we all know it’s gauche to quote yourself, but I meant it when I said it and each time I sing the words or think them to myself: my loneliness has nothing to do with you. 

whatever I’m crying about, the politics and the men and the money and the aching body and the list of tasks I can never get on top of, it’s a symptom, not a cause. 

this sickness in my chest, in my head, in the pit of my stomach, it needs something to crawl out of. it needs a shape to whittle into something sharp to twist into my body. the hideous beast that I am needs carrion to worry.

to pretend like this pain I am so often in is about something is to pretend like there is still something rational left in me. to externalize this self-indulgent suffering is to give my foolish self some respite from the feeling that this is all my fault, that I could just somehow stop.

all this selfish language pours out of me and I feel a deep shame. 

please, please take care of me. please hear this keening sound and help it find a melody. please hold me in the dark and forgive me my trespasses. please make me get my shit together, please make me get help, please make me stop this. 

I fall in love with every spark of positivity and fall apart when it falls flat. I grasp at straws and weep at the splinters they give me. I am an idiot and time falls in on itself over and over and over again. 

every mistake I’ve ever made makes me want to send four a.m. sexts to occupied acquaintances. every thing I can’t remember makes me assume a horrifying action. 

I am not a human being, I’m a pile of organs with an iphone and a pack of cigarettes. I’m a breath-hitch on an old recording. I’m a poor recollection and a half-assembled collection. A bloodstain on your alleyway couch. A partial object and a full-blame shitshow.

This list could go on forever, but it won’t buy your groceries or call your mother or remind you to participate in your communities and your friendships. I spit blood in parking lots and it leaves no mark. Every gesture I have ever made has been a cry for help and it’s too fucking loud in here for my bullshit. 

I think maybe we are both going completely insane. 

You’ve ruined me for everything but wanting you, all throwing rocks at the windows of my thoughts and falling down laughing in the middle of the Saturday night Milwaukee Avenue traffic of my heart.

My standards for excitement have exploded and there’s shrapnel in my shoulders for you, baby. I hope you like this look, this one where I’m all bloody and earnest and 100% totally fucking wild about you all the time. 

I’ve spent my whole life feeling crazy for a mottled litany of reasons and unreasons, felt my hinges bend and break and mend and break again a thousand times. I am no stranger to strange nights and uncontrollable thoughts, but these, this beast is a new breed. 

My veins are full of neon. My teeth are made of loving knives. I want to trace your lines with every part of my body, even the parts I do not have. Especially the parts I do not have. 

I look in the mirror and feel surprised not to see tiny shafts of light pouring out of me in all directions, beer can reflections and wicked eye glints and a lighter flicking on in the dark. 

I’m a rock n roll marquee all jumbled up anew to spell out valentines for you. I’m a grinning girl and a wicked dad and a night of free beers and a sky full of streetlights and stars. I’m everything, everything, anything, yours, everything. 

notebook, 9/17/14:

I am suddenly very aware of the fact
that the fact of anything happening
that might make you sad
makes me want to do something, 

like burn entire cities down, wipe the memories of millions, colonize new planets, carve new worlds out of ice or stone, make a place where you aren’t ever aching with that deep, bad ache of real awful news, that deep, bad ache that we both know. I want to make you bleed from a thousand little cuts so that nothing can ever gouge you, nothing can punch through all the way to bone. 

Or everything can stay fucked up and terrible, but please let me hold you.
I want to lick each other’s wounds a while. 

Climb into a bed like a treehouse, fortify these bodies that we so like to bruise, these hearts we batter worse. Drag our animal saliva on the knee scrapes of our egos until we’re ready, for more devastating glances unexpectedly lashing us, more butterfly bandages over cuts the size of hours.

I want to learn new songs from the bees buzzing in your chest, show you how I take apart my bones to keep them from breaking when I travel or when I sit too still. The ringing in my ears could be retuned. You could hold my hand while I am sleeping. We could shimmy down to earth, and whoever has the broken foot that day can lean.

Every year, I have anxiety dreams.

Their content varies hugely. This year it was a glowering David Bowie disappointed in me for messing something up in our collaborative gallery show, and a panicked realization that it was Halloween, children were knocking on my door, and I had no candy and no costumes. In years past it has been zombie apocalypses, fights with my mother, horrific murder sprees, failed schoolwork. 

The waking varies too.

Previous years: Alone, in a panic, bolt upright in the 5am dark. In the afternoon sweat beside a poor decision. Stumbling my way to some school or work or meeting, only realizing hours later what the date was. 

This year, I found myself woken before my alarm, curled up around in a body full of warm blood and kindness, our skin covered in sunlight and cum and our foolish tattoos. I felt that silky kind of comfort, content to shift quietly from one position to another, finding different ways of fitting mostly-sleeping skins together until the day called us up out of bed. So why the stressful dreams? If I felt more relaxed than I had in … weeks, really, why was I a textbook case of nerves throughout the little movies in my head? 

And like I do every year, I eventually remembered the date. 

And so I imagine it will always be until I no longer know what time is: the early morning of September 11th gives me bad dreams. And yet I can at least hope that each year’s waking is as sweet. 

good thing I’ve found a new boy to feel obsessed with, because I’ve lost a couple with the closing of summer and I’ve got a chapbook to finish. and despite all my grandiose articulations, my claims of ceaseless aesthetic commitment, everybody knows that nothing gets me more prolific than the thought of my cheek against a chest tattoo, my tongue pushing against crooked teeth. These are some recurring themes, along with bad habits and good songs and the kind of hearts that push and pulse and stay up until dawn reading poetry. 

I guess all I’m ever doing is drawing out a map of the ever-sinking ever-rising bubble of blood in my chest–I lust, I weep, I sing, I sleep, I want I want I want I try–and its fear, its fascination with its own collapse, all its sticky little tendrils seeking out a world to hold. 

But imagine: if every time I wrote something, it meant someone I want to put my hands all over sitting across from me at the bar, reading, spilling his beer with excitement while I turn into a giant grin and two bitten, smiling lips. 

something hard and plastic was banging loud against the bathroom stall and her lips were girl soft, you know that soft soft and with just those slightest girl hairs above her lips and she tasted like someone else’s younger girlfriend and later there was anger and awkwardness and there was standing in the lake up to our knees and there was her body against mine on the southbound el and there was the strange morning when I walked away and realized the game was done and I never gave back her t-shirt but let me tell you there is a special magic in two girls whispering secrets in a bathroom stall.

My mouth balloons with silence, as I catch myself again pouring all the raw material for words instead into the act of hunting, or of longing for the hunt. I size up men and women like gently dappled deer, glimpsed in the roadside forests of my childhood. My heart’s teeth are glistening and pointed.

I suddenly remember with massive force the afternoon light on the Natchez Trace, and every curve my life has taken from it. Lately I feel I am scrambling in a foolish effort to find the right pieces; if I could only find the right town, the right girl, the right man, the right way to pay the bills, the right old American car, the right haircut, the right arrangement of the furniture, the right artistic practice, then, then, all the beauty that I see in fits and patches would unleash itself to me at all times without this constant ache. 

I know, I know.

I dreamt last night I was falling slowly from the lighting rig of a stage–the sinister man behind the security cameras had it out for us, setting grids to tilt and lights to blind–but somehow descended gracefully to the floor, frightened and for some reason embarrassed, but utterly unharmed. 

And here I keep drawing the Queen of Wands–upright, then reversed, then reversed again, and over and over she makes her appearance, turning this way and that–and the better women that I could be flicker before my eyes each morning. 

I want, I want, I want the mystery and its uncovering and for the mystery to somehow still remain. This is all we want. A constant cliffhanger with kind eyes, staring at you from across the bridge. 

Finally the wave of mourning for some little lost hope flicker overtakes me. I want to take to my bed. I want to run away from home. I want to sell all my things and get a little RV. Flee south, only ever work on one thing at a time. 

What a trick of light, to hold in your hands that which you most desire, feel it firm under your touch but not to know how long it will hold, how long until it yields to time or better judgement or foolish fear.

Everything, all things, will be lost to me; the only difference is time.

I hold you in my arms for sixty years until death sweeps us quietly off, one and then the other. I hold you in my arms for six hours until something in your thinking changes, the calculation of your action shifts. 

Each moment that has come to pass hangs in the air at once, our lungs are thick with dewy time as we try to craft a story of our lives that moves in order: this, and for this long, and then this. 

I longed for a feeling I did not possess, and for a brief pause in all this longing I held it to my chest, and then again I longed for that which is not mine to have. This is the way of it.

I am a woman in love with my own aching wants, we know. 

You are a man of armor and tricks, we know. 

It’s too late to unravel all the years of my young heart’s sabotage, it would seem. This is fine. This is fine. Another tingling down my crooked spine is no breaking news, although this blood drips redder in the clay than most. Your taste in my mouth will never fully fade, and this is not a thing that should worry you. No regrets, not for this. Never. 

I guess I’m just goddamn sick of nights like a lone star. 

And once again, again again, I do not know how to tell my love of a southern state from my love of a southern man. But here at least he does not want me, does not invite me with honeysuckle and whiskey and wife-wording, to muddle my thoughts with entangled desires. How strange, to think of that other life, in which the Cumberland River runs in my veins, valentines stitched across my chest.

Because the day that I head south–and I do know, the long winters have etched the story in my bones, rubbed clear with the charcoal of warm nights, that day will come–it has to be for me, for me, and not for one of these pairs of eyes that slays me. 

Again again again my heart is a peach splitting through its sides, but at least now I have the memories to justify the fire. It’s gonna be alright, it’s gonna be alright, the day you get married I’ll drink ‘til I’m blind and I’ll tear off all my skin and dance bleeding on the lawn, punch someone’s second cousin, scream myself hoarse with half-remembered songs, but it’s gonna be alright it’s gonna be alright, because when we both die I will have known you, and maybe nothing matters but that matters to me. 

I spend my nights breaking rules I never quite claimed as applicable to me, and I sweat out my lone bike ride thoughts in fear that all these small infractions will one day in sum cost me the thing that matters most to my foolish heart.

If I knew anything, I would–

If I could read the tables of your heart I–

I want you I want–

Nothing that I could ever say would speak the volumes of this silence. And yet the urge to speak overwhelms me, and so I turn it toward any other route that will allow it. I pour out my molten words on any hand held out, because to let this sea rush across you would be to carry you away from me forever. A risk I cannot take.