Freak Girl

And in the sand
where I lay,
stretched out naked
on a towel
that felt like a scrub brush,
I ended up
standing in the bathroom line
for 34 minutes
while listening to two women
in matching stripped suits
talking about hating blowjobs
and wondering if they’d ever love again.

The world tilted the same
all the time,
and it felt particularly predictable
some days in the summer heat,
especially in grocery store lines
or at parties
where you only know one person
who’s really more a friend of a friend.
And I rolled my eyes
to the circus
I saw around me,
which did not make me popular
even in middle school
where clicks got their kicks
by messing with the freaks
so I sang in the choir
and kept my head down.

But somewhere
along the rocky way
I found
this solid fire magic
within me
and she cradles me
when this freak of a girl

feels too crazy and alone.

Be You in Your Sensual Splendor

Oh God
sometimes I fake “ok”
so well
it scares me.
Im all smiles and
foreplay phrases at the table
then sitting on restaurant toilets,
spinning panicked breaths
and craving a dark watery hole
to scuttle back into.

Why couldn’t I just
be me and
be done with it?
The pressure around and within
howls me to sleep
with rhapsodies
of acting normal
in a fucked up world
which is a goddamn laugh
but still has me
chained to the lamplight
beside my bed
practicing odes
of pretending
which makes me so angry
I felt the hot breath
of the dragon inside
snort and sputter.

We are made
to be messy and
irreverently more
ourselves in each moment
during these times
of the capitalist pig
and the boar
that knocks down
the door
demanding production
and sleek slime sublime stupors
that keep us under steel-toed boots.

We can speak up.
We have the power.
Shout it out loud
and be heard by the angels and
some of us beings on earth
do crave you to be
exactly and magically
you,

in all your sensual splendor.

To Be Wild

I was the lost boy
that fell back
through the moon’s mirror
to earth with a crunch,
back to this side of the looking glass
with a moan,
and I had to squint and
tilt my head slightly
to remember my home
in that other world of
ether and water.

Back in my skin
the body felt,
predictable,
and the delusions or prophetic visions,
however you see fit,
stretched out time
so that a million flashes
could happen in just one moment,
Jesus,
slow down,
stop,
breathe.

Count back the clock tower
from madness,
match up
mixed up memories:
I said this?
You did that?
I hopped a circus train
headed out of town
to get far away from
the shoulds and shouldn’ts.
I stripped down completely naked
to feel the air
coursing through me,
sighing,
singing fire out of my mouth,
wanting,
with fervor and
the deepest desire
to not have to explain myself.

To Be wild-

The Magician and the Deck of Cards

The magician’s
deck of cards
was full of insecurities:

The Joker,
a constant wild animal
with an obscene mouth
which I kinda dug
but who refuses to take off his mask
and still wrings his hands
and squeals his sorrow cries
into the dark
when he is alone.

The Queen of spades,
a shade bitch
with eyes
that even pierce
the skies
and pours down
on her fellow
ghosts that walked
in bones,
groaning for approval.

The 4 of hearts
who crashed his car
into a bridge wall
with full force
for he thought
he was a caterpillar
turning into a butterfly.

And the Jack of clubs
who lies while
speaking soft
into your ear
and promises to leave the keys
under the doormat
but throws
a pack of cigarettes
on the porch instead.

I watched the game play out
from the hole in my dollhouse,
with its own share of hauntings,
and winked at the magician
who laughs with a knowing
that the cards
may switch characters
but the queen
is always left like the queen of Macbeth,
shaking blood

from her broken hands.

Family (grief trigger warning)

When I sit
at 2 in the morning
eating a family size
pack of m&ms
it almost feels forbidden:
to eat so much
it almost makes me sick,
to think so fast
my body lines blur,
to be too deep in it,
that messy glory wasteland
with her howling angels,
to stay up so late
I forget what month it is,
to remember
what family feels like,
all 5 of us,
sitting at the picnic table
in the fall
when the wind whips
around you,
listening to NPR
on the radio,
laughing together
as the leaves
fall down
mixing with the
gravel and sunshine.

How could I have known
that even though I loved the snow,
the move to cold Minnesota
was the start
of the end of family.
I cut my hair off
at 3 in the morning
with a rusty pair
of old scissors
that my nana used
to cut crisp and neat with
when I was young,
and now scraping clumps
of hair off my head
with dull pieces of metal
the summer after
my dad died
and I missed him
and my mom
yelped at the sight
when I came down
to breakfast
in the morning.

And later,
I smoked 6 cigarettes
outside in the depths of the dark
having paced round
the hospital room for so long
I was forming a trail
of sunken floor
with my heavy feet,
waiting for my twin flame
to wake up after
his first brain surgery
as the doctors
ripped out as much
of the tumor as
they could
even then knowing
that this was a road
which would end,
in tears,
and for me
my worst fears being right,
doing it all,
running round and round
so as to feel nothing,
sitting at the window,
looking out at the red bird
perched in her tree branches
outside my bedroom
at 11 in the morning
when I held Jordan’s hand
and whispered
over and over:
I love you. I love you.
Can you hear me? I love you,
until he died in my hands

with a sigh.