Saying Goodbye to April

One hundred feet away I am an enticing splash. Two feet away I am slow drying cement. The grubby hands of uninvited schoolchildren fight each other for space, begging to declare they were here. This is my first taste of desperation.

In a December 2012 circle, I could not cry. New and naive, I still believed we'd met again. Who we are at seventeen should not define who we are for the rest of our lives. I imagine a prettier April. Lighting a cigarette in my parent's living room, I am careless, the coffin nail burning a perfect circle in blue sweatpants. Across the street, I climb atop a small horse. Galloping, my inner thighs bruise with familiarity. My pony calls this learning and all the men in the audience agree. Achey, I enjoy the pain of forced adulthood.

I was eighteen the first time I remember being mistook for a prostitute. In lilac cutoffs and a tie-dye t-shirt, my tips from a busy summer day spill onto a gas station counter. "Be careful out there honey. You are so young." Her voice quivers with pity as she beckons her co-worker. Afraid of my youth, the sweet nectar of a freshly untethered sexuality, the second store clerk scolds, "But you're so pretty."

A man, circles his car. "Where's your daddy, baby? You got a boyfriend?" Finger licking the shadow of a harness, my knobby knees carry me, sprinting, up a flight of white stairs until I am back in my room for the night. Climbing into bed, having nothing to grasp onto but myself, I pulled at my own orange hair and scream. An observer glued to a story in which I am not a character, a tragic symbol for a pain I've never known, I bend over to vomit. I should of cried when I said goodbye.

The Rabid

Read through every word you have written in the past eight months
blinking at yourself in the mirror, every night for eighty days
could you look at me and still declare, "Humans are very genuine creatures"

I was gritting my teeth and panting
when they examined my body without seeing me,
in their glances they said, "It's time to put her down"

Myself, I imagine pushing you down a flight of stairs
so violently, your upper lip splits
my fury petting me like a lap dog
howling in my ear

They found me, the perfect rabid
uncompromising and covered in drool
damning everything within reach

I have dreamt of pushing ten people
down a flight of stairs only to say,
I have arrived.

my sister, the mean one, pulling my hair

Wake up. Go to class. It's critique day and I'm not an art major. Sad boys grow up to be accountants. Meanwhile, I'm in the bathroom cutting the string off a tampon. "Oh wow, you deal with disasters." He talks in speeches. I laugh too loudly. Car air always feels more fake than non-car air. No one seems tired and I am reminded that I have so much more life ahead of me. "Once you were seventeen. Now you are not." Somehow I have fooled the whole room into believing in me. Sweaty in a new space.

I can't walk home alone at night. There are so many other things to sing about besides being lonely. Or cold.

En route. A woman with ten butterfly tattoos on her back. I spend the next two weeks spitting out gossamer wings. I wonder if my uncle goes to strip clubs and what type of patron he is.

In a dream, Lauren calls, "I'm proud of you for being everything I'm not - everything I'm afraid of." Why does every holiday feel like the last supper? Look oily; smell peonies. Sitting next to her in a car that reminds us both of our father, she is seven months pregnant, but I take up more space somehow.

"Keep him still," an operator spits.  

"I know what you did Carol! I have an attorney. You better watch yourself!"

I am barefoot on summer grass and he is not still, so when I ask myself how I got here I already know the answer. As always, in the film version, they love each other. Hand holding throughout suburbia. Move your lips and say nothing. I edit out their voices and place my tongue in their mouths. That way no one can disappoint me.

In my dream, the love doesn't run out. In my dream, I am not barefoot on the lawn.

My life has taught me one lesson, and not the one I thought it would.

There is nothing in this world that could prevent me from loving you, except maybe being both drunk and gay. I know that I am a very strong woman because each day I have existed within Mother Earth's grasp I have successfully overcame the urge to tear these photos off the wall and strip soul from body. Just because you do not want to believe something does not mean it is not true. What idiot has you convinced that truth is beautiful? The children know the king will not end their misery, so an endless reelection remains. My only desire is to be a part of this new wonder because how awful to simply accept fate, how awful to not rise up with fists and fight, how awful to sit stagnantly. And it is a failed day if I have spent more of my day within a bra than sans brassiere.

Mama cried when I put ink on my ribs. I am ruining my body and the damage seeps into my soul. Age is a restriction we have placed upon ourselves for centuries, but I own your emotions, and pass the revolution via kiss. I suppose everything has a purpose, and from her perspective, mine is to sit still, and kindly abandon my angst, adorn myself in kitschy apron-esque frocks and slick pinned strands. So, unsatisfied I forever remain, tarnished and broken.

Oh, what is comfort if not a change in perspective?

Spitting Blade Memory Regurgitation

When I proclaim the creativity seeping from your pores is to blame for the dampness of your skin, you dispute me with a claim that no beauty could have come from you. "It's just the rain," you say while locked within a dry bolt room.

My fingers trace across a slightly sloped spine, dreams have been weighing you down, chase them and watch yourself bloom. Turning, I can no longer fit myself into such a paradoxical juxtaposition. Your faulted desire to be taller accompanied by a lifetime spent between dope-tinted lens crammed within the corners of heart-shaped boxes.

Open your mouth, invite me inside to greet leathery cheeks and absorbent tongues. Unused dull teeth who nowadays exclusively chew misery and regret hors d'oeuvres. Each attempt to escape the depressive clutch that is yourself is met with an ever increasing tighter squeeze as we cram together like last season's garments, my world, an overstuffed clothing rack. How can there always be less of you? And how do so many ideas sleep forever dormant coiled within such a slender frame? Venturing, bitter but sweet, I am drowning, but you would still describe the water.

Sitting within me now I hate the way life besides you tastes. A sly reply of misery pours down my throat only to rest in my stomach for eternity. I know you would end me, if it meant you could remain a coward. Chokes frame our faces like smiles, everything blurs, melting into a voodoo realm, she's gone, I'm here, but you are live from nowhere near.

Refusal to recall hello or goodbye, but when you split yourself into a planned pattern I felt my face crack into a series of streams. Letters that long ago have grown foreign, spill out the optimism we once clung to, struggling veins softly crying to stain a shy pale skin I once naively believed was capable of reality.

Mother and child, cop versus criminal, broken china, how did we cascade into such opposing forces? You absorb into me, blemishing my soul. My inscribed name together with yours, it was goodbye for sure, I just wish I knew for whom.

High Fives for Low Lives.

Grunge is an addiction and you're worse than nicotine. Scratch that. You are worse than the black tar I would kill for. Two years sober and I swear I'd tear flesh from bone and drink blood like wine off the nearest junkie who was as sick as I was: as sick as I still am.

But, what if you are real? Eat acid. See God. We could meet up next weekend to eat pizza and complain. Your cells contain the universe, but I'm afraid you're growing up. Giving up. What's the difference? Fuck pizza. What the world needs is a group hug.

In a search for something higher I found only trash. Began a search for myself just to pass time. We all burn hotter in the end, so with a Marlboro hanging from my lips, I'm here to tell you how to live your life.

Two pills a day to calm my brain, but it's my mind that chooses not to behave. So, did smack steal your appetite or did some monster of a man? A lifetime spent trying to wash away the dirt entered through windows you remember locking and a summertime spent underneath a pear tree making a love sweeter than that blessed fruit's nectar.

Flashback. We're in your old bathtub on 42nd, shampoo in our hair, only water in sight bred from the nipples of my face and absorbed into the fabric of your flesh. I'd love to be back in that place in your head, but you're just too good at being alone.

Bragging now, "My first time was with a grown man," you'll recreate memories only needles can erase as I am left seasick in an endless epiphany of implications. The witch who gave birth to me no longer bothers to call, so when I'm shipped home like a Russian mail order bride, the paramedics scream, "Everybody back up, she's still alive."

Track marks - not hieroglyphics - so you read me like braille. Perhaps I'm too busy being the needle in someone else's arm to belong to myself. Perhaps I've seen too much unknown through another's dope-tinted lenses. If that last line left you confused consider yourself lucky that such men are not archetypes in the plot you call life.

We plan for life but only live in binge and purge moments. Inside two star motel drug holidays, there's no love, only words to obtain what you want. I'll walk alongside the nervous laughter of the girls whose arms are only filled while their man is around while secretly lusting after such a bourgeois luxury.

Pet snake sleeps on my arm like a childhood bracelet while seventy two hook and eye closures led to bolted legs unhinged. Sans man. Voodoo realm entrance accepted. Am I more of a woman? Baby Jesus and the devil are fucking inside me. One more sick without you.

Mailboxes like staircases.

I try to fight it, but I'm simply not strong enough. The sadness seeps in, consuming me in its thick entirety. I am forced to acknowledge that I will never farm coffee in Peru. I'll probably never own a catering company or be a foster mom. I'll definitely never know what it's like to be an astronaut and see home from such a distance. Nor will I travel the globe, gun in my hand, defending my country. I will never fight loneliness for livelihood and I will never be a sculpter and go to sleep with once wet clay, now hardened and dry, caked beneath my fingernails. 

Their bodies, their minds, their actualities, all those people I will never be leave me completely overwhelmed. There is not enough time, I have to settle and trick myself into believing I am satisfied by just knowing them. Our interactions serving as a reminder that although I do not belong among them, they exist, they prosper, they expire. They speak their stories and I listen greedily wanting to fill my head with as much information before my childhood curiosity retreats and replaced with steadfast bitterness. 

I write narratives in my head, allowing my reality to blur together with the lives of others. The edges fade out into each other. I feel what they feel. For a moment, I know them, and I feel them knowing me. Each character builds a nest within my frame, forever sleeping in my spine. I rewrite, remake, and remodel particular characters daily, letting one bleed into another like a domino. My favorites come and go, the disc gets scratched, and the whole thing starts to skip, but in the end the actors did their best, and everything played out perfectly. Taking a bow, they finish their concluding scene unsteadily, and cascade into fragments. The next one stands up, only to remind that our creations can never fully escape us. I find bits and pieces of them recycled with each other. Another beautiful story created.

Perhaps I will become a sculpter after all. Perhaps I already am one. 

No more sleep walking dead.

A pretty frame to fondle and touch or a locked window to force open and enter, I was nothing but a thin crystal glass for you to pour yourself into. You never dust me off, so what could have been a trophy collects dust like a completed novella. In the process of molding and forming me like the wet virgin clay I was, you gave me a set of wings in which to leave you, this place, and this life.

Out from the confusion, a hazy abyss, grows a green spring, both leafless and bare. Do not pluck her, for her roots are too deep for a man of your strength. You’ve lost in admiration, so someone else came along, plucked her up from the ground, and made her a queen.

Humanity's Humility.

The questions in which you do not want the answers you dare not ask, so my past remains a mystery and together we work. How easy to fall back into an old pattern of naively believing your promise of a lifetime free of suffering. Leather harness, your hair blue at the time, for a moment such a tempting source of pleasure leaves me seduced. You're nothing but the pit stop on the road trip of my life, the spot you pull over to piss at. No present real meaning, just something to feel nostalgic about later, just names, just memories, nothing profound. What defined and constituted your life a year ago now means nothing to you. Perhaps my biggest grievance against humanity is it's humility: individual's failure to admit just how interesting they truly are.

I've Been Eating (For You.)

Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday, and all the moments in between in which you find something for the two of you to swallow, your night ends in a sickly entanglement with the body of a nine year old boy.

Passing with a smirk, a desperate cry for attention and approval, yearning, a scream for help, but I can not silence such discomfort. Long ago have I tried to invent some sort of humanity for you, but your behavior leaves you completely unlovable. So damaged you remain, boys pass you around like a basketball, as Lana's "Carmen" churns in the broken record of my mind.

Perhaps an effort for power or mere terror in its purest form that serves as your inspiration, I'm so lost as to why you think you've gained something. Should I congratulate you on your meaningless drunk sex with an asshole? What's it like to be so sexually insecure that the contents of your veins must be diluted with liquor before your party dress cascades to the floor? So when you blow a .27, do you still swallow?

Standing in front of a mirror, your true self emerges: a shallow puddle containing just enough water to dribble what it is you are:

vap·id
adjective 1. offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging.

Perhaps you've found your match.

It's not the subject matter, but the formation in which the letters march that'll make you cringe.

There is nothing more I want than an unsevered hymen and unexplored frame, but you can not grant me such a rebirth. You are neither my God, nor my creator. But instead, you offer me a pinch and a prick, so I can forget for an hour or two, when and why, who and how, what exactly was it I so eloquently wished for, spent decades blowing birthday candles out towards in hopes of obtaining? Can't remember for the world is such a pretty place behind those dope tinted glasses. It was free, so I took all I could. Slice after slice of lost hope I gorge myself on, until my whole existence blurs into a lullaby of calm numbness. Can we filter this experience, grind it into a fine sand until a murmured steady stillness clenches my spine?

Does a silly sloppy label even exist for such an endeavor? I imagine myself with a swollen stomach, my entire reality nothing more than something to be stamped down into the scrapbook of a future generation. I will never come to you with a teary white damp face and knobby broken knees nor will your arms ever be stuffed with the softness of young flesh or your nose filled with such a sweet innocence, but as a lie down for the final time, neither will mine.

So now, I leave you to choke within the cocoon of your own creation.

Intuition with a side of sap.

You ask, "Do you want to?" and the entirety of my being blisters in a pulsating no. Still, with a ticket burrowed deep within your pocket, entry has flourished into such a tangled expectation. Take a moment and I’ll bring my knees to meet once more, as I swallow this memory like the toxic cum of your existence.

No excitement, you can't even look at me, as the only thing that builds inside me are the feelings I had so conveniently convinced myself I had cast aside alongside with broken mirrors and clogged syringes.

Stirring until I melt into complete self-hatred, I find sex distilled into something I do for you. Do for you? Twist and churn, I'm inside out, stripped, pulped, naked and stark because tell me, what exactly, have you done for me? So you don't know that you are one, but you probably wouldn't care. You won't even remember me. No, not even at all.

So I muzzle some sickly phoniness into your ear, in an attempt to hurry this along. We migrate from such different worlds, and although storybooks and pop songs have taught me otherwise, where I come from such acts require basic levels of care. How naive of I to believe such nonsense, for long ago have I graduated from wearing my heart on my sleeve. Unstitching that abstraction, and upon crushing that damned organ into a fine powder, it now neatly resides within each and every one of my pores.

When you leave me, I am left emptier than before because sex doesn't soothe the orphaned child searching for mama nor does it quiet the gun in a soldier's hand, or loosen his grip around his woman's throat. Affection, adoration, and other nine letter words I am certain you are not capable of feigning.

How daring to sashay into my sphere only to remind me that the sole reason I chose to exist is precisely the reason it's all jiggled and jangled. You want to talk about fairness? Fine. But erase that steady smirk for I am not some vase in which you manipulated and poured yourself into, because my dear, don't you think every empty glass is just waiting to be filled?

That's why they call it a one night stand for to do what we do, do what we did, for more than a night, is nothing but masochistic, but fear not for you shouldn't be surprised. You are well read and suitably versed in my self-destructive patterns. Silence. Let us again satisfy the bastard with talks of fairness and feelings.

Ask and I shall answer quite honestly, I didn’t forget, just couldn’t find the time to care. Kiss me, for ‘tis something to feel nostalgic about later. With a blackened soul doctors claim they simply cannot cure, my fingers spun around the knob as you instead filled my cup with a bitter series of justifications. Hand me a paintbrush, and I’ll modge-podge myself into a series of oblivion. Darling, won’t you do the honors? Glue me with labels. Eventually the wind too has to sleep, and how sad it is to watch a lover fall victim to a superior ship.

I’m just another stock character in the plot you call life.

One More Time with Feeling.

Photographs of a girl, gaunt yet radiant, hang all along the wall. Like weeds in a garden, these images have a habit of appearing out of nowhere. Found tucked between folds of clothing or glued to the pages of abandoned journal entries, all depict the same frail girl: exposed ribs, collarbone daringly bare. Each portrait a constant reminder of a life I fear I can never return to. A reminder that at one moment, I was as pretty as a flower.

Drift off into a steady ponder, is love restricted to that between two souls? Is there some internal love bar within us all dictating the maximum amount of love we can offer? Is caring for one person taking away your ability to care for another? I find that rather selfish.

Awaken from this daydream with the gentle settling of pills atop your palm. With a demeaning smile, he promises to make my brain behave. I can't even function in this world without some alteration. Hah, pills, like that'll make me forget.

All desire is gone, but he stole all my razors, and the garage door doesn't shut. I'm such an animal, but his gaze acts as a cage. So nauseas, dry heaving for years, and to think, Tuesday I can finally, finally, throw it all up and admit love you forever not maybe.

This is beauty.

Within an isolated pond, beryl algae emerges like a mother tortoise from her shell as the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. The honesty of wilting flower, her dying children: She doesn't mind that yes, we will remember her like this, not the graceful delight she once was. Or perhaps, the sole flaw in your award winning tomato garden, a stubborn weed, that just won't go away, no matter how hard you stab, regardless of the basin of Swedish fertilizer pooling at it's feet

What is beauty?

Guilt churns like Amish butter atop your molars leaving you jumpy with each ring of the telephone.
Wet, his skin glows with a majestic luster from the constant stream of creativity seeping from his pores.
The chatter of children's teeth and cascades of snow serve as the only trophy for the aggressive weather.
Proclaiming her strength, a steady stream of sweat that belongs to anyone but herself, runs across the overexposed spine of a newly formed warrior. Years later, she stands bare and vulnerable, waves of hair crash upon the ocean that is her back, presenting herself to you, she offers an honest invitation to open the door and forever change her.

What is beauty?

Overly excited, all too eager, you've felt the feeling before, cherries ooze out of the top of a pie crust.
Whereas a utopia flourishes between the lips of two lovers you are left to believe that upon taking a hammer to your skull, all your ideas and fantasies would pour right out, purer and cleaner than water. No blood, no science, no worries. Across town, in his porcelain padded room he closes his eyes, a cloudy image forms between his bitter eye and its lid. Her memory is fading, but her radiance remains like the eternity of two mirrors facing each other.

Hark! Could it be? 

Beauty.

How it feels to be her.

Sorrowful, self-loathing, suicidal lyrics swirl together like the soy protein myths she slurps on weekends, creating the lengthiest most extravagant mix-tape known to this realm. Scratched with the most horrifyingly painful migraine, they weigh down the brain people repeatedly try to convince her exists.

Jointly, they grow frightened inside their jail-like rooms as the predictability of the surrounding faces begins to suffocate them. She keeps hoping a new one will appear among them, but it is yet to emerge, just a dreary cascade of the same regressive faces bonded with the same regressive beliefs.

Running for a moribund organization, she finds her sprints cluttered with visions of weed killers and fertilizers. Wilting petals, participants die off on this struggling flower of a dictatorship. Shackles at her feet, she wonders can they tell, can anybody tell? This weight, this memory, has built a brick wall around a heavily charred exterior. Chisel away, but the mortar remains like volcanic ash: gray, wet, deadly.

Her showers are hot and not always alone as memories and regret enter the crime scene, regardless of the fact that the lock remains. Like school children at recess, they taunt her as she stands shivering in her most vulnerable state. As if an instant replay, the pictures they paint of that summer day are so vivid, she can feel that rat in the faded blue t-shirt. A blaring I-pod hides screams of terror, but only impregnates fear. No matter how hard she scrubs she never comes clean. He tells her she's dirty and she's yet to prove him wrong.

Afternoon churns like Amish butter into evening as she lays in something familiarly burning. The hands of a monster who doesn't glue her with labels when crimson drips like a broken faucet from the rivers of her scarcely dressed body or pours from the ocean of my mouth draped about her like curtains.

So you tell me, what is life without a steady stream of death's kisses?

You think that because she smiles that you turn off her dials.

Atop a stage so bare a song escapes from a virgin's cracked lips. Twas written for a creature in whom she loves, yet her glossed wide eyes fail to see a fragile face amidst the crowd. Raising her stentorian voice, she pleads someone to listen, but Erie devours and travelers trample the echo until all her lover receives is nonsense. Surprisingly, her already heavy veins make room for chagrin. Acceptance that you've heard nothing plants the seeds of respite and leads her offstage with naked shoulders.

Is it me or is it her in whom you wish to destroy? Am I truly this intuitive or is it just paranoia? Violence is not a fancy among the educated nor the warrior, so who is the vain one, is it I or is it you?

all I ever wanted was to be fallow.

He comes inside with no bleeding or screaming. Slaps her in the face saying, “Bitch, you ain’t a virgin.” Was it all a mirage or a simple household lie? Some things are taken, others misplaced. Others, stolen. Sans invitation, just an unquenchable sickness. Hah, like that would stop them.

The problem is that once he came inside he never came out. No, not completely. Not entirely. So, tell me, how does she go on as if nothing has happened? Coal rimmed eyes mask some inner pain as she thrusts herself back into the world with a smile on her face, and a dusting of coins. She has grown so sick of secrets, yet so accustomed to being burdensome. Of course it hasn't changed her, because that'll be easier for them to swallow. Whatever works for them. It is all about them. Whatever. Whatever. 

Convinced of an existence no greater than a black hole, he threw himself inside and planted some wicked  seed that's yet to leave her. Like a night-light, the sheen of his devilish grin keeps her eyelids from falling. He's laughing now from some far off plateau, with each cackle that seed begins to blossom.

I don’t deserve to wear white, so I’ll take it in black. When the clock strikes midnight I die inside for the second time. Twelve just isn’t my number.

My only wish is that this is to you as it is to me.

At a time in which my favorite person was no more than a voodoo doll, I find love distilled into a series of bitter tasting kisses and numb embraces. A loving no more than nodding, she tires of hospital room date nights. I thought by becoming one of them they could no longer scare me, but when I shifted into their shape is precisely when I began to develop autophobia. How does one manage to remain themselves, as they try to end themselves?

The car radio churns out yet another seemingly inappropriately cheery pop song, but I can’t help to sing along. In an effort to drown my crooning, I turn the volume to a heavy vibration. An inked and gemmed finger belonging to the most crooked of doctors, curls around the dial. “Why do you always do that? I can’t hear you, goof” and restores the volume to a mere hum.

Rolling out a giant canvas we tried to capture the sun melting into the sea. When every inch of that cotton blend was coated, with gentle delicate brushstrokes that felt like eternity, you painted me from head to toe. So, on that beach we feel into one, as did the sun and sea. When you've built your house of a heart on a foundation of toxins the first big wind'll blow you away. So that's exactly what I did. I blew away with the promise of radiance.

                                  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

À un moment où ma personne préférée n'était pas plus qu'une poupée vaudou, je trouve l'amour distillés en une série de baisers acerbe et étreintes gourds. Un amour pas plus de hochant, elle se lasse date nuits à l'hôpital. Je pensais en devenant l'un d'entre eux, ils ne pouvaient plus me faire peur, mais quand j'ai changé dans leur forme est précisément au moment où j'ai commencé à développer autophobia. Comment parvient-on à rester eux-mêmes, quand ils essaient de se terminer?

L'autoradio barattes à une autre chanson pop qui semble inappropriée heureux, mais je ne peux m'empêcher de chanter avec eux. Dans un effort pour étouffer mon chantant, je me tourne le volume à une vibration intense. Un doigt taché d'encre appartenant au la plus tordue des médecins, s'enroule autour du cadran. «Pourquoi tu fais toujours ça? Je ne peux pas vous entendre »et rétablit le volume à un hum simple.

Roulant une toile géante, nous avons essayé de capturer la fonte soleil dans la mer. Quand chaque espace du coton a était enduite, avec de touches délicates qui se sont senties comme l'éternité, tu m'as peint de la tête aux pieds. Ainsi, sur cette plage que nous ressentons en un seul, comme le soleil et la mer. Quand tu as construit votre maison d'un coeur sur une fondation de toxines du vent premier grand va tu emporter. C'est exactement ce que j'ai fait. Je souffla avec la promesse d'eclat.