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bb Nov 2021
Another **** conversation
beneath a tangerine moon
Tonight is one segment - not enough to share
You tell me I’m selfish
and you are yelling
even though I told you that grapefruit
can make your medication not work;
And it’s unnerving peeling clementines with you
Can you de-flesh me too, with your bare hands?
Are you mad at me?
No, You say,
it’s just not the right time
I told you I would give you the moon
But for now these oranges will have to do

But come back when the world is ripe
Then I’ll peel and split it with you.
bb Sep 2014
So today you'll be in love this girl from the internet and tomorrow you be in love with that girl from the internet and today your mother will ask you to look up from your phone for two seconds and tomorrow you will be ******* over a girl that you can't that you can't look in the eye because her eyes are miles and away and they're always watching you with disinterest, until you lose interest; some Catholic girl told me that long distance relationships make it easy to fall I to son and I got to understanding why God stays so far away. I know how to ruin myself with one hand, I know how to tear you apart with two. I know how stop taking care of myself until I'm overgrown with weeds just to watch you grow; some idiot said you don't forget how to ride a bike so I got lazy and stopped using one and some idiot said you don't forget your first love and I did the same thing. I saw the train coming and I laid you down on the tracks like I cared, and I did but I just don't know how and that's how the deal, no one knows how to do anything, hardly anyone knows how to derail trains.
And today I'll fail my test becase I didn't study, tomorrow I'll remember that a year ago you said my name for the first time; today I'll sit on my hands until they tingle just to make sure that I'm alive; we'll delve into the meanings of 'love' and 'lust', but in the end they'll both still feel the same, I'll wonder if you track dirt into your house with your boots or if you just track hurt, you'll always keep me right where you can see you but never where I can hold you. We'll speak well about each other and keep our dark secrets tucked into the waistbands of our skirts like crisp white shirts. I can't understand why anyone would want to live in the first world, where all we do is keep things we love in dusty boxes and sit in traffic and hurt the people we love and write about it.
And then we'll leave the internet and grow up and be gray and our tweets will die out like people do and then we won't think about it much. We won't think about it much.
bb Sep 2014
Put your mouth into mine and hold me like a tomb does. We've shared our bodies and our badness to the point of decay, we might as well keep washing our hands with each other's filth.
On the one night I slept for more than four hours, I dreamt that you had derailed a train with your your bare hand
it crashed into my front door and ran into my bedroom to see me, it pulled me atop it and the train was you
now i need you to cut up your passport and give it to the wind, I need you to set your past on fire and return to the ground with me, to consume with the only fire that will out mine out.
The fine line between you holding me and you holding me hostage is  wearing so thin that I can hardly see it, wearing, like the clothes I had on, the clothes I tore off in hopes of finding you somewhere beneath them, like a stupid girl does, like a stupid girl does, like a stupid girl does
I remember when you told me that I'd never see the good side of you,
right after you told me how easy it is for me to see the truth. And those words tasted nice , they tasted like power
You put dominance into the hands of submissive like an orphaned child into the hands of a widow, and you watched her run with it
I make a bet with myself that I can abandon you for more than a little while
I made a bet last September that I would hate you this September, but you keep slipping
into the arousal of the hatred you provoke in me and I keep saying your name into a hole in the ground like a song into a microphone. So listen. So listen. So listen.
A language is just the way the tongue falls in love with the body
I miss the days when I ached for you to put yours to mine.
bb Jun 2014
Walking in a circle is, in the fondest sense, going absolutely nowhere, even though it feels better than walking completely backwards. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I have never even been face to face with you and mine grows weaker and weaker with the length of time between the moments I get to touch you. The strange thing is that, prior to meeting you, I have a hard time describing what it was I was even doing - the storms you have hurled into my quiet life is all I know now, and I never realized just how flimsy my own infrastructure was. I have seeped into the walls you throw dishes in and the floors you roll around on, and I feel everything your fists do equally, if not more. Who knows my body better than you? The places I dip and divide and ***** and bend; who has held me down with nothing but words and sweaty silence that lay thick enough for us to cut with butcher knives? My stomach is trained to clench is desperation when your name is mentioned and I am nervous around anyone who shares with you; a picture is worth a thousand words, but your name is worth one million, and you've never spoken mine aloud but I have murmured yours, like a mantra, repeatedly, groaning in the way wounded animals do and trembling with that same fear. I can't count on my fingers how many nights I traded sleep for a reason to talk to you, and all too well do I know how many lifetimes are crammed into the seconds before an anticipated phone call. People might wonder how I even survive when you aren't around, but how many ways can a dog entertain himself when the master is away? Oftentimes, in a state of unwarranted panic, I claw at my clothes as though you are lurking underneath, and only rarely are you there, metaphysically. I am not the only person the rain falls on; I understand that there are plenty of others who are lulled by the charm of someone who knows nature of a human being in the way that otherworldly creatures might, but in this instance I know that everyone is haunted in their own exclusive way, and you are always flickering in the periphery of my blurry vision when my bedroom lights are out.
bb Jun 2014
you are not twenty seven years old. you are twenty seven sorrows, twenty seven apologies, twenty seven broken pencils in a coffee mug. you used to keep memories like fireflies in jars, but now, you harvest them like organs, and you can't shake them to make you glow. i stuck a bird in where my heart should be but my pulse still sounds like a dial tone. the way a ticking clock drives a person insane is the way everything falls in love with you. the way everything falls in love with you is the way that delicate things break, and everything is delicate in the presence of a hurricane. you know how to be a storm, but no one loved you enough to show you how be a home, and the foundation you are built on is a broken as our mind - you are held together by tape and tiny hands , you are bound together by apologies and if anyone forgave you, you would simply fall apart. we must fold ourselves seventy seven times and tuck ourselves into the arms of the people we love, in hopes they never learn to read our language, and you are words written in a way that leaves everyone hanging onto each one by the skin of their teeth, even if they don't understand. I hope it's fine if i still try. if you are brave enough to touch the world, you will find that it is constantly on fire, and you never have to ask for a light.
you are not twenty seven years old, you are twenty seven wet matches, twenty seven empty rooms to scream in, twenty seven breakdowns in the bathroom. sometimes you are the sun and you can rise, but you are a deadly comedown (in any event, you are always glowing). I can hear you folding and unfolding like an origami flower, my hands know where you bend even though i have never touched you. i have seen the fear that drips through the cracks in your tough exterior, and i pried apart my own innocence to slip my way inside.  
  how many times do you groan before you finally heave and let the weight **** you? you know, contrary to what is generally believed, love knows bounds very well. it knows them and, it plunges over them, spills and overcomes you and foams around your feet before dragging you out to open see and mocks your cries for help until you finally stop thrashing and succumb to the sick trick that you have fallen for. i used to think love was a steady push and pull, but then i love you; when play tug of war with a ghost, you always end up with enough rope on your side to make a noose out of. i wanted to turn you on, not disgustingly, but in the way that i stumble in the dark, groping the wall for a switch. all of my nerves were hair triggers when you opened your mouth, now they are loud sirens and they scream when you are gone. a barely present as you would like to paint yourself out to be, i have felt you in places that are four dimensional, in the depths of my own murky consciousness that not even i know how to reach. the way a storm busts down a wooden door is the way that you enter a room,  the way you enter me. you know how to bend the light and you know how to break it, too. allow me to envelop myself in you like words in brackets, but never let me speak aloud. how many times can someone caress your jaw until it feels like you've been clocked repeatedly, and how many times can you fall in love with same person before you bust your mouth completely on their shoulder?
even after you have dragged me through this fire and made me bite all of the dust and all of the concrete beneath it, i have still loved you with a mouthful of broken teeth. now i am here to spit them out into your hands and make enough room in my throat to cough up my stifled pride.
bb Jun 2014
There is sea salt all over my hands, and I know I'm not the ocean.
So let's drink tea out of mason jars,
with cold porcelain shards instead of ice,
and let's cut our mouths on every argument we've ever had.
I hope you don't mind if I make a home out of you,
and I'm sorry if my spirit doesn't fit so well inside of yours, you see
I have been carrying dead weight with me like a terminated pregnancy,
and mourning the emptiness inside of me like a miscarriage.
Now it seems like I'm only giving birth
to the sorrow that my heart cannot hold.
Now I'm starting my mid-life crisis early, stating over, starting with you.
I'm writing my past into the sand, waiting for the tide to clean my slate.
So just wait a little but while I hold my breath hostage,
and I will wait for a ransom to come,
and I will pray that it doesn't come barreling down my door, looking like you.
bb Jun 2014
People don't love the way they used to. My mom taught me that. You taught me everything else. We, in a state of mock individuality, look for the good part of ourselves in others so we have a good reason to love them better than we hate ourselves, because we are too afraid to admit that we aren't terrible things. So I keep checking my yard to see if you had been asleep when you crashed into my lawn (but that is never the case). And it's not even because I'm looking for the good parts of myself in you, it's because I'm just looking for someone who doesn't care that there is no good part of myself to look for. No matter where I sit, my feet always dangle off the ground. And that's what life is like : an infinite state of dangling; a throne of questions, and we never quite touch the ground.
Summer doesn't feel like freedom when you've spent the whole winter in love. Buried beneath the crushing weight of my own frozen apologies and punching my feelings into deaf ears like the clock on a workday, I keep twirling in circles, trying to check the serial number on the back of my neck in vain. I am falling, but not into you and so it is more of a fast crash in slow motion that nobody can feel but me. I'm tired of spinning. I'm tired of digging for reasons like a stick in the ground. I know I'm not a dog, but I never learn. Oh my God, I never learn. And neither do you.
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