good-bye, memphis

every now and then, I've been getting these little jabs of guilt. it has taken me this long to realize I am going to miss this shit city. memphis is not a receptacle where i can abandon all of my hurt, my bad memories. it's all going to come with me. it is not this city's fault.

or the south for that matter.

i'm going to miss how clear the air is here. big open spaces where you can yell and no one will here you for miles. part of me will always want to be thirteen again, walking around in the middle of woods and laying on pavement with allison. there's some big part of my childhood that will always stay with that girl. and i have this nibbling fear that there will be no country where i'm going. if i ever find a best friend like that, where will we walk to? whose driveway will we lay in?

i don't want to forget how naive i was as a kid. i want to remember how bad it can fucking get when I read myself into a hole or play so much warcraft, i no longer have any friends i can hear without using a headset. i still can't believe how much i idolized lisa when i was younger. she was so perfect and beautiful in my mind. i think it keeps me up at night now, the thought of having a single thing in common with her. i think she really wanted us to be the same. i think she tried her hardest to make it that way. maybe we are similar. but now I get to pick the ways how. i think people are really all grey areas.

if i was less of a coward, I would call up every guy who ever thought he was in love with me and apologize to him. apologize for being so insensitive, for playing with your feelings and taking them for granted. i'm still trying to see all the things you saw in me in myself. until very recently, I don't think I had an inkling of an idea of what i problem i have with these things. i know i've laughed at the situations, but i also know now that I have permanently damaged people in this way. I am so sorry. a lot of people hurt me before i hurt you. in some ways, i am trying to get back at life for fucking me over so young. it wasn't your fault, though. I hope you have moved on. I hope you don't think about me anymore. I know saying this here doesn't make a difference because none of you will ever read it (and you'd all hate me for lumping you together like this) but I need to collect my thoughts. I regret how I tried so hard to be the perfect girl for you, and then I got bored of it and tore it all down. I am flawed. I never expect any of you to forgive me. no one deserves to be disrespected the way I did you.

as far as forgiveness goes, I am not far away enough to forgive the people that have wronged me. I can only hope that day will come.

for any person that has stayed up late talking to me-- whether we were reclining in a car, loitering in some restaurant, falling asleep on the floor or on the phone-- thank you. thank you for letting me get in your head. you will never know how much your words have shaped me.

allison. bailey. linda. liz. rose. not all women are dumb.

i can't believe all the different parts of the world i've found in this city. fuck, i can almost speak a different language now. I've made friends with people from places I barely knew existed. I make bad jokes about memphis being a cultural wasteland, but I've found everything to disprove that. I'm so behind :) i should have learned more languages.

i am really going to miss my surrogate parents. they have cared for me in ways that i never got (and probably never will get) from my biological parents. there are good people that actually care about others in this world, for sure.

i will not miss memphis drug culture. the people who do it here are beautiful and sad and pathetic and I always wanted to help all of them, but the truth of it was if I ever let myself do these sorts of things, I am among the worst. I have no more self-control than they do. I hope they all find something wonderful to hold onto that they don't have to buy or smoke away.

i can't finish this right now.

"Music is beautiful. Since the beginning of time...we have been looking for a new way of speaking. We often blame our treatment throughout history on terrible misunderstandings (Words never mean what we want them to mean.) If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best things we've got."

- from Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated

when i look at you,

i see some kind of

allegiance,

some kind of love for

an idea wherein family really means something.

work is not an option.

size is not important.

and beautiful things can be

almost negligible,

like the thinness of a lip

or a scar wrapped about a finger.

so i try to exile this

growing tumor of envy,

because you didn't make me

more complicated, didn't

contract my large being

in corners.

it is just that

sometimes,

i want to feel like a part

of that simplicity

i have never known.

no one will hit me

i keep feeling that dark chocolate melting into my tongue, followed by that surprising sweetness that so contradicts the silky bitterness preceding it.

i keep drinking too much sake because the sleep after it settles in my belly and satiates my exhaustion.

i like to wake up early and listen to my coffee brewing as i scour my room for matching socks.

i am so perfect when you kiss me in the morning, testing each of your joints to make sure they work today. watching your body come to life again next to mine.

i love walking people through the rain with big umbrellas.

i'm so excited about los angeles that i don't think i'll ever get there.

i used to

think i was slightly original until i relapsed, totally relapsed into this complete worthless and utterly typical lifestyle of being afraid submissive making all the wrong decisions--

and the gravel, the broken pieces of used-to-be-sidewalk crunching awkwardly below his jordans and that shitty job waiting to be wham!toasted, bam!served to the enforcers that won't enforce because they want our sandwiches and

i am your sky, i am your fucking sunny day sundown and i'll shine on you until you flee to the shadows, the oscuro and let's ride all day long i want to lose myself and lose you so badly on these bullshit roads that will never end they will just change and dead-end and turn into bigger better BOULEVARDS! santa monica, hollywood rodeo drive oh please i will be anything you want if you just let me go down on you like i've been doing this all my life

fuck those compulsions to buy little stuffed toys that i can clutch and pretend into friends for myself when i'm alone-- and wrap those appendages (not arms if they can't support) about me why yes there's a bit of weight to be regained BUT FUCK IT REALLY darling because when i looooook in the mirror these bones are so much bigger like you when you're tangling me up in the sheets and i won't let you have me. she's so heavy.

and there is this nagging irrational feeling that i had a quarter in 1992 and when i least expect it, that quarter is going to be in my pocket again and there's nothing i can do but spendspendspend it.

i am so nervous i shake and coat myself in flour.

it

it's hitting me.

warbling

memphis is playing a cacophony for us tonight, baby
of cicadas screaming for a somebody,
of boxcars wishing for the past.
and one day,
this will course through everything,
a weak circulation from better days, too
veinous and steely to render a mistake

i can feel how still the trees are
now
even with the living things moving inside of them:

"I was in love once."

the crickets drown all my miss-yous
in this siren-dirtied air,
with my neurons forever synaptic between evolution and
how you always
felt.

things

are most evasive when needed.

simplicity

is the people that walk in-and-out of those misted glass doors,
drowning their slightly overpriced food in vats of reduced sodium soy sauce. always asking for a little more drink than can be drunk up.

a heroin-ruled lady barely existing in her marred skin, splayed across the hood of my car. never too unreasonable, so long as no one pointed out that she is really speaking to entities no one else can see. or perhaps we just don't care to see.

the cigarette she asked for that I do not have. that little cylinder of cancerous destruction that I will not hold carefully between my lips. I will not leave lipsticked stains on its filter. I will not tongue out careless smoke rings with its burning tobacco. I will not do any of these things because I do not have a cigarette. and that is simple.

what is not simple, not finite is currently in washington, fresh from oregon, still fresh in my mind. it steams there, hot and undisturbed as if it is still. and I feel every fat lip, every stolen breath on my dry lips and my now-clear lungs. a shadow of the pain they feel, but a shadow that is as familiar, relative and empathetic as pain can be.

i've grown up a long time past

it is tender and translucent
like the virgin skin of a
new lesion;

soft and afflicted. unprepared,
unprotected. just like they said
as i focused my gaze
on their incensed countenances.

"you are not ready, not ready
to survive her."

they did not even have to mash
their fingers into my imperfections
to feel the fibrous tissue
swelling underneath that perceived
vulnerability.

it is an oddly unnatural thing, how
naturally the blood clots,
fortifies. rebuilds.
how the scars that line my limbs
lock within the most sagacious
defenses and adamantine surfaces.

the skin on their bodies
is as flawed as
the smooth lids that blink over
doubtful eyes.

the hardest person

to surprise is most definitely myself.

after

when I get home, I pour wax into my embossed limbs
impressed with the contours of your solidity
I will make a stencil of you.

don't tilt your head at my absurdity
and don't tattoo your brow with lines.
I know it will be an impostor's arms
wrapped about my birdcage ribs
but at least I can make believe
with your voice distended
across too many miles for authenticity.

as I bastardize someone
I will never really taste, no matter
how comatose we become in each other's
fireside kisses,
the verisimilitude of
us
decays.

we may have slept away the storm, but
clouds have no time for silly things
like dreams or Aphrodite
so that tree in the park died on its side,
roots in the air like splayed fingers.

its body as hollow
as this t o g e t h e r.

a concise summary of the vacation

more to come-- need to raid the better camera.

it was a fear that settled into satiation like kneading air bubbles out of dough.
that eroded to apathy, then barreled into frustration.
which transmuted into another kind.
lascivious contact, sheets inescapable as quicksand--
i tried to retrieve you.
yelled at a mute huddling at the bottom of a well
only to be met with my own vociferations
that snuck through my tympanic membranes.

needless frenzy. air vents blew warmth into
the enclosed December chill near the ceiling.
(most of us look up to that comfort
and heat rises)
diffused into acceptance.
which caused an overjustification of my
argument.
I lost the case in the end.

that gush of relief that overtook me
the tourniquet lifted, my accomplishments
deindividualized, yet anomalous.
then ladder rungs. up up up
with all my green amorous intent.
I've never been reflective enough to
play up all those spotlights.

then all our doors were agape.
conversations fell. acid rain.
indecisive footing and traveling hands.

in that place I keep returning to.
where temptation hangs out in the circles
that line the fingertips running over me.
and i am so very flawed.
but let's muffle our egos for just this minute
it is so easy to let go
with your hand over mine.

each an oar I cannot retain
for only one stroke.
so I rotate one direction
and back again

floating, at least.

flop flop

i think i accomplished this year the same way I drink coffee on mornings I don't want to wake up

meaning i keep closing my eyes
and opening them again
and putting my hand on the warm cup
then taking it off again
and drowsing off a bit
until the liquid cools
and all the small amount of sugar settles at the bottom
and the creamer floats to the top.

and then I make ice coffee!

oh oh oh

IV: X
a pro reel iv drip in the longest summer

out.

fuck

i'm a sheep.

oh and by the way

i fuel all of my rage into hating you, not because you deserve it
or because i have sufficient grounds
but because no one will answer my questions
and so i'm just left to falter
or linger like some sock shoved deep beneath the bed

and sometimes i stare at pictures of you
cook those images up between my molars
revisit all of those clues that i cannot uncover
at least not by any respectable means
(I could decode it if I wasn't so moralistic)
and then i fucking rip the seams of my knuckles open
bite my own wrist,
get the keyboard wet with my own goddamn tears

because i hate you hate you hate you
what the fuck do you have that i don't have
that i can't weave into my pathetic excuses for words
i'm not an artist, so what
i don't have what you have, so what
i like myself from time to time
and when that comes around
I am a weapon of mass creation
with the brilliance of aurora boureali that
you'll never be able to fucking paint or draw
or whatever it is that you goddamn do
since I don't know

and yes, I'm ridiculous and unnecessary
I have giraffe legs and sometimes I get a little
carried away, but I bet I've spelunked
into places you will never fucking find,
you bastard.

you don't even know what you're missing
and that's the only way I can stop hating you.

then she wilts a little

there is a mulberry tree that sulks in the backyard
a little alien to these parts, maybe
but mostly because she never had any fruit
not last October, nor September
when they pried the FOR SALE sign out of the scanty grass.
she had nothing with which to shock
and that was the way she liked it,
cloaked between the ostentatious walnut,
the disreputable pine,
she could easily slip behind the scenery.
the tree didn't like the adolescent oak they
planted like a battalion front at her knees
doesn't anyone ever consider a tree's opinion?
anyways, she never entertained the thought of
another's growth. the sapling would have to wither
while she soaked up the soggy March sun in her
malnourished arms.

not a thought. and then, to deflower her from
the wall: mulberries! pieces of her forcing their
way into her small body as her new leaves
fell with the April rain in fluttery protest.
because newcomers should be planned
--which is why she disapproved of refugees,
whether it was a stray cat or little boy
running from Katrina's hyperventilation--
but May would soon make her more naked
than she had been in November,
adorned only in her own palpable errors.

the frenzy of poetic inspiration undone

I don't live in the past so much as I skim my fingertips over its saturated, amorphous surface from time to time. bounding down our then-seemingly-infinite driveway to ambush my dad in his cranberry pickup, just to greet him after a long day's work. destroying coloring books with my mom in one of her fits of silent artistry.

the longstanding debate of nature versus nurture likes to hang out in my lucid dreams. just last night, it interrupted me as I scaled a barbed-wire fence. I silently cursed the concept, little bits of metal latching its claws onto the skin of my thigh. I didn't want a trickle of blood to slow me down, since I was following someone. a girl with twine for hair and big mood ring eyes. she took me into a house with molded walls. all of its windows were sleeping. and then we went into a big room with stuffed animals--they were all missing something: an eye, a leg, a smile-- with a hole in the floor. I feel as if it sucked us in. perhaps by way of intrusive curiosity...is wondering a sin?

maybe it was hell, and maybe it wasn't. but you couldn't sit up, much less stand. it was pleated crawl spaces of chalky walls, further confused by searing pipes that kept singing my hair.

her face was incandescent and it hurt to look at it because her eyes were big craters with nothing behind them and she wanted me to descend further, but I could feel the pipes breathing faster and she was strangling me with her viney arms and pulling me down further further until

my cat was kneading her claws on my belly through the sheets and waking me up.

*picture not related.

don't judge me

not sure if i like it or not.

i guess if there are serious objections to the pictures, I can change them.

couldn't find anything funny for valerie, clift, o'brien, or india. they're not photographed in excess like the rest of us.

i tried to scan it but my scanner sucks, so i had to just take a picture.

JESUS CHRIST i hate my scanner for wasting me 20 minutes. this will need to be scanned eventually, anyway. the photo quality makes it look worse than it really is.

i'm pretty sure

that I'm being punished for poking fun at the afterlife, or something.

and it's a vicious cycle because, every day, the possibility of me believing in god decreases.

derby hall

some kind of receptacle for the bits of bone in my life



that he cushions with the ashen cancer
made malignant by his seized rise-and-fall



i glanced reproachfully at the necktie in my closet
through a gap between the door and its frame
and mull over if his breath felt trapped
there in the moving walls of his esophagus.
did his endorphins ever revolt--and
if they did
were they too late?


possibilities glare in the curve of his nose,
the inescapable empathy nesting on his brow
that ejected him from the cockpit--
I resist the urge to draw lines between
the hands that move me
with the fingers that forsook control.



when they shook their bodies to those riffs
did they know they were dancing to
your personal prophesied elegy?


i could have moved my hips to your secrets
without an uttered word
and I find it hard to chase them away
even post-mortem.
because we would have been friends
and the pale of your eyes confuses his irises
when he lingers on my lips.


we could have swung together.

(this isn't even a picture of ian curtis)

don't

day one of another something dumb. I can't sleep and something I thought up is real. Freud is still bullshit. my shoulders taste like sunscreen. 59114.4

i don't want to do this.

a fraction of oneself

we are the vortex
we are the cylclonic remnants of what was
once
compartmentalized, desensitized--
vulnerable as thick-bottomed window panes
salvaged from a condemned
structure
and left to crack on some
dusty artery.

we are the vortex
we are the alloyed cicatrices of memories
past
disengaged, post-enraged--
volatile as a demilitarized wasteland
with stones groomed to snap
your spine
and watch you etiolate with
paralysis.

we are the vortex
we are the landslipping intricacies of
now
inexorable, inconclusive--
obtrusive as the mortal child
heart ebbing on its leadened
tempo
between the arms of a
remissive father.

fuuuuu

I can only transfer 50 entries in a 24-hour-period, due to some anti-abuse rule.

Ohhhh well.

For the slender possibility that any of you have wandered over to me from livejournal, you should follow me here. I'm tired of fangirls and fanfiction and other drooly-imagined worlds.

this is a test

testing.

1
2
3

also

this is terrifying:



we are all different. I swear it.

canon

~we are the same--
the two of us fall like stars.

what
does
this
mean?
you have my attention.

death cab was so lovely in concert. i am v. disappointed in the lack of "marching bands of manhattan," but they played several other songs that I love muchly.

i kind of really want a leather jacket.

and LOLWAT at awesome people being engaged to eachother:

ben gibbard + zooey deschanel glaskjdshasldk my mind esplodey

 

so basically, i think my favorite singer/songwriter just kind of pummeled my woman crush.


--


I have a good catch
and I think he likes me.

walls

you can build walls all day long, but eventually they will crumble. and when that happens, everyone wants to take a piece.

and you figure the wall had a pretty good run. it wasn't like Berlin and you could never see it from beyond the atmosphere. besides, you never held a personal affinity for China.

even when you're dissembled, gravity assures that all of your paint chips, your supports and your bricks are going to fall down into a neat mess. it starts to get complicated when you let people take the pieces.

then you're being exchanged in shoddy ebay transactions, sold, sold like that slippery hooker on airways. your chips of bone and severed fingers are dealt as symbols of hope, in the hushed voices of drug dealers and enigmatic politicians.

you're too many yellowing puzzle pieces thrown into a holographic jigsaw box. there is nothing distinctive about you and their unpredictable images befuddle you into an acidic stupor.

we never went bowling

oh god, I fell in love with you
as your contagious laughter
spread
tangentially into my ribcage.
we shook in so many ways--
who really wants to be taken seriously
in bed?

and I am a slave to
world maps, always jonesing
for an outbound ticket; yet,
your chameleon eyes take me
to so many places
I have never been
with no speed limits on the freeway,
meteor showers in your backyard--
endless vacations days.

you taught me another word
for kissing:
two points coming together
lines that never end fitting
together, the same curvature.
the first move only pretended
to be mine--
i told you i fall
so hard for words.
you never stopped sending
those songs and poems.
damn those two foolish years
i could have spent with you.

we visited
your demented grandmother
she constructed stories
of glaring gunshots and leaky rooves
but her questions were very real--
what are you going to do, so far away
from one another?
i could sleep forever
if only to stop wondering
if only to be in love with you,
forever,
as I am in love with you now
every time your touch
melts out of my skin
like permafrost.
I'll be your antarctica.

louisiana stole my platonic lover

He dated some girl named Leslie-- Leslie with the outdated, tin can braces, Leslie with the sheepdog bangs. My first day back in Memphis, she asked me to sit at her lunch table. After a half year of socially defunct Florida schooling, I judged people like an apocalyptic jury. Leslie was one of those awkward, overdeveloped pre-teens whose palms reeked of bleeding Sharpie. God forbid she try to run in her pants-- they were huge, chained parachutes-- and I hope for her pride that she has stopped wearing all of those Anime t-shirts.

She was the first one to misinterpret what I had with him. If you were to ask me how we began conversing, I would have to lie. My memory fails me. I do remember the first song he gave me, though: "Butterflies & Hurricanes," by some British band called Muse. It was the beginning of the most enticing, yet brief encounter I will ever have.

We were always attached to opposite ends of the same headphones, reading lyrics off each other's lips. Everything was euphonic with him. I could find eighth notes dancing among the freckles that decorated his cheekbones, and I could see musical staffs flowing in the waves of his unkempt hair. I veered dangerously close to appreciating the Southern accents; his voice was as languorous and sunken as the bass lines in "Scar Tissue." I had an apple green Ipod mini back then, and as high school loomed near, his illegally torrented harmonies began to carve a lingering beat into my tympanic membranes.

"I'm going to sing you something," he would murmur, "and then it will be your turn."

I would press my ear close to the phone until the walls of my throat could feel his songs. He sang me Sinatra and "Mr. Brightside," until he convinced me that "Hot Fuss" was the soundtrack to my life. I also nursed a personal envy for the Ava Gardener I could never be.

I am so much further than three years away from those blithe nights.

After one semester and too few days of summer, he sent me a trippy song by the Crystal Method and told me he was moving. I brushed it off as a joke. I did not get to say good-bye. I listened to The Dark Side of the Moon CD he burnt for a week straight, and by the end of it I was hoarding a mountain of crumpled Kleenex in my wastebasket. We still had our nightly mutual serenades, and I felt strangely safe. It was the kind of safe you feel under an giant, overworn black hoodie during wintertime. I slept better then.

His cellphone bill escalated to a damning six hundred dollars by October, and we have never really talked since. Sometimes he visits Mississippi, and I drive down there (alone) to pick him up and spend a few days with him. Things are different now; we exchange the occasional broken instant message, but it usually amounts to small talk. An entire Ipod later, his music, including some songs he mixed himself, still haunts my speakers. I can't listen to ten minutes of my library without thinking of that insufferably humid summer.

At the end of May, he will move back to Memphis. He will bring back a playlist of songs I will never hear, and he will speak with a strange accent I will never adjust to. I will be on the other side of the country by August, yet I find myself futilely repressing callow hopes of another summer he will not give me.

"Tell all your Cajun friends that there's an Asian girl in Memphis who loves you more than your own mother," I tell him.
"They'll make fun of m-"

The noise on his bus pressures the phone signal until it crinkles and rips. Connection lost, says my cell screen.

**disclaimer to lurkers and those who don't know who this is about: this friendship was purely friendly.

permission to gloat

when i was greener, you told me stories--
eskimo-kissed my flat nose to sleep and
lured me conscious with bacon by mornings.

when you were gone, I would live in your word--
pull your DNA from the backs of stamps,
and recreate you in my flightless bird.

when prison released you, he left his cage--
I buried his corpse in your new backyard.
and my brain found the time to disengage.

when you said you won't watch me suicide
today, I pulled the warmth out of my drink--
gathered the courage to tell you: I tried.

we left my wings, rotting, without headstone--
I cannot aviate without my will
perhaps I'm prepared for the great unknown.

dialogue

release me out of my teems, let me destroy--

did you see

the way he was

looking at you?

hit him, push him-- do something,

I swear to god if you turn the other cheek

then it's over, you might as well die

what good are you to defend yourself in the pride you carry

around your neck; why should I be quiet? call me by my name when you

are speaking to me-- without me

your edge is gone; without me, you would be

scared break something, this isn't fair

why should they talk to you like that? no more hourglasses.

I'm allergic to salt water; let's slaughter

all things in a two-mile radius. hate is us

and it fuels our divine fire.

take another step towards the confrontation,

this is my favorite part, let's create a way to start--

death is impossible and we are invincible so

there is nothing tougher than our image.

i grow fond of the anger; stranger than the others

i come when you least expect--

torment is caused it's a job well done; torture our

opponents we know the world as they know it--

listen to me and do everything i wish

then we'll dominate, claim privilege to

all the things we see--

you don't use me enough, i come out

to rescue you and this is the thanks i get? i never get recognized for my brilliance--

only the pain and the destruction and

the negative effects i cause to the innocent.

the temperature rises; let's get psychotic, intimidate;

get a reputation for being untouchable and I am the voice

no turning back,

the strength when you attack

i'm here forever, never forget i control you--

and god gave me the on and off switch,

I use it for your own good; these others

do nothing for you-- with me

we advance and collect scars

and walk tall

and talk about whatever we want

i've watched you grow and collect power

now it's time to use

immortal decisions

and the moment is only half of what we want--

the energy is our destiny; grab as much as you can

without thinking about the sand; i was giving birth.

your teasing and abuse-- now we all face the truth:

without me you were nothing.

so acknowledge my

existence so you can never distance

yourself from the

things that keep you alive--

sit back and get ready, my student,

the ride is going to be painful and incredibly intense

we walk as two, but we'll leave as one set of

tortured

footprints

re: My Original Personality

Hello there, it seems we haven't spoken in a while. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've zeroed in on what's going on. I understand. My original personality (you) works like a dick husband, and my mental stability is the emotionally abused wife. So you go to work every day, come home for about twenty minutes to give me a pity fuck, and then go off to your younger and more vibrant mistress. Lately you've started drinking a lot, and I noticed that you've also taken to hitting me. That's okay. I don't mind being battered. I'd just like you to come around more often. You see, in our decently long marriage of almost seventeen years, I've lost all ability to survive without you. Personalities aren't meant to be changed or lost like cheap earrings. I'm going to selfishly yearn for you every goddamn minute you're off having sex with someone else.

And I'm cataloging the bruises you're leaving all over me. Let me tell you, the friends that I think I have are beginning to notice. You can't get away with this forever. Eventually you're either going to have to just leave me alone so I can find a new husband, or stick around. Do things right for a change. I may be a hopeless, deranged nymphomaniac, but I know that you are not fulfilling your obligations as my primary personality.

Don't get all offended, either, because I have wanted you around, but you just bail on me all of the time. Do you know how confusing things get without you? Then all these other dumb shits try to play the game. It just doesn't work. I need you.

So I guess, what I'm trying to say is...I'm sorry. I'm sorry I repressed you into submission when you got too emotional. I'm especially sorry that I am not very in-touch with you.

My predicament lies in the fact that you have all of my social skills. Bring them back. Please?

the devil only exists because of your belief in him

On Mondays in kindergarten, my teacher always asked what we did with our Sundays. Each time I relayed my churchless afternoons, she acted as if she had never heard of such a thing. The other students were similarly bewildered at the concept of life-without-Bible-verses, and life-without-dad-slapping-you-during-cus

tomary-prayertime-shut-eye.

I was a child aglow with questionnaire sieges, so, naturally, I asked mother why we had family bike rides on the Sabbath instead of bible study.

"The people around here raise their arms in praise to sermons about sins of alcoholism, then they go to work with hangovers on Monday morning. They condemn gluttony and watch their waistbands stretch out. They give their vows under the nose of a priest, then they sleep with their neighbor's wife."

My mother never sugarcoated life for me, not even at five.

Both of my parents managed to maintain the consistency of sand dunes. After they began to home-school Julian and me, we transmuted our near-Atheistic beliefs to Catholicism. There was never much of anything to divulge in confession, though I suspect I would have eroded my rosary to dust if I was Catholic these days. My mother strung a brazen crucifix over our front door, inherited from her late grandma. She stopped braiding my hair and started pulling it instead. Bruises don't show on the scalp. Julian was never good with his Hail Marys. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

From the radioactive decay of my mom's days in Salt Lake City, there was a lady by the name of Mary Baugas. She made decadent birthday cakes while relaying passages from the Book of Mormon to my family. I started to question Catholicism. It didn't have enough icing.

We played touch-and-go with the Baptists. I went to vacation bible school, where they gave us candy for memorized verse. They told us that Catholics were occult. I felt withdrawn from children my own age, so I never made any friends. I thought there was something wrong with me. I told one of my VBS teachers that one day. 1 Corinthians: When I was a child, I thought like a child, I talked like a child, I reasoned like a child.

I became a member of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian church. The preacher there brimmed with self-righteousness until he shook at the pulpit. He gave all his children the same leaky-tap-blue eyes. I found his daughter on a social networking site a month ago. She blogged about the time she drank herself silly with altar wine. Not all churches have mellowed to grape juice. That one sip was always so bitter. My parents never touched a drop of alcohol, until my mother became a single parent. I swept up the shards of 80 proof bottles one afternoon in the seventh grade. She told me, "Never get your stomach pumped. It hurts."

I joined Bellevue right before I turned twelve. No one there ever knows your name, but I think that the fragments of my family liked it that way. Services there have more singing than preaching, more tithing than fellowshipping. After we stopped going there, they still gave us the food we couldn't afford to buy. Years later, our advocate and counselor was convicted of molesting his son. Many of the church authorities had known for twenty years.

By ninth grade, I had read the Bible in New King James version and New International version. I had dabbled in the Quaran, obsessed over karma and nirvana, and attended churches of Lutheran, Methodist, and non-denominational persuasion. At fifteen, I renounced all religious affiliation I previously upheld. Though I publicly denied the existance of any deity, I was personally convinced that God hated me, and began to insert it as a sort of interjection in any given conversation: "God hates me."

The truth is, I spent hours of my childhood trying to convince myself that someone was listening to my prayers through a styrofoam cup. For every day that nothing changed, I pretended that maybe my prayers were lost somewhere along the string between God and me. After fifteen years, I stopped despising religion. I started seeing it a sort of answer key, a flashlight to help people make their way through the dark. Who am I to hate that kind of thing? I'm no good at answering questions and I can't even walk around my house in broad daylight without glasses.

1 Corinthians: When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. I stopped praying through styrofoam cups. I stopped praying at all. I'm my own Jesus now, and I'll save my goddamned self.

teddy bear

I have known for a while
as I watched the hem of your pantleg
scaling your ankle
that my fabric would fade-
emerald in autumn.

the air stuffing my fibers, sucked away
by the lungs of all your lovers.
and my button eyes lost
their shine, as you outgrew me
faster than a soggy wool sweater.

and your primal moans blew me
like you blew him, off the bed
into lost-sock world, dust bunny
graveyard. besmirched by bedskirt,
finished by philanderers.

I will try to find the curve of your
elbow between the books of
the shelf you buried me in-
repress your dessicated snot that
I stored from your lamentations.

so you move along. will me
to Goodwill, with all of your
nights of opened eyes. find
someone with arms that hug and
a mouth that kisses back.

remember, though you boxed
me up, you cannot contain bad
memories within corrugated walls.
she will depart like stars in the morning
and I would have never stopped loving you.

mythologizing me

Leez:

Mehhh

I'm trying to remember friday.

but i don't.

are you making fun of me?

...her coat is red.

Or at least I think it is. The color makes the blood rise into her lips, as if freshly bitten, and her eyes have to be greener than usual. It could be the scarlet tile that walls the subway underground that make it look red, but I think that it just is. My cones prefer shenanigans to the truth.

The subways clear out earlier than you would think, and we are two-thirds of the occupants in this car. The other is a man with two white bags that crinkle under his drowsy exhales. Boston has more character than home. My shoe brushes against her exposed ankle, but she doesn't even turn around to look at me. She remains comfortably afloat in her bass-pumped rock, fat headphones hugging her ears like a life preserver. The way she looks at me and that man is familiar to me. One quick glance over her shoulder and the jump of her eyes as the doors slide to a close: I know her.

It is not like noticing your older brother, seated at the kitchen table in only plaid lounge pants, as you sneak into the house early Saturday morning. It is not like passing the same nameless student in the hallway each day. It is not like stumbling onto the networking profile of some childhood friend.

It is more like those awkward moments when you pass a mirror in the dark and terrify yourself with the fleeting reflection of your own face.

I can feel the augmented rush of blood into her fingertips as if they are my own, stimulated by the sultry subway air. Her tongue, clicking the beat of Infra Red onto the roof of her mouth, becomes my tongue as I remember the endless loop of Placebo possessing my ears. The white of her knuckles wrapped about the metal pole is that of my own. She is a clone of my very being, manifested in some foreign body and painted all the wrong colors.

My gaze finally intercepts hers, and we look hard until my eyes convulse in their sockets. She asks me what's wrong and I shrug, biting the thumb of my glove. She steps over the yellow line, where I am standing, and she tells me her name. I tell her mine. We start to talk, and I can tell that her stop was a long time ago. We are both just along for the ride, piggybacking on someone's seven-day pass, trying to find some warmth within the subway's accordioned segments.

Then small talk three-sixties to something serious, and we writhe in our boots to maintain stoicism. I take a fingernail between my teeth. The red line is ending, and she pretends to have someone to meet. My stare remains attached to her retreating back. The drone of some underground guitar echoes into the car, and is severed by the shutting doors.

I will remember seeing her this time so that next time I won't be so dismayed, so unready with my unforthcoming mouth. These people come and go, and they will haunt me until I learn to communicate with them.

I cut a path through the fresh snow as I make my way back to the hotel. My brain is already erasing the past ten minutes. People will ask questions, it tells me. People will wonder where you were. I plug my ears with the headphones my brother bought. It's too late for all these people to be screaming. I don't want to listen.

shuffling

there are days I feel so wrong that my brain has convinced me my DNA has fallen out of line. and my compulsions count my breaths in series of fives. my head feels awkward, stacked haphazardly on my neck like a poorly constructed skyscraper. why do I live for such maladexterities? I want so badly to navigate using only the stars, to pedal-push until my achilles tendon collapses and my brake pads turn to silt. careening down empty freeways, blind to speed limits and self-preservation. and all my ashes will disintegrate into the tide's breath and I will lose the wrinkles barricading my eyelashes.

there is a game of pong being pinged in my cranial cavity where my brain should be.

don't tell me to calm down or get along or deal because I am beyond the realm of such things. I am amidst the stuff of movie scripts and American tragedies, and it is more draining than a marathon in spandex shorts. my stomach insists on swallowing everything below the protection of my rib cage.

it's so pointless to engage anyone these days. they are all the elect and I am but a gypsy. shiny things and pretty dances, with bones awry. no regard for confines like skin and bodily proportions. tomorrow is a friday and I am acute kidney failure. I wonder how it feels to have all your blood filtered into a plastic chamber and ushered back into your veins. synthetic? violated?

to deduce a truth is an incredible feat when they are so easily nestled between fields of untruths and antitheses.

nrghasdj

i am unimpressed by color
more to me means nerve twinges

and pressure--

so night vision is the best way I see you

ubiquitous hands, streetlight silouettes

the expanse of my chest still

debating its pace

as you wrangle a pen
as your lips release word dioxide.
my alluring serpent,
more innocent than olfactory vanilla
yet deeper than a well of discarded poetry.

when they tell us to

be more civilized
to tuck in and to see

their uninspired colors,
i will drench my body with the palettes of dreams.
i will engrave your skin with my teeth
and pierce their skulls

with bullets of recycled silver spoons.

they will convict us.

drain us into some
prosaic lake.

lloro

I hate the way you feel
all holed up in my eyes, like you're on a stake-out
just waiting to hold the cold muzzle of your gun
between my lips, and--
release. shoot the sentence I have weaved
with my very capillaries and arteries.
a burst of glassed milk, spoiled into blood.

I hate it when I taste you
when you tear pathways into my cheek,
like a mobile glacier that sinks even the
unsinkable. you ruin me, with your salt as you
fall, uninvited, into my agape mouth.
I am underage. if you are alcohol, then I am
prematurely a drunk, useless.

you take all the people who matter
and you kiss their necks and tell them
you're here now. but I am still here I am still
breathing, I am still human. and you will dry into
their shoulders and worn cotton. but I am
solidified, if a bit colloidal. someday I will
barricade you into a season.

you have wrestled my eyelids through nights
of sleeplessness and lonesomeness until
dreams and reality synthesize. my mondays
transform into rapid eye movements.
my anger is but a night terror. my speeches
diminished to somniloquy. and each new
acquaintance is a nightmare.

someday, I will rid my inky scribble of your
blur. I will free my palms of your flood
and I will banish you from the corners of
my pillowcase. but today

today is not that day.