wait.
i remember
when you said my illness
does not (will not) define me.
but i see words beneath
the webbing over platelets
and they tell me
there is nothing more
than their mark.
and so i tear them open;
let them free
and i hope
the blood will wash
away the ink.
it turns out
you lied
when you promised
i was more.
Bed
Your lips were like honey
on my cracked lips
at midnight.
And I will taste you
again
in the bottom of my cup;
sleep blinking out of my
tired eyes
and dreams of your
honeycomb lips
and beehive tongue
slowly fade
a
w
a
y
I always thought my butterflies died
with my soul.
I imagined the wings
cut by razors
and eyes clouded by pills
would fall next to
broken
shards
of what used to be
hope
and
laughter.
There was a butterfly graveyard
of wings falling to dust;
bones of men long forgotten.
But
perhaps not.
For there was a flutter of wings,
(though only a nightflyer)
that stirred up ashes
and monarch ruins
when a deep timber
promised me
a touch.
Fall of 2011, I was on the subway,
and I remember meeting eyes with a girl,
we kept looking at each other and we
didn’t really look away. I feel like we
saw each other in such an intimate
way from across the car. I wanted to
talk to her, but I was way to shy
and she was much to close to
seeing my soul making just a
few feet seem way too far.
Writers
are nothing but words;
we are idioms
metaphors/mantras/malopropisms
that live only in print.
And I wonder,
will we bleed ink?
(Did Hemingway leave Rorschach?)
If my wrists
are caesured will it be black?
(or lilac like my favorite pen?)
Bones made of syntax;
fingers made of hyperbole
that can caress skin like dionysian imitatio.
Lungs made of meter
and versed veins/alliteration arteries
that pump us full
of oxygen wasted until
those final breaths
(of genius).
We lie gasping in de’nouemont
leitwortsil tongues muttering
(Was Raleigh’s strike a graphite smudge?)
Will we leave drops of bloody words
or ashes yellowing like pages?
How do I summarize
17 years of life of a boy
who never got to live?
Years spent in pain,
in braces and wheelchairs,
society giving him up,
family refusing to let go.
I’m only a sad minstrel,
trying to spin rhymes
about a boy broken,
only in his body;
And how does one
tell of the joy in his eyes
at the touch of a sibling
or the sound of his laugh
as he tasted a drop
of birthday frosting?
How do I tell the pain
that comes with his
last, smothered breaths?
I can’t fill his empty bed,
or give his brother back
a friend and his mother a son.
He was a boy, no older than me.
Life taken from the start,
but happier than the giggles
he uttered, the smiles
he caused.
How do I tell
the essence of him?
Mixed hips carve into the
soft gesso flesh that joins
at the heat of the heart of her;
And spilled ink fingers leave
merlot paintings on the clean
virgin canvas of her sloping hips.
Of her crumbling paper mache limbs;
Obsidian eyes pass over a
ceramic glazed face to the
dip of her uneven breasts,
and steaming breath burns
slurred curses into the slope of
her blown glass neck as she
lets herself shatter in the heat
of the kiln; and oil pastel
eyes roll behind her transparent lids
into a plaster of paris skull.
And the perfectly blended man
shudders in his marble sculpted
frame; he misses the watercolor drops
slip from pure pigment eyes
concentrating only on the soft rasp
of brush on canvas and the burnt
sienna starburst behind clay-lidded eyes.
she didn’t have words to speak
for no words could do justice to how she felt
so she tore open her chest
and exposed the flowers and vines wrapped around her heart
protecting her, from everything she was afraid of
but she didn’t want them there anymore
she wanted to be
vulnerable
darling i can see you were crying
please, don’t try and hide it
let me come hold you
and tell me why, you feel like dying
i’ll comfort you with my touch and every kiss
you’ll soon forget what upset you
and begin to realize
that this is what you truly miss
