for
Than to be loved as passionately
As they do.

Lines blur as if
The world has inconveniently
Placed itself behind a foggy window.
My horizon becomes the sky,
My sea becomes the shore,
My feet become the grass,
And everything--
Everything there is--becomes you.
My heart becomes yours,
My mind becomes yours,
My soul becomes yours,
My skin becomes yours,
My lips become yours,
And my breath becomes yours...
Oh especially that , I am sure
Because you stole it right from my
Sensitive lungs.

All my senses can detect is you
And there is nothing better,
Nothing more I could want for.


I will be whatever I wish to
Because I refuse to sit still and
Settle into the
Preset mold prepared for me,
Yet now that I see you
I loose my identity in your
Fine dark eyes.
I wish to be noting more of less
Than what you choose to make me.
Who am I? All I can process
Is what thoughts sweep across your
Beautiful mind.

You finally realize what I
Questioned all along: how can
You love someone who is no one?

I am the grain of sand
And you are the desert.
I am the pebble,
And you are the mountain.
I am the raindrop,
and you are the waterfall.
I am the seed
And you are the forest.
I am nothing
And you are everything

To me.

Hastily recoil and retreat with all
You bestowed upon me
If that is what pleases you.
I will still be nothing
And my world will also be nothing,
And you will be nothing but a face
That tugs at my nothingness of a heart,
Sinking deep into
This murky clot of my
Broken memories
And messy past.