raison d'etre

Shoot

me

or 

yourself

to save

this little oily hell

with your sticky smell

and your

swell

well

alright

way of saying goodnight

to sleep tight

on the mattress

where you met me

and forgot me

and lost me all over again

and again

and you’re shouting

amen 

to pretend

that you’re praying at all

cuz the fall

after all

is eternally worth it

so i guess we’ll endure it

and float

in a cloud

or a boat

if that’s allowed

and stare at the naked girls hotter than me

who all could give you quite a lot more than me 

parce que my french is shitty

but you’re my raison d’être 

Baise-moi

if you’re in the mood

but my little fucking heart

can’t really start 

bearing this menage a trois relationship

bullshit

kissing me and missing her

and pretending we 

never were

you’ve got my feelings twirling

like a ballerina

who dropped acid during swan lake

and fell into the orchestra pit

and staked

herself 

naked 

on the accordion’s music stand

and bled until her tutu was gauze

be-caaaaaauze

you just wanna live 2 years behind 

and, sweetheart, you’re blowing my mind. 

Either tell me that you’re holding my hand

or tell me that you’re not. 

Either want me to kiss you every :27

or tell me that you don’t. 

Either say to me “hey we should be” 

or give me the trigger to the shot. 

if you’re feeling poetic 

you should’ve just left it

well enough

all alone

or let me build 

(in your hands)

a little home 

where we can be

all alone

together. 

Drop the Pin

I wrote something about your mind

And I told you that you look awful nice in peach

and that the sand on your shoes wouldn't help 

climbing up the rocks from the shore

anymore

But I deleted it all because your angel was even more beautiful in my words than she is in your eyes

Also because my tongue is getting tired

of hating the way that I am telling my heart

to keep on chugging

and plugging

and giving the break

to take

or make

another choice for your team or mine

again.

So despite everyone's warnings about the ways

of your 

nuances

I'm going to keep on wishing forever that your breath was underneath my teeth and that my words were on your tongue the way that my words are inked into my skin. 

And despite the fact that you don't think i know you at all

and that

you couldn't tell my right from my left

I realize that maybe it's just the fact that I'm always lost. 

I really must have terrible directionality

because I just can't get into your heart

Yellow

You earnestly encompassed my flowerpots and hugged the hemlock like another mother smothering the wind again. 

Threesomes that I missed when you were calculating the exchange rates for your final runaway attempt, humming honey bee and cherry bomb to yourself, hitchhiking in your mind in order to find a tragedy to rectify the disclosure. 

"Don't you dare say what when I say fuck me" and leave the money on the doormat when you pay for finishing first. 

I love your future like a child and your past like a morning fog bank. 

you read

bon matin

my heartbeat is resting next to yours, so calm on down and i'll get some sleep 

When you called to wish me happy valentines day, we opened up the camera to see your face. 

I was bouncing in the back just trying to say "fuck you"

And she fell to her knees and said "fuck me" 

And she looked into your eyes and she said "fuck off" 

And when you hung up in black licorice, you said "fuck it" 

But still. Even when you're far away, you've got me thinking "wish you were here." Bravo 

If you never knew my name

I get scared people will do what I think and then they think that I do what they're doing and then I'm remembering that I think about my doings less than thinkers who let their thinkings start their doings and my doings stop mattering and your thinkings are all I wonder about and we're thinking and doing too far apart and you forgot and I remembered.

And then we both walked on.

xanax for the realist

Nothing can be solved.
Just write dope poetry and drink.
Keep eating your lolipops like they're nutritional and dye your tongue bluer than before.
Schedule in time for you to slap yourself in the face for caring.


You could've made a better choice when you were four and decided to be an astronaut instead of a princess. It would've been more realistic.
Maybe you would've made it instead of sitting at 44 without a person who gives a fuck that you are breathing and a bottle of cognac and a whole bottle of pills which you're taking all at once to give you a quick dose of death.

Goodnight.

Alternate Ending

[FADE IN]
I stared at the counter, watching the shadows from the car headlights passing on the street below shine against the wall behind MY and reflect against the tops of MY hands. I was humming something slowly and quietly, at first unaware that the door behind ME was swinging open.
YOU enter, the smoke still curling out of YOUR lips, the sounds of the city dulling the sound of your heavy breathing. YOU stare at MY back and I begin to cry.

ME

Why couldn't you have trusted the liquid desires you wrought inside of my nervous system?

YOU

You don't make sense anymore. 

ME

It's like you never wanted me to stick around for long enough for you to love it, but just for long enough to prove wrong the blueness of her eyes. 

I turn to YOU.   YOU step closer to me, letting the palms of YOUR hands wrap around MY wrists. YOU don't remember the last time that YOU touched ME. MY heart is beating so loudly that YOU can feel it on my skin.

YOU

Give up, already. Just walk away.

ME

I wanted to wish you Merry Christmas on the rooftop of the hand sanitizer factory.  I wanted to kiss you at midnight when the year dies.

YOU

One day, you'll stop babbling and I'll thank God for the fact that he invented lips to close your mouth. 

YOU let go of ME and turn to the cabinet. YOU pour a glass of wine and hand it to ME. I sip it while you grab YOURSELF a beer. 

ME

I thank God that he invented lips so that I can touch yours. 

YOU

Then stop giving up. 

ME

Then stop pretending that you want me to.

YOU

You left. 

ME

I wasn't planning on going anywhere anyway. I just wanted to know if you would fight for me. You didn't. You never do. Nobody ever has.

YOU

You are the worst thing that's happened to me since the hurricane last February. Lots of wind. Lots of rain. I was so wet.

ME

That's probably why you needed me, just to dry you up. But, I'm the worst thing that's happened to anyone since the world became flammable. You're flammable now. So, it's probably time for me to go.

I put down the glass of wine and turn to the door. I slide into YOUR coat, which has spray paint on the arms, and I slip a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket. It's empty.

ME

I thought you quit. 

YOU

I thought you cared. 

I put the pack back in the pocket and walk toward YOU, grabbing the key ring from YOUR pocket, holding it with MY teeth as I zip up MY sweater underneath. Turning away, I step into MY shoes and open the door.

YOU clear your throat and I turn. I watch YOU finish YOUR beer and toss the bottle in the sink. It shatters. YOU step to ME and push ME against the fridge, which rocks against OUR weight. YOU haven't been this close to ME in so long that I had forgotten what YOUR eyes looked like when YOU could actually see ME. I smile.

YOU

I wish you'd talk to me. 

ME

I'll always love you. 

YOU

I don't want to make you unhappy...

ME

I'll always love you. 

YOU

Bella... 

ME

Fight for me. 

YOU

Fight who? 

ME

Me. 

YOU

Don't leave. 

ME

Thank you. 

WE kiss. I love YOU quite a lot. It's all very simple.
 [FADE OUT]


I'm sorry.

cut to burn

like it was all already gone

universally underrated

without congruencies 

for anything 

or the train tracks on the west side

death avenue

all anchored down

for the storm

blowing

and kindling

in the vein of the 

presocratic philosophy

that you never paid much attention to

like me

or

it

It’s room smelled like lollipops and it’s questions were more watery than not
when you morphed into my fantasy I could’ve kissed you from relief
Like a nonsense driven lullaby or a quantity-bound quality-chart
you made up words that hugged my cavities and I made love, fucked quizzically, the notion of your nature
humming in our communal drapery
your sheets wrapping our Greek heroism in a shadowy monotony
I always knew you had to be just around the corner
problem was, I couldn’t figure out which corner.

really?

"really?"
"yup."

she twirled the letters in her mouth like beaujolais and sipped on the atmosphere as if it was the bottle of chianti that she couldn't afford from the top shelf.

"you disappear a lot."
"yup."

all the remembrances came back to her at an alarming speed, and she labeled herself as a Mason Jar like the quarantined, non-admittance, under-aged faker that she was when they first met. 

"will you pretend like you missed me when you see me again?"
"yup."

6,5,2 days left until they m-m-made a memory inside each other's incisors, re-sizing, integrating all the outskirts, and in skirts, until there wasn't another k-k-kiss that they could hold back.

"you could tell me all of it back."
"nah."

figures.

risen

In between every pulse, my blood sings your name. 

I won’t ever be able to give you everything

But I can write you a lot of poems 

and kiss you when the clock strikes

1:01

and 1:01.1

and 1:01.2

I’ll make my bed into a cloud for you

to cry about the little things you never told to 

anybody

neverbody

nobody

everbody

everynobody

And you can show up on my pillow when I’m fast asleep

and I will wake up with a smile for your

CO2 emissions are more lovely than the 

oxygen of every tree

and every leaf

and every little piece of grass that can make

fingers into whistles 

and tune up the saturation on the memories of your smile

I’ll paint your windows during nighttime

while you’re reading a book about the philosophy of butterflies

so that when you awaken

the sunshine will make a stained glass mosaic on your

porcelain skin and you’ll realize

that you’ve been

art

to me all along

As you hum along to a peaceful riot

remembering the dos and don’ts of karmic reverence

my brain waves keep with the rhythm of your questions 

so that my body manufactures

— in it’s hormonal expulsions — 

wannabe answers

I’ll tinker with the locks until every door is more open than not 

on the path way that brings you

to here

Ancestral Forest

Your name is the kind of word that poets say softly to themselves as they scribe it on paper.
And the quicker your sandy being slips through my hourglass, the stormier the skies become as I cease in my ability to reckon with the roundness of the roads.
Burying myself in the crannies between rose petals, growing into winter glory on the outside of your window, where your fireplace turns your skin an amber gold, and the reflection of the moon upon my hair gives me steel silver slices on the crevices on my cheeks.
The slightest breeze could knock you over onto the empty plains of the American past. No closure for a period made up of people wishing they were older than the magazine's paper binding.
Celsius or Fahrenheit, you'll always be cooler than me, and I'll never be hotter than you.
Paris was dominated by a Marxist-Freudian-Nietzchian paradigm. Your ballot was taped to the wall of your living room, upon which you had written VOID and scribbled a poem about someone who had forgotten you exist.
Is this a poem about someone who has forgotten I exist?

Does everyone have an ancestral forest? Because if we do, I think my tree was planted next to yours and that, really, I have no choice. My branches can't help but reach for your leaves until the last sun has set on over the last ocean on the West.

Tongue Tied

The dust was flying through the sun streaming through the window as she tipped her bed to the side. It slid out like it wanted to be found, all orange and dusty, faded because of the time she had forced past. She didn't remember anymore why she kept it at all, and the way that it had begun to deteriorate, it seemed as though the world hated the way she was then almost as much as she does now. The noises of the room were hot and sticky, and her fingers felt their way onto the pages easily, muscle memory, like seconds ago she tucked it underneath her sleeping body, tears streaming down her face. The pages fell easily, all worn and over-worked, limp and flexible, an old pair of shoes that have molded to the shape of your walk.
She flipped through, her eyes scanning through the words she used to use, her lips stringing into a smile for the way that her mind had attempted to find solace in the middle of the inky circles and coffee stains.
But her heart couldn't take the way your handwriting filled up the middle page. She could see it all so clearly, the way that you held the pen with your eyes closed, writing out of your mouth instead of your mind. She never let anyone touch that notebook before you. Not after you either.

"For every day that you want to be my first cigarette, I want to call you bella. Every night."

She remembered why she kept it all these years. With a sad smile, she slid it back under her mattress to be found again someday. Until then, she would hold your words like a prayer and hope that you might come back to prove it all true.
She couldn't believe you, but she couldn't believe either that you'd lie.

strikethrough

I let myself be caught by your corners
where I sit next to the doll you lost in second grade
and the confetti from New Year's Eve circa 1999.

There's only kindness from the forgotten,
lade with appreciation for recognition of a smile
from the shell-self you're giving out now,
who mumbles words and phrases on repeat
hoping nobody notices.

Oneiric musings let my minutes slowly pass
until you pass
and we hold our breath,
the doll, the confetti, the dust, and I,
to see.

What I wouldn't give to know what you thought of me then
if you thought of me then
when
your clouds were cotton candy and the Seine
was warmed sugar butter and you bothered to lend
out your paperclips to make art instead of words.

Trace me wantonly and burn your calendar until messages are optional and impermanent.

her prayer

There's no such thing as chance;

She saw God reflected in all the shimmering words of the morning

and when she asked for an escape from the troublesome quarantine of her mind, it fell into her pockets like loose change that might have been there all along.

My flight was delayed for rain on a sunny afternoon and I happened to meet my soul mate in the time I spent perusing the magazines, wishing I was flying. 

She couldn't wait to tehila and halal until her mouth when dry and her bones were bare and she was giving more than she had to an ultimate she didn't understand.

In the name she still has trouble spelling, she prays.

Since

Since I fell, the underside of the moon reflected the motion of my bricking boundaries. Everything beautiful you could have said started waltzing through my mind like the youthful memories you painted in the snow. Graciousness was lost on my obsolete threshold, but your proximity to my dreams was good enough for a chapter or two. 

I handed you my heart in a pile of books and I've missed you ever since. 

Calypso

They hadn't considered my ability to weave the web across the windows. I wasn't just a widow anymore, all adorned in the mourning for my past that had come so strongly when I found the nuisance of the city dissipating underneath my palms. Plated like Achilles, all guarded under Hades word, I strung underneath and around them like a knitting arachnid and a haunted memory. She was sick beside me. So sick she was with wondering that harkening to the realization that she made other people matter, by existing we made other people matter, when we kissed we made the world matter, she slept soundly as the fever's fervor pushed and pulsed with a carriage like the coming of the sun through her veins. Every night that it rained, the music blessed her skin with tears from the afterlife. I wept for her children that couldn't be mine, and I thundered through her lightning bolts like a monsoon. Together we were a storm.
We made the world matter when we darkened the skies and she never struck the same spot twice. You could hear me for miles, and you continue to judge your fate from the sound of my voice. I call to you and flock her light until the blackness of my clouds and the whiteness of her flashes become something of a postcard for the apocalypse.

Come home to me, Calypso. Come rain on my fire and put me to sleep.  

Autobody

It was over in seconds. She dropped the end of the string and began to recite spoken word in her native tongue instead of looking me in the eye like she used to when I loved her back. But she bit my tongue instead of having me speak out against her ethnographically denoting economy, pointing to the sunrise over the Pacific like we were hanging in Hawaii, and ignoring the point of the Mediterranean whatsoever.

“I need you,” she drew a wheelchair across the wall and scribbled her initials at the bottom. She crippled herself every night when the moonlight manufactured existentialism on yonder bare field. Black eyes and black religion, she never cared about her knives until I started telling her they were sharp.

It was over in seconds like she won and I lost. It was over before it began like I tied us to a pine tree a month before Christmas. It was over and she couldn’t forget my teetering fantasies that were lingering underneath her fingernails because she refused to clean them out.

I’m a dirty kind of machine. The autobody shops don’t fix my type anymore.

Hills

We found ourselves on a hill overlooking the sound of the ocean and the rocks kissing each other like tomorrow would never come. "Fuck me," she held her vomit right back from her teeth like it was biting back for all the times she had lied to her own mind. I couldn't stand the way she watched herself, all drunk and wishing for a memory, because I pushed my self off the upper story balcony so that I could be better for her someday. Odds were that she wouldn't be marked for or against their wandering forfeits, but "how old are you?" was the same as asking "what's your name?"


I'll never stop loving you.
I'll love you until the second that I die.

fucked with a knife

[FADE IN]

[Int. Bedroom. Nighttime.]

She is laying on the bed, her hair spread around her, in a corset, ripped at the seams, fraying around her. It is tied so tight that the skin on her chest is pooling at the top and her breathing is shallow. She has a long black skirt, pooling with fabric, covering her legs, but hanging off of her feet, which are dangling off the bed, a pair of worn heels are rocking back and forth as she moves her ankles. Her chest moves up and down rhythmically, quickly, as the flash of car headlights runs continuously over the walls. She is making music to herself, a tuneless melody, half-whistling, half-humming, while her eyes examine on the ceiling and her fingers twirl around the sheets beneath her.

The door opens, and man walks in. He has a cigarette in his mouth and he is holding a newspaper underneath his arm. The man looks at her and smiles. She looks at him back, blank.

SHE
Tell me something that will change my mind.

HE
I can't change your mind. You're stubborn.

SHE
Try.

She looks to the ceiling again, licking her lips. Her breathing is still shallow, and it's making a little noise when she inhales and exhales. It's soft, and the lack of air is making her cheeks rosy. He looks at her like she's a painting, trying to recognize the artist by the strokes of the brush on her skin. It was him all along, but he couldn't tell his own work.

He moves a portion of her skirt and sits on the edge of the bed. Her hand slides to his lower back, underneath his shirt, and taps the rhythm of the song she is humming onto his skin. He watches her feet swaying back and forth, the shoes swinging.
SHE
One thing, please. Just say one thing. 

HE
Who did this to you?

SHE
I think it was the artist.

HE

Ah…

She stops humming and rolls to one side. The lights are shining behind her, so her silhouette is mostly all you can see. As her legs close together, she winces, biting her lip before she speaks.
SHE
Do you like your head?

HE
It's skin on bone on brain. It's exactly like everybody else's. Nothing exceptional. Nothing mundane.

SHE
I'd like you to see yourself through my eyes. I think you'd probably fall in love too.

HE
I don't believe in love.

SHE
I should've liked to know you when you did.

HE
I dreamt that I met God last night. He told me something about the trees in the North, and the way that the nighttime sky watches you less than the daytime one. That's why people sin in the dark.

SHE
Will you lay?

HE
I'd rather not. 

SHE

I'm assuming you won't take me to God either. 

HE

Most likely.

SHE
He doesn't even remember my name now, probably. He's too busy getting lost in your stained glass eyes.  

She takes her hand from his skin and pulls him down by the fabric of his shirt. He lays still and she slides her fingers into his palm, pushing until his hand gives in and holds hers back. She doesn't smile. He does not look at her. They are silent.

SHE
I should probably go.

HE
It's too late for you too be walking around and it's too dark for me to be trying to figure out how to solve the details of your faces.

SHE
I've only got one face.

HE
Not right now. I've never seen this face on you before.

SHE
Kiss me.

He sits up slowly, pushing off of the bed so that he is facing her completely. His cigarette has gone out now, but it still is hanging from his lips. She watches him as he shifts until he is hovering over top of her, their faces close, her shallow breath blowing onto his lips. Her eyes begin to well and his lips charm up into a smile.

He begins to kiss her, starting at her bare shoulders and then her chest, down her corset, down her torso, to her hips; he hooks his fingers under her skirt and pulls it down, showing the garter belt underneath, all black lace, hooked onto her stockings. He pulls the skirt down more and a glint of light sparks off the inside of her thighs. Lowering his face, he withdraws, with his teeth, a cold, bloody knife, that is tucked into her stocking, immediately opposite an open wound made from when she rolled over.

He takes the knife from between his teeth and, starting at the top, cuts the corset all the way down the front. It falls open. Her skin has red marks from the pressed ribbing. He sits on his knees and examines her as she begins to hum again, sliding her hands up and down his arm, staring at the ceiling.
HE
You can't have my knife.

She takes the knife from his hand and holds it above her head.

SHE
Trade me for it.

HE
(smiling)
Fine.
(pausing)
I'll change your mind.

She holds the knife out to him.

SHE
Try me.

He takes the knife and tosses it off the bed, propped up on his knees, he pulls his cigarette case from his breast pocket, and takes one out. He lights it with a match, igniting it off the bottom of her dangling stiletto. She watches him slowly. He looks at her.

HE
Stay.

SHE
Alright.


[FADE TO BLACK]

Flyer

Before losing my wings, I got a feel for the fall. There wasn't a noise in the movie theatre other than my breathing because the sound of the film had cut out and I was the only one who stayed. I had an odd appreciation for the silent movie; it seemed that it wasn't shared by anyone on this coast at all. Breathing in and out and in...and out, I made the soundtrack on my own, syncopating my heart beat to match the rhythm of the mouths on screen. I let my back push really nice and firm into the fur jacket I was wearing to clear off the bite of the cold from my skin. It wasn't supposed to be so cool in heaven, but I knew my time was running out, so God might have already cut my central heating since I had failed to pay rent. "What if it was a game?" was what it looked like Fred Astaire was saying to Ginger in the black and white serenity. I lit up my cigarette despite the NO SMOKING signs wallpapering the room. 

It wasn't quite so bad just yet because I was only going to be a fallen angel for eternity, and I kind of liked sky diving when I was alive. 

I had to come up with a name now, because hell doesn't take well to saints, and I was getting awful good at feeling like a sinner. 

"Hey princess," The security guard called, "no smoking eh??" I nodded and snuffed it out on the seat next to me, burning a little hole in the faux-velvet covering. 

Princess. 

It could work. Something like that. 

They turned the lights on and shut off the movie, wordlessly telling me to leave. 

Jesus was waiting by the door, and without saying a single thing, unhooked my wings from my shoulder blades and shook his head sadly. 

"I'll miss you, JC." I said to him. My face was melting off already and he gave me the kind of sad grimace that psychoanalysts give their patients before the institution. 

"Yeah," he muttered, his voice like raw silk and butterscotch, (apparently he sounded different to everyone. He made up the noises of everyone's own paradise.) "I guess I'll see you around, Lucy." 

I thought about a sex change. It always seemed like the devil should be a man. 

oh

"Touch me so that I can be myself"
I'm begging for the longest of your kisses
and your tarnished smile only pointing toward my eager
eagle eyes
because
I can neither live with you nor exist without you.

let me be materialized for another
moment
until the sunshine on your mantle piece
has begun to turn
to the moon
and you tell me that I had better
go.

I really only like the way I feel myself
under your skin and your smile

Trotsky

As the snow began to fall we moved the boxes that you were taping shut so that we could make it from the bed to the kitchen. It had passed more quickly than I could've imagined it might have, and I could still taste all the words I'd failed to say. Whether they held truth or not would stay buried next to my childhood secrets in the shadows of my consciousness, because it looked like you might not stick around to find them out after all.
I had never seen you write so well, nor graph the stars like a cartographer, all heavy on the nighttime and my sins. It must have been upsetting that you never saw the sky with her, but I have set your telescope up right next to my bed so you can hold me while you show me the whole universe.
There was a stain on the new sofa that you flipped over to hide from the landlady who would see it in a couple months and curse you under her breath. There were cigarette butts under everything I moved, wedged into cushions and the nooks and crannies that I thought I'd stuffed up with my secrets when the draft had begun through the walls.
You looked more lovely than the kaleidoscope you bought me after we road tripped to Moscow for the fun of being misunderstood in the least understanding of lands. The rain was thicker there, and it bailed across our windshield like a steady stream of imperial socialism.
"What would Trotsky think?" You muttered, debating how much longer your lungs would last smoking with the windows all rolled up.
When the crash hit the wall and the blood boiled down until it couldn't have been anything human, you stopped smiling.
We are moving boxes like we're out of time, because you're obsessed with your immortality almost as much as I'm obsessed with my death.
And the snow had started falling when I cracked the champagne open with my teeth to propose a toast;
"to you, my love, on the last night of forever."
"What would Trotsky think?" You muttered to yourself as you chugged the champagne til you sparkled and made love to me for the first time in a long, long time.

tie

Last night I dreamt about your favorite tie;

The sun was cracking through your window, which was opaque because of the heat. Morning smelled like pastries and your skin was like a backlit alabaster dream next to mine. I wanted nothing more than to lie there forever with your fingers wrapped in my fingers wrapped in my hair wrapped in your arms in our sheets in your house that I'm calling ours for a second. Hearing your lungs pull for a few more full inhales of oxygen before your eyelids would flutter open and push away serenity, before you would let the tolerance of being a soul in the soulless world weigh down upon your crisping shoulder blades, I could tell you were dreaming of something sad.
I let my lips touch the corners of your extremities, right on your collarbone, right on your cheeks, right on your wrists, until your furrowed brow smoothed out. You began to move like consciousness was stirring in your mouth and, at the same moment, the birds outside began their choir.

You made a noise.
I said good morning.
You kissed me in return.

We sat there for a little while, the sound of your musical city warming up like an orchestra. I sat up to watch the clouds turn on. You watched me.
I tripped over your favorite tie when I was climbing out of bed; the far end stuck to the desk that had caught it when I ripped it off you with my teeth the night before. You chuckled from behind me and I walked away like there had been nothing to see.
When you called me back, I had your coffee in my hand and your tie around my neck and the stains and bruises from last night roped across my skin. You kissed them like they were art. Since you made them, and you're an artist, I guess they were.
Hunting for a wiser frame, just another time of day, you pushed out of bed and disappeared, like you did in all my nightmares. You were gone before I could tell you I loved you enough to wait there all day.
I held onto your favorite tie and fell asleep on your side of the bed.


When I woke up, your tie was gone.

Place

"It's all just a picture."
I asked her why.
"There's nothing real anymore. Everything is the past or tomorrow or right now, which is little more than the act of every breath fading into a memory."
She let her eyes wander into the sunset.
"I'm hoping that it blinds me today."
I couldn't speak.
It only took a second.
It only takes a second every time.
"I  miss being young, when each minute was so much of your life, that being four years old took a millennium. There's something that's so aesthetically pleasing about being young."
I watched her still. She moved her eyes until they fell upwards at the darkness.
"It's all becoming night very quickly."

the back of the door

I'm pleading the fifth while she's getting dressed
We're watching the width of the over oppressed
The dishes are breaking on the frozen concrete
But it's nothing quite like that sad, summer heat

You're a right wonder crossword
I'm as dumb as I seem
And I'm moving to Hartford
To live out the dream

It's like they all told me on the radio show
I won't ever like anywhere that I go
But you're running away from me just like before
And you're still hidden on the back of the door

I wish that I could
I wish that I'd try
I wish that you would
I'll try not to cry

The pots on the counter are all from the past
And they're marked up with stories just trying to last


I'll impress myself on the back of the door
And you'll feel as if you have seen me before. 

bon voyage

I could've killed you out of sympathy for every single pair of weak little eyes who are ever going to fall in love with your perfect monstrosity of a smile. 

Instantly instantaneous, like the drunkest of your winks to nobody in particular, I have this feeling growing down below that 

you might still be too broken for any of this to be real.

 Excuse me?? No, no, it's all optional; all of the scars and blood and your tissue on my tissues are unnecessarily beautiful.
I couldn't have stopped if I had wanted to, until you marketed the business man's secretary off to the highest bidder for the sake of the art, and had 

"sic ego nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum" 

written on her arms in an attempt to make her feel like any of your words had ever been true in the slightest.
I was thrashing at concerts, trying so hard to want to fuck anybody else.

Thus I cannot live without you, and I cannot live with you. 

So get your ass over here and let me die in your arms. 

I met a pretty girl who told me a couple pretty words about an ugly situation that you put me in. 

"You can't always take the shit. You have to give some too. That's the nature of equality."
You'll realize that you still care and then you'll figure something out like nonsense and nothing at all.
We should probably go…
And I guess because I've been fighting for your human rights and the kids in the sahara and because it's been deemed bad to smoke and good to work out and bad to eat candy and good to eat carrots and bad to love anyone and good to love anyone and bad to love yourself and bad to hate yourself and good to glue your eyes to the television like the colored lines will solve your depression; goddamn it baby, won't you just turn up the volume, i'm trying to drown out the sound of our daughter committing suicide upstairs.
Uterus or fallopian tubes or mice on the back of the highway underpass, it doesn't matter where you push me.

I'm going to fall.

Because I've been falling every day since you told me you'd rather kill me than love me back. 

I could've killed you out of sympathy,

but I'd rather just tuck you in and slip out while you sleep.

bbq

mark it up on your
bulletin board
terminal departure
credit card statement

that the girl is leaving town
for a little slice
of something else
without a net
below the bridge

she's going to bury
treasure
in your skin
and make you wonder
why she
wanders

on
and
on

mary j.

He was pushing her face
against the wall in a way that made her
insides burn like
dynamite and
die-no-might
bucking heads
like a locked up tattoo artist
who can't find his ink
and the mafia lord who
really needs a mother fucking hug.

 

They watched the colors change, really slowly, as their pills dissolved in the plastic Aquafina bottles on the bedside table.

The youngest of the rebellion couldn't stomach the pain.

They were running out of time.

 

But she was more marvelous than the northern lights when she finally decided to smile

and she was more mysterious than the deepest ocean when she let herself laugh

and she was more beautiful than the darkest night when the television screen flickered on her sleeping breath

and she was more everything than he could've ever dreamt of

in his cowboy sheets and his indian mind.

 

likened to the falling of an era and the end of some thing bigger than all of us, the poppers opened up our eyes and we could see that our pupils were filled with blood and history.

all I wanted was to sleep for another hour or to wake up really awake.

all I wanted was to love you for a second when you weren't thinking of someone else.

all I wanted was to drink up the pills that had dissolved in the water so my liver wouldn't hate me so much and so that my tongue could taste what I was doing to my insides.

but I couldn't stomach it either.

When he pressed himself onto my skin and made me hold the rope between my aching jaws

{"bite down bitch"}

the smell of his discontent mingled with my own

until I felt like I could understand him for a second

 

 

"Free from desire, you see the mystery.

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations."

Tao Te Ching



one year

dipping my tongue into your teeth

the way your dipping your fingers into my flesh

pressing your bones

against all my 

atoms in january

until you're

apt to

burst

like

the 

[our]

first 

time all

over again. 

february hurt

and the holy grail

that you've been searching for

marching on like springtime until

april sank into everything that your mother

swore you'd never have to feel 

and it was all coming back like

may had never left at all.

marley was defending your mind in the antiquity of 

rebellion underneath bridges in june's stagnant 

intensity, without any chance of coming or

going any time before independence day 

sang on july's tambourines  and i made believe

that when i said it drunk

i didn't say it

at all

all over august 

i wanted you and watched you

like the maddening september sun

on the end of the louisiana leaves of burning grey

as that cold october night was turned away 

and november came crying in like 

insanity in the flesh and 

the mesh she kept 

over her stocking

for that  one

christmas

eve

ripped. 

december 

a little colder 

than before in your 

bad religious applications

that tied me down with your

leather and biblical words unearthing

all the sin you could've ever dreamed of 

on my skin

and

it 

feels

like the

[our]

first time

every 

night

you're

gone. 

an age in art

Though the committee had

closed the case on the 

666th plea of innocence, 

as we stood their with our hands shackled

cracking  

in the 

sugar                        glass                      jury               room                   where                    our                 linkages                make              up                   nothing          at          all

i started to sing.

And there's something about the way I'm pulling out the seeds from my pockets

and using your mind as a flowerbed

where I'm going to harvest the rising of a new millennium from your laughter;

I'll show the rest of the world how 

when the two of us converse

we are the epoch of a culture

like a newly                                                                 lost

found 

generation

throwing a particle of your wisdom 

where the wind hit the cliffs 

to combine it with a fraction of my 

voice

until the cubist illustrations are the most realistic things in the room

and our words

just a harmony of contradictions

make grown men cry

and the angels weep

My mechanized cataclysms are waiting under the arch in an attempt to argue their way into a philosophy-free future and no disjunction between the then and the now. 

it all rings incessantly true

that there has never been a single case wherein 

an age has failed to recognize potentiality

that it had rejected an age before. 

waking up

Understandably, she questioned all of them; the noises that erupted from the back of her throat when she cried, the monsters under the bed and the demons in the closet, the harsh realization that her nothingness could've suited her better or suited someone else worse. When she was caught in rainstorms in September, like the kind that sent the homeless people into store fronts with their left-over highs, that broke umbrellas like they didn't have any substance whatsoever, that made the mothers have to sit up late with the kids who cried at the crashing noises from the sky, ("It's God bowling," they would assure them, "don't you think it sounds like he got a strike?" The dogs darted around the living room, barking as the father puffed lazily on his cigar and wondered when he became a man of a house of mediocrity. He still remembered that night in Cancun.) she would sit outside and let her cigarette go limp instead of smoking it to the end. She would let her clothes get see-through and then she would stare at her reflection in the streaking windows of her building. She would wash her make-up off in the run-off and see if the acid rain could give her any sort of a trip. 
She had been caught in a storm last night, but the lightning was so hypnotic that she forgot to get all cold and wet, but stood on the stoop of the coffee shop that she was waiting in. She had been there for hours, her lipstick fading in potency as she cycled through cup after cup of bitter reality. She smoked all her tobacco, so she settled for a fat joint that she rolled in the open in the middle of the cafe. Nobody stopped her though, because her hair was plastered down, and the tear stains couldn't be distinguished from the destruction that the rain had done to her face. In fact, a man dropped his lighter on the table and touched her shoulder in the veiled attempted to promise that it might be alright someday. She didn't look up at him because his hand was too heavy and she knew she was really only waiting for one touch. 
"Make a wish and then I'll stop crying," she said to the barista who passed her as she was putting the joint between her lips. 
"I wouldn't know what to wish for at all." 
"I hope that you're happy," she wished for him. 
"I hope that my rent check doesn't bounce..." he said. He hadn't heard her.
The sunset was blackening the night. She felt like she might as well walk home. 

"Beautiful...." the voice was far away, filtering through a nights worth of cinematic distortions, "beautiful, it's okay." She fluttered her eyes open and stared into the semi-darkness. There was a glow around the room and the voice that seemed to come from the covers emerged like a miracle, wrapping itself all around her. Warm, and comfortable, she fit just right in the arms that encircled her torso to tuck her into the shadowy corners of their mutuality. "You were having a nightmare." She kissed the velvet skin. "I'm right here."

The alarm clock was unusually jarring this morning.
Her bed was still empty.
Her eyes were still wet.
She threw herself onto the carpet and settled for examining the underside of her cabinet.
Waking up is much, much harder alone.

pHd
PhD
Doctor of the acids and the basics that we're flying
tuh-ranasaurous trying
teaching us the movements
buying diamonds in college
waiting for the foliage
to change
to say
to name
that summer's gone
and autumn's coming around.

but i won't be satisfied until the gospel's singing spring. 

Italy or something

You're in the middle of the street, marking your territory on the cars that are running too quickly to ever catch full glimpse of, always going north when we're trying as hard as we can, just trying to go south. and i met her at a bar, or standing next to a bar--a railing really. everything was closing, because it was about the time when all the people who haven't had any sleep turn their lights off and try to die instead of live another night awake. and her hair was too blonde, but her roots were too long, and the nightlife was shining off her skin, which was sparkling the way authors try to describe with twenty six misspelled letters. and i was standing close enough to forget where my cell phone was. they were walking far enough away to tell only that the interactions as such could only cut the chord if a minute's worth of tequila had been added to the brownie mix and her nose ring hadn't been so silver and my tongue hadn't been so swollen after all.
they weren't stoned like i was stoned, and i knew you were watching me from a hundred miles away and she was dreaming me from a thousand miles away and i was dreaming of her watching me from next door with a cigarette precariously stacked on her film canisters, giving her the perfect light to shoot another thousand still frame shadows on the mixed up files of the cereal milk jugs and their significant others.
Closer and tinier and smaller and sweeter to the postal service trucks. Options and marxists and trash-bins full of the Wonder Years, making up a street called Menage a Trois just uptown from the avenue Fuck You Two? Fuck you too.
Polaroids are wallpapering my nosebleeds, but your bandages never soak it up
Smoke it up
Smoke up
Smoke
your lungs look too alive

new york minute

Blink 

and then I'm gone. 

a little bicycle

with all your obvious inconsistencies

tap dancing on my break up

sugar cubes, i'd write our romance novel

on the back of a book-store receipt

and tuck it in your closeted reflection. 

infecting both the multiplicity of meanderings and the

musicality of morning, the thoughts told tenuously tinted the glasses and made the whole goddamn world look rosy.

Romantic in the worst sense, I'm Paris and Rosaline

watching Romeo and Juliet 

the ballet

on the handlebars of your little bicycle

because the drugs are real

and your life is all

all

hallucinating me meandering past your window and holding all your secrets like the diary you couldn't ever stop writing thoughts about me in when you were supposed to be forgetting. 

Choking on narcotics 

and praising the ecosystem of the city, 

Verona couldn't even wish 

me farewell

because you're too busy killing yourself over a fucking

peach

fuck you

i'm holding you
in my mouth like a secret
while you're
imagining your
twiddling her little thumbs
humming
strumming
the words you can't remember
because you
haven't been together
in forever
fuck you

fuck you 

and 

your summer fruits

all in cahoots

with your 

body suits

and

piles of useless shit

that's it

because

i'm trying

dying 

to morph and mold

and hold

something you wouldn't give me

but wanted to 

prove

i couldn't see

while i'm trying

to

fuck you

fuck you

because my crystalline walls

all

Niagara 

fuh-fuh-fallin

while you're 

buh-buh-ballin

and making

me want 

you

even

more

than I wanted

when I just

wanted to

fuck you. 

In Defense of Being Alone

The rain was falling out out time with the beating of her idiosyncratic heart. The lights burned too bright indoors for her to see the blank walls with any sort of creative expression, so she dimmed them most of the days in order for her eyes to be able to squint and find in the emptiness a sort of peaceful art. She sat on this sunless morning, with her fingernail polish already chipped though she had painted them less than an hour before, contemplating the nature of the world, while dangling her head off the side of her bed to see if the rush of blood could speed up her thoughts. Like a wind-up toy in desperate need of a good twist, she let her circular marching slow and slow until she could stop and breathe, or stop and hold her breath long enough to see if the little girl with the hazel eyes on the other line had really hung up the phone. She had. She always did.

It seemed to her that young people, though she herself by all terms and by every adult in the entire world could too be counted amongst the youth, didn't appreciate the beauty of loneliness nearly enough. She felt that she alone could find amongst the waltzing of nothing but her thoughts a sense of peace that was eternally absent from the perpetual discussions present outside the walls of her head. It was many a night where she fell softly into her bed, holding nothing close other than her wit and her eclecticism, and being completely satisfied. Without the din of the ceaseless noise - she still could not fathom how they all did not run out of things to say - she could find commonalities with literature, she could schedule her own intergalactic pondering, and she could market her emotions as exactly what they were. Her options were endless when she had no one to answer to but herself.

This morning, while crafting her essay entitled "In Defense of Being Alone," with the rain falling out of time with her idiosyncratic heart, she shut her eyes and fell off into a slumber unlike that of the night before or the night after. She fell into a dream of a truly profound nature wherein, with her hands tied behind her back and the lights of a stage pointed directly at her skin, beading with sweat, she found herself wrapped up completely, thoroughly engrossed that is, in a conversation with a person who was not herself.

Upon waking, she blinked at the light that was now shifting through a nearly cloudless sky. The rain had gone and the grass outside her window was dewey and delicious. It could've thrown green lights against her walls had she looked close enough. Hearing nothing inside of her room, she realized that the silence in this moment was too absolute. Nothing was chattering, not even her thoughts. It perplexed her, as many things tended to do (facts of one's own mind are much more perplexing when your mind is your own best friend) and she stood. The blood rushed quickly from her head and the stars that popped up like nighttime diamonds in front of her eyes made it seem like she was far too empty to be standing. Quickly, and without any sort of warning, a thought sprang through her brain like a bullet through sugar-glass. "I'm lonely."

She thought for a moment, as she tied up her shoes mechanically, on the difference between being alone and being lonely.

Stepping outside, the sun warmed her skin like a hug. She hadn't been hugged in months. And down the block, a child laughed, pedaling along the sidewalk in unobtrusive, wholly youthful joy.  She smiled at him and he smiled back with every fiber of his being. His mother, disheveled and full of gaiety, trotted along after him.
"Good morning!" The mother laughed as she passed.
"Good morning..." she whispered in response. For a lithe heartbeat, she felt like an active player in the game of someone else's life.
Smiling without any notion as to why, she began to walk.

People were milling about in many a listless fashion; but their thoughts could still pass through them as she found her thoughts still passing through her. Not mutually exclusive, she realized, were interaction and self-advancement. In fact, she pondered, I feel rather quite advanced. 

Thinking, as she was, she failed to notice the car skidding quickly toward her as she stepped onto the asphalt, so taken by the child on his bicycle.

Had she survived, she might have made this anecdote the final point to her "Defense of Being Alone."

as

they're teaching them how to march

and mark

and march
like they had any sense of why
they
did it
any of it
i
watch
i
watch
and
i
watch
and i'm looking for the future in their dead beat, dead pan, heart break, no shame faces, still jousting with themselves on the rooftop gardens that their parents made for cocktail parties and intimate gatherings of the faces who matter.
i watch and i keep trying to figure out
make all my miscalculations
add up
to something more
substantial than a square
full of money
or a square
full of
heart
artistically endowed to become
a feather in the wind
and a stone's throw away.

VELVET

Perhaps it stems only from the fact that I've taken to writing in all capital letters, or maybe I'm becoming a hoarder of sentiment and relative confusion, but I am unusually sure of my excessive belief in the unbelievable and I'm recalling you in a manner that is way too fresh to be debatable.
I'd rather lay in velvet and let the spiders move across the sky without my involvement than dance with the hummingbirds, so obsessed with successful pollination. The flower to flower life never caught my eye, because I've been staring at the same sunflower blossom for months, years now, and waiting to become the sun that turns its head west.
Everybody, sans Dostoevsky, is west of the ice so I'm burning on the coast, trying to evaporate the Atlantic with my mind, watching the concrete rust unseasonably soon.
And though they still don't know, all patiently marketing my manipulation [eyes closed, tongue dancing and the like] I could not believe the signs that pointed me away from Waverley Place that Wednesday night. Rather, it must have been Thursday morning by then. They wanted me to think thin, but my mind is getting fatter to accommodate my physical wasting away; velvet on my skin can't keep my mind thin.
"It's all a metaphor for the homosexuality of the urban youth."
"What about the suburban youth?"
"Oh, never mind them. The gay ones skip town and the straight ones keep on praying."
And when he offered me another coffee, too closely entwined with his dirty fingers (too interested in pollination), I smiled. "No thanks, I skipped town."
Too much velvet pressed against my skin, and I'd rather touch her dirty palms {addicted to her fabric} and find reason for my ultimatum of confusion.
It makes no sense, the way I'm forcing myself deeper and deeper into their mad treasure hunt, but I find that I'm addicted to claustrophobia and the fact that I like being whatever everyone wants out of me.

I'm just so young and ____________________
                                  a. restless
                                  b. beautiful
                                  c. lucky
                                  d. fucked up
                                  e. fucking sorry
                                  f. all of the above

I'm sorry that I did it, but I'm really not sorry about the fact that I'd fuck her velvet all night and that I'd rather philosophize than economize.
The sun is setting on the square and I keep trying to make it into a triangular prism

but no such luck thus far.

calendar year

There wasn't a breath left in the room. All of the air had been soaked up by her whispers and the muted responses mumbled through kisses under the pillows. The electricity in their fingerprints was enough to shock sparks of light into the otherwise dark stratosphere. They couldn't be seen and they couldn't be heard, so for a few precious moments in that century-long evening, to the rest of the world, they did not exist.
She pulled the pen out of her pocket. Without any light other than their after-glow, she wrote on her thigh:

"Incongruous as it all seemed, when the midnight hit and the windows broke, the words that flowed from your mouth to my skin weren't anything less than miraculous. Buildings were falling around us, and the mechanized sound of periodic destruction had begun to ring out, ring up, through the spine of the structure. We must've been high up; we must've been floating in those sheets. I couldn't feel a thing that wasn't connected to the smile that you get when you're a few more remarks away from sleep.
Yawning like a child, with your hands glued to the steering wheel and my eyes glued to your whitened knuckles, rubbing against your flesh like they were itching to get out in the same way that I was itching to get in, you scanned the windshield. It seemed to me that you were looking for trouble, but there wasn't anything left in front of you that could've done anything but love you. I stared at the past the way that you were staring at the future, until I took my turn behind the wheel.
I'm starting to feel something that I'd sworn I'd thrown away.
I found a calendar with a map that you drew."

Funny enough, neither of them remembered a calendar at all. But the energy it would have spent on the asking was energy that could've been harvested into a few more thrusts of deliverance before the clouds covered over their eyes again. The time must have been passing at some basic level, for the moon had stopped throwing light through the windows onto the sheets and onto their eyelashes, but they couldn't tell if anything had been living whilst they had made paradise under the covers. And as they continued to lay, because it was an occasional experience wherein they found themselves all alone in their mutual solitary existences, they reveled in a momentary lapse of judgement once again, until the curtains couldn't contain the steam and the flowers bloomed despite the lack of spring.

10003

there are one way streets
[pointing]
all mixed up
[to your]
sensations that always lead me down
South
downtown.

it's beating

your

pulsing

pulse

pull

p

puh

puhpuh

puhpuhpuhplease

miss                         the                    way

one way

sunday morning

just-fucked

no shirt

my skin

everywhere

feeling                                                       of my tongue

                                                  against         your   cheek. 

[ext. fade in. nighttime. paris. 

one year later]

They couldn't stop seeing the sunshine in each other's eyes, even when the new moon was blackening the velvet night and there wasn't any sort of summer time life left in the air. They managed to find the springtime in their fingertips when they held hands in the ice, though, and the eiffel tower's glittering music made for the only thing they could hold onto other than the hope for another year to stay. 

are you 

still

finding

my hair tucked into the secrets of your clothing

folds

holding just enough

of me

to make

sure you

wish at

every 

possible

minute?

for a second

I was thinking on your effervescence in the shower, attempting to reconcile the whole hole that was ripped a while back, all frayed and tattered in my limbic system. You kept me from getting sick, but you also kept me from getting well.
Your face was reflecting off of all the drops falling down my skin, so delicately detailed that I turned around frequently, hoping that you would be standing behind me. It could've been a trick of the trade, but it sounded almost like your fake whistle was seeping through the water, through the pipes, through the walls that Jesus himself paid for; then again, it could've been just the rusty waterline humming along with my own wishful thinking.

I'm not completely sure if you're aware of the way you kiss, so I'll break it down real slow in the essence of your own marketing rally, no techno-parade prompting my adequate stripping down to nothing at all.
You always kiss me hard enough to leave a bruise, but you never kiss me hard enough to take any part of me with you.

It feels the same as it did before, and I feel the same as I did yesterday. You, on the other hand, feel like a monsoon's wet dream, and all my lightning strikes can't begin to permeate into your enigmatic notions of the beauty of nature and the inconsistency of aesthetics. Examining your own clicking jaw, you watch as my thoughts spin circles around yours, but with only one out of every ten words I write meaning anything, your calculated molasses pace seems to be something worth aspiring to.
I don't think you'd like me if I didn't run as quick.
I don't think I'd like me either.

3 hours, 27 minutes

It's all music in your
spinal chord
hyper-linked
underlined
melodies
marking your
mooooooooovveesssssss
against
the checker board
that's empty
in Washington Square.

You should probably start
fucking me like a rag doll
and
I'll probably start kissing you
only long enough
to keep you wanting more.

Nobody knows why
or how
or
[silence the formatting process to retain creative individuality]
why you would want
or how you could try
or when you will remember
or why
or

don't throw my legs up over your shoulders
and
scream like
your fingering
a centigrade century's worth of
studs' girlz
with overly-defined curlz
because you can't stop picturing me coming up your driveway
with my ripped-up
torn-off
bra-free
sex
moooooooooooving
along the yardstick
to mark
off
six foot two
one hundred and eleven pounds
of bubblegum candy cake.

Maybe I'm a little crazy, but I think you might be a little crazy for me.

anagram

volvo

Incarcerated inside of your outcomes
I forgot
forget
what it feels like to land
without my hand
in your-----
I couldn't stand to hold it in (on) me
one
more
bite
and I made it stop before I started
cumming
coming
out
laughing
to stop the gasping

even though your breathing was 

seething

and I could have gone

for

hours

picking your powers

like flowers

                  all third grade shit like

                             she hearts me

                             she hearts me not

                             check yes

                                             or no

               check check check. 

all these days are feeling like milliseconds

billiseconds

trilliseconds

but I like spending them with your eyeliner smeared 

across

my skin

in

the

highest of fashion

clashing

like I've never 

smashed

crashed

before

and                                   burning                        on                      your                  ice

is so fucking nice

twice

thrice

and every time

it happens again

and

again

                                         until i'm sure that you're sure.

I'm for goddamn sure

that the holy

spirit

hears it

and

likes

the way we sound

here on the ground

because we found

a slice 

of

something

dice

for

nothing

bullets in your 

mind. 

Please, just for my heart, 

be kind. 

eulogy

A pastor might say this of the evident equation encompassing my life when the time comes that I am more gravestone than human:

She lived her life like it was a scratched record. She didn't own a record player, and if someone had asked her to set up the music, she might have made a joke pertaining to her own incompetency, and flirted her way over to the window to stare at the street below. It would be only the silence that would really recognize that she couldn't even start up the soundtrack to the moment, but eventually someone would grab her hand, smile at her porous nature, and begin the tune. It always started in the same place, and she was constantly surrounded by too many people who were far more enchanted with the idea of understanding her inconsistencies that they ended up listening to songs twice. It would start again and she would fall back onto the same leather couch, still moist from last night's indiscretions, and begin everything all over again. She had learned something from the last time, but nobody else ever seemed to. If they had, they might have politely excused themselves from her smoky, stinking presence to find a space with a little more sunlight and fresh air, but they always stuck around until it was too late for either of them to change. It was in this way that she collected all of her friends, like murals plastered to a decaying wall, adorning a worthless room with art that would never be seen by anyone who could ever appreciate it. Then, when the nighttime had finally struck, and the candles were burning low enough to make an impression, she would light the whole room on fire and start over in a new place, with a new sound, and a new scent. Marking up the path that she walked on with ashes and legends, she travelled around like a wafting raincloud. She was rain in all senses save for the fact that she never really nourished anything. She was more like a flood than a sprinkle. She was more like a fire than a flood. She was more like destruction than anything else. One day, she ran out of options, and decided (since she had been telling everybody all along) that she was just always meant to be the narrator to her own thoughts rather than the character in her own life. In the dead of winter, when the chill was something that was more of a comfort in assuring her of her pulse than anything else, she watched the moon that was only hers--there were nights when she thought that the moon belonged only to her-and she would stare at the face on the other side, conversing with it on the nature of existence and the truth that she hadn't ever appreciated a single person in her whole life. The sick little game she played with all of her healthy players was the same as arsenic in cookies; you didn't taste her poison until you were on the brink of death. She had enough heart, however, to leave then. That was the moment when she burned down the next room, when all of her cohorts were chapped with venom and sinking into the blackness that she had manufactured for them to wallow in. Pulling up the curtains so they could watch the day around them grow bright with flame, she would kiss each of them on the mouth and apologize for her lack of conscience. She wasn't ever diagnosed. It could have been anything that brought around the end. But, for the good of all man kind, the end finally came. She's gone now, and everybody can breathe a little easier, fall asleep a little quicker, and pretend that they'll miss her more than she is going to miss herself. Nobody read her writing anyway, so her "purposeful existence" was most likely another trick of the eye or slide of hand. She always pretended like she didn't understand magic tricks, but really, she was living one all along. She just had to wait to until everyone was hooked enough for the final stage of her biggest trick yet to be truly set up for her; she was to disappear completely and never be found. 

You were all hooked and you played right in. 
She would thank you if you were here, but then again, if she were here, we all wouldn't be. 

arrivals

You fuck like London

She fucks like Paris

I fuck like a lover

another

eviction noted on the door

sore;

far more

into

nothing and 

out of

everything.

Sex me up like a rag doll

and 

pour your insides onto my skin

to

test

my pressed

arrest

and mark it on your excel spreadsheet

document

full of permanent

beliefs

and 

fleeting

facts.

Silence your qualms

and give me all of you

in my palms

balm

and 

charm

to undo the harms

done

and undone

against my 

definition

of 

orgasmic.

Ask me about it.

I'll point to my stencil of you

and make you cry

Nightengale

When I’m with you, it’s less like a quantitative analysis and more like a qualitative dialysis, 
excruciating paralysis, 
thickening calluses forming from the cigarette burns that I say I don’t feel. 
It’ll heal. 
When it comes down to it, you’re a steal, 
locked up in stainless steel
because only the most enigmatic blatantly refuse to feel.
I’d rather learn that the imaginary speed limits you’re abiding 
as I’m riding
are just your excuse for hiding,
writing our stories in a book 
for someone else to take a look; 
I’ll hook them with the line, “our love was one of those that should only be written on handmade paper.”  
See you later. 
I know. 
No... 
yes, I know, there’s no snow in San Diego. 
It’s a desert. 
You’ll desert me while I’m sitting with my cookies, wrapped up in your jacket, holding on until
holding on until
holding on until
holding
on 
until I find a faith in something a little bit bigger than the love you parachuted down to kiss me with last night. 
I want to be tomorrow’s first cigarette, and the next day, and a couple thousand days after that until we’ve sat in a salon and talked about the necessity of call boxes. 
All boxes just there to hold things 
we burn and burn until the fire is bigger than the ice and it all evaporates into embers of what it could have been if it had ever even gotten the chance to soar
I’m on the floor
pacing
my pulse is racing
and it’s strange because I feel like dancing, 
romancing,
because you’re entrancing,
like driving the wrong way down a one-way street,
an empty alley with too many police cars to make this at all representational of her existential behaviors towards those people who are
too disgusting to not kiss.
Hit or miss.
Miss? 
Miss?
Yes, I wanted to let you know that the lights are a little bit brighter when they’re reflected from your eyes. 
How did they get so goddamn blue?  
You stole the skies. 
Sighs, sizing me up and down, 
waiting for that effervescent frown 
that can illicit more out of a whole lonely town 
than one of my smiles 
could for miles. 
Parking in the no park zone, 
trying too hard to hit all the caution cones, 
waiting for you to answer the phone, 
coming home. 
You’re home? 
You are home. 
Such an awkward sensation to feel alone. 
But I locked the car 
and I have to walk pretty far 
to see or find where you are.
Shit.
Fuck.
I’m stuck.
I forgot my key without a doubt, 
so locked out. 
I have no idea how to be
me
with all the lights on
It’s too bright, these songs. 
I’m turning it off to start all over. 
Pull off the covers and find another lover. 

It’s difficult when you only believe in believing just to give yourself a reason to stand up.

Yup.
I wanna hold you in my mouth for the next three months and see if you grow into something edible, or credible.
There are very few people who can leave me without a thing to say. 
But you’ve hooked me that way. 
And that’s not to say that I wouldn’t love
love
to spend forever trying to find the words big enough for you and me to be heard
Let’s lose a generation in grand central station
and find it in the middle of your bed
standing on my head trying to clear the wet clothes smell
pungent enough for me to tell
or sell
really, sell anything just to get by.
Just to keep on living this little lie.
Too intimate for me to ever say goodbye.
Happy today, sweetheart.
I’ll tell you it tomorrow too.