Glass Messiah

I have a crown of thorns twisted in my side, its
bleeding and festering
and somehow healing me from
the inside out, wrapping
its arms around each
muscle and vein, stretching
and squeezing until
I stop. I stop
fighting back, stop asking you to
make me holy again, stop
begging you to give
me a reason to pull
this tiara out of me, wash
it with some holy water and
wear it on my head
like the messiah
I was meant to be.
I stop bathing my own
feet, kissing my own
footsteps, weeping
in my own untimely death and all
because I’m not as satisfied
as Jesus was to be
naked and forsaken.
I can’t pretend to love myself
well enough for you
to love me, too. So please
leave me on a dirt road,
make sure I’m shoeless.
Break both my legs
and say, “walk.” Break me
beyond recognition,
enjoy the clamor of
shatter. Fuck me up
so badly that I have no
choice but to start
from the ground up.
Douse me in self-loathing,
wrap me in the ugly truths,
believe that I shouldn’t
be believed in.
Because I’ll never make myself
into anything until
I’m absolutely nothing
to you.

A Nautical Room

Your sweet breath swells
into mine, fills a sail
softly undulating as if
the winds of the world
waned away. You blow

heavy on my back when
the sound of your
discomfort fills the room;
you slip into
my sheets and watch
them billow above us,
giving half-satisfying
direction towards a
horizon lost. So we

sail on, buck up,
tie our shoes and wait
while sea water slaps
against the hardwood floor
and the breathless coastal fog
hovers above our bed. So we

wait for the instant when
I can make you better, wait
for when ecstasy isn’t
a curse, wait for
the moment when you can
finally love me, wait
for the day
I raise mast by myself.

Untitled (prose piece)

The moon swayed against her bare back every time the wind pushed with enough vigor to weave her body left. Its light hugged the swell of her breast, swiveled down her side unevenly. For a moment, she was fully exposed in the paleness. Then the wind would rise up again and the broken pendulum would shift left like before, swallowing her body in darkness. She eluded both the dark and the light, unable to balance herself on the grass below her naked form. So she swung back and forth, left to center, dodging the shadows for the light before involuntarily swinging back into the black again.

She was used to this inconsistency; the artist in her could sense it from simple moments like this one. Everything became a metaphor once she acknowledged her thirst for one. She wanted to believe that her inability to stay still was somewhat uncontrollable, like the way the beads of a kaleidoscope fall with the slightest movement, like the wind that eased her sideways. So she spent a good part of her evenings on the grassy hill behind her house, rising and falling with each breath, swinging left to right inside of the evening's unpredictable beat.

This is the woman I fell in love with. A woman who defined herself by the world surrounding her, a woman who eased her way into the universe as precisely and delicately as I eased my way into her mind, into her open body. This woman was poetry that flowed in the perfect places-- her hips melodically dipped into her waist and rose up again, billowing into the fullness of her chest. Her eyes were the punch line that killed, that broke the immaculate curvature I knew so well. Sometimes, I'd find myself lost in her softness, wrapped in the overwhelming effect of such subtlety. I'd watch her write in bed, following her lips and her hair and her spine and her fingers until she'd catch me staring and stare right back, breaking her general sense of tenderness with something staccato and poignant. Her eyes reminded me that she had meaning; she had a distinct and riveting pulse. She existed beyond me; she existed beyond herself.

And then she fell in love with me in return. She let herself succumb to the warmth between us and melt, molding inside of my every breath. She abandoned each curve that she loved, slapped her arms lifelessly around my ribs, dropped the look in her eye that once kept me hungry. All of a sudden, her pulse walked in step with mine.

I was lost—slithering away from her on a buttery track that she had kneaded with her own hands. Each touch became a more and more obsessive attempt for completion; she searched my body with her fingers, frantically seeking any trace of herself in my skin. And as she slept, in her only gentle moments free of desperation, I realized that she had cascaded into the most beautiful loss of self that I had ever seen.

Syncopation

I told you to put your head there
on my chest
as we lay in our bed.

I wanted you to hear my heart beat
and seamlessly float into
its rhythm,
our rhythm
of delicate sways and boundless ease
with no name and face
and age, no
latitude and longitude.

I wanted your heart
to not be alone for a while,
to follow.

As you sleep, I collect
your snores and sighs
in a jar under our bed. I swallow them
like water, gulping you in
until morning, when
you insist to once again
become plottable.

We split, we multiply.
Into all of our moments
without one another, into all of our
feigned strengths,
embellished and worn,
adding distinct recognition
to each syllable of our names,
differentiating.

I climb into this bed—
our bed—
and watch the demarcation.
I watch you lean into
my body and consume
the smell of my skin, I feel
your palms stretch
underneath me, their
desperate hunger
for completion.

We have diverged and we
have merged, monogamous
in a moment, synonymous
in an experience.

I hate myself for loving
how you love me
whatever way you can.

To Drink

The stains it left on my body leech
the artistry out of me, chafe
at my skin from the inside, brand
my face with a number, leave me
here for dead. And while

suspended between life and
the chance to live without you, I
ricochet between your palms
with no life at all. There’s
nothing here to excavate, no breath.

No lips, no lies, no justification
for the way these words rise up
to my chest and stop when
you give me a few foreign tears
to swallow. “Rub your throat,
baby, gulp down your pride
and let the breath and the heartbeat
drown with them.”

So I drink you in with half-assed prayers.

I drink for the way the house sounds
when the sound of your unease
floats away. I drink for the smell
of your skin in the morning
before you have the chance to
come clean. I drink when
you need me to, when I can feel
your cries swell up in my lungs
and escape my body in sighs—

I drink until I can’t drink any longer.

I Want To Howl

I want to howl—
to wake you from your half-masted sleep
and force your white flag up or down.

I want to peel away the sky
and find an unwritten metaphor
for everything I could never explain,
and then maybe re-carve all
the lines on my face so that
you could help chisel them away.

But I’m tinged red
from the numbers on the clock,
binding me to the sadness I never feel
from the look on your faces
when there’s nothing left to say.
I’m bound to the familiarity a child feels
while clinging to her new mother’s skin,
and to all of the sickening sweetness
that chains me to vacantly belonging.

I have never felt bound to you.

I want to howl to the moon and the earth
and the stars
and I want them all to howl back at me

because one idle moment and I’m
howling at the sea,
wishing it had worked
to keep us from the shore.

Invisible Blood

I was never fully satisfied, chasing you
on heels that weren’t yet broken,
dodging the defenselessness you allowed me to feel
like it was a bullet soaked in a plague.

But this Achilles found her weakness
when something in her ankles snapped
and she surrendered to the ground
apologetically.
I clung to you in spite of myself,
a tendril clasped for dear life
around the stoic woman
who found so much warmth to give
when needed in another’s darkness.

You work only by the moonlight,
working only with your hands:
silently, I watch you wrap your fingers
around my limbs
like an irrepressible vine,
attend to my reservations
like they belong to your own blood.

Blood—
an indelible tie of which
we can never be fully conscious;
the endless space we make in our womb
where ends don’t ever have to meet.

I’m on this earth to share the bonds
that warm my aching body,
here in skin and bones to watch
all of these bones break,
absorbing all the life you have to give
so that I may one day
give it back to you.

Witching Hour

In September, he found his witching hour,
while the rest of the house was asleep
and I was the only one left
to switch out the records for him—

To sing “teenage wasteland” with him,
to top off his rum for him,
to light his cigars.

In September, it was cool outside
but his body stayed warm.
I sat in the cold with him,
rocked in the wind with him,
my eyes following the furious sway
of his body with him.

But he wasn’t furious with me.

Baba o’Riley excited my father.
“Doesn’t this get your blood going, honey?
“Don’t you just need to hit something?”

I watched him dance with it,
the heavyweight bag flying seamlessly
between his drunken fists.
I watched him with frozen veins,
with all the need in the world
to sit still, to never hit anything
like he could.

He took his last swaggered punch
and I jumped to break his fall—
clinging to hands that know
my blood all too well;
haunted by a breath
that once kissed me goodnight.

A Benevolent Ghost

You’re haunting me.

You, like everyone else
Like the astronaut
Who called on the girl next to me
When my hand was held higher.
Like the man in the movie
Who helped Charlie blast his way
Through the ceiling in a glass elevator
But would never, ever help me.

You’re haunting me like a plague,
Swallowing me like sour beer,
Licking me up from between your fingers
to help clean your newest scrapes.
What is it about blood that’s so
God damn satisfying to you?

You’re haunting me like
You have nothing better to do,
No one better to love,
No other way to sleep at night--
Thinking I’ll understand
If you would just wait till morning.

You’re haunting me:
Like a wicked poltergeist,
Like all the loving mothers I’ve ever met,
Like all the sweetest moments
That we may never have.

You’re a ghost that I’ve only ever seen before
when it’s chained inside of myself.

My Eleventh Hour

I caught my own breath in my hands
and took the time to breathe it back in--
sweet and satisfied, stale and strangled,
spangled with lavender and sour milk
and what it means to be nationless.

Tell me you smell something different.

Tell me I'm bound to what I give
but never to what I am given;
that I can choose when the balloon pops,
when my corpse falls earthbound;
that the rushed and eager touches
I collect under my bed
can be quilted into
a sickening new height of love.

I can't remember who told me
that I wasn't young anymore.
It might've been the stout cashier woman
who proclaimed me a thief when I
slid a Snickers bar into my pocket.
It might've been my Playboy Mommy:
she warned me of the sins in my blood,
of her own obsession
with a woman's power to unveil.
Or maybe God told me on the day
when he made me suddenly
wretchedly
unequivocally alone.

On this ancient earth, I'm rarely glad to seem young--
until I'm tangled in sheets
and limbs I can't get out of,
until the simplest mechanisms of
a beating heart lose their intrigue
in my stoic desperation for blood.

Tell me you smell something different on my breath;
Tell me I can choose to be boundless.