i can't give you the moment when you enter my home, and are introduced to its scent, and could not foresee that you would become so familiar with it. i can't give you any kind of structure, regardless of its condition. and though i exist, i just can't bear to prove it. you take me entirely on faith, and i should be forever grateful that you tolerate my absence and lack of transparency. and yet any move i make is not worthy, though i not only move, i disturb and wreck the space you've granted me. and still you tolerate me. my absence and lack of transparency.

I feel a pain when I look inside houses,
orange tint, lit like ****, like bloodshot eyes staring back at mine,
I only ever lived in cheap apartments, and we moved somewhere new every few years
People grow up in houses, they come and go when they're older, they die in them
My only experience being welcome in a house, a man I knew who's wife ended up dying in it
It was only weeks later when he took his own life in it
I'm afraid of houses, the implications of commitment, the familiarity, the comfort
When the foundation becomes cancerous,
These never ending thoughts of how your comfort can become a haunted house

I'm so afraid of death.

I know I wrote that poem, last December, 
I said I no longer fear death 
Let me correct it
I no longer fear dying 
But I fear death
God, do I fear death

Sometimes, I like to believe I'm a superhero,
queen of dissociation, maybe 
My trauma, my dysphoria is nothing in the context of this...prophecy, plot armor, whatever it is keeping in line with the story
of who I am, where I came from, of how this pain truly meant something 
but if I abandon fiction to breathe uncertainty 
raise my arms in front of me, bracing 
where do I exist outside of me

Scissors and slanted fingers
Skeletal trills
Stretched, hung, resembling my pollinator
sliding down my throat, and cut
cut,
cut
and choke on the blood
Thicker than pink or red
and purple and black
beneath my father

Catch me if you can, I'm spread above the earth
I'll catch a morning train so we can figure out what hurts
In a place of dying men
I cry sometimes, but that's all part of it
Yeah, that's all part of it, don't catch yourself

I leave it opened up, but you can put it back just fine
You're a sucker for that sentimental sorcery of mine
Stuck below the surface, I want to love you more
But that's all part of it, I guess, that's all part of it

I don't know what to say, I've done all that I can,
and if it really hurts then you can press your hand against the glass
I'll be there with you first, know you'll never have to wait,
no, you'll never have to be alone

I've been looking at old pictures of rock stars in their prime
such feminine, almost childlike features compared to their current selves
There are some of Bob Dylan playing guitar with Donavan
And one of Lou Reed with his hand pressed against his cheek, sitting at a table with Jagger and Bowie, at Cafe Royal in London
and when I see them I think,
"I want to be young."
but I am young
years younger, in fact