Pinned

Quivering like a butterfly

Held to the fire

With singed wing

Flapping furious

As she tries to fly as she should

Pinned to a wall

By a stranger who never knew

Her.

The flowers are dead

The damned flowers are dead,

She said, as she tried

To revive them with

Fresh and cool water

And all that she's said

Before, on the floor,

With her knees skinned and bruised

From the times 

That she'd done it
So often before.

Boiling point

Heat glues you slow, and down, and

Drawls like an accent,
Southern and thickened with syrup 

Too hot for soul

To move, to think, and ah,

The drink that would quench you

Swept down, the throat

Like it never was meant to, despite how

You meant it

To, stench of yourself

And intent to compel 

Your self to go on, keeps the flow, but low,

Lower, flows still, and how? You don't know,

And lower, until, spent,

You remember

That once, was it true?

You're not sure,

But they say it was

Cool.

Cool,

And low.

Slow, with the scent of reminder

Of who

You thought
You knew
You were.

A few good

Men and women who find

Women and men who love

Love, 

Then men and women wonder

Whether love is something

Safe at all if women

and men are meant to love

And if so, what is it, this thing

Made up of easier, measurable emotion

Like lust, loneliness,

Insecurity, the go to anger, 

Men and women

Jealous, hateful, or some

Combination thereof

Dragging love and its other amalgams

Through the mud and the blood

That should sustain you drains

Or takes down the whole brigade

It's not meant, blood,

To be in another's veins like that.

So which is it? Is it high in the sky

Like nunneries and Shakespeare,

Ethereal and pure or

Trenched with war and fear;

And where is the line,

The front or to the center

Of the soul and the earth where

Men and women who find

Women and men either an object of

Affection or just an object

Rendered possession with obsession

And the more up in the head

And further from the heart, the

More the dread,

And love is dead, if it ever lived

To begin with.

And yet --

Church

The bells chime

In an uneasy rhythm that suggests

A person pulls the cord

And not God

While human voices

Waft over the rooftops

Of the towns

That calloused hands built.

Intellectual property

At least when someone swipes

Your car or your watch,

There are things to do.

You file a report, you take the steps

Necessary to get them back,

You wait.

You probably don't get them back.

But you replace them.

You move on.

At least when someone who is threatened

By you and wants you

Out of the way and tries

To hurt you,

There are things to do.

You file a report, you take the steps

Necessary to defend yourself,

You fight back.

You try to pay your hospital bills.

Or maybe you wear concrete shoes

And hang with the fishes

Nibbling on your eyelashes.

But when someone steals
Pieces of your life, or pokes

Around in places you've put behind you,

Or hampers your ability

To exist as you are,

There is no recourse.

You wander the world still, halfway between

Who you were, and what people make you.

The thieves hold the shiny booty

In their hands 

Like children who've gotten away with the candy jar

Feeling ill and bloated

Emotional and political assassins

But liking it that way,

Knowing they've eaten all the evidence.

Gone today

The mist erased the entire, huge city

Like it never existed;

All of the trash, the triumph, the angsty beauty,

Covered in a cloud of tiny droplets.

If you can't see something

Is it really there? If

You wake up one pre-dawn to find

What's been in the same place

Every day, every year, is no longer,

Was it ever? 

They say when you leave a dog at home

They think you're gone forever

And if you come back a minute later

They greet you the same

As if you've been gone for a year.

They say the key is to live in the moment.

So this moment, the city

Is gone.

And if tomorrow is not guaranteed,

It may be gone

Forever.

Summer

This, the season things begin

Again to shake the dust free

And plan for bouts of sunbaked

Revelry while tearing through

The offices and onto the playground

Shedding extra clothes and weight

In hopes of -- what exactly -- coming

Holidays to forget the lives

That don't quite match the dreams

And those who don't vacation

And those whose playgrounds are empty

Swing on the rusting playset

With free, free air cooling

Their faces while they watch

The planners bustle on to Fall.

Deadline

If you always wake 

Before the alarm rings

Why set it?

If you always brake

Before the real collision

Why sweat it?

If you always make it in

Before the deadline

Why regret it

When what you've left behind

Would have never towed the line

Even if you let it?

Surrender

The pull, the push, the inescapable

Flow of float, then sink,

The crash, the hell, the unavoidable

Wellspring of toss, and turn,

And then,

I think,

There's no more rhyme

To reason than if there is

No reason behind the rhyme.

And so, I will,

With one deep breath,

And one last nondenominational, 

Faith-filled push,

Let go.

People are not poems

People are not poems

Meant to reflect the reader’s subjective thoughts

And assumptions, shaping the

Words almost as much as 
The author in self-serving artistry.

Sadomasochist

Like drinking your morning coffee

At crisp-linened tables, sun spilling

Onto your crisp-written newspaper and

The chit-chat comfort of banter, banter, banter;

PICK UP THE BUTTER KNIFE AND JAM IT INTO YOUR OWN BACK HAND,

And banter, banter, sip more coffee

And casually blame your chat-mate across the table

While the blood runs down your forearm

Making the table a study in pointillism.

Like walking together down a trash-strewn

But full-of-character street

Shooting the breeze with promises of

Friendship past, future, present

With the sneakers counting a pleasant thud, thud, thud;

TURN AND SMASH YOUR OWN FACE AGAINST COLD BRICK,

And thud, thud, walk some more

And unassumingly question how your walking partner could do such a thing

While the blood runs down your unchanged face

Leaving a crimson breadcrumb trail.

Like sauntering up to a bar with your colleague

With familiar dim-lit lights, winsome

Talk about how thank God things are good again

And trust you, darling, never another reason not to trust you,

And mutually, with camaraderie, bitch, bitch, bitch;

SNATCH THE WINE GLASS AND SHOVE IT THROUGH YOUR CHEST,

And bitch...then run, run,

And hound your bitch -- I mean friend -- for hours as to how badly friend has hurt you

While friend is gaslit and abandoned and hanging off a rooftop

You sit in a double pool of blood.

Alone.

Six windows

Wind whips through the six windows
Of this space called 'home'
Simply since my things rest here,
Selectively accumulated and discarded
Over a near-two-years;
Bears the smell of shared suppers in the evenings,
And parting coffees at six a.m., exactly.

And the melancholy Latin rhythms at all hours
Pour from loud-rimmed cars, mingled 
With the angry sirens of trucks ripped 
From county firehouses
Full of men ripped from faked unnervous families
And on their way to settle messes,
Just like smells and music do.

Big city to my east and
Smaller city to my west and
My carefully scrubbed floors and lazy cats
And my collection of books full of half-city dust
Buffer the in-between spaces
Of my attention-deficit-disordered life timeline.

Here I've run for refuge,
Here I've hovered in limbo,
Here I've dampened pillows 
With panic sweat and unbelieving tears,
Finding various outside sources to sustain it
That have cured, disturbed, and captured me till 
I shook them off and moved away
But here have always returned.

Select people come and go,
And go and come,
But always go: the final answer
To the question whether
Home is where another is
As they gaze out my six windows
And comment absently on how 'nice' this is
Before they leave and forget.

Home is a lifelong aspiration that evades
Me usually as I sit and watch 
The many-flavored varieties
Of loosely-unhewn lives pass by 
My sextuplet windowpains;
Alienating when they laugh together,
Reaffirming when they fight together,
Inducing empathy when they scream or cry
In front of one another
And it's clear it would be better
If they did it alone.

Sanctuary -- necessary -- and prison, both
Depending not on itself, but
On the inside of our minds 
Where the real things lie and
The true potential for home is in
Them that fight the cliche that binds:
'Home is where the heart is.'

So where is mine?

The possibility of growth

Did you hear that?

The subtle lifting of the hazy dirge

That smothers and stilts the soul into submission

No matter the number of push-ups

And sit-ups it strives to strengthen itself with

Through the years

Weighted by fears that should diminish, not grow

Over time, yet the sublime

Passion that youth hefts (un)knowingly (un)toward

A life promised to fulfill and protect

Still finds itself subject

To and of the opposite of the Disney tale

Force-fed, led through 

And behind the curtain they should have mentioned

To begin with?

Tired

Curling against her

Like a first prize ribbon

Like the first-spied glisten

Of a voice that reprimands;

And she can't tell

If it's good or bad or indifferent

Or worse, of no importance

As the world wears itself away

More slowly than she does.

Justice.

When everything stops

And you take stock and stop

To realize you've been wrong

All this time

And have blamed yourself

All along

You surmise that sometimes

You cannot dare predict

All the backlogged prerogative

And then you dare

Share your private hell with someone who is

Kind enough

To tell enough

To try enough

To care enough

To be enough

To prove to you

That you were right all along.

Truthing

Give me blood or give me nothing

I want to see your skin torn open

Past the bone, the sinew,

With every word, every step, every move

Cracking and holding vulnerable

Like a retractor

Bypassing the clean, the neat, and

Past the things that waste our lives

And straight to the core

Like I do

Like I do almost every time

Like I do when it's worth it.

And as the last sacred, useless vestiges of your closely-kept trappings

Fall to the blood-slicked floor,

Then

Then we will know.

How I "sleep"

When I was very small, before one is supposed to have developed the capacity to remember, but I do anyway, I used to have night terrors. My parents have told me bits and pieces of what I was like when that happened, but what they tell me doesn't match what I remember, and it took me a long time to realize that what I remember was probably what they tried to describe.

They say I'd burst into their room, eyes wide, sheen of sweat covering me, not looking at anything concrete and screaming nonsensical things as I wandered aimlessly around. They'd have to splash water on my face and yell at me to wake up. Sometimes I would, sometimes I would just go back to bed and fall into a more acceptable, quieter form of sleep.

I remember lying in bed while people and animals and other random entities tried to get at me, the foot part of my feetie pajamas suffocating me from bottom to top, the air closing out slowly and about to reach my head, when finally I jump out of bed to escape possible death, still living the scenarios in my dreams where things were coming toward me, taunting me, I unable to speak and hardly able to breath, and suddenly the light goes on and everything becomes this too-intense blur of garish color.

I recognize my parents, the wallpaper, the furniture, and see them waving at me with what I sense is concern and maybe even anger, but I can't hear what they're saying. I try to tell them what's happening, but the words won't come out, the "real" world in the background like the ghosts that my dream world should be but aren't. It's hot. I'm confused. And terrified.

Sometimes I end up with my head buried in my mother's arms while she's telling me to wake up, and I long to lay down and sleep, exhausted. Sometimes I don't remember how it ended, because in many ways it never did.

As I grew up the walking terrors stopped, but the dreams did not. Only on occasion, perhaps counted on two hands, can I recall having peaceful sleep, waking feeling rested. The dreams calmed for a while, but almost as if returning to the cradle, as I get older, they get worse.

I don't walk around anymore, or so I assume, since I live alone, but I wake up in full panic flop sweat as I try to remember who I am and where I am and what my "real" life is, because my dreaming life is so real, and so vivid--almost moreso than my waking life. I open my eyes and I feel like a stranger who's been ripped from their true home, forced to wander this strange land piecing it all together.

Sometimes I have false wake-ups. I open my eyes, I'm in my bed, I try to get out of it and some times I do, and I walk into the living room and there are the characters of my dream world in this one, or the floor drops out, or I walk into the sea, which shouldn't be attached to my room in the first place. I go back to bed, close my eyes, try to wake in the right place. I have known this to occur at least ten times before actually waking up, which has often led me to wonder whether I every actually succeeded.

Sometimes I have people beside me, enviably sleeping like "normal" people should, to cling desperately to and the heart beat and breath that comes from them, for a time, comforts me and eases the transition, but it rarely lasts long, and it's never a reason to have a person beside you.

There are places I frequent there (in my dreams), people who frequent those places too, people I've never met but know, things I could never know because I never experienced them but know at night, and there is no rest. There is never rest. I go to sleep, run from and to and between places and people, exhausting myself as I do in wakefulness, and enter each day fatigued and confused. It's probably how I enter each dream.

I try to remember what I dream but I also try not to. There are days when I wonder which is the real life I lead; who is the real me? The one who writes this? Or the one who perhaps writes this, annoyed at not being fully present, while I write and write and write, searching for a more stable picture of what people are and capturing it in a limited word count, clinging to my pile of clippings in the hopes that it might, one day, be as simple, or simply complex, as that?