Venus of America

When the full moon hit the stained glass window that evening, before the way you looked at me changed to the way you look at me now, I cried.
I know I have a map around here, somewhere, from when I got this lost before, but my voice is cracking and my lips are burnt and my sore throat won't go away because I have spent too much time massaging the tendrils of your tenuousness and not enough time planning what I'll do if it ends.
I'm scared I'm going to float away.
I'm scared you're going to let me.

Self-Efficacy Tests

The Biographical Rendering of a Girl in Diguise

She always spoke a little louder than she needed to, because when her green eyes sang with the hypnotic hum that her voice attempted to resonate, she was something like a spotlight on a blackened stage. In an effort to continuously redefine herself, to continuously redefine herself, continuously redefine herself, redefine herself, herself, she manipulated careful psychotic breakdowns while she smiled in an over sized t-shirt that she pretended someone left in her bed the night before. She was a virgin with the mentality of a slut. When she snuck downstairs, quietly on a Tuesday night, and opened the door to continue her love affair with nicotine and rebellion, she would make herself coffee and stand, her bare feet pressing hard against the marble floor, and stare at the multiplicity of her face in the reflection of the windows. Holding a joint, or the hand of this week’s squeeze, she desperately pushed to become the difference. She was a question mark that read like an exclamation point. The sun never shone bright enough and the rain never poured hard enough and the wind never blew strong enough to actually change the way she looked; but she rendered it all useless when she decided not to question her physicality. She was good enough, truthfully, but she’d pretend not to know.

Whodunnits

Addicted to double takes

and the way you make

the silence seem tangible

and the meandering quality left after a moment of ecstasy come back to bite me right on the back of the neck. 

I'm all full up

of finger print bruises

and back-alley paint jobs

and a cigarette burn on my left upper thigh. 

It's too high

for anyone to care.

I wish that my words came out like a typewritten paragraph from my mouth. 

I'd hyperlink all the good words to a picture of you. 

Burnt Out Lights

She whispered, "Once upon a time someone in the farthest parts of the lens thought I was beautiful. And they made sure that the rest of the little hummingbirds knew that the silence in between my teeth and the shadows underneath my eyes were the most appreciated part of humanity."

She puffed on her cigarette like there was nothing left for her to forget. She pretended, every afternoon, like she didn't remember the way that you smell; she remembered.

She was running on a tight enough schedule with tight enough jeans so that you were something of a strangled memory underneath the cables and the bungee cords that manipulated your shape and your size until you were understandable, recognizable, and comprehensible. But, truthfully, you are still too beautiful for her to imagine.

She's got wine in her hand, nowadays, instead of a cellular phone or a purse. And, when the room is spinning in the darkness, she kisses your imaginary lips and wishes you goodnight in a thousand words from a million years ago.

On Finding Solace

He was the mayor of a town with a population of one.
He always held his bowler hat with his left hand so that his right could hold an unlit cigarette. He'd been holding the same one since 1983.
He had fake police lights on his car and he would pull people over for no other reason than to ask them about their day. No one was ever mad.
They said he smelled like Christmas and it wasn't until he moved into the house under the waterfall that anyone actually bemoaned the passing of the holidays. They didn't even celebrate the new year until he came home; it was still the sixties in his old town.
Once in a while, he would slip tabs of drugs he couldn't name into his coffee so that he could experience something worth experiencing at his very own kitchen table.
With a marked appreciation for butter croissants, black and white films, and well bottled wine, he lived with the ecclecticism of a European in a time far behind his own.
Moderately expendable, occasionally proposed to, and thoroughly misunderstood, he climbed up trees in his spare time so that, like the birds who flew, and the rest of the things that did things, he might be a thing that some thing would write something about someday.
Too many cloud fields blocked his passage and the exit that he usually took to get from the French quarter to the Latin quarter to the library and home again. So instead, he stayed in bed and thought about the ways that he could hang a flag on his ceiling without ever letting it fall.

Theatricality

I can feel the wind from the

wings of the

butterflies

a thousand miles away

Chaos is replicating itself on my ladylike tears

until the banality of your existence

becomes the wine I toast to your

metamorphosis

Too Late

She was impervious to the grins that were surrounding the stars above the back lit black lit beach. It seemed to her that the multitudes of marbles she had been collecting in her pockets, all of them filled with little words that would've meant something to another version of her consciousness, should be abandoned. Little footfalls on the rocks that made up a jetty (something she learned to understand a couple weeks before she hit the back of the car and decided she should drive it on the wrong side of the road) brought up clouds of dust and sand and cigarette smoke. It was a whopper. She was a scorcher. They were oblivious. The waves were getting larger. At the end, she stood out in the sea, building a model of her superfluous character out of salt and brine, and she fingered the rounded, smoothed child’s toy. The marbles made singular splashes into the sea; one, two, three, thousand. She stood there until age played upon the corners of her eyes and she could watch the passage of time on her fingernails. Once, someone had told her that sadness suited her, that she was a beautiful mistake. It became her goal to forget how to smile that summer, when she let all the grains of the eternal disasters that never actually existed fall gradually into the holes of her ratty old tights and the crevices in her scarves. Out in the distance, just below the horizon, the ocean was frozen. Icy cracks were moving toward her, hardening the massive sea. Poseidon hailed down his trident and sent the glassy surface rocketing faster her way. When the sand finally froze over, she stepped down from the rocks and walked herself, in the semblance of Jesus Christ, across the many monsoons. She would walk until she hit the end of the earth, she decided. She couldn't feel the way that the sharks were following her footsteps in the soda water below her lighted path, but their shadows were visible under the still-blazing sun. Hiding under her leather, under her skin, under her scars, she was almost invisible to the bystanders collecting to witness the coming of the lord. In circular rhythmic patterns, she made the most of a bad situation. In triangular emergencies, she kissed all the little wonders she had met on the other side of the equator. In square cars, she drove until she ran out of gas and nobody knew her name. She would tattoo a lightning rod along her spine so that maybe, one day, she’ll catch something worth holding on to. 

Miluji tvůj smích, Я люблю твой смех, 我喜欢你的笑声, मैं अपने हँसते हैं को प्यार करता हूँ, me encanta tu sonrisa, j'adore ton rire, i love your laugh

There are spots of wisdom on my windshield that are blurring my vision of the road in front of me. The seats are starting to feel like a zoo, and the sun is shining into my palms when I'm really busy just really trying to steer away from the road taken by the recreational vehicles filled with all of the jokes I don't understand. It seems that there is something soaking into my skin that makes it harder to not smile than it is to not fall asleep when the lectures on the mediocrity of literary genius croon on in the background of my daydreams about the angel from your nightmares.
I'm taking the turn to Budapest because I've always desired to see the way that the nighttime looks on the far side of the upturned chins and the underside of what yesterday desires to become. We aren't going anywhere in particular this time, though. It's one of those feelings that clings to the part of thimbles that doesn't protect your sensitivity, but hugs the sweat that accumulates and makes it so that the needles are less sharp than my wit.
There are legal documents that counteract the wisdom I could be gaining from driving for this long, since they dictate the subterfuge that marks the end of my development and the start of my consumption of gasoline straight. Papers in the back and papers on my lap and papers that cause the paper cuts that color the interior; so many papers and none of them say anything whatsoever other than "I love your laugh" in a thousand different languages.