(no subject)
You take pills and talk to pictures,
Knew it was time to quit something,
figured dreaming would be easier than smoking so you stay up smoking now.
I will remember your mind when you forget it,
Sign reassurance into your hands on the nights when you are Helen Keller gone
When you are beside yourself I will also be beside you.
I’ll reforest your strip-mined spine and wish whispers on every bone there
That I will never paint your fingernails for you
in a hospital room.
Hide your ears behind your wild hair so they cannot see how you hear them.
This morning there was a double-barreled tundra pressed
icy and hair-triggered
between my shoulders.
I had dreamt that I was chopping paper into the shapes
of sad songs and cut my thumb half off doing it.
an empty freezer which had no place inside my dream
spattering with my blood as I reached for ice like it would help something.
I can’t shake that image of its cold white plastic corner
Plane on plane on plane of arctic imitation meeting
Of my blood filling up ice cube trays
Of bloody marys between classes and
myspace pages turned into memorials for hanging girls.
"you were so beautiful"
To my waking mind it looks like the death of a polaroid
fading, fading, fading under my eyelids' emulsion.
You give me something worth crying over,
my shatter-hearted harmony,
and I can't handle you with sliced through thumbs
You shuttering bug bastard love child,
you mistresses of blind curves,
ten toed tender heart,
you are a breathing keyboard,
and you’ve fallen asleep againt the z button again,
you’re spelling smoke with your rapid eye movements
they type 20 lifetimes a year.
You must be exhausted when you sleep.
Tomorrow I will carry a piano to the basement
And teach myself how to play him with no thumbs
Sing with split lips
Spit so I can catapult my teeth at your enemies.
In this dream my father found me bleeding
and yelled at me not to let my mother see,
then took my snippy paper music so I wouldn't do it again.
I cried at him and tried to hold my hands together.
Woke up to ruined sheets:
I had repeatedly rolled over on a pocket knife I left open in my bed.
I am not badly hurt.
I am not entirely honest.
I wasn’t issued the standard parachute, so I’m afraid I’ll break my spine
Falling asleep and wake up paralyzed,
I am locked from the inside.
so I woke up feeling like a collection of morning afters,
like an extinction.
I must tell you, that tonight I finally feel broken
There are bruises and burns on my breasts
shaped like subcontinents and someone’s teeth
my thumbs are missing, dangling from someone's belt loops somewhere
and more opposable than this undertow.
Anywhere there is bone it shows now,
shining somehow like armor does and again
we have reached the end of a crusade.