The sad ones they
see.

How some things are harder to embrace.

Dear one, you are loved, it will get better and I know it is hard to see how. It is hard to see when the dust settles, and you are surrounded by the ways time stretches and suffocates you.

And it is so easy for you to laugh, and I am so jealous sometimes because of the crippling consuming emptiness and sadness and awareness that you do not have.

Why is it so hard for me to be light?

These clothes don’t matter. This body doesn’t matter. We will be gone and everything you are will be gone and what matters? What matters?

Maybe the tree shouldn’t have been eaten from. Maybe it would have been better not to know. Instead of the gasping,

I am always gasping. And it hurts so much.

It’s not that

I am sad or want to be gone or want to have pain.

But I have looked at a length of a belt, and snapped the black leather between my palms, and thought of the agony of waiting to cease to be and watching those you love cease to be and thought maybe I can’t handle this— all the waiting and watching and maybe in some ways it would be calmer to ebb away now on my own time.

my own choice instead of waiting to see when I couldn’t have this and them any more and being oh so sad it is ending instead of being able to be present instead of just watching it end.

I wish I wasn’t aware sometimes

it would be simpler not to be noticing

the way everyone is going about around me like a life is  a thing that doesn’t end like they are

on the track moving and running and I am hoping and hoping

I keep being frozen and waiting

but I gasp, I gasp noticing how we all keep going,

dear friend,

we keep going.

whispering heart you always

try and fool me like a colorblind pup who chases after the same parts of toys thrown in fields for him,

and can only bring back jagged broken bottles

oh why do you sear my gums with your green glass

why do you insist upon

cutting the flesh until I am only a ragged old thing

and I spin and turn upside down for you

exposing my underside and wanting only some affection somehow

maybe it’s time to stop staring and letting it go

You were it, the treasure that I’ve always searched for, golden beautiful love of mine.

Even if it is one year, maybe two— I can feel wanting your lips more than I’ve wanted any type of honey or mangoes or even water when the air is thick with how much I need. I am suffocated by the extent of my need for you. I can breathe in the ways in which I was clear- ah the clarity! I loved you, dear, I loved you oh. How I did.

hush now, mind and words floating around trying to explain away

the feelings and the way may chest constricts and expands breathing you in, even now.

so much time, and I wait

for your smile and spirit to release me from the way you clutch onto me.

sigh gasp, I know, you don’t want me the way I consume you (oh, how you consume me).

"I like to think of you in that little town," she said. "Happy and frozen in those photos of you and the sea."

if I were just a little bit wiser I would have

been troubled so much sooner by this.

It has been a hellish year and

shouldn’t someone who says they wish you were “we” want to at least

know the truth?

My body is a stranger

It unwillingly lumbars from place to place aching all the time under the strain of having to carry itself from the garden back to the concrete and swelter under the heat of airconditioned vents and the keys chattering away on a keyboard.

Sometimes we shut our eyes and there is the burning when the oxygen hits them and every breath is ours and we fought goddamnit for it and sometimes

the only thing I can say I’ve done is made it until I could crawl into my sliver of a bed and move the dog to the right side and, stretch out my muscles and tendons and all the other things the body is and

try and recognize my life as mine and not some distant life that I keep watching happen to some distant girl, like a movie that I have muted on in the background while I 

iron my clothes and yours too, and make food for the men in our house (because that is what the women do)

and clean the food scrapes and scraps off of the table and sweep them onto the floor until the boys then step on them, barefoot, crumbs sticking to their toes and

trying to sleep after a long, long day of apologizing

(because that is what the women do).

 am never raunchy I always

say the polite thing and make sure the polite feelings

flicker across my face

fuck

I am a deceiver

I plan it I plan

the way you will react to my subtleties

I plan the way you will see me flinch or see the vacant expressions cross my face I plan

the tiredness and the revolving door slamming in your face

and the way I shudder away from you or have distance and

I know if you are smart you will see what I’ve laid out for you

When really I am just blank and 

the politeness in every fucking day makes me want to 

rip off the heads of magazine people and

shove their smiles into bottles of empty cola and

take another shot of whiskey so you can feel like you can finally decode what isn’t there.

I’m sorry it isn’t and I’d

try a little harder if I could.

From my insides wretched and writhing, I have been told.

Wretched, writhing creatures and

when I imagine this I think of exploding faiths and dogmas, the way you took my heart and scrambled it, sizzling my mind and interweaving truth and crunchy apples wrought with worms eating the flesh inside and out;

and brie (soggy on the cracker) fatty and savory, melting on the sides of my tongue. Appetite (yes), but

Sopping wet with entrails and telling me that it was caviar (but from the insides again)

How do you disentangle your own morality from the dead and expired bodies lying on the ground, rotting and seeping back into the earth?

In the pictures painted on doors and houses and on the sides of the walls, the lambs were always wholesome and cradled and protected.

This was never the whole truth, was it? How could it have been when the things we take we’ve deemed more precious broken into parts and pieces than as a whole?

How could you not mention the pieces of chipped white paint underneath the nails of those clawing at the images on church doors?

These pieces are needed to construct an entire portrait, yet they are splintered in the fingertips of girls with long hair that hasn’t yet had time to be twisted into braids.

Every bit of me tries to stay in the present even though

I cannot help but race around the time in my head, the pounding maniacal self inside this skull that refuses to be content with the things a life are made of;

and I know of heroin that you are engulfed by pleasure waves streaming through your veins and that is why white women in their mid-thirties berated us to choose wisely and

what was I but someone who could choose.

Gratefulness is always expected of those allowed to be. My issues with God always came down to this, the measure of where my gratefulness should be and where it was and is.

I am only afraid because I never let myself slow down and it is tiring, and now I take sleeping pills to sleep and then I can never quite manage to be awake.

The way you move against me even when I’m not there and you are lost

no, not lost, just

a little unwilling to be found,

shudder, sigh and a lisping fan sputters the honesty we couldn’t

my hand feels for how soft you are, yearns for it, my ribcage melts under the pressure of everything you keep demanding from me

taking more, taking more

and sometimes the games end in sweaty limbs huddled next to each other, hoping the fire in the room won’t singe the eyelashes from our bodies.