the ocean

well man, 17 seems awfully young to have your heart broken

but then

i guess 70 might seem so too.

quick as a blink you'll find yourself washed up in tinted bones and pleas that will make your stomach turn, years later. there will be crawling and black streaks and requests to ignore the subject. but you'll cling as you swing from you convictions up up and away

we were born

to taint each others blood

make it bloom at thrown-away memory jogs

and insist

"but i am happy"

and before you know it, you'll find yourself between waking and sleeping and sleeping and dreaming and dreaming and emptiness and anyways, that is just my experience, as the product of a stolen season swollen with hollow beats and hazy desires to feel, you know---him.

outside of the sea, we're strange and awkward and our tongues hurt

but you and i both know, you and i both live with one thing:

you are going to chase my memory until you die. and then i will chase yours.

sun francisco.

one of these days, i'm gonna climb to the top of that bubblegumwrapper&cigarette throne i composed at age 17 in the middle of dying and i will tear open my sticky lips and let you all know once and for all that the rumours you read in the backs of your textbooks are true:

i'm Queen of the Bohemes, and there's pepper in my veins and a hole in my nose.

stomping like a clumsy troll-lette, cloaked as a tigress, i have only to blow the mane out of my eyes and throw my head to the skies for you to know i don't belong to anything but the grass, and i know you'll want to follow me. stalking, slink-sliding through the tall ferns and the street posts, legend has it i'll lead the revolution of this urban forest back to the hippiedaisical mythology of open-toed shoes and still more open romantic lip-smacking. you've just got to muddle through how easy it is to hate someone like me and hum through the stares thrown on people with good posture like that and believe that there's actually a spot of sun in this city we can lie in where people will stop standing to watch us and start joining us. then we can stick out our tongues and play tambourine music and our ragtag royalty will reign unwisely for one whole skipping-school day, and you'll just get it.

finger space.

There is more than one “smooth”.

My own fingers, silken-tipped
Slide across the warm ruffling
And over the cool feathered slip
To find hands different from mine,
Blunt, porous, radiating masculinity
And above all, breathing.

Some smoothness has breath.
It has sweat, it has rippling
Quiet musculature and the flickering
Flame-feeling of pulse
And this smoothness is different from sculpture
So different from wood
That my hands know language’s mistake.

My fingers brushing his fingers
Unlike my fingers lacing with my fingers
Or swimming over a child’s palm
I feel the tense pounce of his
The miniscule shaking of crinkled nerves
And what he will not say
My hands know.

confidence.

so one day i got a job.

i can do grown-up things! --and still read picture books and bark like a pup and live how i like to live, which is naked and loud and summer-haired and in love and absolutely cuckoo.

i like the evolution of myself.

present and open-eyed.

i live in a fallen angel city and arrange words at scholarly leisure and sleep with the love of my life and i embrace the idea of what is "woman" and reclaim it from politics and Hollywood and morality and pundits i make it

MINE

and i draw all over the blueprints and

if all these things don't make me beautiful, tell me

what ever could?

months and years.

i used to like the
whimsy-feathered look of your lower lip as you
fought the trembling because you liked me too much and
maybe i didn't like you that way, but still, you bubbled with happy to see me and
dropped your keys once or twice and slipped up your tongue and said things a little too
mmmmmmm maybee you should have not? i brushed your fingers and felt your blood and my own ghosts flickered in and out and behind my eyes, but i tried. i promise i tried. you were so warm on my neck, so delicately delightfully warm, i had to try.

i wasn't numb. i was haunted, but i wasn't numb. my lungs expanded when you blew into them, like birthday balloons. i shook when you shook. it was like swimming, inhaling the water and choking. it was panic and relief, it was my teeth, it was a battle. you were a thing so new.

now, i'm used to it.