By the time I’ve stopped trying to hate you, I’ve started to hate myself. And, it’s certainly not the first time and I’m still hoping that it’s the last, but this hurt, this sadness, this deep ache that tightens itself around my neck, threatens to choke the remaining life out of me and I’m scared my reckless mind just might let it. Because this bitterness is dipping into my blood and it slithers into my soul and I want to scream the sickness out because the crying has stopping working. All of my backup plans are crumbling to dust around me and my memories dance around my head like haunted specters. I’m done. I’m done with this anger and resentment towards people who are too busy to care. Too vain to reach out. They do not deserve my rage when they cannot be bothered to love me if I am not there to remind them I exist. I do exist and I am worthy of being loved. So I refuse to sit here and play the martyr, still waiting for a fictional apology. I’m not sorry. I am finished. The End.

Take the gun from off your back and shoot down the wild birds from the sky
They come easily if you wait
If you wait
When my ankles swell with the storms
You carry me over your shoulder like the corpse of a Canadian goose
I am your prize
You've blown a bullet through my aching bones and I am your prize

These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.

O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start.

They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air --
It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.

Here are two pupils
whose moons of black
transform to cripples
all who look:

each lovely lady
who peers inside
take on the body
of a toad.

Within these mirrors
the world inverts:
the fond admirer's
burning darts

turn back to injure
the thrusting hand
and inflame to danger
the scarlet wound.

I sought my image
in the scorching glass,
for what fire could damage
a witch's face?

So I stared in that furnace
where beauties char
but found radiant Venus
reflected there.