theres no place like home

“You feel like home”               his hands slid to the valley between hips and breasts

                                              we used to hold hands when his grandmother took us

                                                to the mall on Saturdays. So we wouldn’t lose each other

                                                in the crowd. She’d say.

                                            The first time we did it, his fingers slid in and out of here

                                            And there. I took them in my mouth and kissed his palms,

                                            Laid them on my breasts, let them run through the nest

                                            Of my hair and they were careful, not to break the naps or

                                            Pull too hard, careful not to hurt me unless I

                                            Wanted him to and even then. Before I pushed. They’d

                                            pause.

So I know his hands well, I’ve hated his hands so I’d

Best know how to love his hands and how his hands

Loved me.

                        He was crying.

I haven’t cried in months. Maybe a year.

But doubts I didn’t know I had about him filled

In the spaces between my soul and my skin and

All I could think of was how strange. How strange

To love someone who I knew I could break that could

Break me. Im ashamed but I’m already thinking of ways

I could leave.

                                                “There’s no place like home,

                                                            especially not me,” I said,

but he was already asleep

listening to my heart,

but I was wondering if he could hear,

in between the beats.

How much I wanted to run.

love?

some people you love;

you give them your bloody entrails, your brain,

heart, pulled out by cracked fingernails,

shit guts and blood, your heat, your fire

your clothes, your money, your time,

and your times new roman:

the words and font you tell

your stories with! and then,

then they tell you they never wanted it

to begin with.

and then there’s the people that didnt ask;

but took it anyway. they brought you coffee,

your favorite book, 

and left you the hell alone.

night sky in the city

I spent most of my 

last twenty years looking at

the stars.

burnt out, memories,

stars were dead out there in space

but here their headstones

were lights that wouldnt go out

for another billion or so years.

they were dead out there but here,

we knew their names, wrote songs

of their brightness, had them in our eyes,

in our hair, in our dreams, in our tabloids,

stayed out late, necks craned to

watch them turn with the seasons.

the past staring out at us with dead bright eyes

that didnt see us, didn’t care.

we were all bearing witness to galactic fire,

to whole lives and worlds in the time’s blinking eyes

every night and all we could say was that

they were beautiful?

it took moving somewhere

where stars were a myth,

where midnight was like death to me

to realize

that they were inside of me

the whole time

the fields

kiamokourtney:

ive outgrown the fields that bore me

the tangled weed,

 the budding seed.

that was

the girl now within me.

dragonlady

its quelling,

rolling.

somewhere beneath her lungs,

smoking out all the things

that probably don’t need to be said

ever.

it flickers in her rolling eyes,

sulfur on her flicking tongue, 

deft, equipped with language,

and words as precise

and misleading as her talons, bronzed.

Gold flecked and purple eyes

She borrows and mimics the light

trickling from the stars, and watching

the green of the earth

spin, wilt and sway.

 then her deep breath of rage

blew black and gray and

everything melted

away.

The Fall

I remember once our feet touched while sleeping next to each. You woke up, jerked away. I stared into the velvet darkness of my eyelids, and after moment’s hesitation and with held breath, I rolled a little closer to you, letting the side of my right foot graze against your left. We both froze and then through the dark, you said, sounding half-amused but annoyed all the same

“Hey….Quit”

It was too early for the morning’s onset of general anxiety and paranoia to kick in. I exhaled and found a chuckle in my lungs that was more like a cough. My face hurt my from crying. You rolled over, your back to me. I sighed.

Outside, the birds celebrated my epic fail. But they don’t know anything about being human, about being stupid, about having hope, about the symbolism of the way we all spent some nights, eating too much and laughing hysterically, and while they knew of me and my breakdowns, they didn’t how I cried into your shoulder once or twice, having permanently lost the ability to stop drinking and be properly ashamed of my emotions. They didn’t know and they didn’t ask, born from an egg up high, born always knowing the danger of the fall.

Why else would they flirt with death when they kamikaze through the falling leaves toward speeding cars?  

I rolled over and tried, but I wouldn’t sleep.