Pang after pain
My heart sinks to my feet
Every morning
I wake up to maroon socks
A trail of crimson every where I step
I am reminded
I am not the robins fluttering outside my window
I am not my cozy cobalt couch
I am not my daughter
Freedom will always come with shame
To rest is to sink into blue veins
No one will wipe my nose
Only women will love me like I love her
Like I loved you
I hold onto feminine first aid
like ancient coral roots into a deep sapphire sandy floor
Please let me be the one to crush chested ***** on heel
Instead of you
You **** milky marrow from my bones
You lick your lips on vulnerable aorta
I wrap open nape with the tentacles of my ancestors,
You ******* vampire
I wipe alligator tears from my eyes
My back wrists are sponges, they were prepared for this moment.  
Every time I breathe I gulp up salt water
I fight
I refuse to drown
For her.
You hate that she needs me more
You crumble because you cannot eat me up
Full, I sit without you.

You thumbed mute on my mouth
Pushing buttons on all that I shared, so vulnerable
Stapled words on the inside of my molars
You with your silver gun
Metal bent ends punched through enamel stating:

CRAZY
OVERREACTIVE
BAD MOM
WORTHLESS
FAILURE OF A WIFE
DESERVING OF BEING CHEATED ON

I take tongue and unclip your frantic grasps at control
I push my lips like a dagger through your thumb
You will not hold me down any longer
The women I come from and the woman I am
Is stronger than any man of your men
Pathetic, you cling to your photographed ****
While I wake up clinging to my core, lovesick
The mask is unveiled
My daughter, so pure
As much as you try you won't turn me frail
I will always endure.

The sun as my witness, my heart rising up in my throat
Reminds me that my truth can never be evoked.

It is too much
and never enough
I seek you in Bukowski rants
I let his refrain boil over me
and scald me
the same way I let your apathy light me
on summer nights
my skin, already crisp from the afternoon sun

and how many pathetic lyrics
of
must I French kiss
until I no longer see your curled cigarette lips?
and worst of all
my dreams
You are standing right there
a cigarette bit between your curled lips
I can almost hold your face in my hand
Only to awake to
my arms squeezed tight around core
When I dream of you
Why do I always wake up cradling myself
gripping the you in me

Bottle me up
fill me to the brim
Posture me on your grainy shelf
Watch as I
Scoot my ribbed bottom closer and closer to the ledge
I inching over bourbon blondes
like a solo cup at a wedding
Anxiously awaiting a lofty bouquet toss
I await to be uncorked
Ah, the moment you grip my glass
and collapse a key into me
OPEN and ALIVE.
Please let me air-ate  
Let my maroon acid settle like freckles
on your tongue
See how my tannins feel like cannons right in the ribs down to the gut?
Notice how my words are cabernet crisp?
It is a beautifully intoxicating experience to break me down from solid to liquid

This is not my true form

I am solid.
I am a cascade. a basalt boulder. at the very, least a cloudy glacier not meant to melt and definitely not meant to be bottled.
I am a mountain.
Delicious if you are willing to trek to the top.

If I swallow my heart whole
Will aorta pulse as it twists through esophagus?
Down Small Intestine,
Down to Large Intestine too?
If it does not
and my heart was not all I believed it to be
Attest for me.
Tell them how I would hold my breath underwater
and dive down to the quiet of the ocean.
How I would trace my finger along  
a grainy gold carpet
Mapping out thousands of
Portraits.
Portraits my heart will never. stop. digesting. of. you.
For anyone who asks
In this desperate life about you, unlucky lover
Who ends up with me.
How the story ends with I end up purging back

"Just Intermission. Be safe. Be kind."
Our sunset view for 18 months
My home is made up of windows
and I don't want anyone handing me a stone
There are exactly  3 crosses around me and a 20 foot lit up Mary holding a baby Jesus I see when I look out my southside window
I get an email stating that they will be birthing

A rough surface of sorrow
forms under eyelids
when I see you
You strike it with a match of apathy,
Light your cigarette,
and throw fire to the burn pile of your life.
Flames flicker around
your daughter's botched haircuts
her eyes have the same longing yours do.
Violet heat swirls around questions, trapped in thought bubbles,  
that hang over your son's sweet hazel head
His prism tears make
everything go to ash

As I stand an outsider
Poking rod to ember
Even as I ****
I know the only thing I will find
is empty charcoal memories of how we used to be
Before the (w)reckoning  

How scorched it feels, how black it hurts
To lose someone who was there through it all
I could always arrive with streaks down my cheeks.
We could always be the kindling.

I guess all I can do now is say
Burn it all down, baby