Day moon bobbing in a cornflower sky

hello, distant friend— hazy stranger, goodbye

as you start to fade, Lady Cirrus starts to cry,

hello, fabled foreigner— wayward guest, goodbye.

Day moon smiling on my sky-gazing soul

could your crescent sliver make this naïve heart whole?

loving is a burden, loving takes its toll,

loving is a blessing to this sky-gazing soul.

Day moon sinking in an ocean of blue

I feel you in my bones, I’m losing grip of you

Tried to hold you in my fingers but you keep slipping through

I know you’ll never need me, I’ll never know you.

I am a self-contained orb of shimmering hate

that hisses and flashes from

the space beneath my closed door,

emitting rhythmic crashes like July thunder,

rattling our rundown 19^th century farmhouse

with my twentieth century grunge rock rage

and my twenty-first century post-everything

existentialist boredom.

I am hate that spans the ages;

I am primordial deprecation.

nighttime lunacy and broken beauty

i came to be shattered on your kitchen floor

and glitter demolished in your dustpan embrace

but you’re too golden to be morrison

and too clean for my bukowski lows

and maybe illness won’t infatuate you

like it clutches me by the bruised throat

and kisses along my collarbone

when you think we’re alone

but if you don’t get hard for desolation

i don’t think i have anything to offer you

Universe! I am in love!

and yet you still turn your iron cogs,

and yet you still lash my windows with winter,

and yet you still paint my city with smog.

Universe! I am in love!

where are the gardenias sprung from your heart?

where are the flutes, and where the winged cherubs?

where is the poetry and where is the art?

Universe! I am in love!

but not with you, not today;

I love a boy who sings tales of elsewhere,

I love a boy who will whisk me away.

You can smash me into loving debris

awash in the oceans of energy

that flow through our encircled arms,

and I’ll float in eternal, beautiful ruin

with your wild summer all around me.

I can scatter through the seas of your being,

and turn to steam in your unequivocal sunlight

rising brazenly from your bronze skin

and being set free in the cerulean afternoon,

feeling deeply, unknowing, unseeing.

Fuck me,

or rather,

fill me up with love and hatred and divine passionate ambivalence

and turn me into a cosmic spectrum of vibrating light

casting heavenly prisms on the peeling eggshell wallpaper.

I want galaxies rippling between our moon-white hips

and smoke and sparkles and pyrotechnics simmering

in the trail of your charmed fingertips,

and I want to moan invocations to sprig-clad deities

who dance in pastures of carnal mysticism,

and to be dirty and pure and belong to you

and to the pagan wheel of cyclical death and pleasure,

and I want the proud earth to tremble beneath our quivering embrace

and nocturnal tree branches to sway rhythmically as you rock me

and ocean waves to lap the sloping shore like lips down our heathen bodies.

Make me into wind,

gusting through the shuddering treetops that huddle over our hovering forms,

whipping through the pulsating evening and painting it with bewitched desire.

Make me into flame,

licking the indigo air and consuming indiscriminately,

big and blind to all inhibition and expanding infinitely into the night.

Make me into magic,

or rather,

fuck me.

I crave unapologetic ugliness,

with no pretense of art or promise of pleasure,

rough and irregular like the careless Fates intended;

I seek an uninhibited vileness

that tastes so bitterly of retched certainty

that you might cut it with cheap vodka to stem the bite.

But everything turns to awkward poetry

between my slight fingers,

and is syrupy rather than sour,

and is artificial rather than  appalling.

Ugliness is truth, and truth ugliness,

and these words are saccharine lies.

I wasn’t built for bus rides

between February’s pale yawning lips,

for mechanical bleeps grabbing me by the huddled shoulders

and shaking me out of the sweet safety of elsewhere.

I was not designed for Sunday nights

and the restless sleep of those who fear waking,

who clench shut thousand-year-old eyes

and cling dispassionately to a sweaty mattress.

I wasn’t  made for the lurid glare of the hall light,

staring me down as I shiver and stumble to the bathroom,

scour my cheeks with benzoyl peroxide and scorch my gasping hair,

dust myself with the colors of the living.

This is not my world.

There’s a controlled blaze behind my brow,

though my eyes are soft as earth,

something stirring,

an awakening,

like the Virgin flushed from birth.

“Something’s changing,” says the phoenix,

that has nestled in my hair;

you can hear the fire crackling,

smell its fervor in the air.

He sings of the revolution

taking place between my ears,

thoughts that spark like matches,

lies that burn,

and truths that sear.

And though my hands are clammy,

and my cheek is cool like glass,

inside me I am simmering,

burning hot,

and spreading fast.

And the fire will consume me,

melt me down in its cleansing flame,

then reduce the world to ashes,

so we’ll all be one again.

(subtitled, I Found an Old Notebook and Boy, Was I Angsty When I Was Sixteen)

Baby, I’m a body,

grayish limbs and lavender tongue;

you are fruit punch blood,

the ammonia in my lungs.

I am frail but feral,

you keep me nearly alive,

do I exist outside your arms—

if you left would I survive?

Babe, you’re the anesthesia

from which I might never awake,

you’re every razor blade,

and every pill I take.

You could slit me open

and climb into my skin,

rot me from the inside,

drive me from within.

And if you want to kill me,

only one thing I would miss,

so with your knife deep in me,

I’d give you one last kiss.