I know someone who finds solace in ballet shoes
                A boy who strums his secrets to guitar strings
Someone that spends his waking moments with glazed red eyes
             As if facing this world cold turkey
                       Isn’t even an option.

For boys whose fingertips shake
                Like the burning end of a cigarette
And girls whose smiles resemble
Car crashes waiting to happen
A cacophony of shattered noises
             And those of us who feel guilty for the
                     mere act
                           Inhaling air
                        And exhaling poison
So we spend lifetimes holding our breaths

   Until we burn our lungs out trying
            To warm our hearts
            With something other than the fire
           That burns out in a smoky haze

Until our eyes become rivers,
flowing oceans
That cry out a thousand melted glaciers

Our tongues speak ruined languages
We read everything backwards
Curse in Latin
Make oaths in Russian
So whatever we say sounds beautiful.

So that our hands wont have to learn permanence,
affection
consolation.

Men who look like ferris wheels
every color representing different aspects of their personality

The first three words don't have to be beautiful
they just have to make sense
like connecting dots on paper

men who love with their fists
and hate with their mouths
who once were boys taking things apart
like remote controls their own fathers used to beat     Obedience into their small bodies.  Left them with a fury tattooed across their hearts
Just to give them the challenge of putting themselves back together

They buy their wive's flowers after
a four day bruise isn't so glaringly purple anymore
not so accusing-
kiss her broken ribs
and tell their children midnight stories

children trained as mood detectors
human robots
know when to shutup
speak when you are spoken to*

Men who speak like cutting boards
Every slice of the knives in their toungues leave
hollow aching missing parts
just to teach their children that not all
things can be put together once taken apart

whose daughter glues together the parts of old telephones
to spite the missing pieces
so every welt he beats into her bones
she sings herself unbroken
until she stands robust and imperfect
there are holes in her armour
but she holds it together

with her fathers fists.

Because we both know the sound of gunfire
Except I, didn’t grow up in a war zone
It was a different kind from yours
Our bullets were words
Sounds of breaking glass
And the shards of which made it into my cheerios the next day
Chewed them anyway to spite
The sound that
Breaking makes

You,
you know the sound of falling bodies too readily
  you can mimic them in your footsteps
The smell of rotting corpses
What kind of scars shrapnel really leaves

What the color of blood really looks like
I see that shade of red every time you speak
  The way you keep it hidden in those paintings
In the drawer that I sneak into when you sleep
Know too well what evil looks like

I can find a place for all the words buried in my chest
inside your bullet wounds easily

If I were not a coward

Staring into the dark irises of men in uniforms dirtier than their conscience,
Find it easier to look into a barrel of a gun
Only one of them holds salvation
  
No, you are not afraid of guns
Nor the sound that breaking makes


But I still remove the safety pin
Just in case

The law said her body was made for love
The kind of love that wants to show you
just how much it loves you
by sticking things inside of you

hard
fast

Then slower

The kind of love that wanted to make the bible blush
make you quiver; the
kind of love when you put a female and male hamster together.
The kind of love that wanted to make music out of your ******

Love said "This is what happens
when you use
Needles to ingrain the words love
on peoples skin"

It feels a lot like pain did

Like when the first boy you ever loved
said I love you back
And proved it because he held you after
sticking sticky things inside of you
Like how he said hed wait untill you were ready
then said "You're gonna make me wait forever.."

How that guy on the third date said
"Come back to my apartament
So I can put what I want into you
Until you are empty
Because we might call it love"

Until you met a boy
who untaught what the word love meant
never asked you when you wanted to have ***
whose hands never roamed as greedily
searching for places to settle on your body
who didnt wish to make a home out of you by filling you senseless
and calling it his furniture
art
who traced outlines of constellations on the palms of your hands
and played
"Guess the Nebula"

Whose hardness never prodded you in the back
like a protest
in the early morning
whose breath always came easy
never hard
or fast

It was just holding you with no intention to
*******

He said
"Love isnt what you put inside a person
In hopes of making it stick;and naming it after something beautiful
I can pin my thoughts on you but
you are not my canvas. That wouldnt be fair.
I respect your property."

There was nothing broken when he left.

There is a never ending breed of bracteria livig in my bones
It
almost chews with the full intent of biting off but not quite, holds back just enough to leave me hanging
my joints, nooses of collateral damage,
they
almost wiggle like worms but burn with less intensity than pain.

There is a never ending wall of inter knotted muscle within my back

I call these things frustration
although alot of the time they feel like fury
make my neck ache like guilts burden.

I have ground my teeth to tiny sizable pellets and
picked at my charred white skin,
until there is no more youth in this body
all you will see is five foot seven of sallow eyes
pale faced
bloated frustration
corpse-like
if corpses smiled.

Untill my teeth are yellowed from coffee and cigarettes and the laugh lines around my mouth taunt me like the scars on my upper arm (if you are scarred just as painfully by laughter as a knife what is the point of it all)
12 inches of stitched back frustration that reads:

you cannot undo
what was done


   stitches I want i want to rip out in the company of polite
normal people and
smile at their disgusted faces

have you ever as a child
been so unhappy by what you put down on paper
you would scrunch the whole thing up after crossing it out in the thickest black marker
throw it in the bin and start over?

This is what living feels like
I am just a  canvas

I can almost remember what it was like to laugh

On the day you finally broke
you let every bit of the control you valued so much, slip
slip
away
And I loved it.

On the day you broke I pushed a button I knew I shouldnt have
pushed
and between your anger
I named your fear
"You're sccared." I said
Between your anger and your fear there was no more room left for
control
so you broke and broke down.
As broken down a control freak gets
Shaking, you spat out the saddest sentence I have ever heard
come out of your beautiful mouth
Hair crackled with the ferocity of your hatred you said
"IF. I could change everything about. MYSELF,  I would. My ****** zip code, my zodiac sign, every. *******. thing. The good, the bad, the ******* joyous and the ******* ugly."
You whispered the word "everything" as if I did not yet understand.

My father only taught me how to be a man but my mother taught me how to be a human being
And I too know how heavy armour wears on your skin
Even soldiers sleep
Even vikings take their armour off at some point
Even a captain removes his ******* hat
You
you sleep with clenched fists and gritted teeth
I havent heard you
yawn
burp
****
****
***
or snore
you are
the one eye open on the door and I'm
the kitchen floor cleaner going back for more
ill unload your baggage
just  tell me where you left the ******* keys to the trunk

"The problem is..."
he drawls
"that it is'nt us who see people differently from you,
but you see things different from us. We are not the problem you are.
You see the basest humans when we paint majestic creatures,
we tell stories of superheroes with no faults,
we expect our boyfriends to mirror night skies in their comfort,
and speak like Kerouac. Kiss our scars like white girl tumblr pictures."
"People like you," he says;
"...Dont ever **** yourselves. You're used to the disappointment. Your used to kissing your boyfriends sweaty upper lips and smelling...just that. You clean up the puke on bathroom floors without complaining because you know what people look like from the inside. That's why your art will never be good. Thats why today in class when I asked you to paint a human body cut open, you drew a colorless man with his organs splaying out of him, and *******" he laughs..
"I have to fold petals into my boyfriends armpits just to stand the sight of him
our ******* is'nt *******,
its *******. Supposedly.
When I tell this story later,
I'll leave out the spit and saliva and how the human body
aint that pretty, especially *******. Even 6 ft 3 chiseled muscle of it, ill write metaphors about his eyes and similes to his fists,
you will tell us about the humaness of his breath and how
it annoyingly kept you up at night,
you will speak of storms but not of the ones in his eyes.
The ones in your belly
when he farts during *** and you will
describe every putrid detail, like the fact that waking up in the morning aint so pretty,
morning breath is something we dreamers leave out in movies. And, it must be exhausting
living here seeing things how they really are, but atleast when you expect disappointment, theres room for surprise.
People like me expect the good and are disappointed when its ****** on."

I wrote you a poem
Titled it gravity
For your lack of it
And how that made me want you more
Called the scars in your eyes stability
Those were the only things that remained
I am looking for sand to set my anchor on
This is how i just keep sinking
But you
You were fluidity in motion you were the
Once a week reminder that
Typhoons hit and people change
When my moods were changing tides
On the days my speech was so rapid and my eyes so clear it made everyone want me
Atleast thats how it appeared to me
But for the days when my arms drag me out to sea and you have a hand over these fists begging me to let go of these ******* bricks as you kick
Afraid ill drown us both
And i would
If it werent for the flight in your smle keeping us up
Afloat
I pray you dont drop me for the wight of us both can be too much for you to carry

In the wild
You are left to consider graffiti disasters
hatched from gypsy palates
Vanished in music through spiders

In a wilderness of orange viral light
Moths push from the lips of willow switch
Geishas who stargaze on
Matrimonial black powder

In our wilderness of birth the
Name of Fire is swallowed by moths
We are reborn in Geisha operas
Over the embers of burned invention

You sign the word for sand
In a lamplight hem
A voice skating chalk
Points over pearl

Its pitch wound in a white
Arched wax arm
Ticking the membrane
In her submerged bell

When the flavor of the West has really touched you
you'll walk for the animals
The hotels will boil

the idea of your ear as a welcoming door
We pull your pacific heart into plush pine
quilted music and quiet knives

The execution songs are soft
blackouts of deer
The songs that pour from the mourning procession are

clever legal tactics
**** anthems and verbal
Castrations

A mad stone mask waits
in memorized frost on the
blood heavy curtains of ****

Backstage are the petrified
coronas of silver babies whose
ghostpaper hands whisper
wreaths of slavery

's favorite meal is not children as you may expect
it is old people, the elderly near death
they taste better to him
he fantasizes their whole lives with every bite

whose heart like bottles or ransom clinks against
itself eating the useless parts of its own stomach
rotors of bone hum about revenge
the earth clones pale enigmatic cyanide

my spawn sweat bourbon and bleed sweet milk
I'm the Tower
Look Look
let us hold eachother here until the dark blossoms

into an invisible canine snarl
crushed by feathers at a
tomb-encrusted countryside
wax swans bleed from

their eyes and bulls inside run
in circles around ancient ice prisons

Look a clock
century weary mariners
gape in disbelief
at a yawning dawn
of cadmium
on the tongue of
a bristling free roaming
continent of
gothic salt

When the brink vanishes
the furnace swallows its
mother's pastoral tongue
which then echoes through
one thousand years of dead mouths

Beauty flings its severed head cavalier
over the mob who are nippled toothed
and penised maggots of war

Through my window
from my black scaffold
at the furthest edge of the orchard
we'll meet in secret