"It's just one cut,"
said the sharp lady doctor before language
melted off her clipboard and the operating lamps
grew huge and spilled their bright innards into my eyes.

I lay on the cold tiled floor of the museum.
One monstrous cut -- the white shark suspended
above in a last hungry lunge yawns, belly open.
Around me what a wide-eyed fisherman pulled out:
old tires, whale-oil lamps, Damien Hirst, bones upon bones.
Damien sits on a tire, bored as hell. See the jagged edges,
he says, they pulled him into our cold afterlife
and cut while he suffocated, explosive oxygen flooding
his lungs from the wrong direction.

Later, the doctors showed me
what had for so long kicked and screamed to be out.
Liver-colored, swollen, wrapped in catgut, it was not
as expected. Others had promised ground seaglass,
poppyseed freckles, huge lungs like fibrous balloons
for flying or spouting poetry nonstop in day-long stretches.
Where were my eyes?
It was supposed to have my eyes.

Thirty-two. Adventure.

    Exotic was the word we felt. You rode beside me, small as we were on rickety
flippant and injured bikes, but it was so dark dark and your hair
your hair was *****, and the lights that neoned over our heads turned into lines and twists
fists of red and blue and green and the bricks were wet, like the dirt on the bottom of your shoes
shoes that we fled in, shoes that slapped water and collided with the pavement
You were just as cunning kniving knifing strafing dodging as I
and our lips cracked smiles of sharp white teeth and we ran
because we were bad, we were motors of deliberate disobedience
our eyes were glazed with dizzy daffodil poppyseed crushed ice and bottles hidden
and the room that was the city sky was spinning
weightless and confused and sure so sure, we broke window after window with rocks
and danced, out of character and space

I took you home late

there are just some things
you don't forget.

the time you get stitches on your chin when
you are four and the amount is double that
a result of your careless brother sitting your back and
your face meeting the ground with too much force
you aren't afraid though
you lay quiet as a doctor sews you back to one piece
this is bravery at its finest

the boy with the angry voice and heavy hands
teaches you to cower

the first panic attack with the salted swelling of your breath, the invisible hands wringing your neck into a knot you cannot untie,
the drenched palms and the pinching of your skin to bring you back down to earth
you think you are dying,
you aren't
you wonder if this will happen again,
it will

the dark of your uncle's funeral
your family's tears compiling next to the plate of poppyseed bagels that nobody eats
there is a silence that everybody seems to avoid and the sound of your unexplainable innapropriate laughter accompanying grief

your first kiss in someone's back bedroom and your body turning on vibrate mode
ringing with excitement, a smile numb from it's inability to escape

making out on the top of the movie theatre stairs at the mall on Fridays

the time you sneak out to meet up with older boys, the thrill coming from the risk
you trade tongues at 1 am and make it back in bed before mom and dad notice

the blacked out memory of your first time, in between his cartoon printed childhood sheets
you are fifteen and the **** and alcohol in your system make it harder to remember clearly
it is less of an event and more just a blurry moment

the nights with cough medicine and a handful of crushed pills up your nose and how it easily could have been too much

the halloween party with the dimmed lights and the red cups
the hammock in the back and the black basement couch and
her wrists the week after everyone found out what had happened on it
the word **** tied on to the back of her jeans for the rest of high school along with her self-destruction

the kid who threw himself in front of the train we all took to get to the city

the quiet in the school hallways the week after the drive-by

swallowing the word cancer and feeling every wall of your stomach turn ash

watching your father lose his hair like little pieces of the future

cursing out your chemistry teacher 6th period and being sent to the principals office
then loudly cracking your knuckles during saturday detention

eating ice cream in Haley's bed after finding out he cheated on her
telling her it will be okay and believing it

laying in bed for three days straight and ignoring any words of reassurance
depression settling comfortably inside your bone marrow

the comfort in his eyes and a sense of understanding nobody else had

your purple bedroom walls and
your purple bedding and
your purple curtains and
the pile of innocence disguised as stuffed animals sitting in
the corner of your room

every book you've ever loved

every song that's made your heart lunge

every human you ever thought of as you were falling asleep

every night you spent awake counting

every day you wasted spent waiting

every time you thought you wouldn't make it

every time you did.

Dahlias, little blue fence, the sweet breeze; long grass in the frontyard.
Kisses with intent lips, September; lemon-poppyseed cake.
The big moon.
Dogs howling, a scratch from a bramble on my wrist.
10pm and the rainfall.
9am and a rainbow arcs over our house which resembles a doll house.
Who is the antagonist in this mess of a story?
...
Burning love-notes in the kitchen,
The coffee tastes wrong, WE used to share it.
You take the puppy and leave only flower-petals in the sink as proof you were ever here.
Cigarettes and nightwalks, dawn; waking in the backseat of my car and hangovers hanging over.
Goodbye dahlias and house with little blue fence,
Bye comfort.
The world is a newborn.
I am at my beginning too and I take a breath....

They warned me about you.
I read the nutrition facts
and saw the ingredients.
The FDA didn't fail to inform me,
you were no good for me.
Toxic, even.
I knew this all but you...
always smelt better than you looked
or tasted,
Like a lemon poppyseed,
with salt for sugar-
strange and savory,
but I should stop eating.

Ocean muffin
maybe made for a bird flying low,
or some big fish
swimming in shallow waters.
I was the bird flying low,
with no luck in the wild,
searching for scraps,
and saw one in tact.
It held promise.
Swallowed you whole
and lost all of my feathers
expelling you out.
You were for the big fish.
The ones who only bite off
what they can chew.
I cannot consume
you who poisons me.

Testing positive
Don't eat this before drug test.
****** is bad.

Nothing is funny at five
Don't test me I'll find a way to make you cry
The ***** is in the soup but you can only taste the bitter parts
Shush your pretty ******* mouth, I'll mouth you off till your heart beets red
I'll send the green handed money men to rub their juices onto you
They're very rich but will make you poor
Your face is a caked home for all their bacteria which lives comfortably at room temperature like you
I am so very frustrated that I'm depressed into a soggy grey pancake
But I am convinced otherwise, so I say what a fun game this is
I smile and twirl my mustache with my sticky green juice fingers as you feverishly release fluids in a quivering animation
From just looking at me, you  can read my mind and you know very well how much I hate your trivial lifestyle with those big, useless idle creatures and how you're "traditional and religious" and how you believe everything is okay
When you die, God will ******* and your life will then end
Your family prays that my words won't **** you but your alienated brother is living on the streets with poppyseed chills running down his crippling spine
It's like he doesn't exist
And it's too late for me because you're calling for bad weather
I'm in your begrudgingly deep **** hole if my landing is safe so let's hope the parachute doesn't open
Just calm down and let me imagine myself rolled into a ball naked, and the room is covered in wires; on the ceiling, on the floor, on the walls, all covered in wires
They can hear me, the room is ******* tapped, they can hear me
Talking to you

You better be thankful
Because no other day you would be

sugar and ****** are the same thing
minus one clean curtail:
the breadth of the crystal is a lame liquid
the flower is self-aware
one knows the power,
has never braved a shower
the other has the breath of a child
heavy ignorance pooling in the air

which one day corrodes with realization
but the other has been
known
always known


to opal opoid Poe traces can be found in down trodden spaces
they caved to impermeance and the ultimate tempter
****** outlining a safe haven for injection
to escape the wind of the winding helicopter wings
by words


the uprooting of the white sand cube crumbles
easily
as though it faked the illusion of beating,
being
and the waves lapped it time after time
making an imprint impermanent to becoming numb

did the classics have it right?
or did they fear dismally to stray from the unearthed crack
something that would unviel multitudes
a seam that would bust and be confused
unleash madness
it only looked as such
but touching a pinky into the ripples reveals
busted seals and phony penguins
curling around their fake egg for sixty days
keeping their minds out of reach of those
who yearned for ebullience
and pretending they contained the very essence of it
they didn't really know

only a small few
in a field
on a sunless day did
or in the middle of a bell jar with cyclones
spinning around the globe
wiping raw the temporal portions
lobes sorting right from wrong

or did they all have it skewed because their sheets were never torn
and they never had to witness what it was like to go to sleep on
a cumbersome cloud and wake with their lips to a puddle in India
poor and cold
both young and old
noticing nother other than what could be
and seeing logic as a spun out drunk
the one in the puddle who has no opinions for others
or flowers or mothers or god

not slicing themselves with invisible butter knives
or asking nicely for advice
but cracking their skulls in sleep
with the cackle of crows
and rusty crowbars

i just know this
the sugar, the plainness, the liiiiiiiiiies
are nothing compared to the lilies seen after getting burn blisters
from black rains produce; poppyseed planes
i know the sugar-coated croaks were toads
diluting their world in no's
afraid to change it
to change it to yes
to say something else
something far away
but attainable


and maybe coughing and once noticing
that no matter what

we are nothing

and doing it all the same

We sat in the back of science class
bored out of our minds; we'd hit each
other with pencils across our forearms
until we were striped red and white and

we looked like dancing shrimps. We found
comedy in hurting each other, playing
both sadist and *******, feeling
the power of inflicting damage
and the humility of pain.

Years later not much had changed—
the pencils now needles, blood striped our arms.
The classroom, like my home—now a car, we joked
about burning a library in Alexandria. The humor remained

but it had changed; no longer about what lied ahead
we joked about what was;
architects of a fallen temple
that never stood yet continued to be raided.

Once the jokes became stale
I couldn't swallow them anymore
spitting out a poppyseed after
receiving the Heimlich maneuver

yet others choke their whole life
on a hollow humor tumor
benign until malignant
the ruins of their adytum
cover the hill to die on.