play on words

she fills me up with beautiful words
i straddle her waist and jot a poem in her curves
while she fondles me with dizzy, hungry hands
a delicate elegance in her dancing fingertips
lips that disarms my linguistic dexterity
i can only get down a few breathless fragments of sentence
before my shoulders go slack and my head falls back
and I moan REALLY FUCKING LOUD because OH MY FUCKING GOD
I feel like I already knew.
Blue eyed femmes, there's nothing I wouldn't give for you
She comes in my hands and I can't breathe
how publicly mae i praise your body?
how loud can i worship your curves in the town square?
how do i thank you for
making me speak in tongues when i taste you?

to the girl who tried to love the body that wasn't mine:
you're my type but it's not the time.
i'll lose sleep over you
and many other things.

i'm black ink on eggshell paper
smeared eyeliner and saltwater spit
sea-sickness on the sidewalk
anxious and horny, nostalgic and impotent and
eternally repentant.

you're the soft curve of a smile
carved from the guards' gunmetal cage
and i have no pity for the inmates who settled.
will you touch the parts that can't ask for it?

I wanted to show her this poem that I wrote about her- about the way she makes me feel and the invisible messages I see etched into her back and chest and shoulders and hands... But I didn't want to tell her in the middle of a crisis, didn't want to sing her a ballad in the middle of a tragedy. She said, you're not alone... and I said, I know.

And When The Sky Opened Up: xanax addiction, fire in the grow house, puppy kidnapping

The first snowfall of this winter happened last night, and it was an omen- a catalyst for many things. Mercury ended its Scorpio retrograde and the recently unscrambled communications that had been waiting for interpretation claimed several casualties. I deleted my blog after more than four years, generally just exhausted at the emotional upkeep for not quite enough benefit to justify continued participation. Lavi generally has rough winters- she's a summertime night party kitty collector. She met with a counselor she trusted who advised her to go to the hospital. We went with her to check in, they took our bags and patted us down. I just got a new anxiety script that I would have liked to keep on me in this high stress situation but of course that's out of the question, this is a closed, controlled environment. The waiting room TV plated KDKA news, which seemed to center around testing and comparing As Seen On TV hair curlers. Other than that though, the local news worth sharing included the news that taking more than 4 Xanax a day can lead to dependency and withdrawal; a fire in a California weed grow house; and a man who robbed a pet store and took three puppies. Vending machines but they take all your change. Wrong names on name tags and the acrid lingering scents of nicotine and adrenaline. Lavi is in-patient, I keep looking at my phone. Alexis had a seizure last night and we're about to take her to the hospital. We spent the day sorting some of her affairs and I got my organizing meeting covered for tomorrow. She wants to be kept. Have you ever seen the episode of the Twilight Zone called "And When The Sky Was Opened" about three pilots who survive a plane crash and then disappear from everyone's memories and on very little sleep and a hotplate of boiling neurons I'm not so sure... that this isn't about me and the besties who I may not see for a while. They want me to believe I should trust but they haven't given me any options so what agency in their is a decision between one thing. There were things that had been spied in premonitions- the midwestern housewives chain smoking over casseroles, dried flowers and Jim Beam, Fiddler on the Roof and Evida, Satanic sermons and queer cuties- and I want to believe those things made us comfortable, and that's why we spiraled out of control, suicidal and delusional and ruined by too many drugs. That's what comfortable crazies do. That's what my professor said, the one who made the puzzle with the winner who can figure out what to do in an impossible situation. Trust that this is not a decision between one thing. Trust in another thing. If you weren't crazy when you got here...

return to sift through the ashes

I beg for you a better gift, a tongue to bridge the bitter rift, a plea and prayer to heal your wounds when there was nothing I could do for you. I'm not near good enough at pretending to act like I don't know the oldest story in the book or its condescending ending. My passion always betrays my attempts at control, eventually. But with you-- naked and bathed in sunlight, wistful and blissful and youthfully unfulfilled, ambitious and gaping orifices and plans to rule the world-- there was nothing but honesty in my fingertips and every moment that our spasming lungs spent spilling battle cries together, cursing history together, celebrating the fact that nothing lasts forever together-- each of those moments taught me a language to write my love with. When I get the last shreds of skin off my bones I will finally be free. I'm the wind-up limbs on a suicide machine, I'm a sandpaper bird in a nest made of matches soaked in gasoline. I'm broken glass near a playground slide, I'm a truthful accusation that's repeatedly denied. I'm a muffled cry from the neighbor's door, a jagged slag of grey slate rock on a mountain near the shore. I have agonizing edges that refuse to be ignored, and the only way to make them smooth is to make them feel adored.

skin hate

They tell me, when I was born I had "perfect skin". It was white, that's very important no matter what anybody actually says out loud. Apparently my skin wasn't blotchy red like some new-borns, and the nurses called me "peach pie". When I was in elementary school I couldn't stop picking at my skin. Other kids thought I was gross, so I picked at my skin more. I'm not sure if it might have been a fringe feeling from my dad's second-hand smoke, or maybe I already knew I was gay and my heart didn't fit in. Or maybe it was a coping mechanism for extreme anxiety, and it was almost certainly all of these things. When I was a teenager, I picked at my face. I cut my arms and legs and hips. I hated my skin, it hurt me. The thought that I once was lucky enough to have something perfect bestowed upon me, through no effort of my own, and then squandered it, was more than I could bare. I was full of hate at this formerly perfect skin that I can't remember but people told me I have. In my early twenties I got tattoos. It felt like I was taking back possession of myself. I got words and symbols to try to remind myself of the lessons in the pain I was feeling. But they faded and the words became illegible, and I hated myself more than ever for the decisions I can't stop making, and now everyone can see my shame, especially me. What lesson will I learn from this? The one I've known all along.

snippets

this is the love note of a laid-off sycophant. this is the confession of a paid-off bureaucrat. this is the threat of a loved-on militant. this is the dying word of an over-zealous hierophant. we are incapable of shame or sorrow, because we signed our names before we sold out tomorrow.