Face of a child with legs like a woman

My baby says he’s got an evil in him and he sees it in me too. He says, “Look at me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I say, “Yes. A bad seed isn’t always a bad person.”
“We’ve got the darkness in us. It’s not a joke. It’s real.”
“We’ve still got goodness even though we’ve got the evil.”
“Exactly.”

Except his evil pumps through his veins and mine goes in and comes out my mouth. We lay in bed. He says the same thing, “Look at me. Do you understand what I am saying?” It reverts me back to a childlike state. I don’t say yes, I just look him in the eye and nod, solemn like. And he tells me my duality of nature extends to my body. That my face has a false innocence to it. That my features are childlike but my legs are that of a woman and my bruises make him think dirty things. He makes me do dirty things.

Fucking hell.

I wish I could find that serenity which lies in my expression but not in my soul. The purity he says he hears in my giggles and sees in my face. “I’m not pure.”
“No, you’re not. But your beauty is. Your giggles are.”

Far from pure. Dude thinks he has the devil in him. Why is it that hearing someone believes in god is scarier than hearing he’s got a head for dope? Even though every time he can’t fuck me I worry it’s because he’s done drugs. I have a feeling I am probably right.

In a few days people will start getting concerned I am sure, but then I’ll be gone and then I’ll be back and then I’ll be scared. I am terrified to move. I’ve lived here for 2 ½ years but that’s another story, another stress, another fear. Still having him in this room made me feel all the more attached to it. Very few lovers have entered its walls. It’s my sanctuary. I can’t imagine moving somewhere with normal ceilings. Id feel choked, squashed, cornered. At least here I can look upwards and breathe. I can stretch my soul fifteen feet to the ceiling and still have room to spread my arms.

Consume or be consumed

Scorned by memories that aren’t our own
We weep through the streets waiting for a sign
A signal of something coming to pass
But nothing happens, each next day as the last

Burnt minds attach themselves to able bodies
Ambling through mists that cauterize
Harshing the lungs hypnotic promises
Of other bodies to take inside

I’m so tired of this death dance scene each voice moans
But we bring ourselves back night by night
To consume or be consumed
That’s the question within the answer.

We aren’t of rabid blood by nature
The thirst is one we’re taught
Unpure and filled with lies
Our tongues burn one another as they touch

The death chant: consume or be consumed
To put your fist in my face is the same as putting your foot in the grave
One trip is quicker than the other
But you’ll disappear just the same

Holed up in blackness its hard hard flight
Through the skies against night searching for the day
But you can’t look, you can only wait
And how long you last is up to you.

And god help you if you flee westward
Buying yourself only negative time
Chasing a sunset that never rises
Through oceans back over land back over seas once again.

The Secret Life of Flies

She was sleeping on her stomach when he entered the room. She was wearing a pair of panties that rode low on her hips and a faded yellow t-shirt. Her right knee was tucked up to her side and a few dark hairs poked out between her legs, making shadows against the faded purple cotton of her underwear. Her t-shirt was worn thin and the ghosts of her tattoos were visible through its shallow barrier. She inhaled deeply as she awoke. A long loud breath inward through her nostrils. She half rolled, half pushed herself up with her arms and sat up tossing her head first to the right, then to the left to a great popping across the circumference of her neck. Then, looking over her shoulder towards the foot of the bed she saw him standing in front of the door he had closed behind him. It was only then that she realized what had awakened her and she sighed softly, disappointedly at the sight of him wearing only a t-shirt, the lower half of him bare and dangling half-mast in the morning light.

“What time is it?” she asked.
“Early still. 7:30 by your alarm clock.”
“You can’t walk around my apartment like that. I’ve got roommates.”
“I couldn’t find my pants and I had to take a piss. What could I do? No one is awake yet, don’t worry so much.”
“It’s too early to start with the worrying.”
He laughed. “It’s true though. Just chill out. You can just hang you know, without worrying, without caring, you know it’s possible.”
“What the fuck man? I’m half asleep, where is this coming from? Maudlin in the morning aren’t we. Besides, I don’t know if it’s in me.”
“It’s in you. You’ll figure it out sooner or later. How not to give a damn.”
“It’ll be a sad day when I do. I do give a damn about something right now and it’s sleeping. And you’re the one accusing me of being too serious. Fucking hell.”
He cocked his head to the side getting a clearer look at her, and she watched his eyes focus on her. His hair fell loosely around his shoulders. It was longer than hers and dirty, always dirty. She’d seen pictures of him when it wasn’t. When it fell just around his chin and you could see his eyes bright. When his beard was trimmed and his mouth quiet. That was before she knew him. She had only touched him in his current state, the type of fair-skinned pseudo-mountain man that was common in the city. They stalked the streets of Williamsburg and the Lower East Side.
They had met one night at a bar on Union. He played music with a friend of hers, one of the many Texans sweet talking their way through Brooklyn. She liked them because they seemed like men, but a twenty-seven year old can grow and beard and throw on a flannel and look very much like a man, but that doesn’t make him so. Still she always fell for displaced Texans and their approximate impersonations of masculinity.

Seasons Rust (in story form)

The tumbled forms struggled blissfully for coherence, a battle more easily won with cigarettes in their mouths, each toxic breath a reminder of the existence of bodies. Heartbeats outside of emotion. The two wrapped and rapt forgotten by the spacial scenes of song and drinks and too many parties were set outside of their former realm. Without the regular smiling appearances consisting more of glances than conversation with the sad revelers, so sad they thought they were joyous, the two fell into the season. Gone were the summer's travels and stories of well-being and kinship. Replaced with the lure of deadened leaves and covered bodies, woolens intruding upon the shiny lotion-skinned bare-legged wonders of a season passed. The death of summer could be no less mourned as the season changed from groping to embrace.

Crazed ghosts cry into faded repose, responses unlimited by depths. Voids turn from eternity to closeted incarnation. Forgotten hindrances tying backwards, binding throats and cries. Sceptered threats face the unknowing pushing shoulders down from pride, into submission's hidden glance. Creation cries for a hand to pull us above the fray past this wretched mess of darkness. Into the glow but is it holy? Only from a distance until we find our bodies alight and the glow becomes a glare in which illumination is damnation and the lights change to fire. We burn with our faces pressed.

...Sometimes silence shows us beauty, strength and grace. Sometimes it shows us death. Always know the difference.

It was fall, the very beginnings of it. The air was still humid but the undertone was colder. That time in mid-September, right before the solstice. The season change hasn’t happened yet but you can feel it turning everywhere. They always say that summer is the season for romance, but I’ve never found that to be true. Summer love never happened for her. It was fall that brought it always. Fall was her season of optimism, of hope – the harvest, the promise, where her body felt fertile, ready to burst. It is the seasons where everyone looks their most beautiful. The summer sun kissed bodies haven’t faded yet and they are in their leanest form.

(So why must I cry through clenched teeth?)

“I feel good, I really do.” She said tugging at the high ponytail perched in the middle of her head.

“You look great. Really great. I mean really.”

“People keep telling me that. It’s amazing what getting it can do for your body. I feel like I look better but more importantly I feel better.” She’d said those words a million times. She didn’t care a damn about feeling better, she didn’t feel better only felt a different kind of bad and lord knows that looking better was number one.

“Yeah, I mean you’ve lost weight, your body looks great but it’s more than that. It’s your eyes, your skin, they look clear, you look healthy.”

“I feel healthy.” Lies all lies. Say just a little bit more. Her throat was stripped raw, bruised on the inside.

Seasons Rust

Your skin is still dark from the summer
Your body’s still slim before the winter
You’re lookin long and lean,
The autumn air’s so clean, I love it when it’s humid and cold

You stretch out before the path of days gone past
Naked except for your shoes
Ready to run despite your reclining state
You can’t relax fully in mood.

Nobody wants a baby who is ready to bail
Because autumn is the true season of love
The harvest, the promise – babe we’re ready to grow
Crawling through the bleached lace lines of hope

And my body is fertile, ready to burst
Not ready to grow but ready to run
Your orange paper leaves heart falling on
My cracked mind’s concept of fun.

Its too late in the season for sweat
But it falls from my body without care
It mingles in the cracks of my elbows
And dampens my knotted up hair

Beyond the Burn (The Drinking Years)

It’s a threat trying to regain your grace as a woman who has fallen so many times. I started to fall as a girl and kept going down until I brought my head back up to breathe at the age of twenty-four. I didn’t learn until I started to live again what grace meant. How it was integral to the type of womanhood I’d always loved but never felt I possessed. I was without bearings, without any focus beyond the nightly rage. Beyond the bodies pressed. Beyond the burn and the grind and the spit. Fueled by lust, not only of the body, my thoughts rarely turned inward during the medicated bliss. Bliss, its something I always associated with being wasted. A sort of thoughtless joy, of pure detachment, free of all introspection. My mind, it pushes itself inward far too often. I am given to bouts of obsessiveness that are hard to tangle with. They are tangles themselves.

It’s shocking to me when I hear that people have noticed a change in me. They seem to have noticed it more than I have. Maybe its because I haven’t changed as much as they think, I’m just showing the insides more and they are more appealing to others than I thought they could ever be. All the hidden faces, faces I thought were all darkness and sadness, are not dark and sad at all. But quiet, reserved, scared perhaps, but vulnerability like grace have their places in womanhood. One never has their bearings if they don’t understand their vulnerability. No one is invulnerable, for someone to be such I would think them a monster. Happiness comes from understanding your vulnerabilities and seeing them as strengths.

Letter

When I tell you to "man up" it doesn't mean act tough
It means admit who you are is at war with who you are trying to be.
Pick one and learn truth.

Phantoms float but spectres crawl.
And you...you just creep.

Or in other terms:
Phantoms aren't fiction
(by necessity)
An imaginary friend isn't a lurker.
A spectre is
(and a spectre crawls)