last night I dreamt that I kissed you,
Mr. Too-Tough-to-Care,
fumbling over grease-stained t-shirts and hair
to find your tungsten-scorched neck,
slipping my slotted fingers onto your left ear
and charging my palm with your heat.

last night I dreamt that I kissed you,
Mr. Beer-is-My-Therapy,
I kissed your ***** nose, sharp and pointed,
prominent, belligerent––
a power symbol––
but it's always the first on your face to flush pink when
I talk back to you––

on saturday when I ****** up the car and nearly
gave you a heart attack, Mr. I-Ain’t-No-Little-*****, you
held my hand with the same
concealed desperation––

I know because you were looking at me
when you instinctively–– against the will of your mechanical masquerade––
forced your sweaty fingers
into the unsuspecting
pockets between mine.

Mr. Brake-Fluid-Doesn’t-Bother-Me
froze...
the honey seeping through the pores in my skin
must have been even more corrosive because,
Mr. Romance-is-for-*******,
you were paralyzed,
like you suddenly realized you’d become
the target of your own jokes––
your heart's powered by something much softer than gears––

news flash, Mr. Too-Tough-to-Care:
you're just as unsalvageable as I am.

I keep close watch of the scars on my body,
making sure that their stories don't liquidate and seep out
like blood when I'm not looking,
that they don't fade and discolor before I remember
who I am without them.
I'm afraid of letting them vanish before
you let yours vanish too.

So I stare pigment into the blisters on my right palm and I
still remember
the first time you held it,
at Six Flags when we were both high on funnelcake and the fumes of late summer mixed with bus fuel and sweat.

I do the same to my shoulder,
where yours would always be after I missed the midnight shuttle
and trudged home with a scarf up to my eyelashes
in the nearly horizontal snow.

And to my ears, because
I'd always have more work to do,
and you'd carry your stereo to my room and play
that song you stained so thoroughly with your voice that
I can't bear to listen to it
anymore.

I spend the most time re-burning the skin around my eyes
to precisely the degree that you did when you brushed the tears
from under them,
and that I did later when
I scratched away at the same flesh because you weren't there
to do it anymore.

I keep close watch of what I never thought would
turn into memories,
making sure that our story doesn't liquidate and trickle away
when I'm not looking,
that it doesn't fade and discolor before I forget
who I was when I knew you.
I'm afraid, too, that you've already long
forgotten.

There was suddenly sun spilling all over,
and suddenly hyacinths everywhere.
I have watched everything change so slowly
that nothing ever seemed to move at all,
and in my obstinate blindness, I didn't notice
that the ground had thawed, never mind that it had begun
to bleed spring.

I have never seen spring.
In all honesty, I have never lived
in any sort of weather –
only the starched, air-conditioned bedroom
in my parents' sickeningly stereotypical suburban concoction
of a house, where nothing –
not the dusty closed blinds or even
a blade of grass – ever moved at all.

Here, there are magnolia trees that move,
swaying in soft rhythm.
They have peeled themselves like vinyl stickers off
the backs of my windowpanes, and they really are
alive. I know because they wave to me
in flurries of dip-dyed pink petals –
like a good diaphragm-laugh,
or maybe like a good cry.

I have never laughed,
or cried.
But I cry at everything now –
now that I see it is all alive.
It must be what happens when you start living
alone – growing pains –
I imagine the hyacinths must get growing pains, too,
from exploding like purple fireworks
out of the frozen soil in
no time at all.

I liked the way you and
your crisscrossed legs sat on
my middle-school-ignorant
navy-blue and daisy-patterned comforter,
watching,
hearing,

the way your fingers crept
towards the neck of my ukulele
while the magnetized look in your eyes drew mine and
my own fingers fell
slack in divine-driven intrigue,

the way you and
your eyes
full of quiet study and wisdom, like
worship, like
your respect of this instrument as not wood but as
hundreds of years of polished amber-tinted history
has earned you ownership, and it
does.

you and
your fingers then
spun aching minor chords, like
worship, like
somehow, in the sparkling incensed-violet melody you
spilled all over
me in my righteous nihilism

you and
your body became an
offering, and
the wood

burned my fingertips when you
handed it back to me, ashamed and awe-stricken, like
worship, like
your life is an offering, and even

when I found the notes you played
(on this instrument that is not mine)
200 days and 200 nights after I knew you and
your legs sitting on my bed and
your multidimensional fingers,
worshipping,

no matter what I tell myself, I
am not a believer in beyond, and
pretending to pray just reeks of
my own mortality.

my diet as a young, unsuspecting girl consisted mainly
of the saccharin that crystallized in between
the glowing, smiling teeth of Disney princesses,
and the artificial-like aftertaste that
coated the walls of my mouth,
enchanting me with fantasies of formulaic love –

level-headed, perfunctory love that
feels like knowing the color of
your dress complements some manicured uniform
waiting offscreen until the waltz your costumes are programmed
to perform, indifferent
(as you are)
to the bodies
that fill them.

so I painted myself monochromatic,
spending my days planning, calculating,
and trusting, wondering
why it seemed that other girls never got too hungry,
(living as they did only on sugar highs),
or bored of the one color they had chosen to become, to wait inside,
but starving was easier than searching for
(or, god forbid, finding)
what I knew I was missing ––

"you are a passionate person,"
he says to me,
truth spilling through my rotting teeth into my shriveled belly,
all rich and creamy-like, as if
he doesn't know what the inside of my mouth
should taste like, as if
his mouth doesn't know
how hungry I am ––

I know
that passionate people
spend their days feasting.
they lie underneath black starry skies
and spoon their own moonlight-infused tears into
each other's mouths, and chew crunchy, fizzling morsels of poetry
along with fistfuls of shadow-drenched notebook paper, and
guzzle violet-tinged philosophy and insomnia until sunrise, but

still, unfortunately, love is what sustains us.

passionate people
are no better at surviving than Disney princesses, but
their bellies are too big and their palates too sophisticated
for light, sugary, level-headed love ––

so, in our wild, potent love, we cram ourselves with
these decadent and deliciously painful things,
and when time and distance and gravity make us still
ache with hunger, we swallow fire the colors of our lovers' eyes and
we burn like kaleidoscopic beacons,
smiling.

I know Father B came to our class more times than you can count, and
denounced all those mortal sins with a firm pointed finger and
one big bulging eye that glared at you in your stiff collared shirt and preppy plaid kilt while he spoke, as if
a white lie or one slice of pizza too many would
send a divine bolt of lightning straight through your chest or
a note home to your parents.

but I left the house once,
and there are some things no one else will tell you.

first of all,
when you tell a lie or eat too much pizza,
all you get is a nasty stomachache,
which feels a bit like a punishment, but you get another chance
and next time, you tell the truth and
eat just enough to fill your belly.

you don't lose any vision at all if you ******* and
people do it
a lot.

speaking of,
***
happens outside of marriage.

actually, I might be so bold as to say that MOST ***
happens
outside of marriage.

sometimes, people have ***
with people they don't love.

people marry people they don't love, too,
or grow into love or
fall out of it just as easily.

and sometimes people love people
they are not having *** with.

you can love someone so much that it physically hurts,
and you will put your tear-stained hand to your aching chest and understand exactly where the phrase "broken heart" comes from.

and sometimes you won't know
how you feel about other people or
about anything, really.

people aren't just bad or good like that –
there are some bad people,
and there are some good people, but
most people
are just lost and
lonely, and
looking for someone who will be the answer to the giant, crying
questions they have curved themselves into.
they read books and go to bars and get promotions and
wear framed glasses and make appointments and call their lawyers and buy apartments and make resumes and get married and divorced all like they know what they're doing, but
most of the time,
they are just taking shots in the dark, and
trying not to feel guilty about
the people they hurt
along the way...

you live under a rock now, and
one day suddenly it'll feel like you've exploded out and
into a hellhole, and honestly,
as far as I can tell,
there are no secrets to life carved into some mountain somewhere, or
arranged in the patterns of your veins, or
even written in a giant bible, but
the one redeeming quality of life is that we can
suffer together.

we're all tired and directionless, but
two warm calloused palms fit together so much better than you think,
and waffle fries taste like heaven at 1 in the morning with friends,
and staying up all night talking with someone and finding out they are just as tired and directionless as you are
makes you realize all of a sudden–– like
seeing the faraway glimmer of two little headlights
on a dark empty highway––
that it's okay.
and
you may be more lost than you can even tell, but
at least you know now
that you're not alone.