to do list

I went to the dentist today.
Sterilize me,
bleach, scrape, poke.
I am raw and helpless before you,
whirring whiteness all around.
I give you pleading eyes:
please save me from this mess.
Swish and spit, you tell me. Swish and spit.
I went to the car wash today.
Massive mops attacked us,
they couldn’t seem to reach as far as they had hoped.
Hot wax and three rinses,
blind me with soap and then clean me,
I am quiet and excited in the dark.
The radio plays steadily on.
Go, you tell me. It’s time to go.
I showed up at your house today.
Colonial and clean,
dark green couches and a glowing TV.
Silence me, offer me a drink,
You stood there at a loss.
Swish and spit, I told you.
It’s time to go.

Loved the Way I Deserve

How quickly it all rots away,
old milk, apple slices browning on the counter.
What is deserved? Death penalty, chocolate cake with a candle,
$100 dollar fine for going too damn fast.
On my day off I baked you peanut butter cookies
I pressed the back of a fork into them,
crossing lines, artistic flourish.
In the end when you soured it all
I ate them myself.
Not because I deserved them,
but because you didn’t.
In the end we all get what we had coming:
mine is the soapy floor, browning apples,
fine for going too damn fast.

beasts have it better

Lend me your tears and I’ll lend you my heart,
between the two of us there is spine enough to stand,
eyes enough to face the day.
Lead me to the water and I’ll carry you through,
its all weightless anyway.
You with the brittle face, so easy to break.
You with the mask that slips
only when you are already hidden.
Give it all to me and I’ll swallow it whole,
you’ll never see it again.
Tear it all off and naked we’ll run,
the moonlight will pass
easily through our emptiness.

fresh out

Sit back and try to make sense of it all,
you out there crashing into things
and me here chewing my nails,
flakes of old polish like red bloody gashes on my lips.
How did I go from “stay, baby stay” to crushed, lonely, so tired of it all?
How did you go from “I’ll always love you and be there for you, no matter what”
to this endless silence?
You even said that you’d be there even if we didn’t stay together-
I knew, like a guilty little kid, that we wouldn’t.
Did you really believe it?
Forever like a marzipan palace, like a Disney movie.
I wish I could ask you these things.
Instead I repeat them to the blank page on my computer screen,
Looking at your screen name that is “available”
I know that you aren’t available for me. That door got shut quickly,
And I’m trying to believe I wasn’t the one who shut it.
No amount of small talk will bring it back,
but that won’t stop me from trying.

Zut, zut et zut!
I thought I was through with all this.
I thought I was strong, moved on,
hardheaded woman of heart and mind,
beautiful and independent.
Turns out I’m not even close-
I’ve just gotten good at avoiding you.
I’m really just small and bruised,
in need of a hug and good long vacation from your memory.
There is no backbone here. Independence? Fresh out.

....

someday
i hope to be loved the way he loves her.

passe

these poems make me cry for who i was
this is me without legs to stand. i think i am past this..?

Wish (september)

I wish.

There was a time when I had a relapse of kindergarten, when life was simple and fun and everything was in primary colors... thats how it was with you

There was no tension, only our lazy bodies strewn around your room like forgotten sweatshirts, conversation that was hardly ever important, and yet it was essential: it was us.

“I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me- without them I would have nothing to say, I would be a cardboard cutout.”

Thats what I am: rough, brown, and paperlike, I stand alone in a world of dark swirling colors, a world difficult to understand, a world I dont want to understand, one I dont want to live in or fit in.

And so Im here wishing, on stars and rainbow sprinkles and memories of what was, what could be but isnt

There is a mound of textbooks on either side of me, empty mailbox on the screen, a phone that will not ring.

I am surrounded by future, possibilities and potential and all I want to do is turn around and run, pumping my arms and breathing hard, burning calories like a madman and hopefully someday running headlong into something more real than what is with me now.
Something solid and rainbow, something endlessly important that I can safely care about, something that wont leave me like you are about to

...I need a hug.

Wish me safe, wish me warm and happy, wish me loved like you would love me if only you could be there. Wish that I could deal, move on and remember but not lose reality in remembering, wish me conscious, wish me real. Wish me luck.




Hey Love (october)

This is just me writing you a note to tell you how much I love you and miss you every day. I am probably supposed to be doing some homework as a write this, but I’m just having lots of trouble these days believing any of that’s important.
I miss the past. I miss security and love.
I need a hug, I need to fall asleep next to you with a smile on my face, I need to bury my face in your flannel sheets and smile at another day.
I miss those days.
I wonder if I will ever feel that again, I wonder if it was even real or if my nostalgic imagination has invented these possibilities gone past.
I think of you when I bake cookies.
I think of you when I cry. I think of you when I laugh.

The truth is I’m not sure if what I’m writing is true. Its possible I’ve moved on.
But in this moment of time it is truer than anything else in the world.
I feel very very alone. I feel very very consumed, like something is eating me from inside, an animal that wants very much to be out, something sucking all the meaning from my life.

I am hurting. I am hurting in a way that is so subtle and painless I did not realize it until I sat down to write and all this came out.

The mask has slipped, the rational, happy, hardworking half of my scitsophrenic being has split, hit the road, blown this popsicle joint. I am left with the reclusive half, the stay up all night and cry half, the binge-and-puke then run half.
The soul-sucking half, or maybe the soulful half.

I wish you were here, then instead of trying to put this into words id be dancing, kicking it all into a corner and letting you hold me and tell me its all my silly imagination.

You’re not. You’ve left me and my life and I’m trying to be OK with that like you are.
I will be someday, I promise.

My love, my support, my dearest friend, my heart and soul, what do I have left once you have taken the best parts of me with you?

it hurts

A dusky silence
nothing more.
Your hair was sunlit,
I was lying on the floor.
As I looked up at you,
your beauty hurt me deeply.
I knew it wouldn’t last.
Then the sun set, and in the dark I was lost.
Your bare legs were crossed,
eyes closed against the sun.
Your beauty hurts me deeply.
The shortest dusky silence,
nothing more.

reality (a november poem)

If I just lie here
pressing myself into the mattress, wanting to be swallowed
in fluffy white linen,
then I can believe you are here.
I can believe that all is right with the world.

Reality is the dropping temperature: it won’t leave me alone, won’t let me be comfortable, comforted, happy.
Reality is the angry woman: she smolders and stabs you in the back, she is quietly treacherous.
Reality is the knife in my heart, the pins in my eyes, the ache in my head.

In the middle of the night with my face in the pillow I can convince myself that reality itself isn’t real. That’s what I need to believe.

The reality, the real reality is that I’m here without you,
without anyone
and I miss who I used to be, I have somehow lost connection with that happy girl.
The reality is that I have a massive headache
and a chemistry test to study for and
I have lost all will to continue.

If I just lay here maybe they’ll forget me,
what I am supposed to do, who I am supposed to be.
Maybe the world will leave me be, pass me by,
and I can sink forever into feathered whiteness and dream dreams of a happier tomorrow.

cartoon

Like a cartoon character
who sprints off the cliff
runs a few yards before realizing
suddenly
that there is nothing holding him up.
I am caught in this gruesom limbo
lost in that second of realization.
I am unsupported
I am going to fall.
and there is nothing i can do,
nothing to stop me, break my fall.
just a cartoon character
invented, imaginary.
created for the sole purpose
of being laughed at
and then destroyed.
The anvil falls,
the dynamite explodes.
The coyote is smoking
and the roadrunner is long gone.
still i hang
caught in my moment of hilarious despair
waiting for the drop.

i tried.

I tried, but
the eggshells you set out for me,
a challenge for my careful feet-
I broke them.
I tried, but
even when I used
the French soap my mother bought me-
I couldn’t get clean.
I tried, but
the plane ticket I spent all my money on
just couldn’t take me far enough.
I tried, but
your water would not stay cupped in my hands,
and fell instead
pearlescent on the undeserving floor.
I tried, but
no amount of sunlight will make me open my eyes
I just don’t want to see.

shot in the dark

Aller tous ensemble.
En haut (hot black roof, burning feet)
En bas (a couch in the basement, tiles on the floor)
A gauche (her mother is making tomato soup)
A droite (out in the garden dusk falls quickly, stale in her mouth)
Rever tous ensemble
A dream of basil-scented evenings
Tous ensemble
A cartwheel in the dark
Ensemble
Making parentheses, imprints in the sand, faces in the stars.

running poem

Push.
Rhythmic pounding, rhythmic breathing.
She loses it all in the rhythm, pores pushing
all the fear out of her body.
Push beyond the pain, the twitching
muscle in her left ankle screaming in protest.
Pain is beauty, beauty is pain
Run for peace, run for security
She can’t decide if she is running away from the present
or running to the future
Maybe running to cleanse,
the rain begins in tiny droplets and soon
the t-shirt sticks and her ponytail
slaps her back and her nose drips.
She licks her lips and tastes salt.
She screams with her burning muscles, she cries with the sky.
Pain is real. Rain is real. She is not real, she is an echo of what was.
She is slippery, she is slick, she is nothingness.
She is producing carbon dioxide and sweat and pain,
so much pain.

certain defeat

She thinks maybe she has
Finally
Moved on.
Maybe it’s the way the grass welcomes her into its arms,
Maybe it’s the way milk tastes good again
Maybe it’s the
Railroad tracks she balances on,
Pink shoes gripping cool steel
As she waves her arms in a pinwheel of certain defeat.

stories

A dried flower
delicate dustiness in a forgotten book.
Close it all away to disintegrate slowly.
Time goes on,
relics of past love long lost
lie pressed between the pages of what had been and what is now.
Remember it,
the flower that crumbles into blackness
dreaming of the sun.

It’s the story I read in your face,
The smoke in your voice, the pain in your lips.
You have waiting eyes,
Waiting for god knows what but left waiting far too long.
It’s the smile I see which sometimes is very real,
The hope for humanity is contained in your kiss.

lost

Lost, so much lost.
How did you go and lose all that I gave you?
Holes in your pockets, leak in your heart?
How did you stab me as I lay down in front of you, a place for you to walk?
Spikes in your heels, lost love?
How did you lose it?
Great quantities floating somewhere in a forgotten corner
of the vastest of oceans.. like an oil spill,
coating the birds, killing the fish,
an overdose of passion.
How did I carry you? Weightless in the water,
wading through it all, a destination disappearing into a fogged horizon line.
A straight spine like toothpicks, lasting only so long.
Its not like I need the extra weight.

how?

1.
She thought of herself as clay,
the neon colored kind you mould into something exciting and carefully
wrap into plastic so that it stays soft.
She had always hated the softness, gathering on her stomach,
the pale fleshiness of her thighs and upper arms.
He could mould her into whatever neon shape he chose,
she was malleable, she was putty in his hands.
She smiled on every day, the colors he mixed, the shapes he chose.
Her happiness was tangible like powdered sugar,
light on the surface of tarts, breakfast delicacies
soft and sweet but always there.
He gave her roses, he gave her kisses as the
sun set softly over the parking lot.
She gave him neon shapes: dinosaurs,
hearts, polka dotted and swirled with color.

2.
He called her from a golf course in Florida,
she sat on her bed and looked at the rain falling out her window.
The wet rotting leafy world seemed to echo with
things fallen, things lost, the moment
when you look around and wonder where the leaves have gone,
when everything turned so grey and moldy.
He said that he missed her, and she wondered
what it was that he missed.
He had become the voice in her head, she
collected stories to tell him, she
predicted his reactions to her everyday ups and downs,
the screaming child in the grocery store, the comment
her mother made while cooking.