I live my life

in extremes.
I summer in forever
and spend my winters
in never, I buy my groceries
in depression
and I buy my clothes
at chemical highs
and gaping smiles.
The only time I run
down the middle
is down my arm with
razor knives or down
the road, in a shitty
jalopy, going 100 miles per hour
falling off of the edge
of everything
into a pile of nothing.
I live like I’m dying
and I’m dying to stay alive
and that’s the problem with
extreme existence.
I’m too tired
to keep trying.

unsent love letters

in an abandoned storage shed
left by an old woman
whose husband killed himself
after coming home from the war
and they weren’t to him
so what does it matter if anyone
ever were to know?

Nothing sounds like
that body hitting the wall
and hitting it again
and that noose won’t give
because he tied it just right.
She’ll have trouble getting me down
he thought. Serves her right
for loving someone else;

Tastes like 
morgue air and
greeting card sentences
that find their way into birthdays 
and funerals because after all if we
really were sorry we would not bring it up again.

Idle nothingness leads to quaint lives and mediocre endings.

(Source: stumpypencils)

She was (naked, hopeless, pale
skin rolling like valleys of January
snow); making eggs.
She always cooked eggs
in her morning glory and
lit her cigarettes with the stove.
Grease popped and she
was never afraid because
she knew what it felt like to get burned.
The neighbors talked
and her nipples were cold
but she didn’t mind. Every morning
she waved to Mr. Charles
and his wife. Her curvature
an endless valley 
speckled with birthmarks.

I’d lie to you
I’d lie and cheat
And hurt and break you
Until there was nothing left
But a broken person under my feet.
I’d set you on fire to watch you burn.
I’d love you your way but I’m made for loving you gently.
I’m supposed to love you deep,
I am too tired to lie to you and you are too jaded to sleep.

I was never new
snow on an untouched
day - white and quiet, waiting;

I’ve been the vacant
lots and abandoned baseball parks
littered with loud weeds and bent fences;

I am the narrow alley,
I am the muggings and rapes
I am the tattered clothing of the vagrants,

the tunnel emptied of trains;
I am the sewer rats and the rain,
I have always been the things most hated

but I am never snow.
Not a single part of me
remains untouched.

Cup that sadness in your hands
and bring it to your lips like you
haven’t had a drink in days and

remember that sorrow
only tastes good when you
wash it down with a hangover

and someone else’s apartment;
tuck the napkin down 
your shirt as you button up your

pants trying to remember the name
of that moving body on the mattress,
think about just grabbing your 

shadow and leaving before it becomes
the morning after.
Feel yourself fill up as

you chow down on promises
and excuses and maybe someday
you’ll meet someone who 

is worth tonight and tomorrow
and maybe even the day after.  

I’ll just add killing myself
onto the list of things I forgot to do
along with looking both ways and
picking up my sister from the sitter,

shutting off the gas and 
closing the windows before the rain, 
leaving a note with enough reasons
for them to forget who I wasn’t able to be 
and letting the cat back in.

I forget to check the mail
forget blood stains come out with warm water,
forget to turn off the porch light,
keep forgetting that there is a difference
between Goodbye and I’m sorry 
never remembering the pressure needed to get it right 

I keep forgetting to give up 
and when I remember I always seem
to have something else to do.  

Theirs is a history I know nothing about,
a history siphoned through twined emerald
and Salvadorian leaves. Theirs is a
story told amid camp fire and gun shots,
shelling out at a time the caramel girl 
swings her hips to. She belongs to
ancient Gods and family recipes and 
a fifty year cigarette addiction. Her 
waist ricochets the metronome of the third 
world against the preconceived notions
of tradition. The one they call Flores
dances in the world at the same speed 
that it turns and she is years
behind me. Her feet pound the earth
that I am merely skimming. 
Where I pace the world with books and
dog-eared pages, her pace is a constant 
rhythm of mistakes waiting to be made
and rivers one shouldn’t wade. I am not
hunted; in the huddled concrete I am
nothing more than a fly looking out 
at the delicious world
rubbing its hands to the swiftness
of that caramel girl’s feat. 

I want to cut you 
out of the best words
in the English language 

want to fall in love with
the way you sound
coming out of my lungs
your consonants getting caught
in my teeth
vowels swimming
around my tongue
You are the word-of-mouth
I want to get sick of hearing

Keeping you cliche
would be like letting
the cat out of the bag
or love at first glance
and saying you are my
favorite song

because you are the track
I’m constantly skipping

and the first time I saw you, you spit in my face
telling me to go fuck myself

as you drove over my cat

When I’m with you
it’s like seventh heaven
until I realize
that this is hell
and there are circles
and being with you is like
trying to fit a square into every single one.

I want to love you with every word
but my love poems never seem to come out right. 

I exist
between your sheets
and tomorrow,

I am 
a layer of soft, decaying 
skin cells on your pillow

We took steps in 
regret and learning
how to hate one another
with our bodies and
our tongues
and it became so
routine
for you

to be the way that I breathe
and for me to be

the clothes on your floor. 

I’d like to say that I’ve forgiven you,
but I’m not that naive

like to think that I’ve
found and thrown out
every memory you left behind,

even deleted the songs
you used to sing along
to with a cigarette hanging
out of your mouth and
your beer can in
your right hand hanging
out of the car window 

I’d like to think that
I’ve buried you beyond
any depth a shrink
may stumble upon
in my twisted knots
and my daddy issues, 

but I can’t throw
away the scars
that decorate
my body

like graffiti on a mosque. 

I live with the obligation
to no one
but myself
to take this feeble thing
on these
tattered limbs out
and
take another shot
at
living. 

Bodies float on through this world
like paper boats
in torrential storms
as if no one checked
the weather

and isn’t it sad
to know
how fast
bodies sink
despite how long it takes
to learn how to float. 

You are the small spaces
between the person
that I am and the one I used to be

you are the seams that stick out
for the world to get caught in
pulling my strings and making holes
in the things I used to be

happy, healthy, whole

I try not to bite my lip
or my tongue anymore because
they were your bad habits
never mine but now all I can
feel is the small spaces
of me being tickled loose;

you are the perforations
I didn’t know
were so easily torn

and I am nothing 
more than the
scraps of paper
that everyone
throws away. 

make sure to hang me 
up by the front door so I can listen in
on you walking away

from the Sunday dinners and our late night
conversations. I don’t know

when you stopped being the
molasses running down my chin
and became the blood creeping
out of my nose but

I remember waving to you 
that first Sunday and
you waving back.

Your hand was
at the top
of the list
of things I shouldn’t count on
and it was on me in flashes
and when you broke my jaw
all I could remember was

me four years old
putting pennies in my mouth
to see what happiness tastes like.

Your hand was a child’s curiosity 
and your fist was a stray
bullet finding it’s way into a little girl.

I used to think 

your shoes were craters
that no ocean could fill,
but even those will walk on with
everything else about you

I keep thinking that your good-bye
will be a pool that isn’t deep enough to
dive into. 

you are the mass grave
my absent-minded thoughts will be buried into.

I am sorry for not
being the permanence
you needed me to be.

I apologize
for the frailty of my being. 

We tend to walk
so nimbly into each other’s lives
that we forget
how easily memories
stain the rug.

We leave our coats and
wine glasses empty,
waiting for something
else to fill the void.

It is fickle adornments
like me that cause the need
for you to have a way to cope
and I’m only sorry for the way that I am,
flighty and foolish.

I am the dream
and you woke up
and I am sorry I wasn’t
able to stay.

Leaving was such an instinctual
thing but for all that I am not worth
you are grounded.

Sturdy, dearest bark,
you are stable and you may 
stumble into others like me.

I merely hope you’ll find a winter
that they stay for