Combust Part I: Flammable Trigger

I’m still in heat, caught in fire as the flames dance, dance upon the edge of the skin, tracing my name as one of the mad, over and over until it leaves scars dug deep into the flesh.
You can’t read it, though. You can’t read those words in fire, smell the smoke rising from the sunken craters my body is becoming, taste the fire that haunts me through the night.
I can read between the lines, almost dancing around the sparks and ashes that flare up from the ground. You think I’m lying, you think I’m crazy, while I know that you’re the one who’s gone over. You wander the house after the lights are turned down. All residents are locked in their rooms to verify our safety at night. I can hear you, though, as you clink, clank, clunk around the kitchen, muttering as you go about damned children, stuck-up brats, and all the liars you have to deal with in order to make a living.
I’m not a liar, though. I’m not a liar and I can see the flames, taste the fire as it grows and grows and grows, crawling along the surface and the edges of my room, my body, my mind as it tries to kill me with one giant spectacle of combustion.

Red River Rising

I swallowed your essence as it slithered across the ground. Blooming wild in the hot rain, it coats the skin of this sad, sympathetic body in the singing of a tempest.
I'm used to thunder, though.
At night, the soft clouds would graze the spindled branches of the trees, seeping through the pale membranes surrounding the bark as if to break and spread the famine into the roots. Let’s eat away this soil, choking back the damp flesh of those who no longer carry flowers blooming across their skin and in their hair.
I don’t know where I’m going, though, as I sleep within the river, mud sucking me down in the form of passionate rape, damned embrace, and thunder as it cracks and booms above my head in victory. Your victory, as you crow overhead while I drink your heavenly poison, all-embracing as the iron silk strips my heart bare and squeezes, echoing wild agony to match the lightning careening across the dimness.
You’re not listening to the storm, though, as it rides across the sky, boiling purple, red, blue, and madness with struck lightning that scorches the earth, kisses the sun, and boils my heart whole in the grand soup pot that you claim to feed this earth with. A thick soup, a dark soup, filled with enough debris to build a drowning man a raft.
We’re still stuck in the river of your laughter, no roots to cling to. And I wonder, how you can be so blind as to not see the frogs as they struggle on the banks before the current floods them all away? But then, I never claimed that God was terribly observant.

Double-Edged Tongue

I’m mad about you, longing in the face of desire, black upon the words of unknown love. But still, I need a reason to admit it, let it all fall free as the carpet is ripped out from under me. I need permission to allow myself to admit the simple fact that I love you.
I need no other love than this. The scraping of teeth together, the lies winding around the tongue, kissed back into the cupboard, and swirled down the drain with all the pregnant dreams of utopia aborted.
When did it all start to fail me? A quick kick, a brief slap, a knock forward into the future as time sighs and smiles that soft apologetic frown. It’s all a pretentious excuse of false love, and the sweet hatred of ignorant children. They try to kill, though, and down we fall, cat-fighting in the halls of hollow academics as I try to defend our relationship. They never seem to listen, though.
What they hear is what they want, and what they see is what they seem to need. I have no excuses, no desire for something more as I flip forward, until you become my defining talent and only characteristic in the classroom. Tell me I’m your child, your king, your clown, your tart in the bakery of immersion classrooms. Tell me I belong to you, that I’m not dreaming, that they haven’t knocked me senseless, upside-down, backward into the pages of the dictionary I seem to have become, your name on my lips and branded on my tongue. Nobody seems to be listening, though. 


This pale galaxy has no place, little comfort for the strange. Because I need your tongue on mine as the world whispers. I need your flesh ingrained upon the pages of my body, black ink spotting, kissing away the laughter as they all point. I need your madness, your joy, entangled, mixed, trapped in mine until I wake from this dream, sideways in the dark, and confused about what is normal, which is natural, and how I managed to make it all mine. I need you, to be normal in the extreme sense of the word.
Still, there’s apparently something wrong with your desire that I carry hidden within me, shrinking away from the bright fluorescent lights that follow us down the school hallways. I’ve never been able to reject you, though, try as I might. Try as I attempt to kill it all.
I’ve become a balance of two tongues, and the shame it carries to be in love with two languages.

Surviving the Night

I am afraid
of surviving the night
as I let the darkness
curl over the blunt edge
of my mind, midnight kisses
falling, blacklight stars
smoldering a dry burn
along my skin.
But I know the dawn
is empty, white
along the edges of the curtains,
hollow in the space where you
once were.
I pray to end
before this night is over
for I don't want to wake up
without you.

want me

11/27/12

funny.
i am used to these feelings,
built on the axis of my heart
tipping forward every time you smile,
the itch in my hands to touch you,
run my fingers through your hair
and kiss you softly.
only now i don't know what
to do with myself.
i have been left here,
unable to run towards you
as i start to shut everything down.
i will end these feelings quickly,
for there is no hope
since you do not want them.

Incomplete

I am awake,
fingers clawing along the edge
of my eyes,
breath a white fog rising,
twisting against the frost
upon the glass of my window,
my heart empty,
blood pooling along
the length of my spine
as I attempt to scream.
I am wholly incomplete
without you.

The Fall

I will take the fall,
the crunch of my bones
as I go down,
head first, arms slack,
body open to receive
the impact.
There is no crying,
for I saw this coming
a long way off.
And I know exactly where
the blame lies.
This is no one's fault
but my own.