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

Blanket

When I was born you were there in the cradle
I saw stripes of yellow with you by my side
And when moon came and scooped up the room like a ladle
She took you along for the ride
I've known you longer than anyone else
So long I don't know how to be only myself
You are the truest friend I've ever known
So true my body cannot hold me all on its own
When I was sick you were there at the table
I'll never forget how you looked in my eyes
But there's something in me that has got to be able
To see myself from the inside out
I've loved you longer than anyone else
So long I don't know how to love only myself
You are the realest soul I've ever known
Real enough that I think it's becoming my own
We walked past the yard sales in quiet contemplation
You turn me to child with the way that you cling
So despite the high prices, the signs of inflation
I decided to buy everything
I tired the stuffed bear and I tried the guitar
But they didn't feel right sitting next to my heart
So I turn back to you but you've lost all your shine
Oh, it's starting to feel like you aren't even mine
Still, you are the truest friend I've ever known
So I've got to destroy you and no one must know
See I've worn you right down to the skin and the bone
I love you but I've got to learn to be alone.
But when I was sick
You were there.