seeds of night

entropy

For longer than I can remember,
for as long as I’ve repressed, and further,
you’ve kept me like a sick animal,
thought of me as nothing more than a sinful automaton.

For years you locked yourself away,
our twin cages,
but you cast your gaze towards the skies
and hoped I would subscribe
to your every ideal.

I remember playing in the woods
because trees don’t demand
worship, praise, and affection,
teaching myself through books
(they were kind and understanding),
and I was eight years old when I first
pleaded GOD to kill me.

It was my eleventh birthday when I
bled for the first time,
but you were too busy hoping I would
never fall in love to teach me
about my own body and desires.

Every action, word, thought, emotion -
instantly corrected, quelled, extinguished.

Like the bouquets of dandelions I picked
in front of the church
that you dismissed as irredeemable weeds,
I wouldn’t become the rose
you wanted so badly.

I nearly died under that roof you called a home,
not because you wouldn’t feed my brothers and I,
but because I was a fragile shell of lies,
built by dogma and shattering like
a windshield
in the face of reality.

I refused to die in the same town
that I was born in,
so I tucked the morphine capsules in the back
of the drawer, and began my inauguration -

a real person, bursting with illicit, all-consuming life.

I put a name to the way I had first adored the girl
in my art class, freckles and dark curls
and still life and shadows,
the simple yearning that you called demonic,
no better than touching an infant or a horse.

How could you have ever expected me
to stay, where I was less than human?

What if I was just like you?
What if I was nothing like you?

Still, I cannot forgive myself
for the basic trespass of existence
or the scars in my eyebrow and lip
that you tried so hard to conceal
until you found new flaws in me to destroy.

How could you expect complete forgiveness
with no atonement?

It was you who left the dandelions
on the sidewalk,
without a second thought,
and now you must watch them blossom
a thousand miles away -
the most glorious blooms,
just out of your reach.

Their bowing heads laugh in the mountains,
between the cracks in the sidewalks
and parking lots,
they only know their feral ways
as I only know that I love and hate
and breathe and fuck
and dance and learn and grow
with a capacity that your vengeful,
jealous GOD cannot tolerate
coinciding with joy,
as you cannot tolerate
my salvation in science or my heart
beating in time with a beautiful girl,
but I’ve found peace in our
separate spheres of existence.

We’re more similar than either
would care to notice or admit
and when we see eye-to-eye,
we tend to look away with alarming reaction times.

You still see the loneliness,
the death behind my hazel-ringed pupils
(my father’s eyes incarnate)
but you look away from the
worldliness, the girl grown old
too quickly.

I look away from the regret -
the brief moment of doubt
in a sea of certain eternity. 

first draft

you had waited so long to hold me for the first time -
a full nine months, plus another two and a half weeks.
i stubbornly resisted tragedy, for the first time
and for the first time, you and i were forced to face it together.

you were still in love with my father, then,
and that wouldn’t end for sixteen more years of
s
a
d
n
e
s
s
.

on the twenty-seventh day of the fifth month of the year nineteen ninety-two,
the doctor didn’t show up, and the nurse,
weary of the old hospital, the old town, the dreary spring,
saw that wednesday, framed by rain and routine,
and thought nothing more of it than the middle of the week.

you gave that wednesday to me,
you gave every wednesday for the rest of your life to me.

you tried so hard to love me,
in the most stifling of ways.

my father told me that there was wisdom
in my eyes
even there in the crumbling darkness.

could you see it then?
can you see it now? 

we’ve grown back together slowly like banyan trees
even as i drift miles further away from the chainlink fence
and the pile of rubble and mud
where that hospital used to be

where i came to life
as you nearly gave yours

a r e

y o u

a w a k e

y e t

ancient haunts, fragile new love

Just the other morning I kissed you, and against all odds, you kissed me back.
Ever since then (the last time I saw you) I’ve been unraveling like a ball of yarn.

The red threads have entangled my throat, the pines,
and I can smell the ocean, but can’t hear the waves.

Happiness circles my wrists like knives, and I have no choice but to feel the edge of it, every moment. 

My sober head cannot find sleep until it finds its way back across the mountains,
out of these old clouds and the reminders of constant death.
Every corner, the red threads keep spreading.

I’m swallowing my own thoughts and feeding on the doubt in this old atmosphere,
I’m hiding behind rotten doors and locking myself away,
I’m spending my money on disguises and hometown drugs; all of my time on the same.

When I hid before, and now that I’ve returned - the reasons never change.

Laying on my back and staring at the space between my hipbones -
(I keep feeling like I’m fifteen years old.)
The town smells like when nobody would kiss me, when I was invisible, when I ran and I wandered and didn’t feel shame for either.

I feel ancient now.

My hipbones are eroding back into my thick thighs.
They remember when my ankles were birds, when my shoes fell off while they were still tied.
(one hundred calorie ankles,
and the scars. the scars on my thighs. scars of the north.)

How could you ever learn to love my broken head? how could I ever let you?

The orange bottles stare and whisper, just like everyone else -
They all have as tarnished a name as mine.

Do we really dare to embark?
Can we cheat the colors that surround me, that cut off my breath and hold my wrists like cocoons?

Our wayward timing,
our unconvincing restraint,
our powerless days.

You called and I met you there,
we smoked in the snowdrifts and you dared to make things right
when no one would look me in the eye.

I’ve grown old in the rain, but you won’t mind.
Will you mind? Could you? 

Parts III & IV.

III. LITTLE BIRD.
Reinventing myself so you’d never touch me again. Your teeth nearly split me in two, weeks after we took our shirts off in Seattle while we both belonged to someone else. It wasn’t only you who I’d tear myself apart to escape, at least in the end. It was everything you’d taught me. Trust is the word I never understood the application of, the word we deconstructed and buried under your bed in the apartment behind the movie theater.

IV. DOMINOES.
Laughing isn’t even safe anymore. I caught myself with your voice the other day, and drank myself into a stupor to relax. We always sat in parking lots, we always kissed but never touched. We left broken glass on every road behind us.

ennui mantra

I only cry for fictional friends,

I eat mold off of bread.

Sour candies and ashtrays,

Falling up a mountain each and every day.

down past the fence

this memory has become a catalog,
a rotating cast which each character serves well in their time.
across oceans and borders,
from mountains and oil spills and deserts,
until i send myself back down to the bottom,
the label on each and every wasted container mocking my first-world convenience,
to take these for granted.

the mementos which each soul leaves me,
and i leave them empty.

the spots where the clocks used to be, when i wondered how you slept at night.
the discarded plane tickets,
the stupid fucking souvenir that you left for only me,
(and took back the rest because you forgot about them)
addresses i’ve never written to,
this ache in my stomach and the stale california air still haunting my lungs,

the ways i’ve said goodbye,
the ways i never got to,

but there’s always others to take the old friends’ places.

no matter how stable i may seem,
i promise you that two orange bottles are waiting for me
inscribed with my name, on the bathroom counter,
following me halfway across the country.

my heart’s spread thin over nearly every time zone,
and my weary feet keep walking and walking and walking -

away from orange bottles and white pills
away from the fields and barns and suburbs and fir trees
away from closed minds and open hands,
and toward uncertainty,
away from state park ravines
and seizures at christmas,
velvet dresses and heavy makeup worn only by the dead.

everywhere i pause, more and more lies are told,
through every valley i drown in,
there’s always another promise that on the other side of the mountains, everything is beautiful
but these treacherous vales through which i lose myself
are not what will stop me -

the empty spaces in my bed are the furthest distance to cross. 

Parts I & II.

I. I ONLY WEAR BLUE.
Closing the blinds as blue cloaks the morning, a blue that could drown the Northwest a thousand times again. Forgiving you for killing my fern in a drunken fever, forgiving you for leaving me every weekend, but there’s not quite enough forgiveness for this. Not now. Maybe never. Probably, anyways. You died once, didn’t you? You came back as this strange creature, wool socks in summer and haircuts in winter, something I could’ve never dreamt of if I were GOD herself. Gods don’t make people like you, they haven’t the bravery, but Mother Earth did, with her hands that have turned slowly into mine.

II. REVELRY.
Floating down the creek, but that’s not the here and now. That was a century ago on the day the man died in that same park. “Sit down. Move along. Be careful.” We burnt our feet on the blacktop - my soles were never quite right after you. Nothing was. 

lonely subconscious nights

at 2:45 a.m. we linger by my front door in a minute long embrace and i inhale deeply of your clean shoulder, so unsure of what my place is among these broken people.

i’m speaking to all of you at once.

my voice gets lost in the elevator and in the sunlight, the hot pavement and the patch of dirt around the two green benches, trampled and cool to my bare feet, blistered with the ache i hold deep in my marrow, the long drought that’s become this reality.

i could spit out words in any order, it wouldn’t qualify as meaningful speech until one of you sits with me on the pillow of the curb and leans in with an open heart. until you’re willing to acknowledge more than my glaring flaws.

i cannot lie and tell you that i am anything more than a nineteen year old miscreant, lost on my way, sick in the head, sexually frustrated, socially crippled, addicted to nicotine, caffeine, and affection.

but i can promise you that i will always be here, holding your hand as we walk by the Platte, ignoring the scent of garbage for the greenest trees in the city, that we will hide in bed together when the snow falls, that we will take midnight grocery trips and that every kiss will be ridiculous and perfect.

my delusions would lead me to believe you could disregard, perhaps even love, how my words stumble and dance between themselves.

how my hand arranges characters where it will, how i wish i could reach the same trembling hand out to you.

it is the strangest thing, to consider how my life has led me to this very moment, every cumulative sorrow pointed me east, and so i will continue on.

Empty Tri-Colored Bed, in memoriam.

No longer must I sleep so close to the edge of the bed, it now belongs all to me.
Sprawled out with my bruises, my right foot confused without the back of a knee to brush.
My sleeping mumbles are once again lost to the walls, the watchful posters, the eyes in the tree.
Empty bowls, discarded wrappers, the scent of pipe tobacco, pancakes, and pomade.
I cough more and more before sleep arrests my sad lungs. My earphones are wearing out and my windows rattle with each  freight car.

The paranormal has become self-contained, less expressed, truer and darker than ever before.
The ghosts behind the door on the third floor, the old man on the third bridge, the three colors of our bed.
This is when I realize that all forty ounces of ashes were ever only mine.

I feed the green bottle with increasing fervor each hour, and the smoke plumes like a weary spectre,
So I keep the gold cap on tight while I lay awake and naked in the old stale two a.m., knowing what hovers in the cracks of reality.
And the shadows cast by slender branches become grudging, aching limbs just like mine,
And the wail of the train becomes the howling spirits in my ancient childhood forest.

I’ll wrap myself in my newfound colors, ‘til they bleed into my skin, slumber on the spin cycle.
Embers falling on my collarbones, volcanic ash growing gardens from my sheets, like the dormant slopes of my Plateau, my Cascades, my lonely grey skies -
The wind of evil spirits, the thunder mountain, the malevolent brother god who split open the hills to devour me whole, my hazel eyes and mossy feet.

I was born to a place cursed by generations, bathed in fire and mud,
Where we have defined a thousand breeds of rain a hundred falls and winters and springs over-
Your oceans cannot understand me, your oil spill of a heart does not hear anything I have to say.
The firs and the palms lose each other in violent translation.

feeding off of clocks

Time treats me so strangely.
The minutes spent daydreaming
waste themselves by the time
they’ve spun out —-
And I sit alone with you,
silent and restless,
as our motel room fills with sunlight
the day before you leave
and the vast nothingness of the day
lurches by
incrementally.
I fall into future moments
at the same rate as love.
Uncertain. Hesitant. Resisting your every effort.

I didn’t want to be the ending,
I wanted it all.
I didn’t want the inevitability
of this 13,000 mile distance
I didn’t want to chain-smoke Thursday away,
I didn’t want to be left behind.
I despise this “not knowing”,
the agony of a flame extinguished too quickly.

I went north,
you crossed the ocean that spans half the world,
out of my life
forever
and now
the seconds
ache
like
the
bruises
on
my
hips