When I forget who I am
When sometimes I feel myself go sour
I look at my family’s recipe book
I hope in there I find the right combination
Of flour and milk that will make me eatable again
I thumb over the pages of hurried writing
Three generations of women glued to
Paper connected by their spine bound
By aging, once white thread
Each woman offering me
A different dish of myself
Depending on the nourishment I need
Their faces ageing backwards in my memory
To when all of their faces looked just like me
And then, there I am
Half cup great grandma
One cup grandma
Three cups mother
Written on floral stationary glued to lined paper
The edges of me and bend and stained from each constant gaze
That’s me, with my name in their book misspelled,
“Grandma’s Three Hole Cake”

My body is a map
One that isn’t pinned up by pushpins
On plenty of pinning boys bedroom walls
Too big to see individual trees but big enough
To hold hopes and dreams
Strung together by red lines and black words
That title places they have yet to have seen
But man, how they wish they could visit me.
No, my body is more of a landscape
Still sitting on a easel that belongs to an artist
Who cannot bring himself to hang me up yet
Who can’t yet declare my permanence with a tac
My body is like that that.
Held in a state of constant change but only minutely
My mountains and streams haven’t changed for years
But the leafs on my branches transform ever so slightly
With aging paint brush strokes
That only I and my artist know are there
My features have no home
No place on a map to pin
They hold a kind of secret place that only
Few have seen but none could not say wasn’t me
But I still look similar to places they have already seen
No, my body is more like art.
When I was born I was naked like you
Pale with promise
And over time I was colored with age
I was wrinkled with paint
And damaged with a sometimes heavy hand
But even with the same wood skeleton as you
My un-uniformed array of colors
Only represent what I really am.

Often I feel all I really am is a pile of embers
Pieces of burn paper collected
And swept into a pile
Awaiting the shovel
Awaiting the trashcan
But I was once a flame
I held the afterglow of something powerful
Something that only man has ever touched
A promethean myth of promise so
Potent its future begs to be clutched
And as much
As I could love to be that flame again
My role as the after math is just as important
The pile of rumble that before a bomb was a building
Can be seen as material for something new
And the lot of something as raw as me
Can stand for hope, rebuilding for remaking
Things only exist from piles of ember and of rumble
And from me I can build an army
My fortune has not yet been set
My goals have certainly not yet been met
But I show promise
Now please tell me how will you make me?

Isn’t it strange how we as writers choose our muse based off of its ability to **** us? Mine, a woman, a girl really. Her face is not beautiful it is fragile, nor is her body it is frail. She looks almost dead to me, freshly buried; hair thin and untouched; skin just now starting to fall off her bones kind of dead. I would think she was but for her eyes. Perhaps too close together and perhaps a little too big for her face but either way they echo the most wonderful hue of vein-blue. They are beautiful. They ruin me. They make me want to start a militia. Run down the street naked. Proclaim my love for blood. Open up my veins that on the surface promise one color but spill a completely different one. She makes me hate my body. Makes me realize its trickery, that it would promise me her eyes in my bloodstream but when I cut myself open to see them, to touch them I am left with nothing but me. My body, blood red when my favorite color has always been her eyes.

Our love was a train wreck
A shot in the chest
A broken neck from
An automobile wreck
And I
I have never felt love so strong than
When I used to stand next to you
I have never felt anything close to it sense
Our love was a nuclear bomb
It destroyed every bit of me
Dismantling my atoms
Scattering them across endless fields
Protons electrons broken bones and cut off finger tips
All of my being missing
From just us kissing
Our love was a fountain in a box
Trapped and suffocated water brimming the edge of us
Spilling out onto everything around us
And there was no mop to be found to clean us up
So we, our parts would just lay there
In pools and puddles of love
Little drops of water and atoms so tiny
It’s a wonder how our love filled us whole.

The mathematical measurement of emotions
Is based off how fast they run
Set all up at the same level white line
Each toeing the chalky powder on cement
All at once taking off at the sound of a gun
Each running-panting in a race whose finish line
Always wraps around to the start again
In an arena where bullets don’t run out
And the chalk is always fresh
Where the winner and loser always play the same role
As math and measures are stagnant
Offering no hope for healing or progress  
The fast step that tears make
Forever beating out the long strides that hurt takes.

I hope your love for me is like  
Early morning coffee.
And I am your favorite mug
When you take me out of the cabinet
Pour into me your energy and motivation
All the things that make you smile when you are tired
Will you set me down gently then
Wait for me to cool off
And kiss me slowly with a smile
Sipping the sleep out of your eyes
Walk me around your house
Careful with the handle.
Looking down at the floor
Make sure all that’s burning up inside me
Stays below the surface and
Doesn’t jump out to burn your toes
You wouldn’t care if it did though
You just wouldn’t want parts of me
That you love so much to be wasted outside
Your favorite mug.