it's possible to lose yourself in loneliness

at some point
my solo reflection that
gazed back into
glassy hollow unequal pupils
began to claw hungrily at the glass
bated breath fogging the
thin membranous divider
keeping back the
unadulterated
most abject terror

that wooden grain
geometrically containing the
image who must stay
hidden in the holy of holies
or risk the ruin of all
things

she beats against the glass
that wraith girl with the
sutured mouth and
blinded eyes
and skin who cries out
for the slice of liquid mirror shards
and grasps the edges
of that rectangular prison
jagged pieces sliding sensually
keys into forbidden locks
surgically opening
the red liquorish vines
pulsing with a viscous
pungent poison
just underneath
onion paper skin

her nails scrape lead paint chips
off the crumbling frame
and i take them into myself
sewing them with the care
of a grandmother's arthritic hand
into the warm moist black
i can ever count on

she falls
like a newborn foal
glistening with those
maternal fluids
the literal matrix of life
hesitant steps on the
feet from that other dimension
where laws diverge and
perception is not relative
but horridly absolute

how can she manage
that leap which
knocks me straight out of my body
astrally exiled from myself
and filled to the brim
with a ghost girl
marionette
with painted sanguine smile
and strings attached
at each one of my joints
moving me with a flick
of some nameless fear

i think i spent too much time
trying to reconcile
the foreign body whose
defection left me howling with
a fiery bloodlust and an
insatiable hunger to vaporize those
staining contaminants
those long chain fatty acids that
deposit like stones in my pockets
weighing me down to the
river bed
whose mirror still reflects
the graven image of
a sinner-saint
whose sallow complexion
demonstrates her devotion
and in her death
faith
though her sacrifice was no
crucifixion to relieve me
of any of my
transgressions
or prevent me from
besmirching the god
i'm not sure i totally believe in

how do i give myself to you
and banish the apprehension
that comes with the
crash landing of me into
this corporeal form
stolen from me ages ago

how do i tell you that
when your hands trace
the curvaceous line of this body
that it feels like a fire's touch
scorching me to the bone
burning me at the stake of
my inadequacy and simultaneous
excess

it's too much.

you don't see life as a game of skill
playing hopscotch on the
white and black checkers
reaching out to infinity with their
comforting symmetry
and severe geometry

you say you're unobservant
but how can you look down
at your calloused mud-caked feet
and not see the
chessboard that is pressing
just as stiffly against your feet
as you reach down
and root yourself into it
burying your head in
the world of fantasy games
without winner or loser

i envy your blissful ignorance
your hope
however misplaced

do you simply refuse to see
how every pensive move
rook to E7
knight to C5
seems to me not an attack
on the mockingly vulnerable king
but an action of
vicious hostility towards
the most powerful piece on the board

so the queen enacts
her equal and opposite
reaction
to slash the entire cosmos to ribbons
an infinite fury of blind terror
that seeks blood
and scavenges the last flesh
clinging to bone.

apparently i wear my hesitation
my measured self control
in bold streaks of watercolors
across the pulled canvas of my face
but somehow that tension
the taut bounce of my shallow panorama
slides thinly by your
probing eyes poking at my weak spots
and waiting to watch me
shatter

search me
put the hidden words in quotations marks
and hit the return key
to query the google of my mind
whose only existence to you
is a retreating shadow
running past the wind
with a sonic boom of silence

it's easier to find something
when you have an idea where to look
and my subversive games
of smoke and mirrors
throwing my voice to a
different part of my body
the elegant distraction and the
final solution to my
nebulous existence
as a paper doll girl whose
amorphous two dimensional body
wears whatever
diaphanous primary color frock
the world demands to keep
it turning without hiccup
a sacrifice to the gods i have
foresaken and blasphemed
whose names i've taken in vain
and cursed with the most excruciating
fervor and
resolution

i want peace
which does not in fact live
in placating distraction
or hand waving while i'm
hemorrhaging from the
butchered wound in
my abdomen out of which
my secret shame seeks
to excrete that pheromone that
warns approaching creatures
that i am still
a wounded animal and
could snap at any moment
see red
then nothing

you can only help
a person so much when
every time they run
to your waiting arms
bleeding and broken
begging for absolution
or perhaps simply an
intercession for their muteness
and sutures of salvation
how do you help a person
who stands from the alter
with the transcendent certainty of
a religious experience
and yet still
pulls out those black wire stitches
while passing the last of the
empty pews
and the flickering flames
sending prayers up to an
empty firmament

i am the headlights on
the cars that follow in
solemn silence behind
the police escort
and the hearse
from church to finality
and a place in this world for eternity
a hole just my own
where peace is blackness of nothing
and the endless chatter
the bile whose acid
eats away at my brain
dries up and in its dessication
flies away in the arid winds
of terminal acceptance

you say you want the truth
but you're not like me
and you can't hide the pain
when i
hiding my fear
tell you that i need you
to leave
when all i want
is to keep your body pressed
infinitely close to mine
world without end
but my words fight to hold
the front line
and my canvas face is pulled
that much tighter.

i want you
constantly
when you scornfully declare
that you think about me
all the time
i bite my tongue
and clench my jaw
to keep back the gushing torrent
wild white water mustangs
my words tripping over each other
tumbling into the stony
barrier of my teeth.

how do i explain
or attempt to reconcile
that desperate
gaping
magnetic longing
when as your trusted
calloused hands
twice the size of mine
to protect me even when
i'm raging to be left bare
and ruined by myself
when those hands
seeking my supple body
those curves that keep you
returning unto the temple
that is my very self
and you peel away the rind
of my vestments to expose
the fruit waiting inside

and i cry

heavy searing tears
sliding like fire down
the rocky cliff face
and the barren planes of my
freckled cheeks

i close my eyes
and shake my head
feeling the repulsive odor
of my looming shame
radiating off me and
strangling the want
the need
for you.

i miss you.

you say that you will
one day
mold me into a clay being
who spins on the potter's wheel of this world
and sees the beauty
and intricately woven cloth that
cradles my effervescent soul
your alchemy seeks to
transform my crocodile tears of shame
into a joyful well of infinite
contentment
in your arms
whispering reassurances that
perhaps one day
will not pass uninhibitedly
through my skull
but linger
and loiter in my cerebellum
sewing themselves into
the sides of my cerebrum
greeting my grey matter and
simply becoming another
wild flower in the
meadow of my thoughts.

i fight as intensely against
your tendrils of hope
and ropes lashed to your vessel of refuge
as i do contrary to the
barbed binds digging into
the flesh around my wrists
and wrenching my heart with
realizations of my own inadequacy.

i don't want to be fixed.

do i want to fix myself?
and the question echoes
through the empty
barren halls of that secret
wherein reality has become
a comforting quagmire of
delusions and a time
delineated only by a
flashing number on a scale.

you haven't seen the blackness
though you've glimpsed its shadow
looming in my wake
when i leave you knowing
in my mind i'm already
doubled over
head buried in the toilet
how to pull it out
and curl my flaccid tongue
around those syllables
those simple six letters

H E L P M E

written like braille across
my forehead and
carved
branded
scarred into the sacrosanct eventuality
of the black hole salivating
to consume
to the end of all things.

i have never been sick enough
the immutable darkness has never
dipped temperatures to
absolute zero and
terrified the entire world
stopped in its orbit to marvel at the
girl disappearing.

i wonder why you worry.

to most you say
a day
24 hours
and it is that simple
24 perfect little steps
to lead the way
and guide humanity through
an astronomical phenomenon
day and night

to me
a day is not
24 hours
nor is it 1440 minutes
not even 86400 seconds
i watch the milliseconds
the femtoseconds
speed by faster than
the photons that drive
the herd inhabiting this pale blue dot

how could they sleep through
the darkest moment of night
when the cool that
you thought couldn't be
on that cornflower blue
summer day
lazily flows across your face
and you feel the longing
that the fingernail moon
must carry for the sun.

how could they appreciate
every single exact color
as the sky brightens
lilacs running like chariots
from the sun still submerged
give way to effervescent
pastel pinks
like a gift for every baby girl
born that moment
until finally the sun pushes its way
out of the grasp of the horizon
and bursts like a blonde from a cake
bathing the world in its
mourning song for
the moon who always
slips just out of his grasp.

i am not your blooming flower
i don't belong in your
garden kingdom populated
by perennials and ruled by
thorn stemmed rose bushes
where you go
to seek solace and discover
the bursting lightness of
that sensuous pain when
blood erupts from that
thin line where
the white fatty layer threatens
to spill out into the world
and stain your white carnations.

and i never promised you
that it would be pretty
and that one day you would be
able to look at those sensationless slices
and see more than just
an act of scarification
that i asked for
that i endured
but the physical embodiment of
that internal scream that
bounces off the sides of my chest
and shatters the crystalline lattice
that protects my dispassionate heart
from your touch
as soft as the downy feathers
of the spring's children
emerging from their
incubator eggs to
greet the world where they
will fall before they fly
and i will impale myself on
the pyre of their sacrifice.

I know the world like no other
the centripetal force that
catapults me into the concrete wall
at my back which leaves
lashes of gravity
and welts and wounds that
remind me
the tides will turn and
I will careen towards
a blackness not even I can comprehend.

I know no middle ground
I live only in extremes
no gradations in my existence
leave me no steps
to descend the sheer cliff face
that I toe ever so recklessly
tempting that gravitational force
whose mere presence
fills me with righteous
distilled
rage.

There is no grey here
or is it gray?
-ey
-ay
I don't even know the orthography
well enough to describe
how the two sides of
me
the wraith and the goddess
could perhaps be intertwined
effervescent power
the cream swirling
in inexplicable patterns
until the coffee is a
calm
warm
and no longer bitter
on the tongue of those
whose life is not lived
only on the fringes
the afterthought
of a leather jacket
fallen out of style
decades ago
and yet still worn
as a reminder of the days when
I danced until my movements
fell in sync with the Earth's and
I stopped being able to
distinguish where
my root feet ended
and the moist midnight soil
began.

I know black
I know white
I know wintry obsidian nights
the darkness so thick
that even my sharpest blade
could never penetrate its
foreboding mass pressing in on me
I know truly endless summer days
when sleep is a forgotten virtue
and sunlight pouring through my window
warms me
and I photosynthesize joy
take all my nourishment from
the ambrosia of the sun.

In extremes there is no need
but want.