on ecstasy

Platinum and peroxide-ridden,
wisps of smoke
on ecstasy, almost like film sprinkled with acid,
acrid and smoking in the dark somewhere,
under a flickering streetlight by a bar teeming with bodies,
pupils dilated to the point where
her eyes are black and reflective,
a neon cat drawing words with
light,
a flame weak enough to put out with your thumb and index finger. But she’s
laughing, laughing
coy enough with all her slits and holes, and
she’s the insides of glow sticks,
electric thrumming, a bass solo
a Jackson Pollock in the blacklight
but sometimes she remembers what it’s like when you play the acoustic
something about how acid eats film like the mind forgets memories
she keeps trying to hold onto the smoke you exhale,
as if she’s foolish enough to think this will preserve her, make her
ageless,
a time with fancy cigarette holders and fringe,
garters and thigh highs,
bright flashes and puffs of smoke mingling in the air with men’s aftershave.

Drag her close by her long pearls or you might lose her,
all her coy slits and holes and dents and marks,
all her laughter dying down to a serious silence
when she grabs your hand and asks you what it’s like
how it feels to lose someone
and you say that it starts out as a tiny little hole that someone drilled into your head
in your sleep and it grows larger,
slow and cancerous and it’s like swallowing glass
like you’re cut to pieces and there’s only one person to fix it but that person’s in
a coma,
under the influence of lights and sound
vibrating apart like guitar feedback
ageless like Jimi Hendrix
but as nontraditional as seven nation army
and her lungs are bruised leather
worn like a permanent hospital bracelet.

Maybe this is how she remembers it,
in smoke filled basements and conversations with old friends about
substandard living as a student and roach fingers
and how you wish you could forget what sleep was again
and come alive, every coy slit and hole, every imperfection,
revolve slow on the spot like a singer’s closing note,
waver towards the finish and then stagger slowly,
as if that could reconcile the tiny hole that started all of this.

from the outside looking in, the skin over your veins looks papery thin.

I.

The watermelon seeds of doubt
tell me what I really need to know.
You can have me pitted and split open
on a Styrofoam plate, because the pink
insides always seem to be appealing
after a few drinks at a barbeque on
Independence Day.

Pitted, gutted. It’s all the same
when you’re splayed and incriminating yourself
without even understanding your own chalk outline.

II.

They said you were beautiful once
when you reminded them of Original Sin.
No compulsion. You were a wildfire
set ablaze and eating everything alive
with your flames.

Your eyes were bottomless
black as charred homes and swollen rivers.

III.

I wanted to write this for you
and for your blue veins like tree branches
growing on your arms and raised like a bas relief –
you were once beautiful but now you are dust.

What is left of you is preserved
in old photographs but they could never
quite capture the bottomless pits of your eyes
as dark as watermelon seeds on a summer day.

Your Catholic guilt was a camera
and your veins were a timeline.

hello stranger

hello stranger
you're a cloudy and unforgiving mist
that never leaves my brain
i'm waiting for the crack and peel of my
skin to shed so that you may see something
more recognizable in me.

hello stranger
i'm quite sure
we have the same burns and itches
so would you mind
not being too careful with me?

hello stranger,
hello stranger
i'm not quite sure where you're taking me.

nothing can break me nothing can bend me nothing can save me

all these sounds in my head rasp and sound too simple
and maybe i am truly losing my grip on everything.
the tang in my mouth is acidic, coppery.
i'm looking for blood in exchange for those months
because nothing can erase the cruel grip of
broken uncertainty.

nothing can break my bones and cause me pain
like the disappearance of an old friend to an old
soul. so i was close to self flagellation
those sins no easy task to crack, a shell of skin
not easily shed.

then you came back.

you clutched me in the red light district i'm surprised you didn't miss it

i've gone and done it again
vacated the inside of my head
so don't look at me
don't try to tell me
"i won't do that to you again"
god said it was one in every ten
from where i'm standing
it seems to be everyone
i put my fist through a mirror today
i don't want to see the vacancies
the cheap neon inconsistencies
but you still put your hand inside of me
thinking it will start me
no, no it won't
i am not here
i haven't been here for awhile
but i should assume you missed that
with your gaping absence
not something you can fix with insistent pleas
i feel like a flea bag
itching and itching
skin red and angry and torn
i will remember shame
i will remember that you're no different
just looking for an opening
with a line cut and grafted like bone
my body rejects it
because that line isn't your own