Hey, Mr. Rager! Mr. Rager!
Tell me where you're going!
Tell us where you're headed!

This is an ode to all the lungs you've burnt, all the times you knew how hurt I was and am and how my heart bruises the inside of my chest, beating the **** out of me, trying to burst from my body, frantic, afraid. Oh- credit card fingers, syringe tongue, bloodiest of Sunday's, show me how to roll it, show me how to make origami of my bones.

I'm off on a adventure.*

To the fickle space between the folds of your brain, to the indecision, to the gentle curve of your shoulders that I trace with my palm, to the gaps in your happiness.

Mr. Rager!
Tell me some of your stories
Tell us of your travels
Hey, Mr. Rager! Mr. Rager!
Tell me where you're going!
Tell us where you're headed!

To the untouched spots on your cheeks, to all the noises that frighten you, to all the things that go bump in the night, to starving, to all the stucco paint, to acid flashbacks, to paranoia, to my knuckles, ****** from beating myself up.

I'm on my way to Heaven.

To the rolling back of your eyes, to ******* nosebleeds, to drunk driving, to the ***** all across your chest, to your mother's mother, to the way your eyes soften when you look at me.

Mr. Rager!
Can we tag along? Can we take a journey?

You're asleep in my arms, my hand in your hair. The world is turning a little slower.  

*When will the fantasy end? When will the heaven begin?

I'm learning how limited forever is in the space between two hearts.

You, I feel my heart swell when I hear your name. You're like my one night stand with happiness. You make me forget how completely cold it is. You remind me what beauty is and what hope feels like, soft and tangible, floating through the air like ribbon. You show me what it means to be alive, survive, swallow difficulty whole. I can feel your palms against my soul.

You, the illegitimate child of sadness and cigarette ashes, the tasteless poison that falls beneath my teeth. I can feel my heart sinking into the soft soil of you, planting itself in the wasteland where the bones of tiny things rest uneasy.  

Please, just let me sleep in peace for once.

Call me humming bird:
Flitting like time
Feathers like skipping stones
Beak like protest
Wings like home

I. Talking like we haven't before, me on your bed you on the floor, I tell you I love you and you tell me how you took a dozen pills.

II. We kiss like its our last, rolling around in the grass, every inch of you aching in some way or another.

III. I know this isn't the end, but I also don't know when the end is. Its crawling in my spine like spiders spinning webs, they want to catch the life out of me.

IV. Your brother screams "He wants to **** himself!" As I walk up the stairs, going home, don't tell mum, she already knows and she's ******.

Hey, grandpa. Well, technically, great grandpa but who has time for that many words? My hearts runnin' on empty, you see, and you know a thing or two about hearts. Do you know what time it is? If Marguerite heard me on the phone, she'd have my head. Well, let me just tell you, I haven't heard from my best friend in a month. I'm starting to think ill never be able to feel my fingers again. I'm really starting to think that I'll never be able to tell pink from gray again. I'm starting to see ghosts, grandpa. They're these big, melting wax figure, mummified soldier, lighthouse-eyed things. They smack the air with the scent of carrion and roll in the smashed jaws of a mother opossum, snaggle-toothed roadkill no one mourns. Their eyes drip puddles on the floor. You'd know something about this, right? 1943, does it ring a bell? Hey, no. You can't hang up. You're the only one who's seen this type of ghoul. If you heard the way their voices overlap and churn like the great belly of the ocean, you'd see where the twang of my heartstrings echoes. You need light, candelabras, great fire places, the first four light bulbs Edison ever spoke into existence. The sun will rise and set again, but UV light only can reach so deep under our apostate skin. Watch as the universe burns itself into place, and keeps you in the eye of all of it. I felt the subtle ghost of my hands plunge deep into my chest, and find my heart a new home.

The night wraps it's dripping rime hands around my neck, catching sweat on Python fingers, their tongues flicking the flyaway hairs. It's nails creep up the soft cape of flesh of my throat, dragging their way up to my eyes. They peel my lids open again and again, jagged cliff edge knife pulling at thinly veiled corners. I can feel the vessels pop within my eyes, a New York New Years firework show of running red.

Dead silence is swept away by the whirring waves of a fan. I am awake and rolling in routine malaise. Guilt tugs at my heart and disappears in the instant I try to pin it down. It is frightful and flightful and with its fleeting nature, leaves and then emanates a trace of soreness in its place. There are no alarms and no time taking place. Everything is frozen under the fingernails of a great beast.

A dull tapping at my windows tells me dear fear wants to braid my hair and whisper gently in my ear. I toss and turn a few times more, trying to shake the animal off of me. It's nails rap again at my eyelids and they blister, hot tears spilling and I look up, staring death in the face and seething from something that I can't quite see, nor feel.

You wash the bubbles of your skin down the drain every night, scraping with a facecloth, hoping to cleanse the ugly from yourself; the putrid stench of your muscles beneath every mistake you've breathed or uttered into this Earth's air. You lick your wounds.
                                                     Bone fracture
You run your fingertips across the bridge of her nose, down to her chin, tip her head  up to meet your hungry eyes, good dog. Now, roll over, show me where your heart is. When she resists, when she bites, your hands don't work like human's do.
                                                    Loneliness
­                                                    without
     ­                                               overflow
Your brain meets another that you read to be feral. Fear, for a moment. Fear, buried under something like happiness. (Insanity) You lick your lips, starving. She can taste your teeth. She can taste the raw meat you have pulled from every past lover. The blood in your drool when you sleep, the sharpness in your stare, the way you mumble sweet nothings, she's known beasts like you.
                                                    Someone like
                                                    you, comfort for a
                                                    moment
You'­re just rough around the edges, you tell her. The world tells you to beat your mutt brain to death. You tell yourself that it's just the phase of the moon. The tides move your blood. The tides pull your ancient mind, tug on the sleeve of your consciousness.
                                                    Living like a car
                                                      accident
­You **** what you don't need. You don't eat what you ****. You don't know what you ****. You don't know where your hands have landed, which throats they have crushed. You will drag your claws across the cold skin, watch it wrinkle and rip, no blood moving; cold, congealed.
                                                    Dead kittens in  
                                                     the air vents
You share the rage of something forgotten by time. Something with blood boiling and eyes like hawks, wings of angels, burning brightly against the backdrop of night.
                                                    The smell of
                                                      strawberri­es
People try to care. They try to wrap their tongues around your ideas and around your ankles. They try to cry the same tears you do. They try to touch the sky and earth like you do. But they never will. No one gets you. No one can move you.
                                                    Your mother's
                                                     arthritis
Curled under the wheels of cars, spit out onto the side of the highway. Cooking in the sun, roadkill is no fun if you don't like to play with your food. The semi trucks barrel by. You feel the gentle shove towards their snouts, their mashing teeth, their twitching tongues, slick with the inside of your bones.
                                                    The way you
                                                     haven't cried in
                                                     years, you say
You meet a girl. You eat her whole. You meet a soulmate. You eat her whole. You shake in your mother's arms. You eat her whole. You look in the mirror. You eat her whole. You visit a therapist. You eat her whole. You see God. You eat her whole.
                                                    Holes in dry
                                                     wall
Your lips don't twist anymore. Your heart doesn't twitch anymore, dead animal. The wind doesn't call to you anymore. You wonder where your mind went, where you left it, in which forest, under which overpass.
                                                   Calling
You­ feel the world shift against you, all eyes on you, knowing what you've done. Where you've been. Who you are.
                                                        And calling
You saw off the barrels of guns.
                                                             *And calling

I wait for peace to find its way into my bones and hair ******* with bows
by the train tracks.

I throw stones
that skip over a river like
r-r-records;
Sublime,
Bradley Nowell, slurring out
the same line
over and over and over,
something about a corner store,
a collection of words that when I sing them,
taste like July.
1, 2, 3,
the rock disappears.

A train passes by,
engine huffing,
wheels churning out a steady rhythm of
"Please don't leave me, please don't leave me."
Dead reggae and dead love,
tangled in its underbelly,
rusted metal guts.

I look into the river to try to find the stone I skipped again.
I think I almost see it,
dead weight,
a speck under the surface.

(Do you believe in ghost trains? I hear something howl every night.)

Stay in bed
Sometimes turning to my right
Until I close my eyes

I feel my face turn moonlight silvering with tears, midnight. You're off to Boston, he's off to sleep, I'm off to the last time I remember seeing my dead old friend's face, his veiny arms, my unknowing.

I can feel my heart settle into a place in my chest, not occupied for the better part of a week. I've been distracted, making choices that will probably **** me in a month's time.

Cause when I came home
I’d lost thirty something pounds

I think of your little nose, scarred legs, tiny laughter shaking your tiny body on this tiny Earth in this tiny space we exist in.

The space we exist in. I think of how small of a box I am contained to. My fingertips will never reach further than I can see.

And I won’t be nice to anyone
Because I don’t see why I should
I don’t see the point

No amount of tears will bring him back, that blood was stilled a long time ago. No amount of my effort matters anything because you're too many months ahead of me, too many heartbeats away, too many lives into it.

I just pick up and drop people like peaches- bruised, unholy sweetness, ripe. I bite my own tongue until it is bubble gum. I want to be a better person.

I've been working on it. I think you're getting me there, somehow, someway.

I won’t, I won't get clean
For the rest of my life
I won’t be nice

I watch you take your life out of the sunlight
And smash it down the sewer
Squeezing it through the pipelines
Smoking it out
I watch you take your future
And put cigarettes out on it
I watch you take a knife to my throat
Slice the most delicate skin and richest blood
And tell me
I didn't know everything
All along

I held you
As you cried
About losing me
That night

You loved campfires
Because your grandfather taught you
How to build them

And while I never learned
How to burn
I picked up a stack of paper
To throw into the flames

And I thought
That in a few moments
What I'm holding in my hands  
Would be just ash and dust

And I felt the very same way
That night

Sunkissed freckles like creek pebbles
Resting on my shoulder, sunlight filtering onto my skin from your cheeks.
I am envious of every ghost that gets to tuck you in and knows what makes you tick tick tick tick tick
12:30
Quit knocking on every fold of my brain, they're not much different, they're all graffitied with your name, if I can feel your hand anywhere close to me.
Every creak of this old door has my head turning to find you,
Find you in the soft dumb center of this earth and my mind and my fingernails.
My hands, my hands, my hands, what are they holding?
Empty, are you so empty that you're going to fill your life with dead rock n rollers?
(Let me be the something that lifts the dirt from your teeth and the spoiled milk from your boiling blood.)

I won't be free until my wings are clipped.
The ocean still smells like blood.
I can still remember the color of your eyes.
The most cliché line, the most cliché lie.
There's no future, there's no answer.
The most therapeutic thing is anger.
(Here I am, lost without you.)

Forget about all the things you know about yourself and imagine this instead

I. I touch the soft tufts of your hair along your neck and wish three times during that instant that I could take back every bruise that you have ever been given.

II. I feel my shoulder against yours, warmth beneath chaos, lying low in the gardens in our hometown. I know in that moment you will shatter every belief I have ever had about love and replace it with framed pictures of me kissing your cheek.

III. I feel your arm around my shoulder and know that this is safety. I have not been afraid in what feels like ages when I hug you, count each rib, watch your face bury in my shoulder.

IV. I love you is bottled in every stare I cast at you. I wonder where I left my mind.

Playing my cards wrong like
Jim Morrison prom night bath,
lavender and drug fixings,
we all just hope I went
missing.

Sorry I only love you
until I wake up in the
morning.
I'm on and off like
sunrise sunset.

My mind is stuffed
in a box
in the attic.
I'm a heartbreak
addict.
Don't ever let me heal.

What's with all these girls living with the consequences of pretty? Picking up jokes with a habit and some smokes. She can't read his blood. She can't see his frayed veins, they bleed inside out. She doesn't know which direction eyes are supposed to roll.

That abrasive touch, one of lying and of lust and I haven't felt the curves of hips in months, it mottled her slender shoulders. He is brusque, unsure and shaking, do you want something to drink? No, she just wants something to hold, something full of leaving and full of feathers and dust. She takes his hand, a comfort object that feels a lot like how her great grandfather described war. The calluses read like mountains.

But can anyone ever really be sure of anything? She can't tell the difference between a boy and an idea. She can't know the way to where owls sleep, sighing out proverbs while they dream. She can't ask him if he really knows how to keep his knuckles clean.

(Which way to the hospital? Yup, it's a .32, right through my left eye socket. Yes, again. Ain't nothin' left there no more.)

You're gonna do this like,
Johnny Cash.
Pills, pills, and public drunkenness until
I love you.
More.
"June Carter, will you marry me?"
Well, I'll tell you Johnny, let's see you walk the line first,
Sober,
Say your A B ******* C's, darling.
Say them once and say them twice,
And say it when we're not being watched,
*******.

If you don't think anyone understands you, open your ******* mouth
Because someone needs to unknot your thoughts
You can't

I'm starting to wonder if I fall for every pair of eyes that go googly when locked with mine
I wonder how much I'm searching for a way out of not knowing and into heaven
which really, sounds a lot like certainty
I don't know how much my heart can bend under the weight of all the lives I hold in my delicate and numb fingertips before it breaks
I just want to be safe
I just want to be loved
I don't wanna be a trophy wife
I don't wanna be anything but happy

I repaint the Sistine Chapel with only my tongue
just to see your face again.
Oh, your holy chocolate covered soul,
holy bird bone finger tips.
How you snap like a star and then burn again.

(Mouthwash, shaken up in the kitchen cabinet and lunch for two.)

I bottled every bit of sorry you gave me, even if the sentiment wasn't there and nothing you ever told me about the knives I took from you was true.
How could you take my sense of safety? How could you rob me of my intuition? How could you choke the life out of me?
You didn't have hands, not even claws, you had jaws the size of Arizona and a tongue so arid the flies didn't think to find the leftover bits of corpses in between your teeth.
Give me the truth.
What's wrong with you?

I just want you to once imagine, without ink on your skin, without the superficial cuts on your wrists, every lie you ever told to be more like everyone else, different, I want you to imagine the color of my eyes.

(You stripped me of my happiness, turpentine. Jail breaker. Head nodder. You erased my chances. Hope is the sunset. Hope is the sunset.)

In the smallest winter nights,
sailing in the eyes of Stan Lee,
Winona Rider,
Joseph Stalin,
the slightest cross unfolds, unfurls into a tree.
Jesus's face is written in the leaves.
Don't believe me?
Look into your mother's eyelashes.

It's 2 am and I want to know why my hands are still twisting knots in my hair, trying to busy themselves from writing out "I love you, sometimes." I don't know when I don't, but I'm hoping it's in me somewhere because if not, I have no hope to ever say that with any conviction. I mean, maybe if I was a little drunk I could pretend to laugh at you. But, really, you fill up my whole heart. I hate it in the way people hate beautiful things that they can't have, like a kid in a candy store. It is child-like, how I cry over you. And you don't notice, not really. I can see it in the way children pick leaves off trees and let them fall to the ground without second thought after the initial satisfying snap. Every time I see a sunflower, head bowed with the heaviness of its petals, I'll think of you. Snow reminds me of you too. In fact, most things remind me of you. I would say only sometimes, but that's a lie I can't even tell myself.

Wash the soap from between
the folds of my brain

Lose my mind in the living room
T.V is all static

Panic in the dark
for what seems like hours

*Control is an illusion

I feel myself falling asleep on the staircase we sat on when you told me for the first time, out loud, that you wanted to die. I can feel the dead breath of winter. I can feel the slow drifting of snow onto my trembling hands and the unforgiving stillness of the concrete beneath me. I can feel your shaking and nonexistent forgiveness towards your own knotting fingers.

I can feel myself dozing off on the carpet you opened your veins and popped the seams of your skin on. I can feel the warm wetness of iron that once flowed through your arteries envelop my eyelids. I can feel your knife saw through my untouched hair. I can feel the soft edge of your cheek turn salty with tears. I can feel the cloth you gag yourself fill my mouth with cotton and the grooves of my teeth with formaldehyde.

I can feel myself awakening in the pill bottle that used to be full. I can feel the milligrams come in doctors note waves. I can feel the ***** climb from the back of my throat. I can feel the dizzy relief of holding back poison. I can feel your sinking regret and all 25 pills of its predecessors wringing your brain out.

I can feel myself opening my eyes in your casket. It is not empty. I can feel the burden of your body beneath me. I can feel the tough leather of your rope burned neck and the dull heat of my skin desperately trying to awaken yours.

Gone is sometimes not an adjective. He is a noun. And he is haunting my dreams.

Maybe it's better this way
My God, I can't have everything I want
Maybe I can't love you

Maybe it's better this way
My God, maybe you're happier
One less hole in my heart
But you leave behind two

Nothing's gonna hurt you baby
As long as you're with me you'll be just fine

I think of how I held onto
your arm so tightly
as we crossed the street.
I said I was afraid
just so I could feel the way
your veins protrude and
your bones shake.
I just wanted to be
close enough
to feel your heartbeat.
I can feel it through the concrete now,
laying on the pavement,
watching the cars whir by
over me.  

Nothing's gonna hurt you baby
Nothing's gonna take you from my side

Stars fall from the black canopy tops of the forest I used to trespass in as a child, finding the definition of apparition and swamp and UFO.

Coyotes break the sound barrier over the water of the river that I used to fall in, pick bugs out of.

I find myself lying awake in the small hours of the morning, thorns pushing into my back and jail birds clanging the chains around the branches of the trees above me, the sky shaking to the tune of their wails and wings flapping desperately, cracks of heat lightening rattling them alive.

Night is the loudest color. I find this through broken flashlights. I find this through "Do Not Enter" signs. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me.

Hey kid, you've been dead a few weeks and I'd just like to say hello. The ground has its first December coat of fragile snow over your dead body and I know you can't feel the cold but I'll tell you right now, I can see my frozen toes, just barely move them, breathe up into the sky, Id be lying if I said I still cry every day. But, I'm lying to myself if I said that I'm not trying to take back your pain every day in a way that won't make your heart start beating again.

I wonder if those butterflies ever drank up the nectar from your blood, probed their soft tongues into the velvet of your cuts, those razor blade ribbons, oh holy romantic, how you bleed like Mozart and bleed like ballads of classic rock stars, how they whip your face with sour sweat and drugs and drugs and drugs until you find yourself half asleep, brain swept under the rug.

Did you know only 1.5% of drug overdose related suicide attempts are successful? Beautiful blonde martyr for an ugly catholic high school in an ugly state in the ugliest of its hearts, how does it feel to be 1 in 100? How does it feel to be a rarity, carbon pressed into diamond? How does it feel to be cry for a week, left in the grass to roll like waves, buried without a name and a face and a grave?

In the latest of solemn sleep deprived nights I press my ear to the chest of the 100th depressed boy I come across and don't feel Vicodin climbing up his arteries, don't feel Klonopin, OxyContin, Ibuprofen. I can't seem to find the one, who knows, maybe you were it and all my efforts really were wasted. All those nights I've stayed up late did nothing. All those knives I stole, all that blood I wiped away with t-shirt sleeves, all the blankets I've put around stupid shaking shoulders, all the bittersweet will this be the last time your skin is this warm hugs, God did they mean nothing at all?

I lock my jaw into a permanent silence, buy back time by putting my money where your knife is. I take bets on when someone will die next. I read the label on every bottle of Xanax. I roll over in my bed again and again, and try to put you to rest again.

Amen.

In the instant it takes a shutter to click and close, you will be gone.

We collected pictures of our perfect pretty smiles, your pearl teeth bear in front, while my lipstick lips, curled into butterfly wings, charmingly drift through the summer air. You are there, you are still there, where I left that you. Before the future became the present and you were no longer here, still there. You are where I cannot reach you.

I held that memory on the tips of my fingers, flicking a lighter close to its edge.

Your hair fell so perfectly over your forehead, but somehow, I still wanted to push it to the side when I looked at the photographs. I guess habit doesn't cease in an instant like the snap of a Polaroid or beat of a heart. When I looked at our pictures, I still wanted to whisper into your ear how much I loved you, chin nuzzled into your neck, fingers draped across your chest, your heart, your warmth. Nothing is permanent. Not even promises. Not even the visions of the kids, the house, the daytime dish washing, and night time monster watching, kids curled up in bed and us, checking on the floor, searching for what is not there and it's funny how even now, even though you're gone, I still find myself doing the same thing. Just alone.

As it caught fire, I watched our perfect lives fall to ashes in the shoe box at my feet, I saw the flash of your eyes and reach of my hand, choking me as it went. They didn't burn as easily as I thought they would.

Im hanging new ones in their place, but the dark spots behind the frames still remain, and your name is written in them.

I. The prettiest thing I've ever done was hold someone while they cried. This was the most beautiful I've ever looked. She shook like a rabbit, watching cars whir by on the roadside.

II. I've fallen in love with strangers. I've fallen in love with familiar faces, and then fell out of love when I realized they were still strangers.

III. I had a dream my father hated me. I woke up, and I couldn't look at him in the eyes during dinner.

IV. I watched a deer cross the road today, her head hung low in the thick morning mist. I called her Daisy, and Daisy ran into the graph paper patterned trees of the forest. She disappeared as the fog closed in, dashing into the blank scene in front of me, the painted canvas of her back running across the page like a blur of everything I love about living.

We were friends again.
Just friends.
We sat, every Sunday morning,
(I work Saturdays)
in a diner.
You leaned over
the black hole
of your coffee,
pouring milk,
creating a galaxy
of bitter sugar.
You looked up to me,
who was just watching,
and said something,
probably nothing.
The comfortable space
between us smelled like
leather booths and orange juice
and small family restaurants and
scrambled eggs.
We got in your car
littered with what made
you, well, you.
I rode shotgun.

Weakness makes me
spit bile into the softly sliced sunburned bruises
of bony arms
and I lock
sympathy in the basement,
it seems to me.

The sunset strings its rosary in beads of strawberry and mother's love as the day comes to an end. The light lays and prays.  

When you miss something, you think of the small, fleeting moments that you gave no attention to before. You start to think of the way she pronounced things, tongue smooth over teeth and so unlike you. You think of the way her eyes moved when she laughed, the way she touched your shoulder gently when she looked at you, blue eyes and butterfly pink lips.

I wonder what it will take to pry me away from you. I wonder how much will ever be too much. What weight will stop my heart from giving anymore?

I saw the way you moved over the kitchen floor, your small feet gliding on the tile, dancing to your own humming. The sun was stinging my eyes, trying to count her days and count her blessings.

It felt like God almost cared about me again.

But God doesn't care about me.
He doesn't care what you like.
He doesn't even care.

And if all good things must come to an end, then let me just say amen to everything that makes you you. Amen to the smallest of moments and the tiniest of hints that someday, the sun would burn out.

I am a silent monstrosity in the heavy and deep belly of the earth
I sit, carving my teeth out with
Nail clippers, chiseling bone like soap
I melt through my tongue with acetone
Like wax
Like wax, I am, like wax
Still and dripping, falling faces and hiding places in the darkest parts of museum floorboards

The phantom ghosts of all your ex-lovers
Line up behind you in the mirror
Shrunk to your size;
You cannot see them
They are staring right through you

I. Look how far I've gotten living like this, kiss my angelic attitude goodbye when mania arrives because I won't be able to control where I stick the knife. You can't find me in a cell no, this isn't no Hannibal Lector story.

II. There are a lot a lot a lot of things people don't understand about depression, like I wanna **** myself a lot but I can't tie knots. But tying the knot isn't as important to me as tying the one 10 years from now with a man with brunette hair and eyes just like yours. He will have skin as soft as your mothers old rug.

III. I can feel the world turning around me and how my poems can't define me. I write a lot of poems about sad ****, bad ****, and more sad ****, but all that sad **** amounts to one happy girl. You forget I spit sunshine right into the face of tragedy. And sometimes I find good luck charms in the form of bottle caps. And those brought me a boy with an Irish name.

IV. This is the silence of the lambs, I have learned to live with it. And you're gonna be taking butterflies out of my throat because you bet it, I'm screaming color into this gray world.

V. It puts the ******* lotion in the basket or else it gets the pills again, and temptation is far worse than death, isn't it?

VI. We covet, Clarice. My brave starling, what you haven't seen is what I have, flight. Bodies flattening on the concrete of Boston is a familiar memory, I haven't lived it but I have seen it.

VII. We all have our lambs don't we?

Two dead girls, flayed into leaves on the forest floor. Butterfly knife not so flitting, more like flying through the air, cutting whatever it dares come across. Mostly pearls, but then again you see a lot of baby opossums drifting up from the side of the road these days.

Cotton, cotton filling the mouths of anger hungry boys, not so sharp jaws and those dull blue eyes you see on every magazine cover. Who knew death looked so fresh dressed in tattoos and bruises that are the same color as your moms wedding night wine?

Tell me, boy, where did you get your emotions? Is that mania an heirloom? Or did you buy it from whoever first sold you that Xanax? Did you rip them from the heart of the first girl you told looked beautiful in blood?

You ***** ******* liar. You filthy thief of virgins' teeth, swaddling your broken skin knuckles in baby bonnets.

I hope God finds His way under your greasy fingernails, your greedy skin and stained teeth. I hope the waves that toss your thoughts only curl towards the bottom and your heart only strains it's sides to reach your father's ghost.

There are so many messy, sloppy secrets behind every self hating fool with a pension for roadside crying and cheap liquor shopping. A desire for so many I'm-only-trying-to-pay-off-my-loans ladies, covered in last weeks work and warm old men cigarette breath and guilt. I hope for all eternity that you find something worth panhandling for, whether it be disease or love. I hope God finds you in the sewers, whimpering your sister's name and your brother's license plate.

(The devil went to find what's his, down in Los Angeles where you last hid.)

I'm a chemist too, Walter. Don't believe me? Just take a look at my blood. This iron, albuterol sulfate, acetaminophen, all this? I did it.

Don't force my hand, sweetheart.
Don't bite the poet that feeds.
Don't lick the flames that keep that rage you have going, you'll lose your identity.
Don't make your mother scream if you don't want to count bruises.
Don't be too soft, child.
Don't be too ugly, boy/girl/parasite.

Your God's a lion, recently fed, drowsy.*

I wish you'd believe me when I say I'm sick, Dad. My tongue's falling out.

The truth
Will set you free
But;
Not until it's done with you.

You will wake up with bruises
You made in your sleep.

(Good luck with those ****** sheets)

Fingers like crayons,
melting over flames,
dripping on your eyelids.
You have your
technicolor world
without the ecstasy.
You told me it wasn't possible.
You told me it wasn't possible
to get drunk without your dad.
You told me it was Pepsi,
it was Diet Coke.
You told me it was love.
It was something like
decay,
in fall,
in the brush,
the words your mother
swept under the rug.

I watch myself fade and wilt in your eyes like valentines flower petals from their vase, falling onto the white desk dirtied with graphite and candy wrappers below. There's thirty one letters from colleges and three love notes left there to peel up at the corners and get stuck with bubblegum but nothing leaves the taste of metal in my mouth more than "Michigan". I'm terrified every day of you leaving. I'm more terrified of your hair being out of place and your smile not being the way I remember it. Do you ever think of the way it would be if you loved me back? Sometimes I wish you'd force yourself into things the way I always do when I'm fitting into prom dresses or looking into my own eyes in the mirror, trying to decide if they're green or hazel like my mom insists every time I fill out a passport application. Think of how my hands would look in yours, the way my chipped nail polish would match your veins, thinly creeping up your arms like you haven't tried to carve them out with office supplies and hours of crying in circles. Sometimes I think I ought to just kiss you, remind you that it's easy to fake things. You should know. Sometimes I dream of holding the side of your face in the bold and silently rotting static of my room and saying "let's run away" and we don't really go anywhere, it's just us, the very edge of the half moon of our shoulders touching, warm like sunshine on pebbles. Most of the time, I don't wish for much. I just wish I could stare into your eyes for even a second without feeling the blood run into my face. Or just that I could look at you. You feel like forever and a universe away and I don't know if that's because you're so perfect or because I only ever see you after your hockey games, which ended exactly five days ago, by the way. Not that I'm counting or anything. And not to say that I miss the way that when I hugged you, I could feel your shoulder blades and the gentleness of your hand on my back, but I'd give anything to feel that again. I never knew if it was as awkward for you as it was life saving for me. You still have no idea how much I looked forward to seeing you even for those painful few minutes where, despite us not making eye contact once, you'd smile at least three times, every time. Again, not that I've been counting. Maybe it was just because you were anxious, but that's okay. They say it helps. I don't know who "they" are, but at this point, I trust anything that holds hope to make you happy. To be honest, I'm not really even sure what your voice sounds like, but I know your laugh like I know the crooked tip of my nose or the smell of vanilla incense. It's all I can think about when I go to sketch anymore, but I can't get the lines right. Amen to that, because I never want to be so in love with a single moment again and because really, I never want it to be over. I just want to make you laugh forever. I just want to see the way your eyes crinkle like that until the sun swallows itself whole and then we all can't see anything ever again. I'd want it just like that, the last light flickering as you come as close to happy as you can be. I'll make you laugh until you're dumb and dizzy and maybe then you'll love me. And maybe you would have to be dumb to love me. But I'll still kiss your nose every night in my dreams and pretend I mean anything to you like you do me.

I can't sleep
without you crawling
into my mind
and under my skin

God, I'll never know what rest is.
I gotta fake my death just to get to sleep.
Counting sheep doesn't do ****,
when you don't got the time.
I flip my eyelids inside out,
burning the night back into them.
I dream of dreaming and I wake up nodding off
to something like daylight.

Life in the shape of gummy bears, Jell-O shots, foldable chairs, and Xanax.

Bending palm tree leaves into pillow cases, codeine mirrors only show you the faces of everyone who's scared of you.

Watch the pink drip from my lips onto the floor, coating the the tile in what it means to be truly lost.

(Hide me away for another day, I beg of you, the sun sets in the wrong direction these days.)

O child of golden thread, sunshine, mothers mistake, I cannot imagine what you felt that night. I might just throw up on your behalf, half of me is feeling just golden and the other is cigarette sick, warm *** breath on my neck, exhale out and inhale in, let this nightmare begin, so help me God pull me out from under the bed or I'll hit my head on every board until I'm nothing but a bruised and limp body, I won't have a name.

Let's play the waiting game. We are waiting until one of you says it, "You win. Can I leave now?" I play this a lot too, were not so different you know? You and her and me and him.

**** him and his warm forearms, I'm watching us on screen like a movie, it's a tragedy, the way he flays those forearms open on screen, just shut up! All your good lines have been cut, cut, cut. But I love you, oh god I love you like the moon kisses waves and the sun leaves it's imprint so permanent it goes into some people's blood and they die. Do you have the sun in your blood? Do you have too much sun in your blood? Is that why you let it out? I can feel hot cancer bubbling in the trenches of  your arteries when I feel your pulse and I hope you can bear radiation because I'm not letting go without saving your wavering life.

But I digress. This mess doesn't belong to me. I forget who's blood I'm wearing. This tearing of flesh comes in puffs and in dull knives. I don't recognize the pain until it is dripping on your floor, half past four I am freezing, you are wheezing out cannabis, and he, he is alone in a basement, rope burn pending. God is sending me his best wishes and Mother Nature is sending me her doves' kisses but I am only speaking in a foreign tongue, "Let me go home," I scream, "Let me go- home."

But O child of discomfort and discontent, I don't know which of you I am speaking to. I can't ignore your eyes. I can smell it on your breath, that lonely sadness. That tongue in cheek, 10 cents sadness. Don't quit breathing, just quit breathing in the wrong things.

I can swear, when morning comes, you'll wash off all your skin and grow something a little softer.