They made you old

Oiled the hinges of my bedroom door

Put the green towel by the sink

Moved the bowls

These silent mechanics

Their implied goodbyes

Net

Every time I see a spider

I worry briefly that I’m a fly

I wonder if the flies are afraid

I wonder why I’m afraid

I wonder how something with wings falls prey to something without them

I worry deeply about this

I wonder which would be worse:

One thousand of them in an

Entrapment so small they would blanket me certainly or

A pitch black enclosure so big I’d never know when one was near

Icon

I’ve been the reason for ample art

Very little though, relative to Marilyn Monroe

Maybe I’ll be famous for sleeping with famous people

For being the muse for famous songs and famous poems

Because art only emerges from brevity

Mine is too brilliant to capture,

That’s my excuse

I’d rather be no one but a little picture in your bedside dresser

I wish the poems stayed in a little book hidden away

When someone uses you as a channel, you copy

Even more when they realize their creation is neither you nor they

Since there is no we, it becomes confetti

On the table at a lawn party

Something insignificant

Something memorable

The First Floor

I have a mask in my closet
And I have a dog
I have a whining in my ear
And it's not the dog. 
I want to bring you to the shore
Walk a while without speaking
Slip your hands in my pockets
And sway until we erode. 
When the whining starts to spit I sprint to the closet
Slip on the mask
Give a swift kick and split to the bathroom
Rip off and resist
My face is a void of mirror magnetism
I come back warped and regretful
A convenient mix
I have a dog in my house
And he doesn't recognize me.
My heart aches with an imitated naïveté
I get him a bowl of water
And scratch behind his ears
An airplane drones
The kitchen clock ticks
I have a mask in my mirror
And a dog in my fridge
I want to slip your hands into my pockets
And sway until we erode.

Date

To fantasize is only human
The term is often misused
I fantasize about our children's graves
Spattered in leaf shade, waiting in aching lines to meet us
We have not just buried our own.
The concept should be familiar enough
I slaughter a million when I salt my food
You'd kill so many if you kissed my neck
The funereal future never was ours to bloodstain
The Germans took our chance, I think
Or maybe it was the waiter
It's deterministic, I know
I've been told it's too abstract for a creed
I can only bring myself to blame the logarithm
Mistakes make people,
And there are no mistakes
I've never been more sure.

Thundercat

You'll have me as long as I'm free

As long as you have me I won't be

Inhabit this paradox with me. 

You drive me insane.

Not so much as to be my only choice

Am I patient, or afraid,

And how much better in bed could I get

How much better in your head could I get

Some waits

Are worth the waste

I have no idea if this is one. 

Before Dawn

A snake bit me
With tweezer teeth
And human arm body
A cat scratched me
Staple claws
In catless house
But I am no mouse
There must be some sort of prey
Unborn inside me

Paris

You are the cup of orange juice I use to
Swallow down the pills
The perfect vehicle of fruity taste and
You've got me fooled
They gonna talk about us someday
At the end of the 6 o'clock news
I hope they write about our bodies
In the newspaper movie reviews
Me and my lover come between
Each other, he says,
"If I had her, I don't think
I could love her."
Everything I've said to him I've
Said to another but we've
Got a silence unlike
Any other
You are the color of the advertisement
That made me buy the shoes
And in a couple days they wrecked my feet
But I still
Didn't believe I'd been used.
We gonna go to Paris someday
In a big hot air balloon
And if we're lucky we'll float away and
Never see anyone soon
Me and my lover play
Tricks on each other he
Runs to basement and I
Hide in the cupboard
In between the lines and
In between the covers there's
So many categories I've
Fallen under
I see your face at every stop sign
I hear your voice in the mall
I am the gum on the bottom of your sneaker I'm
Stuck here but you
Never see me at all
We gonna go to Paris someday
In a big hot air balloon
And if we're lucky we'll float away and
Never see anyone soon
You are a child at a party
And I'm your red balloon
Don't ever try and set me free, I'm
Nothing without you.
Me and my lover play
Tricks on each other he
Runs to basement and I
Hide in the cupboard
In between the lines and
In between the covers there's
So many categories I've
Fallen under
You are the cup of orange juice I use to
Swallow down the pills
The perfect vehicle of fruity taste and
You've got me fooled

Convoluted Response

I wish I had been there the day you realized that everyone who loved you was constantly reminding themselves it was worth it;
That as soon as people met you, they started trying to forget you.
I would've assured you my defense spurred my desire.
As long as there are masochists in the world you will never sit in a coffeeshop alone.

Fair

It’s the drive home.

You’re not anywhere near her. She is in a car that is driving past open farmland under a sky smeared in pink and orange. From the window of your bedroom it only looks light blue.

The energy dispelled on the sun-filled day has dispersed into the atmosphere of the car she is in, leaving a thick, honeyed silence. You think about going downstairs for something to eat.

She resists the urge to break a silence she is enjoying, and knows she will remember this moment for a long time. You didn’t think the summer would come this quickly, or this cleanly.

You feel so heavily how she is saving you every day of your life, and keep hoping she will stop. Until then, your only hope is an end. In that end only can you find the freedom you know she holds for you. In that end only can the debt be reconciled.

She wants the person in the front seat to pin her down on a picnic blanket and show her the years of hunger. She wants his lips on her neck. She hasn’t stopped thinking about you for two years.

You slide off your bed, shut the window, and go downstairs. The game starts in a few minutes. 

She is acutely aware that, tonight at least, her car is driving off into the sunset,

And yours is staying in the driveway.

Putting the Luck in Potluck, or, Nobody Actually Wants You To Find Yourself

You are my great aunt and, 

You love me so much you could eat me

You fork out my heart strings like spaghetti

And twirl them around plastic picnic prongs

For a second, we are intertwined, 

But the sauce is a family secret,

And I'm a little too young

In the Hopes I Will Get To India, Someday

I wanted you to charm me

I wanted a fucking break

I wanted it so badly I

Forgot you were the snake

Crime

He reminded her of the things she had worked so hard to forget

He reminded her of the naked monster crouched in between the lines of every children’s book

He reminded her that she had been raised right

He reminded her of the glowing night light in her old bedroom, or more specifically

Why she'd needed it.

He spoke like the terrifying void of black moths around her sheets

Most consequentially, he reminded her of herself.

Her breath made circles in the dust beneath his bed.

Ashtray

Noon is the midnight of inner-city Cinderella

He found the best smoke of his life inside the Marlboro box she dropped in the first floor hallway

And was convinced

It was love at first coincidence

Zoo Part 1

I see you

Like a child sees a zoo elephant

Too big for sagging skin, oversized, dehydrated, awkward

You’re embarrassing to look at

They don’t take care of you here.

I didn’t know pity wasn’t love,

I wanted to put some water in a bowl for you

And fold you up in my skin, instead

I wanted to pick you a flower

I did,

But your eyesight was poor, you kept

Running into the sides of your cage

You trampled it before you even noticed it was there

I should have felt sorry for you, but I only felt sorry for myself,

Because I had to watch

From the powerless side of the glass

Mother

I am the justification for your infertility
You peer back through the past as if it were a pair of spectacles and decide
That I am the reason why
Your grandfather died on his way to work on Sunday
Dust with the grain, carol in the rain
Refrain
Remain the ways
Number the days
Don't go crying to daddy.
Immature gaze,
Cross continental blaze
You prayed for a daughter,
But you got a maze.
I tried to get to the windy city to quell the ember in my chest, you messed
Me up, dress me up, please
I don't know what you want me to wear.
I wanted to get drenched in holy water so I knocked on the church gate,
But I went
Too late,
Raised voice
Hyperventilate.
I tried to melt someone
I tried to calm down
A once solid state has no other fate
He drowned.
He's around, I've found
Buttons from his shirt buried in the dirt of your father's grave
I misbehave
I read ahead a chapter,
not quite forever after, but at least one more day of laughter, after all,

It runs in the family. 

Crush

You must know true love never happens onscreen.

We like to watch ourselves projected against the concrete wall

Blurred by the cheap grain of an amateur

We deserve nothing more than to be perfect in our own eyes

As cowards what else did we ever have a hope of

We tried too hard

for documentary status and broke the fourth wall

But there was only enough room for me to slip through,

Now I’m watching you.

You’re not sure where to look.
I'm no less trapped. 

Don’t you know why people watch movies?

So they can experience things they never will.

In fact, maybe true love only happens onscreen.

I’d like to press you against a concrete wall.

A Not-So-Friendly Reminder

The muse was heartbroken, and wished the artist would get back from dinner with his wife.

He liked to paint at night, and would likely request her presence at the studio after he'd settled his spouse at home. 

While he was busy replicating his glances of her on the canvas, she would watch him. 

He knew, but he could never even begin to guess the true depth of her worship.
She could never tell him.

All the best art is impersonal, and who was she to spoil his skill?

She liked that what he felt never came close to what he could create. 

And that because of this, it was better that he more incorporated her than loved her. She did suspect he harbored some sort of animal affection, but the feelings were unoriginal and did not matter as much. Anyone can fall in love. (And they always fall out)

They'd fallen in love (or hadn't) in a place that didn't exist, and she knew it. 

She didn't think she could seduce him. 

This scared her. 

They would both expect it to be less like sex, and more like art, and neither were up for the vulnerability of disappointment (Although most men are up for anything.)

Plus, he had a wife.

She was seeing someone else, too. 

The other man (he was hardly the "other man") didn't know about the modeling; he thought she was a songwriter. (She was a songwriter, and they did write songs together, but they weren't her songs.)

She knew she was important to the artist because he never drew her exactly as she was.

He was widely considered by the artistic community as a fine photorealist, down to the last feathered eyelash. 

For her, he was an Impressionist. 

(And anyway, he'd never kept another model around so long.)

This meant that his pictures were not of her, but about her. 

And she took it that since they were about her, they were for her. 

But all the best art is selfish, and who was she to change that?

When she saw his last painting of her, it was like looking in a mirror. 

This painting was for him. 

The artist has broken her heart. 

And he knew it.

Things I Can't Tell Anyone

I do not have a high tolerance for beauty.

If we’re being perfectly honest here, I usually end up on my kitchen floor when it confronts me.

I know nice people and I know good men but perfection I’ve only met in moments

That pull me out of my body a little, and I like that.

He didn’t really like that.

He expressed it through concern that you and I still talked and I believed that I wasn’t sure how right he was.

Meeting new people just means another voice in my head, another ghost to talk to when I’m alone

God knows I never talk to myself. Anyway,

They pile up and I file away, through the night and all the day.

Something most people don’t know about me is that there are moments when I think I’m God.

It usually happens in the shower, or when I’m cleaning my bathroom on Saturday mornings.

I know it’s crazy, because I am God, and God knows everything.

I have delusions of grandeur and depressive episodes but I’m not bipolar, just insane (it’s less medical.) Anyway,

 Something most people don’t know about me is that my mom teaches piano lessons in our house, so I’m always alone. I mean, no one’s with me.

No one’s ever with me, they’re just around. My parents were always so busy being around that we never spent any time together. But all only children are lonely and I knew that going in. It’s probably my fault.

I was the loneliest I’d ever been the December we met and we’d read the same books as a kid and I was glad he was with me.

I know he was with me because we could talk about how sad it was that we were falling out of love. I could tell him about how I liked feeling subservient to someone else’s beauty and I could tell him it wasn’t his. And he could tell me the noises she made that he’d especially liked.

But he was just never around. Anyway,

Something most people don’t know about me is that I made him act it out with me. I wanted to know just what she’d done. How dumb did she sound when she whispered the flattery? Which touch soothed the hurt ego? Was it refreshing that she didn’t dig her nails in? How delicious was the skin she’d never wanted to rip off?  

How could I compete with a human? I had to at least try.

I think I really ended it in a car at 3 AM with my three closest friends. The one in the driver’s seat kept screaming at me that he wasn’t nice and I cried the whole way to McDonald’s.

I think I really ended it the day he put me on the phone with his best friend from college and he asked how I knew him.

I think I really ended it the time he put me on the phone with that animal rights girl after he fucked her,

But before he told me he fucked her.
I think he ended it. Anyway,

He’s around now. We got coffee once. He rescues me when my eagerness gets the best of me and I rip off my skin for someone who doesn’t care about anything.

I guess that means I’m still lonely.

Those are the memories I never want to have with anyone else, but they’re not all like that. Anyway,

I still don’t know how to do my own laundry. My parents never fail to be around, and I know I’ll never find anyone who sees me the way I do. The time’s never right. But here I am. 

Sweep, sweep, sweep

I'm a duck in the cellar and a goose at the ball

I must hate myself a little just to like myself at all