59.

and I am only waiting for the noise to stop
and I am only waiting for the dark to come

you hate me
for saying
No
and I am so tired
of fighting
of snapping my bones
in half and pulling
the skin from my face

I am not made of leather
yet, I have not
aged into a weathered bark
I am still rough, too
raw and harsh
and easily burned

and bending, I am
folded into little squares
and squished
beneath a thousand blackened
boots

your game
is working

I am
losing

Mermaid

you have pushed me
into saltwater silence
you have held me under
the surface
you have left me
no choice

so I will become
a shark-toothed girl

all smooth and gray down
from my waist
sleek, impenetrable
and hard, did you know
that shark's skin
is hard like armor?

your hooks are small
and I am hungry

bring me the depths
of the sea
bring me solitude and
whale song
bring me a pearl for good luck

and I will sing you to your death
on the rocks
and I will shred the skin you thought was thick
like mine

I have your name written inside my eyelids, so that it flickers in my field of vision every time I blink, a subliminal flash of something sweet cut into a film reel. I don't know if you've done the same with mine. But I made this playlist for you, and it has some Radiohead on it, and some Bon Iver, and if I could make songs out of lilac petals or write them with the water in my mouth I would, and I would sing them to you and put them on vinyl and we would listen to them while we sway in the hammock in your backyard. Or while you sit on the swing in my garden, and the light comes in dapples on the leaves and on your feet. I know my lips are crooked and I know I push too hard. I want what I want what I want what I want. But. I can wait. Or I can give up. I can do whatever you need me to do. Even if it's leave.

Sunrise Song

Hello again, sun.
I have not bathed in the
cool peach glow of your early
yawn, your slow rise
in I-don't-know-how-long

I have spent the night in a sort
of half dream, draining blue light
from a four-cornered screen
and aching
for sleep

my fingernails are cracking

and You unfold for me like
her skin blooming under my
hands, and
I am still pushing my feet
harder into the blanket

(prodding for some
 release, or sign of quiet)

the skin around my eyes is
itching; my back is
a bad metaphor
and I am powerless
to stop the choices
I have made

No, you wouldn't want me. Me, wadded up like a scrap of old poetry on the carpet, everything I want from you gushing down my face in a pathetic display of heart ache. Cheeks soaked, lungs crushed and unable to inflate properly. My life is cleaving down the middle and breaking at the seams and I am powerless to stop it. And even now, I can feel flowers blooming up between the fissures. Something is breaking down to make room for something building up. But I have to shed this skin first, to shake off the two-ton weights piled on my shoulders and crack whatever concrete shell I have constructed these past years. I am ready for this all to burn away, to burn away, to burn away, to ignite and blaze for hours, days, weeks, until naught but a few licking flames are left, and at last I am reborn, alone and raw and vulnerable and fresh. And ready. And stronger. And whole. Fire-yellow wings stretching from my spine. Feathers itching for wind. Eyes like embers in the dead of night. Hot and waiting for the breeze to come. I will be incandescent soon.

You think you see me, but what you see is only a tapestry you have woven in my image. A curtain that shields your eyes from me. From looking fully at me. You do not want me the way you think you want me. You cannot want something you have never seen. I would not be the life or death of you. I am only a collection of various hues of gray. You think you want me, but your glasses color me with roses and fragments and I cannot live up to your approximation of me. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the next day, someone will walk into you and you will look at her instead. And she will make you bloom in ways that I never could have. And maybe you will remember the reflection you saw of me in some far-off pool, and maybe you will think that I would have made you happier. But I can promise you that I would not have made you anything but lonely. I was only ever sand slipping through your fingers.

I never want to shed this summer skin; I never want to peel these freckles off.  I never want to care whether the other boys want me, and I never want to know what cooling down from you feels like. Your image is too large in my field of vision to leave room for anyone else. Your tiny frame casts such a shadow over me. I could paint you with my eyes closed. I feel my lungs filling up with air again, pressing my heart into action and forcing blood back into the corners of my fingers and feet. You said you never wrote about him. But you write about me. And that has to mean something.

I never knew love could burn this hard.

I am pulling watery strings from my eyelashes like flower petals, one by one reminding me of what I have been running so fast from, she loves me not, she loves me not, she loves me not. It is a poisonous petal that I have plucked from my ribcage before. A thorny stem with no rose at its end, only another length of twisted brown and green. And I am drowning again in your sea. Only this time, there is a storm raging, and I cannot tell which way to swim for breath again, and I desperately need oxygen but your waves are now thrashing against me with a harsh finality. There is no coming up for air. She loves me not, she loves me not, she loves me not. I will close the gates and let the brambles grow wild around them. Let myself become a forgotten monument which lovers may visit in a thousand years, to hold each other quietly and kiss in the shallow sunlight, and thank the gods for the blessing I did not receive.

58.

My fingers shake as they fall
on each new key, writing
words my mouth has never learned
to say, to you.

I am so afraid
of making you
so afraid
of me.

There are beasts inside
my chest, and they thrash,
protest,
at every turn:

should I speak to her?
twist, writhe, beat
then I will close my mouth --
flail and moan
so I should start?
twist, wince
or stop?
and throb and hate and flutter harsh

So I am at an
impasse;
I have developed
a begrudging talent for
melodrama (which leaves
a bitter lovelorn taste
beneath
my tongue
and teeth).

It seems
as though

I have fallen

       (on a loss for
                                           words)

57.

It stings so much to see you
(walking, putting
 one foot in place of the next,
 each step further
 from where I wait
 for you).

We do not
talk
about these things, but
I know you read
the words I place
on paper.

So let me tell you
here, if
nowhere
else:

I will love you
until I die.

Remainder

stretching our legs
out in the backseat
of a car called Death
and waiting
for it to drive at last
off the edge of
some horizon
somewhere

we do long division
in our sleep
(the problems we work
 that wedge between
 us in the dark)
and I am starting to understand
that I am merely your
remainder

(so please round me off
 and let me go --

 or let me take the
 wheel, and
 we will fall across
 the cracks inside the
 Earth
 together)

so come on
so come on
divide the days we have left
by the answers I've withheld, multiply
by the length of your hair
and tell me, when
you finish the
equation:
will it (finally) tell you
what
you
want
            ?

56.

I want you to be on fire
the way that I am
on fire

(and did you know:
that we could make yellow days like these
that end in violet nights like these
for the rest of our lives?)

so I roll over to you in the darkness
and tonight is the night
and tonight is finally the night
with my bitten back torn
and your hair twisted
into a perfect
knot

I could relent, and
stay like this -- with you --
forever, trapped inside this
gray and misted twilight
nothing coming, nothing
going

(or perhaps the color
blue
could come to mind)

No, no --
I have decided.
I do not want something
lukewarm
from you.

I want you to be on fire
the way that I am
on fire

I cannot see the point in putting his lips on my lips, when all I can taste is the absence of yours. I continue to reinvent your face in pictures I pass, in the faces of other people and the creases left on my pillow. And every time I see the color red, I think it is an answer from you. I have been assuming you into existence. You are no more mine than the leaves are the wind's. But still I will sit under the trees with you, and inhale your vapor, and tell myself stories about how you transform me.

(framework)

she was the framework
of me
lacing wooden beams between
my ribs and around
my collar
bone

she held me up, she
held me
up

and all inside of me
she left her splinters
singing
her name in my
arches and cornerstones

she held me up, she
held me
up


(composed in 60 seconds at oneword.com)

It was black, inside and outside of my eyelids, and the ink in the air shielded us from ourselves. I could feel the tiny hairs on your shoulder blade under my lips. I could feel them raising when I exhaled, slowly and barely, not enough to wake you up but not enough to put you to sleep. I could feel your heart pumping when I traced your ribs with my thumb. I could feel you curl and release like an eggshell under my hands. I was ready for you to roll over in the darkness and face me, but when you did, I could hardly bear the light that your face brought with it.

And yet.

Your timid eyelashes retained some of the night’s velvetness. I began to draw briny lungfuls of saltwater as my knees shook, and I was taken under. Drowning in whatever sea you had created. Dead to yesterday. Waking this morning only to find an ocean surrounding me. No shore, no ship.

So I learned to swim.

(And that, because I did not tell you then, was why I could not sleep last night.)

Love is a spiked drink. I mean something with spikes that you put down your throat. And your breath is taking mine away. Not in the way that the singers sing it, “You take my breath away.” No. I mean that when you breathe, you pull the life force from inside my lungs, out of my mouth and into your nostrils. You steal something from me. Something without which I cannot survive, and you use it to fill up your ribcage. It is an exquisite way to die.

And the space between my legs is growing bigger. And the space from yours to mine is growing smaller. All we are is acceleration. Two particles hurtling through space toward each other. Nothing but trajectory. Nothing but inevitability. Nothing but nothing is stopping us.

I spent the whole night watching your face and counting backwards from three. Three… (I will kiss you once I reach) Two… (This time I will really will do it at) One… (Okay let me start over with) Three… and the carousel spun on and I could not step off. There is something sickly about our mingling breath, our paralysis. The still that we stand. Something ugly and seductive. Something that I hate that I love. Something from which I cannot emerge. The palpable sweetness of not touching you, of having without having you. I am choking on it and smiling.

If I die today, I will never have known the taste of your lips.

(cathedral)

her stained glass eyes are breaking
me, cutting into mine and
lacerating
what hopes I had
of any kind of future
without her

she is my cathedral
I go to her
to pray
and I will be buried
in her shade
one day

(composed in 60 seconds at oneword.com)

You are woven too far into me and if I do not ever get to call you my girlfriend — if I do not ever get to hold you and know that you do not want anyone else holding you — if I do not ever get to know that I am not sharing you — if I do not ever get to be selfish with you — if I do not ever get to have you, to eat you all up, to steal you away and keep you and destroy you with too much of me — I do not know what I will do. I do not know what I will. I do not know. I do not. I do. Please. Please. Please. You are surely with him now as you sleep and I am too big for my body. I cannot listen to the songs we listened to. I cannot listen to you breathing in their risings and fallings. I cannot hold this space for us much longer, this liminal nothing-space with nothing but our fears inside it. I will have to jump soon. I will have to love you soon. I will have to. I will.

(straw)

Her hair. It used to be straw-colored, or rather… something closer to pale sunshine on a December day. Nowadays it’s hard red. Dark. Saturated. I can’t help but breathe it in when I see her. Every time.

(composed in 60 seconds at oneword.com)

(brief)

it was a brief encounter
her teeth, my
collar
the space between
us, fading
into something grayish-blue
and insignificant
following the lines
we made
along the creasing
sheets

(composed in 60 seconds at oneword.com)

(offer)

I can make you only this offer. Only this small, breathing thing, which cannot survive outside of your care and cannot make its own way in the world. I can offer you only my tiny, fluttering heart. It is all I can bring to your feet, but I will bring it.

(composed in 60 seconds at oneword.com)

(avenue)

Down the avenue, I saw her swinging her hips and her watermelon pink lips. A vision straight out of 1969. She was perfect. She was London. She was soul, and her dark crushed velvet voice caught me around my ankles. I tripped into her. She never noticed.

(composed in 60 seconds at oneword.com)

(below)

below the twisting earth is
curling veins of trees
and my toes
leaves trodden and left to sleep
silence

below me waiting
the pads of my feet sullen
oldish shoe prints
rotten things in
pretty vases

ashes of the long gone forgotten and
flower petals fallen


(composed in 60 seconds at oneword.com)

The dullness of a computer screen against a hard, black room. It is enough to keep me awake, but not to keep me awake. I need something more substantial and darker, something with more teeth and more flowers. Sitting here in nothing but a g-string and my words, they are the ones that count (but not quite enough to sustain). Teach me how to bury my toes in the grass, bring me something not shiny but new. Bring me something I can chew on. Sweep me up, I dare you.

(nest)

make a nest in me
find spare parts, find fluff
pieces of straw
bits of me that you can use
create a home beneath my
neck and in the hollow
of my chest
make a little nest in me
where you can go to
hide, or seek

(composed in 60 seconds at oneword.com)

I need more art in my eyes, in my ears, more art and less magazines. Less fluorescence. More sunlight, more moonlight. This has all been said before. But today is a day for speckled shade, for leaves that haven’t fallen yet, for a face clear of paint. If only I had someone to share it with. I need to go somewhere dark and I need to feel the reflection of the stars in my fingertips. I need to scroll less and I need to talk more. No, I need to talk less. I need I need I need. Something is pulling a string in my chest. Something is yanking at my lungs, wanting to teach them how to breathe properly. Something is bubbling up. If only I had someone to share it with.

Poetry

I need
I need you
I need you so
I need you so much
I need you so much closer --

(he sang)

this bed is miles wide

and I have resigned myself
a thousand times
and fought a thousand battles
and lost
and won
and decided
(but no -- but)
not
to touch you
tonight

but but
but oh, your skin
is milk
and I am aching
electrified
and frozen

and I will bloat and burst
if I do not
if I do
if I
if

perhaps I will --

 (we leave things unsaid
 to make for better
 poetry
 (later)
 don't we?)

The Dream We Both Had

I am lying
curved away and into
you, your
hands
(hands, hands)
inside my hair

pressing
thumb to neck, folding
me into myself
a rose-bloom
in reverse

and I am
spread like dough
under your rolling pin arms

you are starlight
purplish gleam and pearl
fire dripping from your
braids
and I am trying not to kiss you
and I am trying not to kiss you
and I am trying not to kiss you

Unlit

my cigarette
like all things
goes out

I am
reminded
of the smell of you(r
fingers
after we would

smoke)

and
like all things
I am left
unlit

55.

I like my hair when
the wind gets in it

reminds me of
myself --
soft and a little too
crazy
and a little too
big
for itself

and stained
darker than it should be

54.

Lather.

The clever things I do
with words are
nothing but a blinking space bar
chased along the page.

Rinse.

An open book that
someone else
has written, and I am merely
the plot.

Repeat.

In all my years,
I have yet to write
a real
poem.