I'm a Poet, Dammit

Casual Sex

Casual sex is not all it’s cracked up to be
it sounds appealing
the safety of a meaningless fuck

but sex
is the beauty of knowing every secret
the sensitive scars
the insecurities made secure with the
brush of fingertips
whispers of beauty
the physical manifestations of brokeness
and healing the hips thought too wide
the breasts thought too small
the nervously worried lips healed with a kiss
thin thick broken untouched
a connection between your past
and the present reality of my hands mapping out
the truth in your bones

I’ll wait for months without a single touch
so when I do
your tendons become bridges
your ribs an opening birdcage
to all the words you can finally say
your heart
a canary freed from the coal mine

I’ve been running out of air
and now that I’m breathing I want to scream
beautybeautybeauty
let our bodies be the invitation, gold embossed
to the inside, our secrets dancing
in the ballroom, shedding masks and
whispering stories,

the paper skin says formal attire only

because some secrets can’t be told
casually.

Relative Reflection

I am the cells in my tongue
and stardust
feed me with eternities and
words that exist only if you tell them
to the universe

Fuck, here we are again
you and I trying to fit the universe
onto a sugar spoon and
swallow it down easy
it’s never easy
its French music
you can’t understand, and you wonder
if it’s because you’re too American
or too stoned, the days
you can’t remember where you come from
be it Paris or an implosion
of matter
or both

the days croissants in the kitchen
smelled like your mother when you
actually felt you could hug her

when you vowed to be above the influence
now you’re lost in the smoke and the
bitterness of your family and your
eating disorder and the way those words
shoved disappointment down your throat
and made you want to break the mirror
you saw in front of you

the universe is never slow

the departure from family dinners
to nights spent hands
holding strangers
arms around shoulders
lipspartinglegsspreadingeyeswideningha
ndsclenchingmusclesconvulsinginsecurities
poundingdrivinghomeshoweringsobbing
watchingthenightsinkingdownthedrain

it all goes by so fast

innocence rushes away exponentially, the curve
you sled down upon, the snow
you scarred again and again and again

but the universe is relative
and compared to everyone else
you know you’re so fucking
happy

a truth
you tell the universe
again and again and again.

After psychology class

It’s too difficult to handle
the fact that I am
a compilation of neurons, my memories
a pattern of neurotransmitters, my mood
comprised of checmicals
so I asked my teacher

I don’t understand how synapses
turn into images and thoughts and actions
and personality

what I meant is

please tell me I am more than this
that there is some divine interpretor
that turns the neurons
into something beautiful, tell me
there is something more to make me
me

He said

to explain that, you’d have to take years
of college courses

to cope with that, I had to live a few years
see a few stars
learn that I am stardust, that my thoughts
are microscopic comets shooting across
my brain cells

it is no longer a question of “is that all”
when I am a perfect alignment
of synapses, of neurons
learned into position, a perfect machine
capable of words that can
only find their way along the map of my mind,
carved by streams and wind and the footsteps
of revisited memories

if it were anyone else
a different life carved into this once
wild and untamed neural matter
these words would not make it to you.

The words I will never tell you

Even now I ache over the days when
you were the horizon dawn broke upon

remember our first New years together
Midnight struck and fireworks
shot up in my chest - I had no doubts

Give it a few months

You were the dusk before a
night that could have been eternal
you were calculated
the 30 pills I had lined up
just so I could sleep sound for once

I’m awake now, and I can imagine
your nightmares, the sensation
of not knowing if you’ll live to
see the morning

I want to say it gets better
but I fucking hate the passive tense

the day you destroyed me
was the day I started putting myself
back together

So make it better
Thats the only advice
I will never give you,
the journey I can only verse

maybe one day if you live
through the nightmares
you’ll hear this poem

consider this my congratulations
or my condolences
for the fate you’ve chosen
whether you decided to hit the
snooze button
or wake up to meet the dawn.

A Love Poem to Myself

I’m hurting a lot today, but I’m about to go to bed so I’ll be okay.

It’s not a terrible type of hurt.

____________

The past has made me as prickly as a cactus
and as picky as a 3-year-old in a Mediterranean restaurant

try and tell me you love me -
you can do so in three ways.

time
the days you wake up with me
drifting in the sea of your arms
and decide ‘five more minutes’
again and again and again

effort
the day I’m a million puzzle pieces
you decide is worth putting back together 

if you must,
speak the words, if they burst
from the seams of your lips like boiling water
beneath the surface erupting
thought we both know they don’t need
to be said.

I’ve become a person
who will take and give no less

all skydive, no parachute
staring at your approaching lips whispering
fall
fall

fall
is a few months away
my future is a 180 degree open jawline
on the horizon. The sun breaking
over the mountains can just
break your heart - we’ll put it
back together - the pieces don’t need to fit
like how they used to

we’ll form a new shape with the anecdotes
spent between us - I trail my fingers down the
path made with your moving lips

there’s nothing wrong with a few holes
where things don’t quite fit, a few
missing pieces, a few jagged edges

this one - your most painful memory
and this, the day you thought you’d
never live to see sunset
and this
the person that made you tell yourself
you’d never trust anyone the way you trusted them
but here I am
my hands bleeding with your wounds
my heart pounding to the beat
of your sobs.

I wonder what a horrid mosaic I must be
below the museum tarps
dusty and in wait of a curious hand
to uncover me
lift me high above their head and -

look up to notice
where the broken ends and I begin;

Surely I
am not the only one

a grecian urn longing
to be turned.

Healing

I’m astray
lost in the hands of men whose names
slip out my mind
slip out my car door
and I feel nothing
but sore bruises and
wonder at where shame, I’ve been told,
should be, where my feminine
emotions should be writhing.

But in the silence of headlights
and my lonely self
lies only the poignant pleasure
of you -
your nonexistence

you might as well be dead.

3/26/12

There was a wildfire recently.

______

I wanted to burn in that fire
before it faded like passion
leaving a scar across the foothills.

We rushed headlong from the city
towards the billowing smoke that
swallowed the sky -

miles and an hour later
and we were stopped
by a police barricade

I wanted to see the burning
and find an epiphany in the flames
but we settled.
 

We turned off into a driveway
to look at the stars
clearer than they’d ever be at home
despite the Earth’s burning
their lights fingerpainting the sky
with stories

and I realized

nothing ever turns out like you expect it to
not exactly, at least

I got to see a million fires
some of which will never stop burning
even after they’ve died
their image holds on to the darkness
leaves an emotion to sit in the nothing

I’m young now, young and burning with
a thousand fires in my chest, sparks
flying from my throat every time I speak

The wildfire will be extinguished
with fear and rain, it will
disappear

but I’m gonna be here, the stars and I
even after we’ve left
we’ll still be sparking somewhere.

I went up to Boulder yesterday, met up with some new friends up at a coffee shop, and accompanied them to an OutBoulder meeting and Writing workshop. It was a lot of fun. :) I also tried hip hop dancing - a difficult feat in jeans - but fun, nonetheless. Quite a lot of new experiences, an interesting adventure indeed.

I was to shy to read my writing from the workshop there, but here it is.

“I hope your words are softer than my fists were hard.”

____________________________________

You’re a spark drowning in things you can’t see, a mirror
distorted by years of ocean. Your face worn into beauty
like sea glass. You are craters made by fists, and rivers
cut by tears
but you’re gonna grow up from this like a sequoia
gonna snag the sky in your branches
and caress the sun’s burning face -
she’s just like you, you know.

every fistful of words is going to kill you
but only a little
until you hit rock bottom

but nothing’s ever dead forever
you’re gonna be the sun’s pheonix child
rising from the ashes
of where your faith in humanity used to be
beautiful and worn
like Jesus’ back, the leather
of the book of fairy tales you
wished you could believe in

Not everyone’s gonna do this to you - maybe most
but everyone’s gotta get lucky sometime
and just stay there, lucky
like a tomorrow
you can pray to.

_____________________________________

You’re soft like the stray’s fur before it was soaked with blood.
I know I’m a monster, and soft breezes don’t stay long,
just fly away like air. You’re always flying.

I want to turn you into a stone I can worry beneath my thumb
Or a breath I can inhale and never let free
keep you closer than you and I would ever be,

I hate you, because I know I don’t deserve you, but I need you
like blood needs veins, I’ll spill, I’ll come undone without you
so don’t leave me.

For the love of God, never leave me.

I’ll crush you into the Earth so I can keep you,
ground you to the bottom of the sea, I
want you to feel just like me.

I’ll beat you into the soil of my love, and maybe
you’ll grow small, into a flower I can tend to
clinging to my Earth and the only salvation from winter
me.

So don’t ever leave me.
I beg of you, don’t ever leave me
Because I’m afraid I might kill you
in an attempt to save myself
from the only loneliness
I have always known.

_____________________________

“I hope you’ve learned to open your fists to caress, to trace the constellations to happiness.”

Valentine’s Day

spare me this pretty
little holiday

pretty
like neon lights
advertising
girlsgirlsgirls
 

myself, i like the pretty
of stark light burning
through night, the tone
of stars reflected
in black coffee
city streets and
cold hands reaching
like moths to a flame

no reservations
no money
read me
the poem of
your eyelashes’
wingbeats
against my cheek
your whispers
a candle against the
dark, your pupils
silhouettes in the
windows of your eyes
lovingly entangled

spare me the
chocolates and flowers
cut to die, sleep
in my arms, exhale
love like lilacs
growing infinite
from pulmonary roots

then we’ll never stop
growing