I Would Leave Me If I Could: A Collection of Poetry(12)
Your rose-colored cheeks and green eyes
and tan nose
and chestnut freckles
and blue-violet veins beneath the skin; all the good colors of some angel in a Renaissance painting.
Your eyelashes so soft and long I close my eyes
and imagine them
brushing up and down the length of my body.
If only I could be so small to lie in your eyelashes as a hammock.
Swim in the whites of your eyes.
Dive off the Cupid’s bow of your lip.
Hang with two hands
from the corner of your smile like Peter Pan from a clock tower.
Dance and splash
in the tiny brown puddles of every single freckle.
Crawl into the lobe of your ear and hide in the seashell cavern where I can hear the ocean and whisper it back to you.
Your face brings me all the joy of the entire world, right to my bed.
Right to my hands.
Right in the breath like a tide in your chest.
STUDIO CITY
I can’t tell how to condense my life into 100 words For a piece of paper
For someone to hold and have and abandon.
Really does a number on your identity.
It’s not hard. It just hurts.
Because it bursts out of me like hot lava.
I find a million dandelions blowing through my head and they are beautiful
But when they come at you like one furious wave (a few times a day)
They stick in your nose and eyes and ears You explode from the inside out Like a time lapse of a decaying animal.
I don’t want to walk around department stores that smell like wax crayons
too bright
so everybody looks like a cartoon Bleeding colors
And breaking the fourth wall and I fucking hate parallel parking the silence of Hollywood is deafening and I will die if I keep eating every meal purchased from the store.
I feel like I’m made of plastic I breathe and it doesn’t reach my lungs I eat and I don’t taste
I cry and there’s no burn in my nose anymore I’m standing in the middle of a 4-way intersection and a car is coming at me
and I have no idea which way to go.
Is this how it was supposed to feel?
EVERYTHING
Before I knew we were poor, Everything
was magic.
An empty fridge
meant freezer-burnt Popsicles for dinner.
Purple-blue mouths and toothless smiles calmed the torment in my mother’s crux.
Everything
was an adventure.
A shared bedroom with my little brother meant an eternal playmate.
A warm tent,
closed off by a blanket hung from a bunk bed and a hair dryer snuck under the sheets to keep warm.
Arctic explorers waiting for a rescue unit.
Everything
was a mystery.
Voices resounding from the living room vehemently snaking through the short halls of the apartment.
And then one day, I had
Everything
And
Everything
was over too soon.
TRAVIS
Travis was a junkie
All my friends were
I was a wallflower
I watched them tie up their arms and collapse onto couches I was never high,
and always on the same strange slow ride with them Travis rode a fixed-gear bike He had nowhere to live
But never went without somewhere to sleep Travis was handsome
He had a backpack and an iPad And nowhere to take a shower He would meet old ladies Whose husbands had moved on or passed He would make love to them For a week or two at a time Hold them in his arms
And stroke their thin hair Kiss their lips, dissolving vermilion ridges.
He would paint their fingernails and take baths with essential oils They would give him somewhere to stay and a few hundred dollars And by Sunday, Travis would tuck a perfumed envelope into his pocket
And ride off on his fixie To score
And he would come meet us With department-store lipstick on his collar And a pocket full of sour candy and dope.
I asked him how he did it.
How it didn’t rip his heart to shreds.
“I really do love them,”
he told me.
“All of them.”
ANTAGONIST
Does a ghost
know that he’s a ghost?
Does a saint
know that she’s forgiven?
If no one knows,
then I don’t know
if I might be
the villain.
I don’t trust the author anymore.
BAD DAY: 3
I’m sorry
I’m having another bad day.
My tongue is twisted my words come out
like venom.
I only use my armor when you frighten me.
Stuck in the middle of “I love you” and “I can’t take this anymore.”
These things they come and go and I mean half of everything I tell you.
I’m half of everything I hate, and half of anything I create is you too.
So I start to hate the poems when I hate you.
THE BAKER
I baked him a cake,
and now I watched him cut it open.
The first slice always falls apart.