“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)







i call you heartbeat,
my little prince
or princess,
baby ghost.

lately, 
you have been screaming 
for me 
in my dreams
motherless
confused
fury incarnate
blood boy red and sticky
clinging to my face like tentacles
crawling in circles

i remember it was christmastime
and i woke to the sound of silver bells
comas are as white as they say
but without the snowy light
the reaching hand
the haloes
i can see you in my irises sometimes
i eat slivers of sugared sorrow
savoring it like penance
salty sinking smiles
like those 50 pills
that began with a wish to not exist
and ended in a watery grave

i birthed you behind a shower curtain 
because restrooms have no doors
when you’re crazy
my porcelain placenta doll 
i fell to my knees
too frightened to kiss your head
a choking bird
i sang to you
of artic mermaids with eyelashes as long as their tails
frosty blue kisses
and sails striped like pajamas
that would touch the stars
my little prince
you were my rose
my heart
and now the baobobs are consuming me
with a pink nose,
i dubbed you astronaut of the wonderwhere
i picture you as a teddy bear frame
with button eyes
and a boy’s smile

i wish i had a way to mummify you
like all the flowers that turned into nothing
carry you home
in a heart shaped casket
like seashells from the shore
so that i could hold you sometimes
give you a bonnet
be buried with you
in a sunflower graveyard

i would have named you something soft and safe,
i think
like seth
simon even if you were a girl
maybe flower
or fern

i would have given you hallelujah
a shadow horse lullaby
pulled stray curls behind your ears
touched your eyelids to my lips
and beamed like a moon for you
a nightlight in white
swaying in the dark
you would have had your daddy’s strawberry kissed hair


i was too selfish to carry you
and then let you go
my sweet baby
MY FUCKING BABY
in some pretty rich white bitch’s sugar coated arms
she’d drive you home in an SUV too big for the road
to a robin egg’s blue 
or satin pink room 
and i’d never see you again
hold you
call you mine
you’d never call me momma
trace your dimples on my face
compare the freckles on our shoulders
our barely there noses

and i knew i couldn’t take care of you
mommy doesn’t even brush her hair most days, baby

i just want you to know
you were all i ever wanted
and i couldn’t let you go
i’m so sorry
so fucking sorry
i meant to go with you
i was never meant to wake
part of me
is still comatose
bleached and broken

i keep thinking i’ll meet you in some other body
that recognizes me
you’ll look on me with something worse than pity
turn your precious head and not lose a step
gone from me again

but i hope someday,
you’ll be fully realized
and grab my hand
you’ll forgive me
be my compass
where the silver thread of destiny
creation
the heart of hearts
imagination
and love
meet wonderland
and marry as heaven


infinity squared






tonight i recall
i have nothing
no one 
at all





i wanted to write you something like a lullaby,
and instead it came out a scream

i feel like a freight train on a vertical track with no place to crash, a run on sentence, a balloon you let go, and there are no limbs anywhere to grab me. hold me. shake me. i just want to stop

.

i saw green fairy star systems exploding in your eyes
reeling through time, space, and dimension
i drowned in absinth
and pretty day weather
your lips softer even than mine
skin feathery and dreamy
enough to make me close my eyes
see a crystal chandelier waterfall
of teardrops
threatening to find light
escape the caves inside
polka dotted vision
the translucency and sparkle of
tinkerbell wings

you smelled like maple syrup
and tasted like you were supposed to
right
it felt right to kiss you
like my entire life had been leading up to that moment

the back of my eyelids
now streaked with the jade veins of a poisoned romeo
a rippling sunset reflected in the sea of your eyes
only to reveal a big bellied moon
blanketing those things that sleep and grow and amaze us
in the morning
with their purple fantasia blossoms
wounds scabbed over
scruffy chins
shapeshifting clouds
disappearing scars
the integrity and goodness
that finds soft soil
and plants seeds of apple trees wherever you go
where someday a father will push his child on a swing
or lovers will carve their initials
taste its fruit like it’s forbidden
adam and eve were here
it will perhaps someday be pulped
spread and smoothed and dried
covered with the scrawling muse
you demand from my trembling hands
my pouting mouth

god,
the intensity
i felt from you when you watched me
i am a glass globe
and you are the snow
that falls mutely over my quiet village
heart shaped doors with no locks
the smell of vanilla and laundry hanging on the line
sunshine and sugar frosting mingling with my perfume
if you feel inside me, you’ll come back with honeyed paws
like pooh bear
enough to share
a limitless supply
I’ll sing us a song
scratch your hairy tummy
and you can dance with me
under the covers
hibernate with me
slow steady hearts
one wrinkled soul to share

you’re gonna give me a sugar coma

you were right
i did fit like a puzzle piece

i have never felt so perfectly safe
as in your arms,

archangel

i want to be the one
that makes you remember
how to fly

your peter pan
your neverland
the weightlessness of heaven’s sigh
when the stars are heavy on our backs
and there can only be happy thoughts
i want to give you something between the chaos of carnivals and icicles gathering at our end of the world snow castles pining in an eternal sunshine the color of clementines melt with me

call me little girl
your princess
touch my body
like it’s the finest silk
and you want to feel it all over you
tangle in it
get lost
become it

my hips will call to you
rise to meet me
dizzy
hypnotized
like a snake in a basket woven of succubus dreams
give me your poison
your bite
feed on me
i want you to squeeze me
with all of your might
crush my ribs

steal my fire
the breath from me
still my aching brooding lust
the blood in me

make me believe you’d die without my mouth
on you
surrounding you, strangling your dick
sucking you so good
you’d think there was a gun to my head

twist my hair around your knuckles and pull
me to your face
i will touch it shyly
fingertips scraping against your five o’clock shadow
examining the shade my hair casts on your face
moving my head a little this way 
then that
to make it dance

moist bottom lip pouting on yours
i always want more 
more, more
fucking more
i want to taste your sweat
inhale the beast in you
raise his hackles

i fell in love with this rabid stalker of my sex
the black sun of my erotic musings
i will run from you
and laugh and trip
skin my knee
the scent of blood with arouse you
and me
as i fingerpaint in it
taste it
scatter it to the wind
an ancient spell
of seduction

i will pin you to the wet grass
lift my skirt
no panties
the moon will make me glow
lick the tip of your tongue
and only then allow you to sink inside 
the sweet rose pink of me
let you feel
how i am like rained on petals
and the juiciness of a nectarine
let my flower swallow
savor you
like it will be the only time
teasing 
testing your need
so slow
such torture

until

you absolutely must fuck me
recklessly
without abandon
now
your nails digging into my throat
your forehead pressed to mine
daring me to resist
you don’t care if i live or die
just as long as i cum when and only when you say so
i think you must have known 
i was begging you to flip me over
all the time
spread these full moon thighs, daddy
take me with the rage and greed
only animals now recognize as love
howl for me like a wolf 
claw and rip me apart
bruise me like an starry scarred indigo sky
tense beneath me like a rape victim’s thighs

and finally

shoot me up

with your brand of ecstasy
my drug of choice
i may be junkie whore
and high as a georgia pine
but i still have manners enough 
to say thank you, sir
when you explode inside me
like summer thunder
and i scream from a distant cloud
unhinged
like alice on acid
off with her head

we float



i ride a cloud like a carpet

yes, there again is your perfect mouth
the sad eyes i want to make my own
or else smile
your nipples still hard and begging to be on my lips
i kiss each one with a sliver of tongue
then the cheek closest to me
curl up beside you as small as i can
wishing i could fold up like origami
and you could put me on your shelf

gracelessly, i graze your chest with my fingers
run two or three fingers hesitantly 
through your hair, scratching your scalp
with a mother’s tenderness
i trace behind your ear
press my thumbnail into the lobe
too nervous to look you in the eyes
see if there was some reaction
now that we both know 
what a dirty fucking slut i am

i feel shy
a bit of shame
i pretend that maybe 
someday
you’ll love me
need me
my lashes drooping sleepily
barely brushing my cheeks
you are aware of the need behind them
in my gold goddess irises
the grotesque need to overcomplicate things
with poetry and commitment
vows and flowers and ‘til deaths

yet you say nothing

kiss my forehead
move your hand over my eyelids
pull me tight to you
so tight i can’t escape
(i would never want to)
loving me
in your brutish way
without words
and for tonight


it’s enough
it’s just what i needed to dream a pretty dream

.




i have become
a two legged mermaid
with no tongue
to kiss you sunny good morning
mute and bewildered,

i left the sea
with plans to touch your flame
make flowers of it
to tease the rain
swing it like sparklers
wear it as a garland
a chain of brightly loving hands
a fluttering flower behind my hair
to match the violent in flame butterflies
filling the cage of my ribs

but here
my magic is only a directionless breeze
less than celestial
more than a sideshow schmendrick
my spells will only whisper against your hair
and make the cherry blossom dance
lonelier than ever
perhaps it will only make you think you love me
for a few days
amethyst stardrops you wrapped around my shoulders
neverending child hood sweethearts
tangerine sunsets that melt like ice cream
like my mouth on your wrist

i will make us my special tigertliy ea
two drizzles of honey
and five strands of forever
we can even disappear with the sun

we are moon bathers, you and i
swallowers of the stars
we love almost as much as we break

is it so wrong that i want to hold you?
is it so wrong that five words cannot
refuse me
when together we crafted constellations of our love,
slaved adoringly over monuments,
gave birth to freckled grandchildren, yellow roses,
and rocking chairs,
married our tombstones to one another?
galaxies of tempest longing that swam about us in circles
casting shadows
of lovemaking on our faces

our love become our walls
our ground
no ceiling

every one of my dandelions
has been for you
since i became empty enough to wish
too young
both of us
when our blind sweet innocence died
we wished for what we needed
and not what we desired

and while i am still dropping coins in wells
to hear their depth
to steal their magic,

the fury in you has quieted
replaced with the idea that if you expect nothing,
you’ll never be let down
but, baby,
i see the disappointment in your eyes
regardless

and

for a while there,
i saw a dream in you
i pried you open gently
and touched my own face
you saw tomorrow in me
and the sunsets were that much more beautiful
sleepy blinking dali marigolds and amethyst creation
ganja divine
such astral perfection
only arises from need
urgency
the i’m-gonna-die-without-you’s
my spirit made watercolors for you
we rubbed we bled we danced we fucked

the world is not so daunting
these thousands of paths and ditches, dead ends and roads
when you know what you want
and have a hand to hold
the journey is smiling, too



baby,


the thought that i may never feel your pulse
trace your veins and tattoos like they’re apocrypha
kiss your rhythm stained lips
tao to my soul
the thought that
that if i looked into your eyes right now
i wouldn’t see the tamed hurt,
the tenderest of caresses
with which you met and held me,
the shy knowing smile,
never again
the most intense crazy gorgeous shade of green i’ve ever seen
the undying devotion i saw there
how our tears became one
how you held me like a promise

you said you’d never leave



oh, how it hurts
like a thorn in a sparrow’s wing
all they have is their freedom
their flight

i wish
i wish
i wish to have no memories
to never make another
i will be sorrow’s bride
unhinged
i will scream like the harpies
i will scream for fucking blood and arrows in my heart
i wish

i wish
i never learned to dream
and just accepted my nightmare
in peace
in pieces






you
you are god
but i will make you mortal yet


i will teach you to be art





no looking back or down
.
.
.
.
.
.







.
.

i can’t sleep because
i’m obsessed with you
hallelujah poised on my lips
like a question

sometimes you are something
like a bleak grey rain
pondering and stern and beautiful
i long to curl up next to you
by firelight
and read you my nonfiction
show you how every page
is absorbed with your essence

i just want to be your muse

love isn’t falling
it’s leaping

though, i am delicate with clumsy hands and words,
a lethal combination
like the porcelain cinderella’s carriage
that sits on my grandmother’s mantle
chipped
and wanting for warm knowing hands
waiting to fall

smash
and shatter

into shards of being

little eyes and limbs

my love for you
is the only thing
in me
that hasn’t been broken
the only thing i truly love about myself
i don’t know anything but how to love you
my words again are clumsy
but my heart is true
you pour into my mind and body like sand
through an hourglass
and i’m afraid
always so very afraid
that we won’t have enough time
to feel this
to breathe this
to make each other know this

after everything we’ve been through,
separately and together,
it is fiercely unjust
that we’re apart

but sometimes, when it’s raining hard enough
that i begin to blur
i can feel your hands in my hair
your eyes on mine
searching
and finding
the reason we endured hell
to find heaven
at last

in each other

when you hold me like i have thorns,
i want to grow them

though i am not a rose

i am the bone garden that suffers
when the moon is happy
swaying with its pregnant belly paranoia gnawing at me
excruciating
those crooked little teeth, clover patches trailing from stone jaws
that ache with their sinister sincerity, simpering smiles straining to be felt

i want to be the voice
inside your head
that tells you to trample me
bury me
it’s better this way
you’re better off without my brand of venom
this insanity is the only thing that blooms in me now
tangling with our love
becoming a knot of disease
but you are so stubborn
i want to kiss your lips when you start to believe it
i want you to be the last thing i see
before these tears become walls
impenetrable
tomb like
welcoming me home

it is easier to succumb to these gyrating weeds of misery
than it is to love you with empty arms

but i will fight another day
to perhaps love you better tomorrow
give you something more than crow fed sunsets
and yesterday’s rain
that washed my eyes
when i thought they had come for me
i cried
that i’d never get to touch your face
know your warmth
decide that you are in fact real
and mine alone

and when they didn’t, i felt that maybe they should have

maybe i am only my poetry
maybe i am not even that

dipping fingers in old wounds
dripping honeycombed shadow bright, clutching at a dying magnolia moon
with numb paws

you are ginger tea and black mornings, a figment of my muse
a fragment
of fractured solitude
slivers of schizophrenic sympathy
a symphony of soft halo cinders
vainglorious rose vined strangulations
heavy steeped lungs and chiming chandelier eyes
hell is a shuttered lighthouse
the temple of my body
your breath upon it

I woke with you combing the cobwebs of my dreaming mind
oyster meat salivating
a rush of beauty and salt
sand dollars under my pillow
starfish holding back my hair from my face
waiting for a kiss that never comes
As I tempted fate,

a faun fell asleep in the palm of your music

i am sorry for being only cold showers in the winter
mournful lashes
purple lilies in the background
a smudge of blue paint on your hands
someone you smile at sometimes
but never truly see
i disappear down the drain,
big footed rabbits tumbling after me

please

never stop touching my soul
squeezing it out like a wet rag
even if it means death
by romance
by imagination

By my own light

it amused him to make confetti of my wings and hips
to be the illustrator of my dreams
only to watch my eyelids spasm
as he kept the torch
steady in my hands

the symphony of pain was ribbons
of oasis threading themselves through my ribs,
i wore my hurt like a corset
i couldn’t breathe
only blink and smile for everyone

i thought,
“this is happiness, being protected
from a long lasting oasis
that will only dry up
and leave me thirsting for more
fiction
this is Truth
life
being loved”

murdered imaginings-
their remains were never snowflake consistency so that i could dust my hair and pillow, pretend he was giving me stardust
instead,
they were crippled maimed things
irreparable
gaping blind holes
for eyes and a mouth
i couldn’t even bring myself to kiss
and put in a burial box

i am a ship skeleton of all the wicked musings i have fled,
the god beasts i carried in my belly like i was an ark
the horrors that have fed on my sails
suckled my marrow
pesticides infecting my mind gardens,
turning my butterfly food to poison
bent unmoving hummingbird bodies dotting the skyline of my misery
my bones thrown back at me to create a make-shift shelter
a place where you could only hear me cry

i have never been one to dream beyond my means
but you
you are so much more than i deserve
you are effortless
and well meaning
and so soft to kiss it startles me
to tears
you bring me rainy day feeling
a fertile horizon
i want to cuddle
and tickle play melodies on your back
thrash against the full moon
defy heaven with our bliss
our completeness
moan like the thunder,
this hunger that will not quell
until i’ve ridden you like we’ll never see a starry sky again
entrapped you in honey and amber
become a blanket for your soul

i’m afraid i will only hurt you

i am not used to being loved so tenderly,
being sought by compassionate eyes

the world we help inhabit is a demented circus
hinge-jawed jackals in the audience
throw my organs at me
and i’m one step ahead of this fire
eating the tightrope to snow white ash

i want to stop sometimes
and crash into the depths below,
save you from my arms
from a fall that would only crush us both
from the demons thrashing within me, banging music on my soul like a garbage pail lid
wracking my body with sobs
that lurch like piano keys
being locked away

i want to leap into the fire
into the crowd
and not look back

i want so desperately to give you the flaming haired sunflower eyed
rhapsody mouthed goddess you imagine of me
wild and insane and beautiful
yours
i want to give you the heavens we try to capture in snow globes
to carve love poetry for you in my breasts, my hips
because you can’t chop me down
wouldn’t dream of it

your love makes me strong
makes me believe i can be more
than a damaged clock eyed girl
with useless music running through my hands like sand

i am just so scared
that when you see me
i’ll be an almost muse
but not quite enough to kiss an always smile onto your lips

that you will realize
it is futile to love a stockholm syndrome monster

i love you even more than i love melancholy in my tea
and thorns in my birdhouses

you are helping me to love me
and i don’t know
how to feel except lost, frail
frightened
like i will fail

i.

loving you is losing me in you
you are nirvana
better than this world
of human shaped ashes
lips parted mid-scream
and electric gurgling
i want to lead you by the hand
to a place of undisturbed water
kneel with you
and let the wind take the rest
as i am found on your lips

please don’t leave me to brave this wasteland without your smile
to light my path
i don’t know how to be without you now
don’t want to know how

ii.

i know the stars are dying,
but we are more than their light
more than daffodil longing and perspiration
more than these gargoyles and ghosts that would have us broken
crawling like ants
with planet sized pyramids
on crying backs
we will build our temple of blood and god bones,
and drink the tears of yesterday, a bittersweet elixir, the most potent of wines, to remind us
how precious is today

iii.

you are pretty
i watch you
it makes me feel the way lemon drops make me feel in my tummy
fizzy
silly
light
bright
glad
rainy eyes
i want your hands in my hairs
as i color a sky
to put on our ceiling
i use all your favorite crayons
make us a castle to grow old in
happily ever after moon
is our nightlight
stars on the ceiling playing ring around the rosy with us
we all fall down
happy arms and legs
1 smiley heart

we are mr. and mrs. dragon

iv.

i want you to need me
know me
tickle me
love me for me
there are not enough minutes in the day to see you
your aura of waterfall clarity mist washing the soot from my face
fever breathed words
coiling in the base of my soul
as rock
the realization
that they are never meant for me
i am a blind white tiger
lost and alone
left to become like the snow
mute
dirtied and lace veins
my pain an insignificant trim for your bride’s veil
my fur a rug to set before your hearth
you’ll fuck her on it while my heart burns to nothing in the fireplace

v.

love is inhuman
a god hand plants a tender young sapling
that makes a tree in the end
of “you” and “me”
we can people the word with fruit and flowers,
the heart’s indiscretions:
food and pollen and muse and honey breath for our brothers,
our own minds

or else we can wait for the axe
dreaming of stumped wrists
and hands we should have caressed,
tears those hands may have caught
and made into earrings that catch the light
and remind you to push her hair behind her ear
we can choose to hold our heads in our hands
while eden falters
withers
fades
paradise lost
unrealized

or we can dance and breathe and be free,
even when the bees sting
or the light is no longer

vi.

i have known beauty
truth
you are both

this mourning is not white roses on my cheeks
or the rain the morning of your funeral
it is as ghastly
as you always thought me to be

I had no voice,
no tears
when my sister crawled into my bed to hold me
I had only gloomy candle light to give her
no understanding
or empathy
I have always been better with goodbyes than hellos
you taught me that
as your mother screamed like a jackal
in the hallway,
feeling her child ripped from her like stitches
still no expression
from your youngest born

the light of angels kept me up that night
as they did when I was a child,
you were not among them
not that I expected you to be

even still
my days became either black or white
dead or living
falling or rising,
my tongue forgotten against the roof of my mouth,
heart torn between missing you
and loving you better as a memory

I thought you a thing of my control
for a brief wonderful while


until your ghost found paint
my waking mind a canvas
for you to color with red scrawling poison
my hands
became your hands,
scratching broken flowering sunsets into my thighs
tattooing regret under my skin with broken mirrors
your flesh and blood
alive in me,
time riddling itself down the drain
I torture myself
because you can’t
because you’re screaming
and god doesn’t listen






yesterday,
he told me I was beautiful
and I believed him,
collecting my hair around my finger
like a promise ring

you were silent for once
and allowed my smile to linger,
to breathe
and plant seeds in me

perhaps you are dying
in this world I inhabit now
a world where love is wellness
in place of sickness,
where color is rejoiced and free

a place
where I can be me
and that’s okay

perhaps you’re waiting for me to fall on my knees again
begging for plum hungry kisses
and a wrist to blot my teardrops against
while you eat me from the inside out

perhaps I was the one giving life to you
all along
10 years of captivity in an unlocked cell
crimeless
an angel wearing a devil’s rags

perhaps i am the ghost

i see you
like blood on my eyeball
sense your wicked imaginings
in the sweat rising
on my flesh

i can feel you
soft on my heart like satin
ripe for the need,
figuring you into my every little daydream
you are written all over me
in flames
that lick and nibble

feel me
stringing your kisses like prayers
like a garter
around my thigh,
breathe you in like smoke
king of my soul
god of my nectar
rain to my snow

filling my mind with glow in the dark sunsets
and purple feeling
i am filled with cold white beaches
shadows sliding over ribcages
volcanoes breathing up spines
the flight of birds
in muscle,
my hand in your hand








i wake up squeezing your palm
peach lush lips on knuckles,
your presence
fading to a whisper
my soul knotted in promise



ever after yours

even the wallflowers flee
when white irised pygmies people my dreams
and the ocean is a strawberry potion 
of bubbles and smoke rings

i remember our barefoot nights together
that became barefoot mornings
my smile blooming against the birth mark
on your throat
we needed no blankets except the clouds
lit from behind in silkscreen strangled angel wing hues
we tasted like chemicals and paper
and type o negative

it smolders
where you touched me, 
where you lingered
and traced words that can never be untraced

i am a canvas
you wept 
and raged upon,
finger painting love in my virgin blood,

then burnt yourself instead


i am puddles of snow, china doll free
become a sea
rocking you to sleep
me, 
the disillusioned breath 
lifting the sails of your fiery ship,
paper lanterns blinking into a cruel empty night
still,
i can hear you crying


fire never forgets,
never sleeps,
is a succubus garden of scars opening in my mind,
my heart,
beneath my flesh,
shaded like whimpers
shrill as hurricanes






i always did call you my suicidal phoenix