You wish much too hard, you cry far too much
You screamed for my silence but beg for my touch
I cannot solve you, for you’re not an equation
I suggest this discovery is a cause for celebration.
You’ve got diamonds in your eyes, ruby red on your lips
You started off as a star then became an eclipse
While I love watching you rise, I’ll skip watching you fall
I hate bruised knees in my bed after all, after all.
“Tie this cross to my wound, I can’t breathe more disease!”
She keeps screaming in the wind, the only listeners: trees
I make signals in smoke, she makes wounds from the fire
Every woman is a lover, and yet also a liar.
Heels on her feet, roses in her arms
She feeds egos with smiles, collateral in charms
Beauty queen take the stage, she curtseys to the judges
But the scabs on her knees break and her mascara smudges.
You wish much too hard for that crown on your head
This is odd as you love humiliation in my bed
You want independence but also to drip in diamonds and gold
This ties you to my bedposts, begging for my billfold.
So keep running away, tiny girl swathed in silk
You rebuff my true love, but come back to my milk
Milk in rectangular forms that I rain down as you dance
After all, when there is money, what little girl needs romance?
Bathed in spotlights by night and “first place” ribbons by day
You’ve parlayed charm into a career, only it doesn’t seem to pay
I’ll pay to watch as you crawl, but I’ll skip watching you fall
I hate washed up women in my bed after all, after all.

I opened a new bank account today (fuck you, CHASE) and it was an interesting experience. I had to fill out and answer questions about my future savings plans, future retirement plans, future this and that and this and that! What is my credit like, do I have a 401k, am I married? Kids? Own a house or plan on owning a house in the near future? Do I have any investments I might need advising on?

I answered that questionnaire the way I write notes to myself. "Why are you looking for a new bank account?" A: Because Chase bank sucks "Do you have plans to start a family or buy a house soon?" A: Hell no and hell no "Do you have enough money saved for 6 months worth of expenses?" A: Good one. HELL NO

I've never written "hell no" so many times. EABOD, bankers! Why don't you advise me on getting some goddamn money so I can put it in your bank? That would be GREAT!

It got me thinking about life, in general. The guy at the bank who helped me was an extremely handsome man, in a traditional sense. Tall, tan, dark hair, in shape and in an impeccable suit. White teeth, well groomed, and friendly. He asked me if I'd ever worked in banking, and if so, maybe I could apply there! They really appreciated types like myself at this bank, he said...happy, friendly. He thought my answers to the questionnaire were funny. I left wondering what that guy does after work, was he going to hit on me when I came in like that "one guy" at Chase? Because if so I'd forget half of what I went in for and I can't have that-I'm very discombobulated and get easily distracted. I walked down the street and people looked at my bouncing boobs in my tight black sweater and someone asked me where I worked at the crosswalk, since I wear a security tag. Tiny events in the tiny series of my tiny life. And I went back to work, filed some papers, billed some invoices for my company, and started fucking around on this fine website, which is nothing more than an accumulation of thoughts and random words put together for my later amusement and, hopefully, yours. But at every moment, a mind such as mine starts reading into it, staring into murky depths for some moment of clarity. Except...There Is No Moment.

There Is No Moment.

Life is full of a series of "a-ha"s and "wish I knew that before"s and all sorts of learning experiences, but the one question (that being "why?") is never answered, and it never will be answered, and while that gives me a sense of comfort in some regards (there is no hell...you can stop looking for the "purpose" of life because the purpose is simply to exist) is also gives you a strange sense of futility. As in, why am I doing what I'm doing? Am I searching for a reward? An answer? Love, marriage, sex, happiness, money, respect, power, fame? I couldn't tell you what I want out of life if I tried. People balk when I say I don't care too much about marriage and children, because they say those instincts are "natural". So I'm supposed to give in to my animal instincts, is that it? Procreate for the sake of myself, really, since the planet certainly doesn't need any more humans, and marry someone who I probably won't even know in 10 years?

I am supposed to fear being alone. I am supposed to listen to my government and obey the laws put before me. I am supposed to work without thanks, live a life without consciousness, eat whatever is presented to me and I am supposed to watch your fucking shoddy, boring television and movies and news and have babies and clean my husbands socks and berate myself when I think about fucking another man all because YOU SAY I SHOULD. I'll need to find a God, mostly to alleviate the cold, aching fear I have that there IS nothing! Nothing is there, before and after you die! Karma doesn't ACTUALLY exist, the bad people in this world will often never be punished and even more often rewarded! I'll need to read more philosophy books to put a name to how I am feeling. My knowledge will never compare to the greats of the past. I need to worship quantum physics, cast away the chains of popular thinking, start meditating and perhaps doing yoga, for which I will need a $600 Gucci yoga mat to help me feel good enough about myself to show up. And what a nifty side effect if I make someone else jealous with my $600 mat that they don't have.

I hear the phrase "passing time" frequently. Passing time? What, to get rid of it?

People tell me I'm a woman, and I need to accept that women are simply more emotional than men and what I want, which is an equal and loving relationship with someone who thinks about me before themselves as I will think about them before myself, is an impossible wish and I better get used to doing housework now. Well, if I take out the trash and kill the bugs, I think that makes ME the man! Why am I so much more attractive when I'm feeble and giggly?

I don't know what I want. I know what is possible: it is possible me and every other human on this planet can have whatever we want. Anything. If you want to settle down, get married, and have an idyllic life filled with love, children's laughter, own a house and two cars and have a great but not-to-demanding career, you can have it. And it can work, with consciousness. If you want to be a tortured artist with greasy hair and get easy pussy all day, you can have that, too. If I could get my head to shut the fuck up I could also have what I want...except what I want is to continue questioning, to continue staring into a murky pond of which I will NEVER see the bottom. And since I want it, I will get it.

Is it all cyclical?

All I know is, at the end of the day, I felt bad leaving that bank. I felt bad because I don't have a retirement plan. I don't have any money saved up. I don't want to buy a house and have a dream wedding and I don't ever, ever think about how my funeral expenses would be paid. Yes, they asked that. I don't care much about, really, anything. I like being stuck in my own head. And apparently, I like typing what is in my head for public consumption.

I love books. I love sunsets and shadows. I love REAL conversations with people, no small talk or networking. I really love animals although sometimes they scare me. I don't need a lot of money but I wish I could stop wanting more than I currently have.

Sometimes, when I read Bukowski, I think "how depressingly accurate". And for a moment, I imagine just he and I had those thoughts together, as if I was in his head while he wrote and he knew I was and welcomed it.

The sun is setting. I should leave the office.

xo

I can see it in your eyes
The way the hands drop to her waist
I can see the tongues on teeth and skin
Watch windows drip with rain and praise
They have said this time would come but
I no longer have a name
It’s so much easier to run away
It’s so much easier to run
Away
Than to stay and deal with the same.
I’m not ready, I’m not ready
Chase that girl, drunk/unsteady
Hands left open, grasping, falling
Knees left scraped, dead phones calling
And I alone can see that look
In. Your. Eyes (the color of cement)
How about before we hurt each other
We agree to leave the front door unlocked
That way if either of us loses our way
We can still get in.
They say the beating organ in the chest
Left of center, right of sin
Tells us what to do and who to be
Since without a heart the eyes cannot see
The mouth won’t speak, the hands won’t work
The body crumples (rain and dirt)
Windows without shades and blinds
Ink on paper, poems without rhymes
I can see it in your eyes
Hands on waists, lips on thighs
He pressed the bow on my top lip
That’s reason enough to fall
Or trip.
Sugar slippers on my teeth, the taste of you remains
Keep the front door open for me
The girl you know without a name.
When things get tough, you’ll run away
And I will stay, to watch the rain
My orchids died as prophesized
Written inside eyelids and the fog of sighs.
And when I say I love you, it is true…

I gave you 14 gold boxes with 14 gold ribbons

Wrapped in tissue imprinted with 95 theses

Inside of those boxes were the rules of my heart

And you saved them and told me I was a work of art.

But as always, the time has eroded that vision

And I’m left here now knowing I must make a decision

I hate the fact this is true

I hate the fact I am here

I hate waiting for someone else’s 95 theses to appear.

Time is like water, and my heart is like steel

Ocean mists turn that glitter into rust as I kneel

Kneel on knees bloodied, broken

Praying with lips cracked and bruised

They say that life is for loving

More like an excuse to abuse.

I presented my heart on a platter, pooled in blood like a leech

And then I wonder why I’m kneeling on bruised, bloodied knees.

I gave you 14 gold boxes wrapped with 14 gold ribbons

Each box held a secret, and now they hold a decision…

One I didn’t think I’d have to make at a junction so soon

But your words have injured a heart already ruined by abuse.

Throw those boxes away.

People and their Problems
I keep missing my turn when I head out to work in the morning because birds have been flocking overhead and I stare, watching, losing track of the fact I am driving or even human for that matter.

Stop and Stare.

I wonder sometimes why my mind spirals off when I read my books on physics and science, how I start to envision new worlds and places where the concept of “time” hasn’t ruined everything, and I realize I simply relate most basically on a human-to-human interactive level.

I used to fantasize, endlessly, about people who I had not yet met and who I was unsure existed. I delved the deepest into my own psyche, alone, which led me to lead a double life of outward vivaciousness and inward confusion. Inwardly timid, inwardly quiet.

Something I realized a long time ago is the more you outwardly project something,

money

fame

sex

accomplishment

Often times, the less you actually have it.

Because people who HAVE things rarely feel the need to remind others they have them.

My mother says gloating is a sign of bad breeding.

So I get lost, sometimes, watching the birds flock above me, thinking about how animal behavior relates to human; thinking about the fact we work against nature with our air conditioning, heating, synthetic fabrics, sugared substances. And then I wonder how it feels to be a bird, using the wind to allow you to float, exerting only enough effort to keep yourself afloat for a period of time just long enough to get. you. somewhere.

Because no matter where you go…there you are.

Isn’t it funny?

I took the time after I became a “legal adult” (and what is that, anyway, a legal definition of how someone has grown away from being a child?…I’d rather be a “child” forever anyway but that is neither here nor there) I started looking outwards, watching people and their problems, how we turned ourselves inside out over others, ourselves, food, the media, how we use something meant to entertain us to sustain us…I looked at my heart and its scars and stories, how instead of those scars and those stories being property of the people involved in those circumstances, only I owned such properties.

And I wept, but tears only meant to eradicate the sense of belonging to someone or something not purely YOU. I belonged to myself. What a concept.

It took me years to realize the way people treat you relates to how they feel about themselves

And I paid penance for those who I had hurt and forgave those who had hurt me.

It is difficult to remember these lessons sometimes, when your arms ache for someone or you watch injustice.

But those lessons are true nonetheless and you know it because you feel it.

I don’t believe in your god, because my god is me.

But I am also you

And you are also we.

People and their problems…we need them to survive in some ways. Because it discomforts so many that at the deepest levels, past our nuclear cores…we are one.

I watch the birds flock, and relate it to us in our cars…no matter where you go, there you are.

"There were days when the seasalt would crystallize itself to the rocks on the shore, and teardrops stung in your eyes when the wind hit them. I watched the tide ebb away, and noticed the flecks of green in the sand, shimmering like pieces of broken glass embedded in skin. They were scales; when the sea bled salt, the mermaids would dance, writhing on the sand and laughing at the sailors who had perished from their songs. I removed my knife from my belt and crashed into the waves.

I felt a tickle on my foot while the sea thrashed against my body, tensed with the cold. I reached downwards, violently, and a pale skinned, pearly face thrust upwards, struggling against the strength of my arm. I dragged her to shore.

Her tail curled as she snarled at me, on the beach that day, and I held my knife to her coral hair. "Grant me a wish", I said, and the fear in her eyes said it all. A mermaid must grant you a wish if she's captured, or you may cut off her hair. A mermaid with no hair has been tamed.

"I shall," she spat, and I kissed her then, a hard kiss that crushed the seasalt between our lips and made her gasp. I pulled away and whispered my wish to her.

While I cannot tell this story to my coral-haired children, I have often told it to the wind, as it cries, and the sea bleeds salt."

The reflection of the sun on snow can blind you.

You don't hurt, you just feel sleepy, he whispered. I watched the oil from his fingertips leave prints on the glossy magazine he glanced at, page after page, searching to find himself in the party pages.

That's what it did to you? I mumbled, walking away, shaking my head, my shoulders loose and relaxed like a puppet.

She was like sunshine, or maybe clouds. Fancy free and pretty in the way birds are; feathers gleaming and uncapturable...but ridden with disease and likely to wound with their claws.

"He's always in magazines," she said, eyelashes fluttering, small town Lolita so easily impressed with Big City boys. No, I said. That doesn't mean much here.

But who says, really? A memory captured in publicly distributed print can be something special, can't it? Something...validating? I shrugged my shoulders, tensed and aching.

He kept crawling to me, mumbling about my warmth as he pressed the sides of my body to his lips like a prayer, the oil on his fingertips creating prints on skin already wrought with freckles. I didn't want it. I didn't want him. I need no published loverboys banging down my door, take the sunshine, won't you? Girls with pale skin like mine burn too easily to be that close to someone who thinks they're a STAR.

Mumbled excuses, ignored phone calls, emails written and saved as drafts, never pressing send. Moments spent sweating and nervous in bathroom stalls, endless showers trying to get those fingerprints off of my skin.

She kept asking and calling and breathing in shallow breaths, her lovely face becoming gaunt and rabid in her compulsion for a man she couldn't have and I couldn't get rid of. "Take sunshine," I told him on printed notes, and he would come back with "the sun resides within you, the warmth of your skin tells me so". I hated such admissions. I wanted new books.

Soon enough, seasons changed, my subsciptions to bad magazines with too many ads ended, and I no longer remember fingerprints and a girl I once called sunshine. New wallpaper, coffee pots exchanged for French presses, I learned how to sew and made myself an apron in anticipation of becoming an amateur chef in my own little world. Then an invitation came in the mail, for a wedding. Fingerprints and sunshine.

"I'm pregnant," she said, eyes wide and hair curled luxuriously against her enlarged busom and luminous skin. "It was an accident. But we're doing the right thing, I think. Getting married. Making it legit."

I stared at her, more sunflower than sunshine now; and just as stupid.

He dropped to his knees when he saw me, I could practically feel his fingertips grasping at the fabric of my dress, my belly flat and toned, nothing like the sweetly swollen stomach of his soon to be wife. I ached. She would break herself attempting to get him to love her. He would be like most men in magazines. That needs no explanation.

Mutiny committed against a child not even born yet.

"Would you be the godmother?" she asked me, eyes framed with lashes like a doe. I nodded. The captain of an unmanned ship.

"You keep your fingertips on sunshine or I'll cut them off," I whispered to him as I left. He stayed on his knees.

Xo

But how can I compete

Moisture in the air, bodies writhing in heat
I feel droplets on my skin, feel the burn of my feet
I smell perfume all around, white teeth bared in grins
Absolution, a sweat laced baptism of sins.

You are talking to me, but I can see you don’t care
About what I am saying, with my tits and my hair
And I’m vaguely accepting, since it doesn’t matter much now
We’re all puppets on a stage, pull my strings and I bow.

But what do I say, should I give birth to a daughter?
When she turns into a woman and is led to the slaughter
Of the sins of her beauty turning her into a toy
Something rotten from the simple game of girl meeting boy.

Don’t play the game, you are boring
Play too much, you’re a whore
It seems we’ve all got our pencils, we’re all keeping score

But how can I compete with fake tits and long hair
When I’m trying to speak and it seems nobody cares.

You keep saying I’m special;
Because I’ve read a book?
Are they mutually exclusive? Intelligence and looks?
You want a woman who works
But she can’t have accomplished TOO much;
You want a woman who can please you
But who’s never been touched.
You want someone to look after…
But more someone to look after YOU
You want a lady without being a gentleman, too.

If all that you meet is the pretty and vapid
There’s a chance you’re the same, it’s the law of attraction.

And how can we compete? A baptism in sweat
The bruises on my knees aren’t from sex. I repent.

White marble stared at me, such a soft material (except it could crack your skull)
I trailed my hands down it, whispering
The marks of his chisel breathed.

Fucking romance novel, pages thrown
Lipstick marks on the edges of the pages
Written with a different feeling, one he couldn't identify
The typed words on the paper tried to scream.

You can edit and critique, with the tongues of a vulture
Tell me you're an aesthetic accomplice, personifying the voice of my culture
You're so creative, my lover, you're so fucking creative

A trembling tenor, the moans of a guitar
Heads shaking, eyes rolling
Who determines what is in tune or in style.

Brush strokes on a canvas that breathed in mocking skin
Colors clash and writhe, making love in the dark
It looks like nothing easily identified
I believe it is supposed to be interpreted.

You can write off and cancel, pull the plugs to their hearts
Say you're the voice of popular opinion, you're versed in literature and art
You're so creative, my lover, you're so fucking creative

I am waiting.

You lie to me frequently

Calling me, catching me

Watching me walking down streets with no end.

You talk to me quietly

When I want to

Ignore you

But you never let me, you grab hold of my hand.

I can’t bite through your skin, can’t break from your embrace

And my nightmares are littered by the profile of your face

It hurts me you exist

It upsets me you breathe

Such a worthless sack of skin who refuses to leave…

I might have loved you once

But I made a mistake

And you’re been replaced, as has always been my way.

Find yourself a new doll

Preferably one who is a faux blonde

Because the cheaper the woman,

The stronger the bond.

And maybe once you’re entangled, you can leave me alone

And I won’t be haunted by blue eyes and the ringing of my phone.

I watched you from the corner of my eye
Hands with long fingers, ropes of veins down the arms
Tucked into a peacoat, buttoned, with eyes behind spectacles
I remember.
I remember sometimes with my lips on your skin and your hands in my hair and my legs around your waist
And my heartbeat goes so fast sometimes it feels like I'm going to
Going to
Run out of breath...
I watch you now, and the way you walk and how you talk about children
It makes me ache in the most appropriate of ways.
I listen, and wait...
Wait for the feel of your palms over the curves of my hips
The feel of your tongue running trails in between my lips
The way your eyelashes curl around the edge of your lids, while I toy with your glasses and am suprised I still feel
Because I wanted it simple
Something dirty and fast
But you're not a disposable boy
You're something that will last
Much like diamonds or gold, or the sediment that I run through my hands
My palms hold your heart, the way they write letters in this sand.
I'll put it in a box
Put it under my bed
Make sure its never hurt
Make sure you're never sad
Because you're part of me, like the clouds or the air
You are in every breath, every strand of my hair.
Every person I see has your memory imbued
Every raindrop and ocean, if it exists, it is you.
I watched you from the corner of my eye
Your hands leave trails in pink over my skin
I see your coat in the closet and I remember...
My hands ache for you
My lips whisper your name
I can't breath when you're away
Perhaps you feel the same
I watch your smile and your laugh, the way you've taken care of me
There are other lovers lurking, but the blind will never see.
I remember your laugh when we first met, and the way I told you to stay with me
All night
And that night has turned into this...
You're the words on my papers and the prints of my fingertips
Don't forget.

What a pair, disaster dolls
Tits and lipstick, texts and calls
Hedonistic champagne groupies
Coke and vodka, rum and roofies
Penthouse lofts
Girls on film
Glass tables cut my knees and shins
Hands clasped together, best friends forever
Disaster dolls in silk and leather
Who needs it, right? Who needs to think?
When you can eradicate issues with just one drink
Or maybe two
And some pills in a bottle
"Its from a DOCTOR
And my friend's a MODEL"
I love lipstick smeared on veneered white teeth
And numbed gums laughing, refilled drinks
Disaster dolls are my favorite girls
Like broken diamonds, or dirty pearls...

<3

Four chimes on a clock of a printer's design
I once wanted just letters, now all I want is the time.
Time ticking away on a bed lined in gold
Like the coins I obtained for the soul that I sold.
She looked cheap
Like she smelled
All imposter and hairspray
She tried hard to remind you
She was smart in the right ways
But intellect isn't something you can learn from a book
And you can't stop being cheap regardless of your designer looks.
Four hours away from graduation day
Put a cap on my wallet for the penance I paid.
I watched the sun as it set, watched it glitter and fade
In the same manner as the Faustian deal we made.
She looked silly
Like her laugh
On the sand, wind in hair
I chased after her then, for that was when I once cared
When we were interchangable people
Twins in stardust and gold
Now my mirror reflects nothing
And the wind has grown cold.
Four seconds from impact, steel on steel
I would trade back this soul for just one thing to be real.
The page is on four
The fourth hour has come
I am watching the clocks while she watches the sun
It is a matter of time, interchangable lovers
I used to think we were the same...now I know there are others.
Four leaves on the wind
Four kisses on my lips
Four hands on her hips, four ends to four tips
Flower petals will bloom
My orchids need the heat
I sense restlessness brewing
"I heard that you called me cheap..."

Four chimes.

Driving down 6th Street
Downtown LA
Filth everywhere but the scent of flowers on the air;
Driving to a date with someone smarter and better looking and richer than you; but I'm thinking about you (I'm talking to you as I'm typing although you can't read this)
And thinking about you makes me angry, vaguely;
As I know for a fact it's the wrong reaction to the wrong thing.
I was thinking about this new person; wondering how his hands would feel in my hair and between my thighs (shapely and perfect) except you kept creeping back in and even after I left later that night, with the taste of his lips on my skin and his cologne on my clothing that creeping, sinking, salty sensation came back to remind me I'm Still In Love With You and it's been long enough where I shouldn't be (three months, give or take)
And I became vaguely angry, again.
Begging and begging and begging me
To love you
And I wouldn't, until I did
Because the color of your eyes was like the ocean
And your lips were always pursed and plumped; hair like asphalt (black) and the scent of your skin (blood oranges and musk)
And then you decided I was too mean to you, you were tired, you didn't want to keep going ON like this
(And I believed it)
Until, months later after you left and came back and left and came back and I said "leave me alone?" and you said no and the ? became a . became a !
But you're still here...
Except what I want from you now is something you'll never be able to deliver, and like the twins we are; even if you could I probably wouldn't want it anymore.
I miss those minty marshmallows you liked.
And I keep feeling like something needs to happen; either you leave me alone (once and for all) or I grow up and learn to ignore you (once and for all) or we get back together (no once and for all for this one) or we...just...
6th Street
Downtown LA
Filth everywhere but the scent of you on me;
So many months ago but still fresh in my memory...
I've got to learn to let you fall.
Teardrops from the vitreous humor in my eyes
(Just not tonight...)
xo

Rain comes; drips and drops that patter on your hair and skin like tiny prayers meant to cleanse you. Sometimes rain makes you feel clean, but usually all you feel is cold.

I’m so sorry I loved you, so angry I betrayed myself and let any of my doors open to your prying eyes and fingers. I’m forgetting the feel of your lips on my skin but that doesn’t mean anything. “I’ll replace him,” she whispered…

I collect feathers left on the ground, only feathers on concrete because in the dirt they look content. On concrete they look cold, and foreign. I pick them up and dust them off, sometimes touch them to my lips although birds are dirty creatures and oft not to be trusted. But I like their feathers, it’s like finding a fur coat on the ground in Beverly Hills, all images of a naked Helmut Newton model running around smearing her red lipstick.

She was good to me, allowing my head to fall on her shoulder and my arms to encircle her waist for support. I looked straight ahead, imagining cotton candy and cloud puffs and secondary illusions all women think of when the light inside has been temporarily extinguished for whatever reason. She tinkered with the key I wore around my neck. “Did he buy this for you?” I nodded. She ripped it off and threw it while we walked.

I always wondered what the person who found that key thought it was for.

His hair was black…not jet black in the unnatural fashion of boys with too much confidence and pants too tight, no…naturally black. In the sun, his hair would glint with a coffee tone, and he smelled like musk and oranges. I smelled like musk and lilies. In the evenings, when our skin pressed together, I imagined it was what paradise smelled like. “I love you…”

I can’t write, I whispered. I can’t write.

Broken fingers and a crippled mind, lips bitten and passive-aggressive glances in the direction of YOU always YOU, I’m the star, you never will be…he screamed accusations silently at me with his eyes, jealous of the admirers he imagined and desperate for attention of his own. What man competes with a woman? Who competes at all? I berated him silently back, wanting lips on mine and hand holding on Sundays but sensing that hatred was replacing the love between us. Truth be told, we are twins in many ways, and his jealously matched my own although our talents and beauty are comparable.

“I…don’t…love…you…”

Words never spoken but proven time and time again. Rain can make you feel clean, but often just cold. She licked the droplets off my lips and tied ribbons around my wrists.

“Do you know what I want?” she whispered. I looked at her, imploringly.

“Love.”

Isn’t that what we all want?

We ended up smoking cigarettes all night and watching the rain play the piano on windows, tying and untying our ribbons, hers red, mine pink…

If I let you love me, will it hurt?

Everything hurts, in the end. Pain is relative and words are interchangable.

I want something…different.

With the sort of lingering apathy afforded to all women, I catalogued my lovers and with my fingertips and memories they arose from the dead, like Lazarus from his tomb. Are breaths and the oily traces left from fingerprints enough to imprint the ether with something secondary, something left to chance or worse...fate? Pushing aside the velvet curtain of memory, the fog crept in on que, stage left.

Oh, but with observations come responsibility, the type left to those with deft fingers on keys that scream names. Quiet the whispers in my head that lead to footprints on guardrails and cleanup crews on freeway underpasses. "I just wanted something better," she breathed to me, with my hands on her head like a preacher about to baptize.

The genie's lamp of originality passed me on the wishes it bestowed, and nothing by banality filled my mind for most of my life. You think you're a thinker until you realize your thoughts are cloud puffs, simple wisps in the dream of a life you can't see through the curtain. Yes, you're special all right. If special means one of many.

I want you to run, faster than you ever have before, to the horizon, jumping off of balconies and screaming the name of your fathers loud enough to turn corpses in their graves. Live for something in the wake of this impending doom and cry to battle, wars fought for nothing more than pieces of paper we assign value to and let lead us into death. What is your currency in the land of Hades, the river Styx your guide for the price of a tale perhaps, or a song. Orpheus and Eurydice would never live in this generation, after her death he simply would have gone online to find a replacement and the Furies would go to sleep hungry.

Kiss me with something that says that I am more than just a whim for the moment, kiss me to tell me you are something, too? I keep dipping my hands in your pools for an answer but they are shallow and with that, bear no secrets. If this is so fleeting keep your lips off of my skin and find solace in your discardance like the rest of the names in my book.

What is life but fodder for the literate. Feed the moon her daily bread and be awarded with dreams. "You don't need wings to fly..." she whispered. I baptized her in the shadows of the moon and my heartbeat as her name etched itself in my soul. Run to the horizon...

I need a recorder in my head, my monologues come out so much better when I can hear my inner voice instead of the clacking of computer keys...

I like to put "e"s in words, like keyes and olde which makes no sense but alludes to my theory I was born in the wrong time. I don't know if I believe in reincarnation...

Carnation Instant Breakfast in strawberry; I always get strawberry in everything, it makes me feel girly. I don't typically feel girly, I feel earthy; womanly. Sometimes feeling lighthearted and girly is good for the soul; putting on too much makeup and going out with your friends, and sleeping with a stuffed animal and getting everything in strawberry even though you know chocolate is probably better.

How do you see me, I wonder; from a looking glass just out of reach. I must look sad, desperate; pining for a love that never delivers and selling my soul to the devil. Emotional exploitation delivered to me from me. And I wonder...who are you?

Are you the one that hurt me? One who knows me? Someone lonely, someone horny, someone sad and slightly tired maybe someone who likes pancakes the same way I do...

Maybe we're all writers and poets and dancers and actors and photographers...artists...singers and flute players...

To speak, listen. To answer, ask. To want, be prepared to receive.

These lines in my palms breathe your name and my own in the same(exhale...)

Yes, I am back for another (put that whip down, in haste)
For just a little of you is not enough for my taste
I keep emotionally stunting, and that isn't really my style
I've got my hands around your throat, and to spite me you SMILE.

Remember those words? TRUE LOVE with a trademark sign
I bet you don't remember that letter, those words wrapped up in rhymes
I could say something mean, could say something to hurt
But what is the point of that, darling...I can't gage how much you are worth.

I can't elaborate on how it feels to be in love with a fraud
There's no handbook for me, silly redheaded broad
I'd kick in your teeth if I could, to punish you for this pain
But at the end of the day, I only have myself to blame.

I know what I'm doing, but I can't find the time
To get over this feeling while I re-read your lines
Give me heartbeats and scars, I'm trying to be vague
While I bend knees and beg because I'm still sadly your slave.

But I know...

If I turn around quickly, I could swear you were just there
Because the smell of your skin is the ghost in my hair.
While my vertebrae pop under the hands of another
I mourn the loss of a man I thought could be my last lover.
But times change as I did; we're not suited for the moment
(Be careful with my heart", I said, "Don't drop it, just hold it")
You clung on to my coattails while I pushed you away
Wanting you always but not having the courage to say...
So I lost you again, this must be the last time
Hour hands on the three, three hours, three chimes
I keep looking for your smile, in the crowds of Downtown
I see men, but not you; photographs of a clown
But it's never you that I see, it's never you that is there
It's just the ghost of your skin in the strands of my hair.

I have something like an exhale on a cold day
Fleeting in the moment but you knew it was warm
I want something longer, I want something that lasts
I look down to see the lines in the palm of my hands.

Spoken words say I love you, but your written words hurt
Long songs with a chorus uncompleted, like wisps on water that bleed away
Push me and pull me, like a kite in the wind
Love letters I've written and with my eyes, try to send.

Do this: I do it
Say this: it is said
"Validate the dreams that manifest in my head"
I kiss the soles of your feet and the bruises on your skin
But it's not good enough for you, such is the curse of all men.

I want a love song, with words tender and true
But all you give me is the wails of a guitar, and the blues...