Fruitless and Ruthless

Lobotomize me.
Hollow out a vessel of flag-waving anarchy,
A watchdog laps up well-hidden poison, sweet like sugar and savory as T-Bone fat.
Train me to stare at stars like you.
Terrorize me.
When the surgery is unsuccessful.
Fruitless missions, dry baskets yielding nothing but vapors from lukewarm dreampools.
Vandalize me.
Bitch slapping with yellow labels,
They be bridges of hate, so easy for you to cross, and build metropolises on,
Easy access to the places of worship for desecration.
Sodomize me.
Teaching me lessons in humility,
Being humble is reserved for the birds,
Early morning creatures of habit and no hunt.
You long to force upon me wing, but no matching talons for defense.
Memorize me.
In between brusque lines of candor and over-the-counter dime store advice,
There is a grain of salt worth knowing.
A window pane looking out to Jupiter,
Tunnels filled with apocalypse rations,
food for survivors.
Prioritize for me.
Vast lists of finite futures,
All scripted out for melancholy, violin-playing Harpies,
The ever growing list of evil women inside of my head.
Each picking a new instrument,
Each one planting Sage graves disguised as seedlings.
Traumatize me.
Brick walls but completely breakable.
Bodily fluids and fermentation of infancy,
Flowing through my veins is a long line of risk taking and half-battles.

Nightmare on christmas

Right now, I have the house to myself. My music is up very loud, and I'm working out - even though I'm battling a hangover and I'm not burning very many calories. Across the street, I can see from my front bay window a family in their brick Colonial house is having a Christmas Party, because it's Christmas Eve. I always liked Christmas Eve better than Christmas Day. I think there was such a finality to Christmas Day, but not the eve. The Eve was filled with cookies and the sarcasm my family was so adept at. As a kid, I always felt special when my mom or older sisters would allow me to wrap presents with them on christmas Eve. I miss being a kid, but then again, I do not. But now, this Christmas, I feel like the oldest person in the world. I feel completely and utterly alone. Last year, me and my husband drove the 400 miles to Georgia to watch my neices and nephew tear into presents. I felt the first twinge of family ever since my dad had died and my mother decided she wanted a new family. I tried to buy and find everything and anything my sister would want, just so she would want me there and love me and to have a good christmas. We gave my neices and nephew an Xbox and games and whatever else we could find. This year, I got nothing, I gave nothing, there is just nothing. My husband is working, I'm sitting in my living room, listening to music.
There saddest part is my sister's facebook status a few days ago, in which she wrote: "I love my wife, and my older sister!" .... I guess not me. I really feel like I have no family left at all. Neither one of my sisters give a damn about me, and my mother will never understand me or love me, I don't think. I never thought this would happen to me. I always thought I'd be surrounded by this amazing family, these amazing women who taught me everything I know. But I'm not. And I'm scared. Very, very scared.

Cruinne - for the love of love

When I hear the music coming from the tunnel of light, I cannot help but feel humbled, and disgusted with myself. There is a thundering drum going on in my head, (or is it my heart) that is leading a bunch of molecules to an imaginary war that is more alive than you or me. I want to search for hidden clues, and leap over oceans, and kneel at the grave of the Goddess. I cannot help but feel ashamed that I have not paid my dues, and served the world.
When the lights go out and I am naked beneath the stars and all of their eyes, I realize that it is really just me and the Universe - judging each other. We are sizing each other up, valiant knights in armor that protect all of the simpletons - and I just that. A simpleton, a gray brain in a tower of translucent iron. I am reaching for you, Universe. I am sending out my tears as tiny drops of hopeful servitude.
Seeking to protect, to defend, to declare a message that will not just open eyes and minds, but also hearts and arms. I am driven by a force wilder than summer storms that break states apart the seams. The same storm that founded governments and changed rules that did nothing but kill innocence. As long as there are notes on a staff, I will never end this battle. As long as there is grass, sunning itself and catching rays, I will always go further and deeper than anyone else. A career in politics, no. A career folding laundry, no. At times, I wonder if anyone feels this drum also. I wonder if money and deceitful friendship has blinded everyone.
But you cannot blind someone like me. You cannot blind someone who does not see with their eyes, but instead with their feet. Running faster into the distance to make a new world for little babies with tempestuous hearts. Hearts that are ready to earn their place at the throne of the goddess, to be able to put their palms up to the sky and say, "I am here. Make me great, not for myself, but for the great good of everyone." Eager ears, and escalating volumes of the sound of their own voices ringing in the wind, this world is just on loan to us from our children. When I see a child, I see someone I owe something to. I see the light carriers, the torch lighters, the ones who will drift me into my twilight.
Make me great, but not for myself, but for everyone. Make my prayers be heard, make my spells be spectacular nets to catch desires with. Make my feet swift, ready to collect needful things for needful people. And then, let me rest alongside the ocean, when the Universe will send me home - finally.

Mhmmm....?

I am a rare fruit. I am miserable, and I do not want your company.
I aspire to be the 50 foot woman, and topple your city.
The city you made in your desk, the one with numbers.
It does not matter if you are my best friend, or worst enemy, if you anger me,
You will pay for it.
It will nothing, but a good time, long and leisurely
But I won't serve you.
I won't even take your order.

Pale Dreaming

Last night in my dream, I was in a home that wasn't mine, nor ever was. The walls were whitewashed, somewhere between 'shabby-chic' and 'institutional', and you visited me. Not just in a metaphorical sense, you came to this house to see me as a visit, you towed with you a red suitcase filled with medical books. You read these books filled with flesh-colored charts of my insides, and told me I was 'incomplete', if only you knew how right you were. You informed me my liver was leaking fluid that made up one of the great lakes, and my kidneys were full of salt - the salt that God grinded up himself and sprinkled across the unforgiving terrain.
"Fuck you!" You yelled, after I asked why. I asked why everything spins out of control, and I am the epicenter. "Fuck you! It's because you put yourself there!" You yelled, your mouth folding into a smirk, and looking at me like a wild animal looks at strange people that inch closer to it. An ignorant mixture of fear and temptation, almost egging me on to fight you. But instead you closed your medical book, and went over to the window in front of you, where the streets outside swooped and slithered through some landscape that resembled part city, and part ocean.
At that moment, a girl with brown hair and a crimson ribbon dangled from her crown and covered her left eye, appeared at your side. You told her to pick you up in a day or so, and she and you exchanged a private joke I didn't understand, and she left.
"Yes, I'm sleeping with her." You responded with a proud smile, when I asked if you were dating her. And then a piece of me broke all over a again. There was a landslide inside of my chest, and it pinched hard when I tried to inhale. All over again I wanted you. All over again, like some dark, intense sunrise, I missed you. Instead of pleading with you to leave her and to love me again, I just watched as you read another book. Since I've been losing weight, we are the same sizes now. You're lean frame matches me now, and I watched your temples pulse as you concentrate on the words in the book. I outlined your strong nose with my eyes, as I felt my eyes tear up. Your hands were long and pale, and rested lightly on the edges of the novel. I remember when you nervously put them on me the first time, and I remember that night with the painted walls and the smell of clean clothes and whatever the name of that cheap teenage cologne you wore.
I woke myself up. I was back in my room now, it was still dark, and I listened to my dogs snore. I hate it when your picture appears out of nowhere. It is hard to do my best in forgetting you, and letting you live a life you deserve and find the sweetest love I was too selfish to give you. It is hard to do that when you keep appearing online and bringing it all back.
What things could have been so different if we had met after we had finished growing up. What amazing things we could have had together if we had met and fallen in love after realizing who we really were.
I really did love you as deep as you did me. I just didn't know what to do with that and the co-existing darkness that ate everything, that was also inside of me.
From the top of my head to the tips of my toes, it's full of energy. Energy that leaps out in ions and electrons, searching for something to stick to. Great storm catchers, that leap from buildings and cliffs, into electricity. Perhaps being a daredevil, or most likely, looking for a place to scream. I'm not lonely, but at times I get so angry I cannot see straight. Who are these people that call me their friends? Who are they, since they don't even know me? I remember when you knew me, breathing into the small of my neck, illuminating something on tv screens. Something that bore my name and smelling of a place where leaves fall - crisp, and telling of things to be reborn a few weeks later. With assurance.

Cultivation

Rachel was plain.
Like cream cheese slathered over the carb filled bagels she ate when she was depressed. Rachel wanted to know why she couldn't make other people laugh unless she was reciting something she had copied from a movie. Her voice quivered with nervousness, she longed for talent, she wanted some sickness to take her away to a bed that she could pump a novel out in.
Perhaps the secret to finding yourself is copying other people, she mused. The rise from mediocrity to superstardom couldn't be that hard. It is much easier when you put yourself on a pedestal, when you make up lies about how fantastical you are - all when you are not. Human emotions are like fish scales, covering you and making you fool proof and unable to catch fire. And Rachel was saturated with these emotions, all copy and pasted from whatever movie she saw it from, book she read it from, stack and stacks of scripts in hear head, littering her until she sunk to the bottom.
A glass pane facade, her face, speckled with sporadic ticks of honesty - is a map of everyone else's words. She is graffiti, a subway wall, a bathroom stall - although untouched by callus hands. If the sky got any bigger, Rachel wondered, it would swallow me up whole. The wind would sweep her up onto a cross, and she would willingly put her arms out for martyrdom - martyrdom means fame. And fame means a name, one she would have earned instead of inheriting. But even still, nothing got Rachel's blood boiling enough to put herself on a cross for. days went by like blizzards, fast, thick, and blinding her. Before Rachel could find a reason to cry, there was a reason to cry - herself. What is a person but a shell anyways? Do you open yourself to an inhale thinking you are above someone? Rachel believed she was destined for great things. But Rachel didn't realize that great things only come to those who have a spirit.
She should have cultivated hers.

A pile.

Crystal, clear polythelene. Simple-minded, bright colored coat, and Paris in the springtime. You may not love anyone as much as you love this sky, dotted with incandescence and self-loathing, it is wrapped around you like a warm scarf and a ticket to somewhere you read about in books. I hate watching everyone make sacrifices to every day goals. Giving up a good tumbler of exploration for a shot glass of degradation and a good conditioner. I wonder about the yellow cars that drove by weeks ago, with the skinny arms of a child hanging out of the passenger window. His arms glided up to the slopes of his young shoulders, and there was no neck or mandible, but only his eyes, looking out my neighborhood as if it were an island in the midst of a sea he could not swim out of. But it was all hope and and signals of what childhood is made of: losing, gaining, and correcting other people's mistakes. And avoiding traps, bear steel ones that older generations set, with candy inside. The whole purpose of winning is to be heads and shoulders above everyone else.
But not you. That yellow car child, the one that helped to remind me of a why I hate the simple minded, and say a prayer of thanks to the floor under my feet that I have grown without injury to mind or spirit - well ,that yellow car child isn't like you. You are crystal, clear polythelene. Wrapped around yourself, letting only tainted air go in and mix up your mind like a cocktail of cyanide and spoiled orange juice. Highly acidic and detrimental to whatever self discovery you may be making. Are you looking for a cave with treasure in it? A wooden sphere containing your jackpot, the keys that will unlock all of the doors with no numbers, no directions on them. Why not make your own keys? They are not just hard as iron, or as fine and delicate as a young girl's cornflower hair. Drink down the bitterness of growing older without a map, and without a mask, or all of those other first-aid, lifesavers so many count on to make it through a lifetime.
Happy Gold, the kind that you wear around your limbs, the material weight that adds to you. Get yourself into irreversible predicaments. Play in the coffins of others dreams and goals. It isn't as difficult as it may seem to play mean and vengeful. But besides all of the things I tell you to do, I have to wonder if there is even a plan laid out for you. On a cardboard bulletin board somewhere in a hidden room behind a rigged bookcase. Where your fortune is being told by old brujas who see the dead and predict hurricanes. Lay out your outfit for tomorrow. This is going to be the outfit you lose your serenity in. You pause to think about the blue jeans you lost your virginity in, even though they laid as a pile on the floor, and you watched them collect dust as he took his time turning you into a 'real' woman. But there are no real women. They are like imaginary skyscrapers, tickling God's belly like parasites, reminding him to quiet them down, keeping them in their places. So, lay out your outfit for tomorrow. If you open your palms and say a wish that something will come along tomorrow to disrupt your plans, whatever crystal clear polythelene plans you may have. Along the storm drains that dump out in to tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, maybe there will be a rock as solid as a dead man's plan for reincarnation that will trip you. Trip and fall. Lose your serenity. But keep your jeans on this time.

Bruise

The bruise I have a taste for pushing is watching the video of you at a birthday party four years ago. You're laugh catches, and rings in my ears like a brass bell, or reveille. Instantly making my eyes flicker and dance across the computer monitor trying to memorize the lines in your face, making sure I still don't forget them.
If it's a chain that binds me to the past, I'm not in a hurry to break it. If it's a signal beaming out to the world that I still hate nameless Supreme beings for taking you away, then so be it.
What gets me going on diatribes about God and politics is the fire that you gave me. The no bullshit, take-no-prisoners, sentimental Downy comforter repartee that weaves in and out both sober and drunken conversations. I hold it in. What gets me going on being able to stare at the setting horizon and not feel completely cynical, and grateful for the juice in my cup and the blood in my veins. Little moments, pouring out of my palms and into the cycle of the plants, and trees, and tiny bumblebees, all keep me marching to my own drum-set. As peculiar as it sounds, I can still hear you telling me to 'be a good girl'. I can still read the fine print at every contract because you told me to.
If you are still waiting for the Rapture in a few years and the nameless Supreme Being decides I won the spiritual lottery and I get to go to the clouds, I hope that the clouds have a pool table and you're playing. I can only imagine the intangible pub in the clouds. I can only resurface old wounds and hope the sky walkers bring me to your healing station.
As every day inches along and ends up coiling into tightly wound years and millenniums, and as he gives one thousand kisses and the night sky tickles my imagination; I say 'hey'. And somewhere I have to hope you are hearing me and saying it back to me.
I don’t ever want to lose the sun. Waving good-bye hurts worse than any needle, worse than any thing they could do to me. When it comes down to the wire, and its crunch time, the time where things are meant to happen or never, ever be mentioned again, I always come back to your face. I always come back to the words you liked to say, to the way you gave up at times, and they way you brought her carnations.
My whole thought process to becoming an exceptional adult and a woman of promise is that never ending merry-go-round of making you proud. Are the attempts of trying to make you proud no different than those people in church, trying to make someone God they only vaguely believe in proud? Sometimes, I don’t believe in anything. Just when I wanted you to stay, you left. Just when I started tightening my grip on myself, learning how to handle left hand turns and launch out a hundred or more bullets from my mouth, the train left, with you on it. Through mountains and plains with cowboys worshipping the evening breaks in heat, and with horses frothing and kicking up dust, that belongs to men, you are a part of that dust now.
I’ve gone home. I’ve headed back to the beaches and the cobblestone streets. I even walked past pieces of whom I was and who you were. But you aren’t there. You are under her bed. You are in our heads. I asked the psychic if you were nearby, and she told me yes, but I know better. I’d rather not look through the dark and find a small light. If I had my choice, and I know I don’t, none of us – I’d look for a small haven of darkness in a room to bright to squint.
There are mirrors out there, and when they spread their wings and play their sad songs I open up my lungs and tell the universe what I want. I want to grow old now, listening to other people’s prayers only aid in my motivation to age. Breaking promises to stay on a path with a beer in one hand, and looking at for others? It’s just what I want to do now; I don’t care about others anymore.
But for now, the bruise I have a habit of pushing, is simply thinking of you. When I hear a joke, when I cook – when the moon goes behind the trees. It is all geometry, its all rules and unspoken wishes. When I look up to the sky, I don’t think Heaven is there. I don’t see past precipitation and lightning bugs. How desperate can the sun be if it is lies down and let’s the moon take over? Pretty desperate. Desperate for attention, for love, for the feeling of knowing it isn’t alone.
Through all of it, I still think you are behind my left shoulder.
At least, that’s where I hope you are.

condition

I purposely cut ties with people I do not like.
I really do wish that town would dissolve onto itself - sparing only the good ones.
If I could sit down with my 16 year old self, I would tell her to join the Navy, and never trust anyone.
I don't want the rest of the world to wait for me, while it rides itself into a storm.
If you waste your time wondering why you didn't get an invite, or why people don't trust you to pay the gas bill, then that's sad.
The fact that people tell me I'm wrong on a daily basis, makes me at least know that I get people's attention.
I don't want people's attention just to dance in front of them. I have something to say.
I'd give anything to have a family.
I hate feeling this way around holidays. Fucking holidays, now I know why people kill themselves during this time of the year.
crawl out of whatever kind of ship you are building - it isn't worth it.

Little Sister

I feel fine.
        I wanted to finish the rest of half-eaten birthday cake in the fridge, it looks like a platter where a massacre took place, a battlefield of sugar rushing agents. Kids, they will eat anything except what they should eat. When you asked me to throw a birthday party for my nephew, your son, I did it because I knew you couldn't. The medication the hospital gave you made you sleepy, often through mealtimes, and you only ate when I came to your room in my house past midnight with a plate of food in my hands. Nothing in my house is mine right now, and normally in such circumstances my attitude would resemble some form of a demonic white woman with an endless supply of Aerosmith tunes and cheap Vodka - I'm swimming in it. I'm listening outside of my guestroom, your bedroom, listening to sleep. The low, blurring, heavy breathing, interruppted by tiny whimpers.
         When you whimper I remember when I was a kid and I had nightmares. Our mother was never home, a bar kept her occupied. You'd rush to my side and make me a milkshake in the middle of the night. You'd drop a couple of drops of green food coloring in it, and carry me back to my room. I sat up in bed drinking it, in my fuzzy footie pajamas, while you watched and telling me to hurry up. Now I'm bringing you plates of nutrition, feeding your kids and making sure they get to school and finish their homework. I even check the math - with a calculator, of course. This isn't a triumph, this is a very unevenly matched game that you're losing.
          You came to my house, a house I managed to own at only 24, two weeks ago with a bandage wrapped around your head, and your left arm in a cast. Your son, my nephew Aven, who usually jumps around and screams when he's at his calmest, was staring at my Welcome mat, unable to look up at me. Your daughter Miri was sucking her thumb, and clutching her backpack straps, and she is in middle school. After I made the kids macaroni and chicken tenders for dinner and they showered and went to bed - you finally broke down and explained that he had finally gone way too far. Finally? I asked. After years of shoving you into walls, fucking other women, and draining your mutual accounts of everything - often making you do drastic things to feed your kids. He had broken your arm when you told him Miri was going to wear a miniskirt to school the next day. She had bought it with her own money, saved up from babysitting jobs, and it wasn't too provocative. No daughter of his was going to dress like a whore, were you some kind of whore? What were you doing when he was working 80 hour workweeks? Raising his kids?! Raising them to be whores! Fighting back was something our dad taught us, but you over-estimated your strength and under-estimated the time it would take him to jump over the dining room table in some kind of primitive lunge. Miri told me last week after coming to my room in the middle of the night, after I fed you, that she thinks it's her fault. She can't sleep, she picks at her food. Aven gets lost in my XboX, which is pretty much now his. Which I guess is fine, I'm 28 and still not married, maybe an xbox isn't what I need anymore, anyways. Aven eats everything, maybe to cover up you two not eating. He volunteers to take out the trash for me after I cook dinner.
         He works at a chemical plant 15 miles outside of the city I live in, 5 miles outside of the one your mail is still going to. Mondays are my night off. I told you in a note that I knew you'd see when you woke up to use the bathroom that I had a baby shower for a friend that I needed to go to. Aven volunteered to make dinner - frozen pizza, and Miri sat with him, allowing him to teach her how to play "Left 4 dead' on the Xbox. I know his shifts usually end at seven or so. I left my house at 6, but I stopped to get Taco Bell. Carbohydrates equal energy. There is nothing like raw energy, it can take you places. When it all comes to a series of interlocking moments, we tend to examine ourselves. Morals are a badge of honor that people like to wear, bute hate to do the work to earn them. I don't wear any merit badges. Over the last few years since our father died, I don't look for badges or medals, I look for cliffs to climb, and set up shop on.
         Your house is beautiful at night, you put up christmas decorations, even though you are the best atheist I know. He plugged them all in before he left for work, I bet. The icicle lights are dangling from your second floor balcony. Your lamp-post has a red ribbon slithering up it, the azalea bushes have white lights twinkling in them. While I sit on the grass, next to one of the bushes, I think: What I wouldn't give for a Salvation Army - Army. His SUV pulls up in the driveway, his music up loud. He drums on the side of the dash as he waits for the garage door to open, and then barrels inside, the garage door lowering behind him. I have to admit, I don't know how I am going to do this. I've watched enough Law & Order that I think I can come up with something when I get in there. I wait a few minutes, until I see the glow of the television set from the bay windows, and then I go in. Of course he leaves the door unlocked. He's watching a show about a guy wrestling gators. He has a budlight longneck in his hands, his feet are propped up on the antique cherrywood coffee table our grandmother gave you on your wedding day. That was a really nice day, but your wedding cake was dry as shit. Nevermind.
       . .. I decide to turn around and go into the garage. The television is up so loud and he's so fucked up he doesn't hear the front door close behind him. This Denali you drive, that he's driving now, takes up most of your garage. Even if you wanted another car where the hell would you put it? His tools are stacked messily in the corner, near the front left headlights. I put on my latex gloves. Disabling a garage door is like knocking a bug off the wall. The mechanisms are already so delicate that a simple cut in the chain will make it so it will not raise. I then fold the other pin over so that it won't raise at all, even manually. The alert light is easy to kill, I zap the power right out.
        When I go back in to check on him, he now has three empty beers next to him, and he is nursing his fourth. He coughs and slowly heaves himself up to go use the bathroom once a commercial break comes. I replace my latex gloves with another. I take the bottle of Unisom from my pocket that you had brought in your overnight case from this house two weeks earlier. You usually needed it to sleep, but what the doctors gave you was ore than enough, and there was a heavy, full bottle left. Tiny, cerulean gel capsules of doxylamine. They burst open when I squeezed them above the rim of his beer bottle. I popped nine of them - he really needed to piss, he was in their for ten minutes. I turn to leave as I hear the toilet flush, and I watch his sillohuette sit back down in front of the bay windows from outside, crouched next to the white lighted bush. From my cell phone I call your house phone, after three rings, he answers, his words slurred.
Baby? It's me. I say.
You finally ready to fucking talk? he yells back.
Yes. Can you come and get me and the kids?
You at that bitch's house?
Yeah, I'll be waiting.
He hangs up, after burping over the phone. I know him well. He didn't leave your wedding reception until he has finished his beer. And he didn't leave his recliner until he finished his beer this time. When he did, I watched him rise from his chair and stumble towards the garage door in the back of the kitchen. From the bush, I hear his engine turn over. I hear his music start up. I watch where the bottom edge of the garage door hits the concrete of your driveway. It doesn't raise, and he doesn't make an effort to raise it. His music or his engine doesn't stop blaring, and I start to smell car exhaust.
        I dart from the bush and use the shadows to get to the playground two blocks from your house where I parked my car. It's a busy playground, other sedans just like mine are crammed into the parking lot, dozens of family's watching a kid's soccer game. I drive quickly to my friend Janelle's house a few miles away. There really was a baby shower I needed to go to, I even bought her a customized Bouncy Seat for her new son coming into the world. I spend over an hour there and hit the supermarket on my way home, picking up Aven's birthday cake for his party tomorrow. I'm grateful that him and Miri are both asleep when I get home - one of them had done the dishes. You raised good kids.
        The cops came after Aven's party, about twenty minutes after I gave them both money to go see a movie with some friends. You told them that the garage door had been having problems, and that you both used unisom to sleep sometimes - having two pre-teens was stressful after all. The call did come from my cell phone, but that was because you didn't have one, and land lines were a waste of money - it was the only phone in the house. In your medicated stupor, you got guilty and wanted to reconcile, you waited on him for a few hours until you took another dosage and passed out for the night. No, you didn't call him today because you just assume he was being an asshole as usual, trying to teach you a lesson on waiting on people. And you were distracted, it was your only son's birthday, so much had to get done so it was a decent one. The cops totally believed it. While they were out at the movies, we went to identify his body. The medication didn't give you much of a leash to express any sadness, but you cried quietly in the hallways while we waited for the administrator to come bring you some papers to sign.
        I was thinking about eating the rest of Aven's birthday cake. You went back to sleep, after telling me that you loved me and that you didn't know what you'd do without me. I shrugged, and told you that we were both good liars. I hadn't even told you what I had done to him - you just knew and went with it, completely improvising in front of the cops. You tell me that you'll tell the kids tomorrow, and take them to the funeral home. I leave the rest of Aven's cake in the fridge, it could be dessert for the next few days.
    I feel fine.