write hard and clear about what hurts.

01. Synapses

The synapses of a brain
are four cornered walls of a bedroom,
with a gentle drumming of a city background,
a highway chorus to fall asleep to
and posters of a metal band hung up
across every blank space.

Clouds above sparking
with impatient thunder,
the same thunder shaking fingertips
scrambling to write, the way bones
scramble and quake with
the holiness of becoming

mirrors catch us changing all the time

Ribcage bog, bones half-frozen
preserved in perfect prosperity,
an echo of a life that once was,
a silent sort of god-like
found only in the moss of forests,
in running rivers and carcasses
long decayed.

what is this journey?
a continuation of existence
spent all trapped in boxes
(bedrooms, offices,
jail cells, coffins) -
a single consciousness
seven billion times reincarnated,
a Universe's attempt
to understand itself
through star-dust
and humans.

Look upon the sky
and see yourself,
galaxy synapses
and stars like track marks,
together an ever growing question
that maybe
doesn't have an answer.

02. Tigers Feeding Chickens

I had a teacher,
once,
who told me:
'You have to do
a certain kind of writing
to be yourself.'

Since that moment, years ago,
it's stuck with me:
that phrasing, that truth,
the title of 'writer',
the title of 'creator,
storyteller, a person who is
defined by the ink in their veins
and the paper of their skin.'

The incessant need
to handwrite things, to feel
the pull of a pen across that
jagged courseness,
to open books and be
intoxicated by the smell,
new or old;

to precisely pin
the provocative presence of sonder;
to be aquiver with delight
or downtrodden with melancholy;
to stare up at stars
and see yourself in them,
to see the narrative woven into
every living thing,

to recognize that writing
isn't just pen on paper
or typing up words;
it can be spitting teeth
and dancing in your bedroom alone,
spray painting walls,
the first cigarette out of a fresh pack,
an open highway, a papercut,
fist to jaw, chugging coffee,
simply being alive.

It goes beyond the stories we tell
and is instead the stories we are ourselves,
living page to page, line to line;
to do a certain kind of writing and be ourselves,
the true essence of who we are, the things
we can't run from;
to claim that title of 'writer', a title
inadvertantly bestowed upon us all.

03. Never Pretty

I have never been
a pretty person;
my face is round and plump
with acne and pockmarks,
scars from a sun poisoning incident,
too round eyes that hold no emotion
(except maybe sadness),
and growing up ugly has been
an affliction on my soul since I was
old enough to remember.

I have never been
a pretty person;
with a shriveled heart
and blackened lungs
(I swear that's where
flowers used to grow),
and bloody knuckles,
remnants of track marks
where I lost myself in the dope.

I have never been
a pretty person;
with too big feelings
and blackout rage,
with an affinity for the bottle
and words stuck in my throat.

I have never been
a pretty person;
inside or out;
so long spent like this
that the word 'beautiful'
has lost all meaning, all hopes
of being achieved.

I will never be
a pretty person.

04. Temple

crisp white cuffs
bleeding into an inked up neck,
covering up tattoo-ed
arms gleaming with bright red to the knuckle.

My father has three stingrays
adorning his left calf,
hand-drawn, self-done -
this is where my legacy began.

The pierce of a tattoo-gun
against raw skin is like an
angel scream, a pen scratch,
until it goes numb -
that was my mother's advice on
my eighteenth birthday,
'just wait until it goes numb' -
and then it is like a soft sigh,
a lover's caress.

Four.
Four so far,
and many more
planned, envisioned
in my nightmare eyes;
the junkie chasing the high
of a needle piercing skin
(dope, body jewelry, tattoo,
you name it),
over and over and over
until one of us dies
(take a guess
as to which one that will be).

My body is a temple;
not immune to decoration,
or is this the highest form
of worship?
My body is a temple;
how much do you think
I could get for it?
My body is a temple,
drawn on, pierced,
desecrated, restored;

it is mine.
it is mine.
it is mine.

05. Recreating

writers are constantly
recreating characters;
sketching on the walls
of their thinkbox bedrooms
design after design after design;
reimagining in their mind's eye
how one comes to be.

how one comes into existence,
into being, into breathing,
what color slips into their iris,
how thin their fingers are, how they laugh,
how they breathe;
how they talk, how they act, how they run.

So much depending on
someone's state of mind;
a thousand reincarnations,
a thousand different types of skin.

Look in the mirror
and if you don't like
what you see,
recreate
your character.

06. Better Yet

i want
to shave my head.

better yet,
I want to take this thinkbox
and dissipate it,
turn it into
a floating ball of ether,
a non-corporeal being,
something simple,
something honest,
something just as broken.

better yet,
I want to defuse this
consciousness altogether,
return myself to star-
dust and thermal heat,
decay, decay, decay,
return to the earth
from where I came.

better yet,
just cease.
Eliminate all proof
of belonging
(no, I have never
belonged - ),
scrub clean the stain
I leave on everything
I ever touch.

better yet,
never be born.
Never subject others
to the ideals
of being known by
and knowing me;
how have they suffered
at my hand?

How many things have I ruined,
will I ruin,
turning anything and everything
black like the space above?

better yet,
turn away. turn away.
take away the poison,
and does the victim not still die?

07. Late Nights

And yet,
here you lay,
in bed
crying and

alone.

08. Trans Baptism

09. Elizabeth (#4)

It is spring,
and the breeze is curly,
and the grass is long,
and you are laying on the couch
and I am in the chair beside you,
our fingers entwined while you
stare at the ceiling and I read my book.

I have never been so in love. Never
been enraptured by a laugh like yours,
a short burst, a rare occasion, but when you
laugh it makes my heart sing. I have never
fallen asleep to the sound of someone breathing
over the phone, but nobody's presence on the other line
has ever made me feel as safe as yours does.
I have never fallen asleep and woken up with the same thought,
at least, not before I met you.

You are an open window on a perfect day, the wind
whistling through my leaves, the flower blooming
in the sidewalk crack I walk upon.
I think about kissing you all the time. About my chapped lips
against your own, our tongues dancing, our teeth
clashing together. I think about your hands on me
and your fingers in me, I think about it all the time, the fire,
like a thousand suns across my skin, flames licking the inside
of my veins, I think about you. I think about you all the time.

You're the soft light guiding me through darkness,
bringing me home to you. To your arms, my one true home,
my shelter from the world. You are the water quenching my thirst,
bringing me to my knees, giving me my life, my light, my heart.
I didn't believe in soulmates until I met you, but you're
the other half of me, the intertwining tendrils of our being, in this lifetime
and the next and every lifetime on every plane in every universe. I hope,
anyway, that I'm with you in every life time. That my love for you
extends beyond this mortal coil and God smiles, because He made me for you.

It is spring,
and the breeze is curly,
and you aren't here but I'm wishing you were, dreaming of
our future. I'm waiting, patiently, because a love likes ours
is worth waiting for.

10. Brain Spaghetti

You have exceptional
fingertip beauty,
lithe and nimble fingers
swirled in my spaghetti brain,
ready to devour.

You desire the
macaroni art of my heart,
the peaches of my body
and it is all yours,
all yours for the taking.

I am the mouse
and you the hawk,
my greatest honor
allowing you to
swallow me whole.

I belong to you,
the way the orange
belongs in Florida,
the way a tongue
has taste buds;

I belong to you.

11. I Don't Cry

I don't cry
when I think about it.

And by that I mean,
I purposefully avoid
remembering what it felt like
to have him inside me,
the way it burned and hurt
and the cold metal of the knife
against my throat.

I don't remember
the way I didn't scream,
or my torn up shirt,
or the way I let him
do whatever he wanted.

No, I don't remember.
When I recall the event,
when I let it pass across my tongue,
I see it in my mind's eye
like a movie.

I don't cry. I stare blankly at the floor,
my heartbeat a little bit faster as he takes
that person's arm and twists, up against the wall,
and I watch from above as it plays out, jeans
around ankles, silent tears, his muffled voice.

When I think about it,
my head hurts,
but I think about the starry night sky.
I think about the blankness of that
indigo velvet, losing myself in it,
and nothing else mattered.

I think about the walk home,
how chilly it was even with my jacket zipped up;
I think about the relief of my bed, taking showers,
scrubbing myself until my skin turns raw
and still not being clean.

I do remember
the way I couldn't leave my dorm
without at least one panic attack,
my entire body shaking as I came through the exit
and walked down the sidewalk,
even in broad daylight. I remember
cringing away from any boy I saw, even though he,
he was a man. I remember wanting to scream.

But when they ask me what happened,
therapist after therapist after therapist,
I don't remember a memory,
only a tale told to myself, an event seen from outside
of my body. I tell them the facts, the truth, with no emotion.
Emotion doesn't serve me, only kills me in my nightmares.

When I talk about it,
I stare blankly at the floor,

and I don't cry.

12. Crooked Teeth

My love for the forest
was born, oddly enough,
from my fascination
with a barn.

It stood in the field
beside my childhood home
on Sugar Plum;
my mother always warned me
not to go barefoot in the grass
because of the glass shards.

I never heeded her words,
and eventually barefoot wanderings
would turn, years later, into trailblazing
with mudcaked boots -

anyway.

I remember this barn vividly,
its decaying walls,
the jam-filled, grime covered jars
that lined its interior on shelves;
I remember the feeling of being watched,
the ghosts in the floorboards and the fairies
in the corners,
the way the air inside it was different -
stale, and magical,
like it held a thousand and one secrets.

I remember standing in its door,
overlooking the swaying grass as the sun set,
like a prince atop his throne, overlooking
the kingdom he's going to inherit.
The world was mine, the barn my refuge;
and also a portal to another world,
the same world you see
when you step into a fairy ring.

I don't know what became of that barn,
after we moved away.
I think about it sometimes, wondering
if it still stands,
with its same glass-covered floorboards
and eyes that watched you from the walls.

I'm scared to go back, in a way;
younger me was so much more brave,
didn't pause to understand the dangers
of what I was playing with.

Didn't understand the dangers
of a smile full of crooked, pointed teeth.

13. Infant Corpse

I died,
a while ago,
a blackened infant corpse
abandoned on a highway shoulder
cooking in the Kentucky sun.

Don't ask me why it happened,
in the swing of a particular low,
too much medicine,
pills caught in my infant throat;

how particularly lost I was,
in the streets of Lexington,
somewhere off of South Limestone street,
it was a Wednesday.

A Wednesday when my last remaining
shred of innocence
was ripped from me,
like my organs from my abdomen,
or the beating heart from my chest.

Yeah, I died sometime after that;
in the halls of a hospital corridor,
in the therapy sessions, seated between
other patients,
refusing or unable to speak;

if you squint hard enough
I'm sure you can still see my ghost
lingering there, room 26, where I slept
the days away, lost and lost again.

If you see my infant corpse,
pick it up for me, will you?
And carry it to the nearest cliff,
spread its blackened ashes
in a place where it most fits;

besides, there is no chance
of me getting it back now,
after all.

(I didn't even glance
in the review mirror
when I tossed it from
its dashboard seat).