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.

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.

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.

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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.