My toes tip toward the drain
The water streams down into the dark
A place for forgotten things.
We couldn’t forget that dark void,
Though we tried
We all walked around it
But my mother would ask questions of the empty,
Yelling across the space as if she hoped to be an echo
We only heard echoes.
I don’t remember that year,
Only a faint ringing in my ears
My mother would ask questions of the empty
The dips of her skin coupling her mouth making parenthesis to indicate she only asked in a whisper
So that my brothers and I would only think it a lullaby
Or song jumbling through her thoughts
Lining her day with a murmur
I think we knew.

My father would love that he’s become something of a song.
He played instruments like chess
Would pull me into his chest
His bass humming through me
My memory of his voice is a shout out the front door
He had glasses round like a question, tortoise-shelled,
Weeping from slender earpieces.
They were as heavy as I imagine his thoughts to be.
I imagine what his thoughts would be sometimes.
How he would hum his lips while thinking of me.
I only rarely think about the crook of his elbow,
Where my hand would be on a softly lit day,
I in a white dress and
He waist deep in memories.
I only rarely think of that.
I more often think about what his face looked like,
Find that I remember the half-finished drawing I made of him better than his actual face,
The drawing only his round glasses, his brow folded in thought, his eyes not looking at me.

I used to whisper my own questions.
At night in my bed, with my ceiling as a canvas for thought
I knew every dip of shadow,
How the blind-stripes would chase across its surface
As my worries dovetailed with my prayers.
I asked
Let everything work out.
I don’t really know why that’s what I asked for,
When it obviously had not.
Let everything work out.
What did I mean?
My dark ceiling taught me that an entity can be the same even as light and shadow fall across it
And that God will always be listening if you think he is.
I’ve decided now
That if I am ok with how life turns me
Then everything will always work out.

I am standing in the bathtub
Crying.
And If I don’t say anything, nothing will echo.
If I don’t talk in the morning, my words won’t settle
Around my feet
And If I don’t speak his name, then it will never fall like the leaves have been recently.

Because I come from a winding road of women
who still collect the tragedies of love in their hands
like the doorknobs they’ve turned upon one another,

You are still the children of your mothers,
On bad days, you are your best friend’s anonymous hero. On good ones, you are your own.
You are descendants of explorers who once cupped moondust in their palms
and felt a pulse louder than their own.
You are ancestors of future prodigies who will save this world from what we are doing to it.
They will forgive us for our crimes and ask more of their own children.

You are who you were before you stopped wanting to be.
Before you settled for less than what you deserved
but told yourself it was the best you could get.
Remember the way you spoke your name when you were still proud of the person it labeled.
Remember your second grade birthday cake, and ask yourself why everything nowadays is tasteless.
Find the colors of your dreams before they greyed in the dustbowls of your eyes.
Find your first heart, the one you grew a couple sizes too good for,
and put it back on your sleeve where it’s meant to be.

Because you are beautiful, beauty yet to behold itself,
like the first ring of “middle c” in a deaf man’s ear after signing his last breath,
like the hallelujah chorus of a godless but holy nation
who doesn’t need a heaven to tell it right from wrong.
Perhaps forgiveness for our enemies grows inside bombs and crumbled buildings.
Perhaps every man’s secret is stored in the chest of a woman he loves,
because our secrets are the same.

So let us praise each other’s deepest shames,
Let the sunlight slap your scars in the face and remind them
that nothing on your body is undeserving of warmth.
Your body is a miracle waiting to change someone’s life.
You have the backbone of Demeter,
the heel of Achilles that doesn’t cover itself with armour,
but lets vulnerability breathe properly.
You have the eyes of God herself
and the palms of an Empire who knows its future because it knows its history.

So get excited for Monday mornings.
Spin proudly, across broad street in red heels and a rippling yellow dress.
Rush hour will forget why it was ever in a hurry.
The 65 year old man on the corner will ask you where you’ve been all his life.
and you will say – “I’ve been busy asking myself what I’m doing with my life.”
Your life is a handpicked continuation of someone else’s that didn’t make it this far.

So take a moment, feel the patch of skin behind your ear,
inside your forearm, between your first and second toe —
Yes, there are tender places where we have all been spared of callouses
from walking too far, too late at night with people who wanted too much from us.

We are young in all the same parts —
untouchable, infinite,
our palms are still pink as the sidewalk chalk we used to spell our names backwards with
And there were once days we didn’t mind so much the backwards —
when you still believed that if you cut a doll’s hair, it would grow back
that if you ate too many sunflower seeds, they would blossom in your belly.

That was before everyone started asking each other
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Who says we ever stop growing?
And why must we be something besides what we are now?

I’ve come to the conclusion that my best days are reincarnations of my childhood.
When I decided I wanted to be a teacher, waitress, professional sumo wrestler
and President of the United States between the beginning and end of recess.
When I was forgetful enough never to run out of first times.
And there are second chances everywhere, so there will always be first times.

I look into it and see nothing,
aside from white space, that is.

II.
The pages are blank of confessions
like a virgin’s heart to their
spouse the night of the honeymoon.

And like said virgin’s body,
they are so very inviting.

Inviting, the way a guitarist’s
forearms are to the sharp
wit of a needle, saying
make of me what I wish.

III.
I discover an urge to recreate the
world along two dimensions and
simplify things a bit. I know depth
need not be the literal to be reality.

IV.
I write my name inside of it,
a first act of self-correction.

V.
The ink bleeds a little bit,
as if it is rising
from the paper itself.

VI.
I impulsively listen to The Wind Cries Mary.

VII.
I realize that art and pain
have never been more
intimate than in a tattoo.

This is without doubt
something to aspire to.

VIII.
I write a poem about my lack
of composure affront the sharp
wit of a needle, sewing my fate.

IX.
I look into myself and see nothing,
aside from white space, that is.

X.
I look into my book,
and see two dimensions,
working as three.

I made it what I wished.

whenever, wherever, whatever

You moved like ink.
I remained stationary,
waiting for a word, a mark, a stain,
a stinging tentacle, or perhaps, a slap.
Fingers testing my temple
so I prayed the pain away.
You wrote me a sonnet of solace
in the Braille of bruises.

whenever, wherever, whatever

It didn’t matter. Your story’s setting, that is.
I am your paper thin confidante.
Make a letter out of me, signed with
backhand typeface. Send the world out to see.
Me? I’m content with warning: you can
hear the canvas cries when his fingers paint.

whenever, wherever, whatever

We spend most of our time kissing
Our foreheads together
Eyelashes skimming skin
Fingers trailing over ribs
“It’s only been three days,”
you say.

We sat on your front porch in the night
Looking over the overgrown garden
Leaves of a small tree trembling in the quiet wind
Halogen light dividing your face into shadow and ocher
You kept drawing your chair closer to mine
And I kept pulling my knees into my chest.
“One day, I want to live in a house that has a porch that goes all the way around. Well, maybe not all the way around.
At least three sides.”
I said.

You pull your chair closer to mine.
You are framed by the yellow wall of the kitchen behind you.
Your knees make parentheses around me.
I turn my eyes away and press my cheek to my knee.
“Everything ends,”
I say.

We huddle in the pool of flowers that is your bedspread and hide from time.
Legs intertwined like hands
Hands intertwined like expectation and disappointment.
You brush my hair out of your eyes.
“Stay in Philadelphia”
you say.

My mom never understood why.
Sometimes, she’d flip the switch on the wall to “help me out.”
And I’d scream, “No, Mom! The colors!”
Orbs of glowing colors appeared on the insides of my eyelids.
I formed them into shapes. Most often, Jesus.
Like that optical illusion where you stare at the four dots, then close your eyes and stare at something bright, then Jesus’ face appears.

Also, ghosts.
I knew they were evil because they spelled out ‘Booooo’ in Comic Sans.
With Helvetica, they might’ve stood a chance.
But with this as my nightly routine, I certainly never did.

So, I’m a little strange.
I don’t like drawing attention to myself,
but don’t mind telling secrets to 600 of my closest friends.

Like how I often woke up home alone when I was little.
I feared everyone went to heaven without me.
I still fear being left behind, but I’d rather be right than happy.

II.
It is always brooding males who understand this.
Introspective loners who view life through a lens and write how things could be.

I’ve always admired the minds of men brave enough to create stories.
The type of men who only know conversation as character development.
The type of men who fall in love with Manic Pixie Dream Girls.

Manic—the A-side of self-loathing.
Pixie—delicate, yet supernatural.
Dream—Altered consciousness has never felt so real.
Girl—The only explicit thing about her.

She’ll ease your pain, tell you to be spontaneous,
to frolic through Ikea, to change your life with mediocre indie pop.
Through her quirks, you’ll become well-adjusted.
You’ll filter your troubles through her like she’s a pair of rose-colored glasses,
which makes sense because she’s always been a spectacle.

You’ll claim you can see through her, unaware that reflection is her pastime.
And past times love shifting shapes.
She’s as long as everything and as widespread as goodness,
but still there’s little depth.

She is a fantasy, who assigns herself your peace of mind,
but no one cares about her story.
She is easy to miss.

III.
I am easy to miss.
Even on Broad Street in a gold “Shakespeare is my homeboy” T-shirt
and a neon coral sweater.
I never said I was nondescript,
Just that you’ll aim for me, but never quite get me.

I am easy to miss.
Because somewhere in your mind, the idea of me will complete you.
You’ve scripted me as your foil, written me as what you’re not
instead of what I am.

I am not your Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
I have struggles of my own, and it’s not my job to charm away your fears.
It’s funny that you think of me as a character, but refuse to acknowledge my flaws.
Right now, you’re too wrapped up in your own
to see I’m queuing up the credits from the director’s chair,
and I intend to fall asleep properly.

A girl comes up to my friend saying “you look like you need someone to dance with,”
and with a I just ate a half hour ago look in his eyes he smiles,
“Nah I’m just dancing with my boys.”

That night we were dancing
like there were shot clocks on our ankles
and pop rocks in our socks.
I felt the same way about my moves
as I did about my hand jobs—
no girl in the world could do them better!

And we could care less that there less girls on the dancefloor
than at a no-shave-november convention
cuz fuck girls, we just wanted to dance!
So unike most my other nights
and all my other poems
this one was for the fellas.

And to the few ladies who’ve
I’ve had the pleasure of showing
my, well yano.
You prolly wish it was longer…
but if it grows at the same rate its grown for the last 10 years
I’m gonna die with a penis at least three feet long.

Now we’re back on the dancefloor
And CeeLo Green comes on
And even the most stubborn wallflower
starts dancing cuz that piano intro is happier
than golden arches for a big mac junkie.
More middle fingers infiltrate the air than when Sarah Palin visited San Francisco.
And all us on the dancefloor could care less about
the fact the sprinkler and the shopping cart stopped being cool about 10 years ago.

Becuase for all my life,
I’ve had the same 3 man wolfpack.
This Italian Jew, a Pizza Bagel if you will,
with guy who used to have me over for thanksgiving dinner on my right
and the guy that taught me how to masturbate on my left.
We danced until the morning
and we couldn’t be happier stumbling home to our parent’s houses
cause we had reached our full bro-tencial.

So at that cheesburgers and regret point in the late evening,
we decided right then and then that when we’re older we’ll get
tattoos across our shafts that read “my penis is beautiful.”
And hopefully I’ll get it when I’m hard,
so when I’m soft it’ll read “my pen is full.”
And that’s really all I need.
Cuz with a full pen
and a full heart
the girls might come,
but even if they don’t come around any more
I still got my boys on the dance floor!

Pompous in exterior,

The extant,

Ex wrought iron armor.

Glistening like mornings dew.

About face,to

a mirror.

Droplets plummet,

Accompanied by slumber’s evidence.

Wide awake.

My Mr. Potatohead,

Dense, fibrous and rooted,

Key to amygdaloid compass.

Palms acquainted with sun, raised

Infinitely to greet her face.

My face.

I watch you in awe.

Curve of jaw, bone

Of nose ready to take flight.

Lifted in proud cognizance of

self.

Treading lightly on rest,

More apt to show power,

Motion in steering towards.

Drawing lines, uniting us.

Oh how you love me.

I won’t know it,

For it is not to be known.

The X factor, making my

Reflection over why I love axes,

And my exes weren’t it.

You are the sonnet to my starstruck map,

Leading to kneeling at altars,

Needing what can’t be altered,

Rocking bands, no games,

Play-doh and tiny socks.

I know you.

The one who won’t leave,

For sake of me and your seed.

Contrary to my own,

Is everything you will be.

Papa, food for the soul.