...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.