This is where I write.

detailed charts on loving.

now the sound of the ocean’s crashing whitecaps made me open my eyes and realize that summer left me and i was stuck in a winter where there wasn’t any snow. she always said it was like beating down butterflies that her stomach made whenever she walked past me in the way that it only matters for a few minutes and then people start to move on.
“you don’t notice it once it happens every day” she would tell me after pressing her lips against the aluminum of a room temperature beer. i watched those lips and envied the can without paying attention to her words.
she left two days later and never said goodbye to me. and whenever she writes the papers are covered in tears that are still moist and smudged eyeliner even though she knows she’s beautiful without it.
i stumble to remember her words whenever i’m alone at night with the butterflies that i can’t push down. but i never listened even when she warned me about her leaving me if i didn’t kick that habit of falling in love.

she isn’t writing to me anymore and i’m still jealous of her lukewarm beers.

swazzycat.

racing thoughts skip over heartbeats and loose lips. she stopped talking about them once she realized that i couldn’t focus on anything she said when her shoulders and collarbone caught my eye. i tried to warn her that i would be distracted but she kept speaking to me.
“they don’t see the connections that i see” she repeated once i shifted my focus.
“i see me and you and your bestfriend and the girl that drives her crazy even though she won’t admit it anymore. but there’s more than just us and them.”
she tried to convince me that she could be connected to the actresses on her favourite shows and the singers that i’ve never heard of. all these relationships made my head twirl and i couldn’t understand her passionate interest in a theory that didn’t have a beautiful backbone like the one i like to run my fingers across. she told me that it didn’t matter that i wasn’t following her. it made me feel lonely with ignorance so i wept. i cried and cried and she held me like a baby but that made me cry even more.
“you don’t need to understand it any more than the others did but at least you didn’t laugh at me. and that’s why i’m with you and not the ones i’m connected to. you didn’t laugh and you tried but your thoughts were as clumsy as the rhymes that the pretty girls used to sing to me when i wasn’t in love. but now i am in love and i love you and no one else means anything to me. my links to others don’t mean a single thing when all i can see in front of me is your freckles and soft smiles and eyes that turn hazel when you’re sick and are dark dark brown when you love me like i love you.”
it’s six weeks later and i still don’t understand what she meant. in another week she might be on the patio next to the drawings of sundresses and beaches that she dreamt of all summer long. she might not recognize me anymore and she’ll leave without closing the gate. i won’t close them either or she might think that i don’t want her to come back and hold me like she used to.
if she’s not around to explain it to me i think i would make myself figure out why her shoulders never burned and who i could meet through her when she forgot my eyes.

dear future,
why are you so distant?
it’s strange how much you are like that one week last april, or so it seems.
do you think you’ll be coming around sometime soon? oh god, wouldn’t that be lovely? i think of you and there are feathers and nice music filling my mind, and happiness comes up with your name.
someone once told me that you’re bad and scary but i don’t agree with them. you seem good to me and i promise to meet you one day, even if it takes me a really long time to get to you. maybe that isn’t much of a promise to you or anyone else. but can you promise me something too? i don’t think it’s much to ask of you if i want it to be special when you arrive. there doesn’t have to be balloons or anything like that, i don’t need that at all. it’d be sweet of you if you made me remember it for as long as my mind stays intact. can you do that for me? just that one little favour will do, since i know you’ll take care of all the other things i want from you without me having to ask.
is it true that you’re magic? that sounds silly coming from a girl like me, but i really hope it’s the truth. you can bring love and good feelings like that, and all these things that only come in dreams, right? there has to be magic in that if most of it can only be seen in mind movies.
i talk about you a lot you know, maybe too much. it gives me a lot of hope though. i tell people how i think you’ll be like when you arrive and what i picture you to look like. i tried drawing youu once actually, i think you looked okay but not exactly how i imagine. that happens to me a lot, i can never make the paper match my thoughts as well as i had hoped. you know what that’s like, right? i hope so, it’s just so hard to explain.
sometimes i write things like this with the intent to send them to you, but that nasty thing called the present always takes them and hides them. i’ve found some of the pages all torn up and soaked in something red, it makes me sad and a little scared too. it really hates you, future. what ever happened to make the present hate you like that? did you fight with it or did it do something bad? oh god, you didn’t hurt it or anything right? i think it’s good sometimes but no one really sees that until later. but then it isn’t the present anymore, is it? it’s just the past after too long. the past never took my letters, but it made me question if i should talk to you or not. it took me a long time to forget about the past and finally write this letter to you, so i hope it means a lot. i was really scared of you for a bit because of what i saw from the past, but you’re not the past and you won’t be for a really long time.
oh my, i think i should wrap this up by now. i hope you don’t take a lot of time to read all this since i know you’re busy with planning and all that, and hopefully that dreadful present won’t get this one too.
i think i’ll love you once you come to see me.

buds of summer, 2009.

1. flowers of loneliness and highways

oh rose, why are you not with her anymore?
instead you shed you thorns on the pavement
and they have been trapped deep within her skinned feet for days now,
but she feels nothing of you and never will.

2. flowers of slumber and abandonment

oh rose, do you know dreams?
no sleep, no sleep,
you like to pretend her tired eyes don’t exist
or feel
or hurt everyone around her.
give it a month or so, she’ll leave you, too.
we all know of your tears
but we continue to move on anyways.

3. flowers of chromatic lies

oh rose, do you know of colours?
those kind-hearted devils she is without,
you only show reds that dye her hair
and the emeralds that are trapped
and bound, in her eyes,
like rain drops in plant pots
or sparrows in bird cages.

4. flowers of greed and fire

oh rose, have you seen wealth?
it resembles the greens in your stem, your thorns,
and brings out red in those who possess it
like blood and fire of a million tribal towns.
she had no monetary value to her, but love was enough.
you took that anyways, burned it up at the stake of summer love.

5. flowers of forests and boardwalks

oh rose, what did you learn from lichens?
the browns of forests and muck from weeks ago,
months you lived in them,
and felt fake infatuation,
but you lasted longer than the black-eyed susans did.
they resembled platinum blonde and hollywood dreams
that you never lived up to when she was so near to you.

here’s your summer love; keep it this time

she feels like breaking off her ribs, she feels like letting go.

all you do is love like surgery and speak words to her that are like knives and pricking needles in her sides. she is weak for you and she likes it that way. and what about her? she doubts you love her (the way she wants you to) or that you think about her at all. her body is a crime scene. her body is matchsticks and lint and gasoline; she walks like an apology.

“i’m a sick girl, a crazy wishbone. i have razors under my tongue.” her shaky voice is whispering but she thinks she’s screaming at you. can you hear her at all? what are you going to say, bird girl?
‘oh god, i’m so sorry i cut your feathers. i didn’t mean it, i swear- does it still hurt?’

of course it does. she knows the answer already no matter what you tell her.
can you trust her razors anymore? nobody believe that you would ever really love a crime scene like her. her body is a brush fire; it will burn you up. her body is a spill that no one wants to clean up, only it’s all over you and not even near the gulf.

“the bottoms of my feet are scorched sand, august asphalt. i’m burned, too.”

birdhouses and the middle east.

moss-coloured walls and stained wood and i’m inside. oh birdie, i know you hate these things i say- but i’ve said it once and i’ll say it many more times- my body is a crime scene; my body is chalk lines and bloodstains and deep wounds that can’t heal anymore.

—

my body has a mind but not one that can make up. handsome or pretty, ugly or attractive, male or female. right or left or upside down and sometimes thrown against barricades. my body is a war zone, it is acidic.

brush fire, crime scene, war zone; ashes and blood and smog and everything in between.

4:21 PM

“cry to the hills and cry to the sea. cry to the birds but never cry for me.” she would always sing as if she never knew the words when she was the one who wrote them to me on coloured paper with coffee stains. she drank but it wasn’t something that could kill her liver.
one day she ran the very tips of her fingers down and around the bars of my cage as if it was made of gold. it was nice but it made me cry once she left. she could do that, she was free; i was an animal trapped and locked up until I could figure out just what i was.
two hands for holding bones and a matching set of ears that i would use to listen and cling to every word she spoke. two eyes, although a bit worn out, for seeing all my mind couldn’t. a mind, i had that too. but no sense of identity.
“you’re beautiful, trust me.”

cages tend to echo things that are tough believe louder than the things you know for certain.p

fight or flight syndrome.

once it was only me, trapped. a burning building thirty stories high with no way out but windows. i watched a woman jump to escape fatal burns, her tummy bulging with another life. she hit as watermelons do. twenty-eight stories to the pavement where she split open.
as dead as mommy was, unborn life still attached by an umbilical chord. their hands held together and a womb cracked as eggs are on sundays.

in the same building there were lovers. together in a tight embrace before the explosion took place; a metal rod flew through them and joined them together as their souls flew away. just like sparrows.

i woke up thirty minutes later and we were holding each other.
nightmares are too real for people like us.

—

corrupt me to the bones. oh sea, oh dreams of big cities; cold air and a thick smell of burning wood and garlic in a breeze. it is fall and where are you now? (somewhere else, i think)

roast me alive. ash and soot fluttering as birds do before the winter comes in. miss me if i choose to follow them south, or drag me back and tie me up. i am caged anyways.

melt away cast iron bars like white hot flame- free me and we will run before they notice i’ve gone missing.
it will be us, infinitely. together in neon lights or apartments with hardwood floors and big white beds.
endlessly.

in the rye.

hold my lit cigarette, love. my knobby knees are swelling up and causing me to limp. just like a doe caught in a steel trap, escaping- she lives although her spindly leg is as snapped as the twigs under her hooves (now i know how deer are scared of headlights and why they hide in forests).
give and receive; hold and return. three puffs sting my dry throat. the feeling takes my mind off of my knees and a twisted spine. the feeling takes my mind off of not feeling.
a cold day and a small park, we are feeding ducks. they waddle as they run and look rather strange. once they hit the water they change- oh, how they swim like swans! you let me wear your overcoat and it smells of the tea you drink out of a flask. we share it, just like everything else.
it feels like days later we are walking past cars and broken leaves on the roads. but it’s only been an hour. maybe it was the tea, but we’ll drink it anyways. it slips through our sore and scarred throats and heads to our starving tummies that are full of anorexic dreams.
sitting by a fireplace, we listen and speak and hold hands because we’re in love whilst we smoke cigarettes. i’ll read to you out of books filled with poems until you stop me or until my fingers callous from turning page after page.
feeling caged gives me anxiety so i fiddle with the shirt collar of my wrinkled button-down that you picked out for me. i wear gloves when i’m afraid.
if you hold my hands, i will shake. but i won’t let go.
please don’t let go, love- i’ll miss you terribly.

once in a while.

skin burning, peeling and on fire. charred patches flake an float away. each cell is a tiny sun, burning and burning; leaving behind little areas of young and pale layers- being reborn again through matches and metal.
over new skin is layers of cloth of different kinds. it is winter and our chests are hollow and shaken. every breeze, every falling snowflake, each crunch with every step ignites ambition inside of us; we are lonely but we will fight back.

eighteen days until we claim each other and you do not acknowledge me yet.
words; small and forgettable in ways, but they are echoing through my cage of a body. I am not yours, so you tell the others, but the sentences you mutter to me daily speak otherwise. are you afraid, little pup? I will not leave but I fear you might.
my body kills me, but you love it. you adore every feminine aspect I’ve grown to loathe and wish to ostracize from myself. you like it though, but you are embarrassed by who I am. this boy with small hands and the high pitched voice is not your boy- that’s what you tell them. they barely know of me. are you ashamed? is it I who causes you to doubt yourself, your love and your own body?

little pup, I do not have to stay hanging off you like a heavy chain.
you are free.
you are not trapped in a cage similar to my own.
you are yourself.

run, run, run, run, run.
do not look back, or they will judge you for loving a boy.
for loving me.