Two More

reality is
nothing more than the fluid
trapped between our bones.

--

everything I am
is beginning to dissolve.
I'm not resisting.

Nerves

It's a wave of sensation that begins in your feet, ringing your ankles and shooting in cold prickling spikes of flame up your legs, pulsing against your shins with every stride, settling as angry embers in your joints, sending waves of shivers racing up your body as your blood distills and the sweat begins to drip. It's a lithographic assault, the Gaea revenge, a disease you have to learn to counter or ignore to survive. It's not your place to protest, you, as transgressor, must accept this penance as your due. Laugh as you embrace the fire shooting up your limbs. It's an invasion, as waves of heat wash down your throat and shocks, shivers radiate out, pushed back farther and farther with every desperate gulp. Push your emotions out of your fingers and your feet to attain perfection in emptiness more beautiful than the purest ecstasy. Hold it off as long as you can, let your mind rest in the cold, clean bliss of untormented logic. Hold it off as long as you can, cling fast to your numbness... but your feet always pull it back, your bones are greedy, as the color spirals, rushing back up and around, encasing your skeleton in a riot of feeling and warmth. It takes another to push it down into your bones, stop it writhing through your skin, shuddering through your fingers and pulling at your eyes, rushing through your ears and washing away your focus and sense of self, of reality. It pulses manicly, in and out, in and out, eroding your skin and your apathy.

I am addicted to haiku

When the glass shatters
don't you worry, love, it will
all have been my fault.

--

I want to get lost
In lonesome woods, burning leaves
please don't follow me.

--

remember my feet.
I will forget, but they've got
so many stories.

--

eloquently, I
have nothing at all to say,
yet I just can't stop.

--

I swear to you I
wanted to, I wanted to...
I just never knew.

--

stars get stuck sometimes,
hang above us, and we wait,
evaporating.

More Haiku

your skin is honey,
but I'm not a bee, no, I'm
just a tiny moth.

--

leave me alone, please.
this dirigible only
holds one psychopath.

--

my nose just floated
off of my face, I'm afraid.
can you spare some bread?

--

your shed has been the
base for all my secret plans.
(ignore the bloodstains).

--

wow, that is a large
basket of hummingbirds, sir.
mind if I steal them?

Several Quick Haiku

hello, old man sun.
burn me quickly, won't you now?
I'm a lobster girl!

--

no matter what you
say to me I cannot cry--
I am an island.

--

why'd you take away
that piece of my sky? all the
daisies are screaming.

--

A SUPERNOVA!
That is how I want to die.
Implode, then, flashBANG!

--

oh my god, your hair
the ocean in my fingers
entwining, sleeping.

Failed Attempts

I am an emotional sink, a lightning rod, if you will
I draw in the raving and hysterical and shudder their shrieks down my bones
Twisting my entrails out and jolting my nerves in an electric ecstasy
Too blunt for effective attraction
Intended catharsis still doesn't work
I'm sorry I don't know how to hold you together when you fall apart on me
In the middle of the night when you're besieged on every side
And the persistent thud of the ballista and the sickening rumble of powdered masonry
Makes me drown myself in stale chocolate
Laced with nostalgia
It doesn't really help, but I do like to pretend
That bitterness cancels itself
Rather than building on every regret
Every reminiscence
Do walls hinder or help, here?
Should I render myself defenseless before you
Or would a strong solid facade be better?
As much as I believe in honesty
I don't think omitting how shaky I am
Really counts as lying
Does it?
I just wish I knew how to hold you together
Without lying to you completely...
Trust me, I wish
I wish it could work
It would do us both good, I think
At least for a time
But I just can't risk that
It's too much
Too much
The stakes have risen far too high for this
I don't care if the shrapnel collides with my body
A shield may be all it's good for anyhow
So I'll catch your pieces, love
And put them together as best I can with bits of wire and
Binding twine
Scraps of ribbon
Don't worry, love, no needle.
But my hands are far from deft
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
I'm so very sorry
I wish I knew what to say to you
But everything is mud, now
All my clarity... did I ever have any?
I wish I could remember how I used to handle crumbling minds
Instead of how hypnotizing you smelled...
Why can't I go through and erase all that?
I really don't want to remember you anymore
I was so much more content when I didn't know how lonely I was
But I don't understand
I'm... I guess I'm glad
But I don't understand why...
Hell, I don't understand any of this
That's why I run away and up
Into the wings of the night on fire
Into the spectral current far above your uncaring head
I walk up her fingertips
Crown my head in flames
Because I can't believe you anymore.

Pieces

Some short ones and bits and pieces, maybe to be revisited and added to, if I ever feel like it... but I think they might be dead by now.

---

And I sit here calmly erasing you
With secret gregarious tendencies
As my mind stares impassively back at me
Then coldly turns and walks out the door.


Smoke wreathing my hair
As empathy drifts, wraithlike, around my head
Dancing against and through a funeral shroud for you.
My eyes close and my brain forces itself clamshell-tight
An instinctive self-defensive uncontrollable reflex
To shield my frightened shrinking mind from your fear.
I want to hold you for hours
Stroke your hair
Tell you everything will be alright
I can't stand to see you so defeated.


We are living in our bones and the bones of our mothers
Intertwined amongst the picket fences and rose bushes.


Am I cooler than a dirigible?


Are the shadows mocking us, or is that just the insomnia talking?


Do I have a problem with suppressed rage, or are the tea leaves telling me to smash the china against the wall and paint the room earl grey?


Why won't you let me be your lightning rod?


Her hands shrunk and paled and twisted and I hid my face so she couldn't see how upset I was; if I'm not strong, cold and emotionless, how can she be?


I climbed the branches as she pointed to all the lovely fruit already lying in the cold, wet ground, but I laughed and climbed higher as it began to rain, and the sun sank behind the trees and gilded every drop beaded in her honey hair. I became a cloud and wept to see her so far below.

Stumble

I meet you there and enjoy a few sweet minutes as we sit draped and entwined and I condense into, finally, a real person, concrete and heavy, and I bask in the luminous lucidity that has found me at last... but then you shove cheaply off and drag me away and up and out and down with you and everything that I am evaporates and my reality fades out like the words you wrote so lovingly in the sand when we were seagulls and danced in the razor-blade grass, not caring about the cuts ringing our calves or the bruises blooming aubergine and aquamarine on our bare sun-baked thighs. I ran away from you on a train in the darkness, and as we roared through the night I laughed to be so free of you, but I disembarked on a minefield hung with glittering spun-sugar lights and clouds of chlorine gas over a deceitful marsh of creme brulee and sofa cushions. You lied to me, to all of us, and then slowly slid your shining knife between my ribs, smiling sweetly all the time, and when you shower me with your false concern I will laugh in your face like the madman I am so surely becoming. You don't even notice, you just think I'm laughing at some stupid joke, or just for the thrill and the joy of being alive, you've never been able to tell when I hate you. Maybe you just think I'm as blind as you are, that I don't see your hands, enticing behind your back, as you stand far too close for innocence and lie with your smiling hopeful eyes at us for fear of losing the people you say you love the most. Pray to whatever you hold dear, darling, because every day you're pushing harder, testing the sinews that we've got tied around our swollen ankles, and they won't hold much longer, I'm warning you; your horrible mistakes, your greed, your complaints, your utter disregard for what anyine else wants or needs, your incredible, mindboggling inability to understand how anyone but yourself is feeling have set off an apocolyptic collection of alarms-- the flashing lights and air-raid wails have got everyone else hiding terrified underground, wrapped in itching blankets with their eyes tightly shut, but you don't notice a thing as you stand on your alabastor pedestal and tell yourself you are raining benevolance upon us, the unwashed masses, but we just shake our heads as we open our umbrellas against your acid, and slowly walk away from your philistine face turned in rapture toward the sun. I leap down and sail on a moth's painted wings across the blueberry sky to settle in your virtual arms even as they fade away and I am left to stare blankly at a cold and unresponding emptiness where I long to see your love flash before me so I can forgive my unresponsiveness and the way I faded away from your linked arms and onto the train in the night. I ramble rumblingly on as my head splits open and forces my body into the sleep of the terminally passive-agressive overthinking psychotic pansy.

Sealed

What the hell was I thinking?
You weren't, that's for god-damned sure.
I always come back to you
I don't know why
It always ends with me hating you again
Our relationship wanes
And I can no longer wax poetic
Eloquence is lost to me now
No pretty words flow out to describe this
This is something entirely new
A new brand of emotion
Cutting deep
Dark and caustic
As you keep ripping out the scar tissue.
Good thing I'm good with cover-up
And you're all but blind
Your eyes stitched shut
With hypnotic chemicals.
You plead, say you love her.
Prove it.
I can't believe you.
Not anymore.
I don't even trust myself
To look you in your saccharin eyes
Without losing control of my tightly-wound temper.
You're scared of losing us
You should be.
You're so goddamned lucky
That we've got heads like plateaus
That we know it's not worth this...
This alkaline burn
It'll heal
We've both got scars already.
But I still can't comprehend
How your mind works
Is it clockwork?
Have you ever read between lines
Or paused
Just
Waited
One
More
Moment
In consideration, contemplation
Of what could happen?
Weighed worths balanced by the world on your shoulders?
But your atlas is much too restricted
So you're not conflicted
Just looking back, regretful
As you finally realize
Oh, shit, this'll hurt
This could...
This could break.
And as my eyes are forced
Wider and wider
Squint as I might
Every inch gained
Pushes me right back to the beginning
Overcoming every frantic attempt
To accept
Forgive
At the very least, forget.
But it's so much worse than even I thought
Despite my mind's delirious hyperbole.
The tiny light in the center of my brain
That holds my trust in you
Every day I try to make it grow
But with every inch gained
It dwindles more and more
And despite all your pleading words
You seem determined to snuff it out completely.
Isolation can only do so much
I have to confront this sometime
But every time I try...
Every determined ounce of steeled nerves run screaming
From your laughing eyes and playful hands
And I smile and fold
Just like always.

I am an island.