hallucination.

It may have been a creak in the house, or maybe
it was the churning, squealing repetition of the Pathfinder's fan belt-
a noise I've heard countless times before, a teeth-clenching
screech that eased its deterioration into my ears
starting last spring. April 2008, to be exact,
the dismal aftermath of our first major dissemination,
the time you called me from 300+ miles away
blamed me for your tragic downfall (was this the third? sixth?)
told me you couldn't stand be away from me, but "told"
isn't anywhere near to the synthetic thud of your voice
which sometimes still ricochetes in the most tender spots of my body.
But this time, this night,

one week ago. It wasn't a creak, and it wasn't the squeal
of damaged car parts. It wasn't quite the thunder of your anger
vibrating from miles away. The dining room floor sprawled
beneath my bare feet and my body stilled, tensed, stilled,
drew up its breath and focus. Your voice still lives in this house.
Its plaintive pain-fueled echo

bruised me back to that particular October
the night I couldn't find you
the night you sat on the floor of my closet
legs bent and folded, torso hunched, eyes glazed
and full of calculated surprise as though
you knew I would rescue you, there,
two empty prescription bottles nestled against your thighs
your stare blank and uneven, turning to me
as I pushed open the door
and you didn't even try to hide
the blood, the flashing promises of black and blue,
your gripping hand aiming, puncturing, over and over
into your forearms and thighs, each penetration
depositing life-saving poison directly into your waiting blood stream.
All I knew to do was hold you against the shakes
and endless chattering of teeth, sleight and stutter of tongue,
dire lack of apology or explanation. And while you never

called out to me that night: two years later,
your absence finally clear, your voice let loose
in the skeletons of this house, finally
drawing the ruptured strength from my knees and heart.

prelude to disaster

if that was love, you can count me out. equations
don't mean shit to me anyway-- i nearly failed fifth grade math
and i'm incapable to adding up the number of times
you were good to me
and subtracting that quantity from the number of times
you so severely fucked me over that i couldn't find my legs
couldn't recognize strength to walk out
leave, or
disappear. & you told me: "this is who i am;
i will never change." which i must have thought was endearing
or cute or something that made my heart beat twice its limit
because i must have believed, then, that you were honest.
like the time you said: "i'll never do that to you, i'll never treat you
that way" and i fell for it- because that was thing to do, when you're falling
in love, you fall for everything- but the thing is- can you see this?-
what you did was incomparable to those tedious flits of fuck-ups.
you may not have fucked the other girl
but you let her in, and out, and in and out.
do you even remember how many times
you tried to kill yourself
in the midst of our love-struck wanderings?
do you remember august, in gramercy. the fight
with your mom- how you were "happy" but she pushed you
over the edge and it scared you how everything was good
and you still wanted to die.
or late january, in essex. your dad
wrestling a gun out of your hands. and how you'd begged me that very day
to come up early. and i couldn't. i should have known, or-
that big fight, april?, when you fell away
just to enjamb yourself back ever so slightly to let me know
that yes, you'd had to go to the hospital. because you wanted
to hurt yourself. but you didn't want to talk about it.
for days.
again. and then that summer.
it was always as if i was one step behind you,
never seeing what should have been so obvious.
when you tried to end us in june- because you didn't know how to be happy-
what a fucking cop-out (even though it's true). and the shitstorm of georgia:
the yelling, the mania, the constant fights, the ruin of two summer weeks.
enter october, 2007. someday i'll ship you a prize
awarding you the esteemed award for contributing heavily
to the worst month of my life.
i guess you can't understand (or care) that every time i open my closet
i see you there, cross-legged on the floor, your eyes wide and stark
blood and bruises caking your arms, epi-pen angled toward your veins,
scratches and pin-pricks spotlighting where you'd already stabbed,
empty pill bottles next to your feet. how i held you that night,
my arms a vice grip around your trembling form. we couldn't stop
the shaking: not then, not ever. and then-
no, it wasn't over-
how weeks later you tugged me into your grasp; we were standing
in a door frame, essex again, you said how sorry
you were, and how embarassed
you were. how that wouldn't happen again. and truly, it wasn't until months later-
april again, 2008, when you called me and ranted, bitched,
threw a fucking fit and ended us. then checked yourself into the psych ward
not two hours after that hang up.


that's just it.
those weeks.
that's where
we are now.
not us, but
time. and it
shakes me
to my core.
april-may.
i won't give
you my tears
my heart
my lifeline.
not anymore.
you had
your chances.

Fuck You

"Fuck you" doesn't cut it anymore. They're just words,

language strung beneath the gritty shit

that truncates my soliloquies and tequila-capped one-liners.

FUCK you doesn't tell you what I feel.

The vowels can't reach around their horse-shoed roundness

to slap the things-I've-never-told-you across your face,

and the consonants, hard and thick against my teeth, swing

open-hinged in the bluster of (what I intend to be a) frozen

downpour of tucked-away truths. But honesty never floods out that way;

it sneaks behind years of calm cool steady and fuck YOU

sounds too much like i hate you leave me alone you don't mean fucking

shit to me and these aren't lies, not anymore. And if I had the vocal energy

I might scream and whisper FUCK YOU fuck you FUCK YOU fuck you

over and over again, till my throat breaks raw and danger-red,

till my mouth and arms seize and spasm, and till my nails

snap off clean from clawing boundaries

and barriers, leaving new skin scathed and pale,

but there isn't any blood because blood is red

and red is love

and love was you

and you were blood but

fuckyou is boiling and endless, sworn like a furtive groan-

like a scalded wound peeled open again (and again, again).

Fuck.

You. 

This drops like dead weight, and "fuck you"

doesn't mean anything to me.

Not anymore. 

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

Sometimes I take the fishing line that is twisted around my neck

and tug a little harder, testing the cut against my skin and I

pick up scissors, weigh them against gravity, slide my fingers

into gaping plastic holes. Open, close. Open, close.

Today I'm thinking about time. Twelve hours
every weekend, strapped into my car. 360-odd miles,
the ones I counted to the music breaking into my wandering mind,
and the ones that escaped me in a mad blur. I don't know what this means:
my drive, metaphorical and not, my pull to your push, the serenade
of touch and go, check your brakes, don't get too close and
why aren't you coming closer. 9:00 or after, picking up my feet
when all I wanted was to drag- the mess of your existence
scattered over every spare space. The dust was intoxicating
and I liked it best when you were awake, reposed
and smiling, your small hands outstretched to draw me in.
Sometimes you slept, your mismatched form twitching
and your mouth slack as I stood in the doorway, listening,
waiting, my inner battle of fear and hope pummeling against
my ribs. We were a tragedy, puppets strung out
in interrupted consciousness, jerking our own strings as the stream of life
passed neatly as though nothing outside existed.

can it make you feel love, love, love, love

Again, in my dreams. You're always there, on a semi-schedule of something like every other night. Sometimes you're laid up in my bed with the flu, and I'm bringing you water with a scoop of chocolate ice cream foaming at the top of the glass. Or you're sitting in my living room, two little sleeping bodies nestled into the furniture, and you're kissing their heads and looking at me. Or we're breaking into each other's personal space, the break-in, the rush, the almost-maybe-we-should. And we have, in my dreams, maybe twice. Mouths pressing into passion at the very least, and I can bring to memory at least one dream in which I fucked you- endlessly, wordlessly, wrapped and bathed in the curiousity that never fails to make me flush when you enter the room.

Last night, you were across the room, sitting on a chair on band concert risers. I was sitting in a folding chair on the floor of the room. Girlyman was there, or at least 2/3 of them: Nate and Ty. They were going to perform, but they had this weird extra band with them, and I wasn't happy about it. Then everyone else there said they wanted Nate and Ty to play Christian rock songs, and I started getting pissed, and I looked at my phone and you'd sent me a text message but I don't remember, now awake, what it said. But I got up and walked to you, behind you, and you turned ever so slightly to see me. I don't know what was said, but somehow, as dreamland tends to do, we were fast-forwarded without motion into my kitchen. We stood at the butcher block island, and the back door was open: the air was spring. You took my right hand and said, "I want to see the wonder," and I showed you what remains of the mystery stress-related mess on my fingers. The one purple dot still puffs on my pointer finger, and you ran your thumb over it in the most natural of ways, then flipped open your palm to show me a small purple circle scar. The same, somehow, but nothing of it. It was then that our foreheads bumped together, pausing within an inhale, the skin warm and smooth but the moment broken by my body stirring awake.

Almost maybe we should.

pinot grigio

here's the story
of rivers and tendrils of anticipation
the walk of purpose trapped beneath
everything i haven't been able to say.
i can do this now, under the wicked spell
of wine and collapsed thoughts.
there are tremors that shake me awake
in the deepest of nights, the darkest
of dreams and wandering chance.
you know probability like i understand nothing
more than syntax and what rests,
shivers, between the finest of lines. these shakes
and missteps filter through the awkward harmony
and i know everything hovering beneath the trespass,
i see the trials and the fears, the daydreams
mottled with sensibility and over-thinking.
i feel, and reel from, the incessant clunk
of arbitrary routine, responsibility, matter-of-fact
quantifiers but that's not quality: that's misstep.
what i know is rhythm and drive, possibility
interlaced with theory and you can fill in the blank
because i've already said too much.

dissemination

charcoaled fine lines dissolve into the background;
dusk's drop cloth of an orange-rimmed sunset
glistens the tightrope that swings between headway
and steady every day nothing.
gently with the rolls of thunder fracturing in the distance
escaping light breaks over interrupted movements-
the armored trepidation of reality- a tender and tenacious crawl
between yes, no, what you think you know, and what you think
you've been able to say without exactly saying.
this double-edged weapon of verbal explosion
illuminates an obliquely wandering path
far past the horizon, beyond promise and doubt, and it blinks
like headlights or maybe it's blinking like one a.m. in union square-
which, while we're there:

i wish i was still in new york city
where these stomping ruminations get caught, dragged beneath
the break-speed whirl of taxis, the tumultuous ease
of rush hour footsteps. and the lurch of the train
disseminates patterned thoughts, driving conscience
from the unspoken script that multiplied and murmured
endlessly. but here, outside the city limits,

this weighted dance swings heavy and low. wrenched
from the ashen strokes of able distraction, these delicate lines
alight and break from their suffocation, heaving themselves
into the careening traffic of my mind. red lights failed me long ago.
and it rushes me back
to the place where notions
can't break into words thrust from my mouth
and i trip over instead of saunter between the lines,
it's just that, to say, to explain:
when i don't answer i'm always
trying to say yes.

making you out of everything

I think I'm ready to write our story now-- the story that exists between the thick lines of my mind, the one that rattles me awake in the sleep of night and the break of day. Write it as we are and everything we could be.

I saw you today, first time in too long I think, and those eyes, that little smile, your hands your everything. I lose it every time. And I mumbled because I was afraid to open my mouth too wide, and then you just stood there and talked to me and we rapid fired yes no back and forth like it was water slipping through river rocks and if we'd been alone, I can't promise you that I wouldn't have touched you. (But actually, I could promise that I wouldn't have touched you because I still haven't seen the blink of the green light, and without that- I sit still.) What always, always gets me with you is the way you won't look away when you're talking to me. Eye to eye, word to word, hidden meaning to supressed wonder.

One solitary finger to finger brush in the passing of a tiny tome of sound. Accidental and beautiful. Miniscule, too. But your smile, your eyes, your fucking everything. I flush into dust the moment you appear. I'm not yet sure if this is good or bad. I'm not yet sure if you've started to realize anything.

Yes, this is floating in my head, chord and rhyme tangled in what ifs. Yes, I am making you a response.

If you were for me, I would never let you go.

what will you wake up and see

Booked my flight this morning. Still have to figure out where I'm staying, but I have an option to fall back on if nothing else pans out, so I'm not worried. And I have to rent a car, but again, not worried about that. The flight was the agent of nerves. I suck at planning, and in the middle of my tab-flipping this morning, I lost the perfect flight for the perfect price. But all's not lost because I ended up with a very similar flight for about $20 more. Whatev! It's done, and I'm getting a mini-vacation out of it since I've decided to fly down Thursday night and come back Monday evening. & the conference itself is Friday night-Sunday afternoon. So I'M EXCITED!

In this morning's madness of planning, I realized that I've managed to lose one of my credit cards, and I cannot figure out how this happened. It has a balance of zero, so clearly it's somewhere in the house, but it's not anywhere where it should be. Got a new account # already, whatever, I'm over it.

But as I was searching for the card, I found a fortune cookie fortune that makes the most fucking sense ever: "No one is standing in your way anymore, it is time to move forward."

HOW FUCKING PROPHETIC IS THAT. Other than how the , should be a ; -- I can look past that and realize that I needed to find this today. After I almost let my ex piss all over my happy fucking parade on Friday, I needed to read that fortune. She's not standing in my way anymore. She was, and I let her, but now... no one is there. The only person that could be in my way is myself, and I'm not willing to do that to myself any longer...

...hence the proactive nature of forward-thinking and planning for this relatively major event. I've obviously never done anything like this before, and it seems that everyone I talk to about it thinks it's a much bigger deal than I do, which is funny because I tend to exaggerate things, but it makes sense-- because if I allowed myself to realize how kind of huge this is, I'd be completely freaked out and I'd stand in my own way. See how I did that? That's what we call PROGRESS.

And anyway. The whole thing makes me feel really fucking smart and, oh I don't know, progressive? Necessary? Validated. I'm still amazed.