it hurts

to let go

my thoughts are never soft or even necessary. they spin like wind shaken leaves inside my veins, dripping, smoky soft and irreconcilable. my charisma is bricks. my humor is a punching bag of everyone i want to love but can’t and

my fingers are small with secrets. my heart- candid. striped and tassled with hugs and penance. the opportunities i tune into are tricks. the weather i face is where mild writes in diaries. my body is numb and imperfect, but it is mine, so it is a map of the world. i’ll take it.

i told myself i’d write something every day this year

someone i know has a mother who got her addicted to coke at age nine

the pain is beautiful

nothing to say

if you say no,
then no it will be.

“you could just call them nightmares.”

i keep having these horrible dreams
then i wake up
and i keep having these horrible dreams

yesterday night,

i caught the pads of my fingers on a million slicing edges before i knew it was my skin. i woke up cold. sweating. behind my knees, inside my elbows, in the crease of my eyelids, i heard, i swear, i heard the nervous breath of a monster. some great and terrible thing, unholy like me, waiting for his chance to grab hold of whatever is left peeling. trashy white betraying skin, ragged broken bumpy skin, lying dirty boring skin. dramatic skin. i molded like a clay pot, like the ones i used to set carefully into heated kilns to bake away the mistakes and the brushstrokes. i froze. not a monster, but something else. an ache, so heavy it had its own shadow. it sat, this weight, it sat next to me and touched my hair and put its finger into my chest and dug out gold with a dull nail. it locked the last lock, shut the book and let all the dust sneeze sporadic, it turned off the light. the same light that promised never to go out.

my body spun itself into a right angle, into the right angle, and it began to condense. but the cracks across my skin, they widened like ocean gaps. the grip on my wrists loosened into prayers, and the apology braids of my tumbling hair became finally, frighteningly still. the door that i opened and the room that i stepped inside were both bare, painted white, wooden and inviting. my incapable feet slid slowly across creaking planks and dead bugs and dead pain, towards the center. there he stood, sullen and aggregate. terrible too, in his own way. i prayed for a kick in the teeth. for damp clothes and crawling through forests. no. i got a nightmare and i got an echoing hallway and i finally got up. he, the being, the weight, was only a cloud of my breath, a trick to tangle my wire mind. when the door closed, my eyes did too. and my two hands, wrecked from holding onto the fight, tightened back around the fucking fight.

synonymous

so much to be thankful for. so much to be hands tied air sucking honest ugly crying red high heels and faith professing even jesus loving shit to be thankful for. a family born from blood and from pain and from laying mulch and pulling weeds and letting the son’s hair grow and believing in the mistakes of the father and coughing on the restlessness of one thousand risky spirits. digging holes not meant for graves, just shovels and truth. thankful for the similar bone structure. for matching freckles and matching laughs.

thankful for friends and steaming showers and soft playing records, for piecing together the truth and for cracking apart the backbones of river wading dumpster divers. thankful for the secret keepers, for their beautiful connected veins. for perfection found around a mouth pushing vowels into open space. words to be trapped and jotted and multiplied and noosed around golden ticking heartbeats. thankful for the to and fro of a handful of soulmates, blissful and youthful and weathered so sweetly. glued tight like book chapters. like the legs of a grander machine.

thankful for heartache, for the pendulum and its predictability. thankful for the rue of winter that comes tucked in coat pockets, for the slicing betrayal of warm weather in fall and for the necessary trails of slime left behind. for the complications, the simplicity, the single answers to impossible endings. thankful for life. for ability. for failure spun like sugar making cobwebs. for the gratitude that comes shredding out so easily. thankful for gender and mind fucks and cavern eyes and a certain tone of voice. for fear. thankful for two billion memories, for songs and colored pens and holding hands and sharing lives. for nothing i remember, for everything i forget.

thankful, in general, for infinite unbelievable transcendent love
and for my words that cannot come close to containing it.

i think i saw you in my sleep

finding peace is breaking promises

infinity
perpetuating
reality

and i am a quitter.

the further

two decades and a sailboat, on top of wind like poetry and a blown out canvas steering wheel. here’s paradise. here’s whipping hair and heated skin. here’s let down and escapism and motivation and stagnation and favoritism. and visions and first aid and jazz blues. involuntary muscle spasms. naked toes on hardwood floors. arms on hips. bruises. here’s the perfect island getaway. right in front of me, as close as my tongue to my teeth.

door slam. go home.
grow up, fever dream.

House of Flies

You, the caged, the wholesome, the ransom note, as fitted to my own tastes as velcro, as tight around my own heart as a tapered shoestring. Helpless to the bind you are caught in. You, the deer only seconds before the bullet hits. Packed bloody with an entire lifetime, only to become someone’s dinner. Simplicity, deception, affection, disorder.

You, the hunter and the hunted.