i feel sick

i don't exactly
know why
but somehow
it is you,
sweet, gentle
you
who has
made me feel
more unwanted,
more unattractive,
more useless
than anyone else
ever could.

gnashing

well, if both of us have torn parts
of ourselves out
with our teeth, then
at least we know
we don't make
an ill match.
it is no consolation,
though,
this along-side ache

full of heavy silence sighing through
our noses, our lips clamped
upon our treacherous tongues,
the
eerie
quiet
pacing through the house
until the endless rushing cycle of tormenting thoughts
stops.
halts.
begins to blur from your intoxicants [take your pick,
it's all numbness
in the end.]

we crash into ourselves and
pass through one another like ghosts.

S [elf] I [sh]

call my cutting selfish all
you like, it
will not alter your self-absorption

the way you want me to wear
a band-aid
to cover the scabs
your guilt can't stand to see,

not because it will help me heal.
i think
it's a clear way to see
what lies between us: you,
handing me a small bandage saying,
cover your wound.
be
happy, i cannot bear to watch
you cry.
i can hide
beneath flesh-
colored tape if you really want, but

it will not erase your involvement
in creating the melancholy
i wrap myself in
like a shawl.


UPDATE:
the picture of the painting this poem has also become:

the den

if i fall asleep on the couch
one more time,
i'll scream

so i occupy my time with obsessive
internet surfing
don't
know why they call it surfing
it's more
like being caught in
a riptide. you go
where it throws you.

sick of being not-tired
waiting for the clock to circle back
into hours that seem reasonable to more
than chronic insomniacs,
or just those
whose brains spiral into the void

he loves me not, he loves me not. he
loves me. [not.] she. they.

trying not to stare
into the mirror, as though
somewhere on my body is written
an answer my brain might accept,
or,
failing acceptance,
curl around
like a cat.
some nights
might be better, i might be able
to tell you
if i could remember with clarity
what blurs.

the act of breaking

i.

what supersedes
the act of breaking?
can you add insult?

glass knocked to the floor
tinkles into pieces that still fit
with glue. it does not alter the fact
that what you have left is
a facsimile.

you tell me
you are broken

and now i'm wondering if this can really harm me
i mean, you make me cry, but
i’ve been broken by better than you

say that glass was a window
if a window is broken
can thrashing the pieces to glittering dust
alter the effect of its breaking?
you can stomp the shards into a puddle and spit
in the residue
but
after glass is no longer
a window
it does not matter next
how it is split in two.





ii.

all last night i dreamed of her, as
i am sure you also dreamed

waking up every hour, or less, to
stare at the clock and wait
for night to be over.
you want me to hold you, but
you won’t hold me

and i have her face inside
my head, the girl you really
think could be “something,”
despite the fact that less than
a months’ worth of knowledge lives
between you.

and what
am i? you tell me
i am wanted i
am loved i am amazing i will find
another

am i so wanted, then, after all?

i refrain from the act of breaking
holding myself upright in a steely grasp
grinding fragments into something
that melds.
sometimes
i have fantasies of acting
as broken as you claim to be

but i’m applying the pressure until i stop
feeling anything at all, although
my body
bears the brunt
of my refusal.
this morning, brushing
my teeth
i vomited into the sink
nothing but blood came up
and i watched it swirl down
the drain, thinking
this is not reality.

this is not a life.





iii.

“i love you,” you say, dick-deep
inside of me
break-up sex,
you’re calling it, as if there
could be such a thing at the
end of a relationship you

never acknowledged.

i know
your heart
is tied in knots, but you don’t
understand what i see
beneath
the lies you keep telling me,

or why i am
holding on.
and i lie
three thousand miles away now,
alone in a strange bed
imagining
unknown situations you are
or aren’t going through,
jumping
at the sound of the heater
clicking
on and off
hurling what little i eat
and drinking wine i have no taste for.
you keep telling me i lose nothing
and perhaps
i lose nothing but you

but in the month you’ve been unable
to leave my bed, i have come
to understand the complications
of love.
lie all you want.


your body is still
next to me.





iv.

so abrupt
one day consoling, the next anger
touching your voice, barely restrained

it does not matter
whether you’ve had her in your bed,
i felt you draw away

i will not need to ask.

that morning i awoke from a
nightmare,
noting the incredible
ill-timing of dreaming true.
if it’s
all the same to you,
stop trying to console me
it is only appeasing you
and your slow letting-go.
no.
i
will not be comforted,
i do not want to,
will not
hide this from you

what a kindness
that would be, were i
to give it.





v.

it’s the tenuous peace we’ve erected that
i’m scared of shattering
terrified
not just of arguing or
the [almost] accepted worst-case

i’m more afraid of better
a little something unexpected

and i don’t have the resources
to bear another change, the violent flipping
of the hourglass back
& forth, before the
sand can go from one
direction
to the other.
my body’s
wound tight and twitching
awake into the night,
blinking
towards morning, and plane engines and uncertain reunions
at variable times
i am weary of watching my hands tremble
on my novel page

see, i’ve got this infinitesimal thing
clasped delicately
under my ribs and although
i told it to die, it turned to me and said
“Fuck you, Bitch”

it is this very last reserve of myself
i am bone-weary afraid
of breaking





vi.

talking about your disjointed
painting, you said

“i feel this is like
the last month of my life – pieces
look pretty but the whole is
chaotic. yet
i must paint it how
it must be.”

well
i say to you – here’s what this month’s
been like
for me: angry

red and rent flesh on my arms
bisecting the clean lines
of parallel, occasionally weeping

and when they finally scab, i
take my fingernails
and time and time again
scratch the layers away

until they toughen
into tissue that will not alter

no matter how i worry them. they build
armor and remain
raised
scarlet in their anger screaming,

“no, you cannot
touch me. i am impervious
to you.”

go ahead

stare,
my skin
is thick enough to take it,
even thicker
in the places you're
viewing with that look
of indecision, trying to
figure out whether to
find meaning in my
skin's incoherence,
the bisection and incision,
the permanent things
we do that stay with us,
no matter how we try
to shake it off

so teach me

it would be, perhaps,
indelicate of me
to ask
if you want to fuck

but the curiosity's
eating in.

every time we meet,
a different reflection
glints from your corners.
i have seen the proper
classroom mask, the
wet&freezing ocean you,
sweating, breath in my ear hiking,
casually revealing you,
the
fireandnight side,
crashing beside me wildly through plants, and
brandishing an ear
of corn like a saber against
the darkness where our flashlights
do not penetrate.
it is
you, every time, whose
long fingers tap out
deliberately inconsequential invitations -
what next, where
to?
i
know what i find in you;
but
your kaleidoscope faces
do not give me the reasons
you show me
your patterns.

in which i realize

i find my priorities have changed.
i don't
want things to remain the same.
& i find you
in this time warp,
trying to squeeze into the mold
we both said we'd never fit in,
i watch you
& wonder where i would be,
had i not stuck
through the dull inanities of the south,
held my ground until my sense of self had
gelled
into what i want to be.
now i watch you and assume the area's
ironic smile, when i realize
that i assume about what you do, only
because i am right about you.
i miss
the easy rolling intimacy of
our earlier years, but know
the past can't be repeated.
i am trying to forge something new, the
push & pull of new scars stretching
into a place we may carve for ourselves,
that is,
if you are willing
to make me any room at all.

spontaneously

i'm obsessed with dancing in the kitchen,
i mean
i realize
it's not your average discerning factor
as to whether the one we fuck
is the one we love,
but still i'm
telling you, take my arms
and
fold them around you and step on
my toes
and off we go around
the kitchen in circles, my head whirling
from too much on-the-house
vodka.
kiss my shoulders i
don't care what music is playing, just

make me laugh
and let me
get dizzy on you

interpret

yesterday i stepped out
of myself for a few minutes, peering
curiously into
the life i'm leading, looking
for signs, or an explanation

floating over the encircling
arms of the one who shares my bed,
i said
something is all wrong
with this picture, i don't
know what it was; maybe
i was too high

but it all gets mixed up
into hoping
that when this is over we'll love
each other as much
as when we were
fucking

the pulling moon

i want to know
where it comes from:
our moisture that wicks into
our underwear, does it
spring forth
as a cave
bears its water on
its walls?
or
are we wet from
the womb's ceaseless sea,
the shifting tides?

today my thighs are still
damp from clenching you, last night,
into me

and i rub my own spunk between
my fingers, salty like the
ocean.
we are all
only
the legacy we leave behind,
if we
leave anything at all

like waves
who vomit shell, fish, and other
debris onto shores washed
by other waves,
who take
what has been given
and leave more in its stead.

"service with a smile"

how quickly
i remembered the dance
the pop-top, palm cash
into hand,
click-click ca-ching,
thank you, here's your change.
seven twenty-five.
whirling
a flimsy straw into the vortex
of someone's nightcap,
or their addiction,
the cigarettes and worn flannel
creep slowly
into my skin.
i cover my awkward,
cuckoo presence: drip
my accent out
in doses, the way it
springs through when i speak
to my family through the phone,
laugh louder at the jokes
from the chauvinists
as if
i, too, grew up in this
particular cultural poverty. here,
my teeth alone mark me as foreigner.
now, i'll practice again the art
of submerging all of me
that does not belong, and waiting
until i reach my car to gasp
for fresh air.

infection

i'm gasping
for breath and you moan alongside
me, push your sleeping head into
my neck like a cat
rubs the one
who feeds it. i don't know
how i caught your fickle feline fancy exactly
but i'd lay odds you're also
drawn by what you can't have.
miaow.
i'll pet you anyway, in my stilted
sort of manner.
if my pores
would just open and breathe
for me i'd join you
on that pillow and stop
rasping through my half-
closed throat but
every method tried
thus-far's a failure, and i have to admit
there's a certain satisfaction
to watching you sleep. there's magic,
somehow, in the still hours. the night
even sleeps, the dead leaves
catching catnaps on their branches
before tomorrow plummets them
to the pavement.
and over
and over i ask myself: what
keeps me? why
am i staying?

soaking

i'll watch as you slowly drift
closer to me
almost touching.
our arms wave in the current
of the water and hang limp,
and well-heated.
your voice
has taken on that confiding tone
i know so well in you,
and i'm warming a bit -

but my trust still oozes slowly
toward you, cringing away
as if expecting a blow.

nudity

sometimes i read
what i have written
years ago,
and it's like a ghost
shouting
from long ago
screaming,
~ please
do not leave me behind ~

it all gets mixed up

i want to say it, but
there's no ears to pick it up.
dear
anonymous: i wish
you were here.
i've been
thinking of writing letters to myself,
scribbles
of indecision
i etch into my memory.
mind-masturbation, a voice
answering my half-assed questions.

i'm too emotional about this,
i keep
thinking i should approach it rationally
but i'm not rational
i'm right out of my head, heart and convictions
while thinking i could just as soon
use the time alone
to talk myself out of what i'm feeling.
it's not real
it's not real
it can't be.
too much to be really happening.

my mind is tired of the racing and
it's no surprise to me,
really,
how much i've been drinking.

either way

i think i need to be left alone
in my private hole
to mull it all over.
i need
to let my private life back in.
i've lost a few parts
of myself on the trail from here
from the life i used to lead,
i missed a turn
somewhere, to end up where i am.
today
i wish i could be completely alone,
no human contact until i've figured out
how human i really am,
i want things
so impossible at this point i'm starting
to give up.
outside it's attempting
to rain, a few drops at a time.
i'm huddling above this book and my
bedcovers and i want to lock the door
i don't have,
to keep myself
inside long enough to figure this out.

burn it onto your retina

remember her face.
remember
rain falling so hard you shoved the window up
and let the water puddle on the
windowsill and the floor, holding
her in your arms.
remember.
or don't.
forgetting comes easy with anguish
make it a blank, black wall that
will not collapse no matter
how hard you'll pound on it later,
wanting back those years of your life.
forget.
remember
she wasn't everything you made her
out to be, a small dark
chaotic whirlwind swirling
around the memories
of who she was. of who you were.

the coffee table hits right on the shins

my house is still unfamiliar enough
that i sometimes miss the last
step
going
down the
stairs,
landing
on the carpet all arms and knees,
just enough impact to get an
"oof"

but it reminds me
of how impermanent i have been
flicking around
waiting to take root somewhere.

i think i'm trying to root here, but
it's
off-putting, the newness of
it all, the jarring realization

that this is nowhere near home
nowhere near.
surroundings i know in the dark
are far from me now.

in this house i stumble
in every room, waiting
to learn it.
waiting
to be sure i won't be leaving
too soon for the knowledge
to matter.

it's novel

tonight my only friend
has 645 pages
a hefty hard cover,
and no way
to wipe off the tears i try
to will away.
i'm sure
my face is steely, but the
impassiveness doesn't matter
to my eyes, which follow,
stubbornly, their own course.

my own victory is to go outside
alone
and experience this silently,
staring at the stars and waiting
for the moon to be full enough
for my howl to seem merely
theatrical.

waiting for the world to
turn around again.