Sweet Like Candy

We are so rich and pathetic and biding our time

until the fix fills in.

She bends over again,

she bends over for him,

she eats the yellow pills,

keeps her numb

and ready for something hard inside her soft.

How appropriate

she’s called Candy,

sweet treat, bitter thrill.

He wants to devour her whole,

that hole,

she knows it well.

We are the fakes,

we are the same preachers

yelling about the apocalypse

in a magnum condom box.

Where did she go after the bomb fell?

The cannibals tell stories of her demise,

of her blood shot eyes

weak from gnawing bones of diseased bodies

on the battlefield Love Me.

Her truth is a three time lie,

long licking lacerated tongue up her thunder thigh. 

When she was a little girl

they left her alone,

she grew up on bottles of whiskey that tasted

like her ancestral home.

The peat bogs filled with mummies,

they rise to greet a new century

artifacts of a simpler time,

when girls were girls

and boys were boys,

they fucked like respectable receptacles,

all smiles and hallelujah,

praise creation and my conscious cunt

cumming in an Irish grave to Waltzing Mathilda.

Look at the sky filled with sparks

of life dancing and screaming and singing

to the last great holy war.

Back from her week night binge,

sick in the porcelain bin,

calling her therapist for sexual advice,

aching to hear it’s not her fault,

it’s her father’s

it’s her mother’s

and her child molester brother’s.

These are wrong excuses

for the behavior that condemned her,

another loose night in something darker than pitch,

wallowing and craving,

never achieving or reaching

climax.

She’s just crying,

big wet salt balls

spill down ivory cheeks,

mascara running with her manic mood

and these prescription solutions.

She was so small

when she built her world

out of mud bricks

to keep the parasites from invading her skin,

digging deep within

making her chew the boys,

chew them like a rabid scorned whore.

She’s not there, she’s not there,

it’s just her frame stretched over the canvas

of a girl who once existed

like a red hot lust fuck,

that they sucked for her cinnamon flavor,

for her youth and purity,

for her stoned satiated smile

that spread like butter,

like her legs,

like her lips

when she made them promises

she never intended keeping

all the beers she stayed awake drinking.

Down she goes,

down down down.

And they all sang ‘wasn’t she something, isn’t she lovely’ 

in harmony.

Girl Named N

those marks on your arm love,

scratching through the itch of defeat,

scabbing over

in green pus,

and you look like a leper

with your sores.

i see it in your clear

turquoise eyes,

you feel like a plague victim,

they keep pushing through

you.

you’ve always been so beautiful,

you’ve always had that smile,

even when your clouds

cover every inch of the sun.

watching you fall,

skin your knees,

break at the seams,

crack and repeat,

it’s a torture porn

or a snuff film

something akin

to spilling arteries.

pick up the keys,

put it in drive

make your get away.

scream for me,

let your lungs go,

explode,

fibrosis filling with fluid.

don’t drown baby,

just reach for my hand

baby,

let me take you home.

they say you seen angels

in the darkest corners

of destruction,

trying to saw those

wings loose.

you’re plucking yours

in a crude way,

patching the feathers

so you can’t fly no more,

you forgot how anyway.

don’t you remember me?

smashing plates and drinking vodka,

leeches sucking you away,

we need a cleansing

today.

i’m gonna get you out of here,

wrap you in foil

carry you,

little left overs,

through the purgatory waiting room,

run a line through your name,

take you off that list of souls

on their way to combustion.

gotta let em be your dust

in the wayside,

never piecing you together

when they should 

when that porcelain is shattering,

just let you break.

gotta cut em free, baby.

they’re sinking your ship

and the puncture wounds on your arms

are enough

to bring you down

without their corpses capsizing

this life raft.

i’ll bring you back from the brink,

from the seventh circle,

from the pins and needle pit.

they say your blood is bad

they say you’re organs 

are failing

your body rejecting you,

but i’ve got a cure

collecting you

unlucky penny

i’ll make you shine,

no time to let the ghost get their way

won’t let you flatline

not gonna let you go down alone,  

just let me take you home.

Nothing On Me

I deserve a serial killer romance,

tied to the radiator,

watching my skin peel back,

his knife on this milk flesh,

running the length of my legs,

taking off my outer casing,

my exoskeleton.

he thought he was being clever

when he took me to his lair

he didn’t know

that I was begging for this

the whole time.

the things I want him to do

in his sickest most tortured dreams

he could never imagine.

I want him to break me

I want him to beat me

I want him to shatter my knee caps

throw me into bathroom stall walls

use that lead pipe on my face

send shrapnel of my bashed nose

deep into my brain

I’m not a Catholic, but I want to burn in hell

I want him to pour kerosene on my naked body

I want him to light the match

that melts my skin

I want to feel the flames

I want punishment and retribution for my sins

please sir, pull my nails out with your pliers

curb stomp my open mouth

kick this lying worthless head

take it apart, please take me apart

please cut me up

snap my fingers

dismember my form

mutilate me

I want my outside to reflect my inside

to be as ugly as I feel

gouge my eyes

scoop them with a spoon

straight razor my breasts

take out the pieces that make me woman

hacksaw at the wrist bone

shred this flesh, shred this girl

I want you to break me

I want you to digest me

I want to be spit out

show the world the blackest heart

by cracking the rib cage

releasing vital organs

use me as kibble and bits

shove this arm through a mountain town wood chipper

please, I’m begging you to make me so small

so unrecognizable

so destroyed

that no one will ever know,

these scraps,

this bloody cartilage and bone

was a human being

no one could hate me

like I hate myself

I’ve made it an art form

I am the Cezanne of self-depreciation

you have nothing on me,

any of you

The Way it Ought To Be

its firing on all cylinders

the way i think of you,

a master machine

with gears in between

to take me down the road.

it runs like Persian silk

leaves me weak in the knees

and i’m still falling asleep

in front of you like a TV.

we are what we are

and who we want to be.

you are me in my heart

and i keep looking for a place

to rest my feet.

so follow me to the last great monument,

follow me to salvation

to a rug burn tragedy.

i will love you

like you should be loved

i will hold you close and free,

take your breath away

rock you into being.

these are my songs

this is my life

this is the way it ought to be,

your head against my chest

a three beer lullaby.

follow me home,

follow me home

i want you always

to be touching me

Only a Bottle Away

Well I grew up in a trailer with a burner stove, it burned me every time I was bad and my mother said the devil works in mysterious ways. I asked her if god knew about trailer park stoves and she told me god left the parks back in 1973 when he realized we were the lost cause of America. I turned up the flame on that stove while she slept in the next room and I left to be a lost cause somewhere that god had not forgotten about. I took the train to Kansas City, a man said I could make some money with my body and that he wouldn’t take a dime. I told him the devil works in mysterious ways and I would let him use me if that was my devil’s plan. They played card games on my naked body and poured whiskey over my bare breasts. A man came in carrying an umbrella, he took my hand and pulled me out of the gambling pit, he said angels don’t lie down with demons; they don’t punish themselves for the world’s sin. He opened his umbrella and took me to the hotel Avalon, put shoes on my feet and a dress over my skin. That man took those sins in a rock he lit on fire and fell into another world, where I could not follow. I followed my ashes to a park in the rain with his umbrella where the sparks of lightning danced around those shoes, that dress got damp and I got cold. He said I was an angel, he told me I didn’t need to lay down with demons. I walked to the first open door and I saw them fist fighting in a ring. He looked out through bloody eyes. He said that god didn’t let saints into hell. He asked me to walk out the way I came in. Hell was only a boxing match away from my umbrella. He took a bare knuckle to the face and on his knees he asked me to forgive him. I put my hands on his face, I pulled out his pain, I pulled out the blood. With my wet clothes and his beaten body, we rode the rails. In a room on the outside of happiness he pulled up my dress, he took off my shoes, he kissed my face and told me saints don’t save the lost causes and we went to bed on a moth eaten mattress. When he woke up my hand was on his gas stove, and the devil was doing his best. I told him no saint lived in this skin and someone said I was an angel, but the demons knew better, that’s why they took me into bed with them. He held my belly against his ear. He said that saviors are a bottle away from sinners, and my heart was strong like an engine, my heart was warm like heaven. We lived on each other’s love, and we died in each other’s arms: saints in the devil’s hands.

Cherries

It seems the Coronado cherries are rotting again, and their excessive sweetness is bottled and sold as car air freshener. Suffocating. But it’s still one of the only fragrances I can recall anytime I’m alone on a border town night, thinking about the Mexican surfers, riding driftwood like waxed long boards. There are only a few of you, I tell him calmly as the breeze pushes the decayed red fruit through my lungs, you have to trust me when I say this. He doesn’t respond, I know he doesn’t believe me. They never do. I’m twisted in a wet t-shirt, wringing sand out of my hair, briny and scant. I think there will be a time when you forget about the others and just let yourself be the only one. The scoff he makes pricks my heart in a stingray barb sort of way. In the end it’s because they can never believe that they’ll be the only one, sometimes I don’t know if I believe it. I never thought I’d be sitting here with this burn, and a wet cigarette looking at waves licking children into their surf. I suppose I always thought I’d die somewhere between the wild west and the train tracks. I’ve proved a lot of people wrong over the years and I think the thing that gets me higher than good chronic is that look of astounded surprise at my unabashed comeback, the domination under impossible odds. Sometimes I think I let myself go just so I can blow them all away at my ability to claw through the dregs of used condoms and needles, sanitary napkins and McDonald’s Happy Meals, boxes of left over lo mien with maggots writhing inside, to come out on top. Then I smell the cherries, dark candy. I can’t always come back though, sometimes I sit on the beach and wring out my hair and the man I love doesn’t trust the words that come out of my mouth. He knows I’m convincing, he knows I’m as putrid as the gray pits the seagulls swallow, sucking the left over shreds. He used to like that about me. He doesn’t feel so inclined. There is a funny line, that I never really notice until it’s too late, which determines where feelings will turn. The line is thin and disguised. It hides in refrigerators and carpet stains. The line is so good at camouflaging itself that we weave ourselves over it time again without so much as a hiccup. Until one day, he’s feeling especially perceptive, he acknowledges I’ve crossed it. Then the words, the same ones I’ve used so many times, the ones I rely on more heavily than iron or steel, they become moot and useless. It is at this moment I realize I am only talking to myself, and the only thing they really wanted was a store-bought bottle of cherry flavored air freshener, sweet and condensed, so they can forget that it was rotten to begin with.

Final Fantasy

String string stringy, her hair on Monday, like clockwork, almost unwashed, almost shiny with oil. She woke up to do whippets on the couch with tearing seams, sucking nitrous from a whipped cream dispenser. She only feels high for a moment, she drools on herself, then she wakes up, it’s the best she can do on a Monday. Putting the car in drive she adjusts her glasses and feels like a super hero, like a super spy, like a champion road rager punching the accelerator. She’s a horrible driver. She wonders if her fantasy life is healthy, it is more interesting than her reality, it makes these days go by in a less painful way. Sometimes her dreams are too vivid, they beat out real life, and she only wants to sleep. Sometimes she believes that she is so much stronger, that she is a femme fatale, with switchblades and butterfly knives. She scares people, with her intense looks, her dissecting looks. Even if she can’t back up her tough talk the language is enough to make them shake. And when she’s drunk, she is a maniac. That’s where her reputation Wild Cat came from. They don’t know it’s just the result of watching those kung fu movies, or dreaming too hard, of fantasizing about tearing them apart. The experiment continues. If she believes she’s a bad ass, does it make it so? Will she eventually turn into the heroine she imagines? So far so good. She hit him in the face with a brick, he was trying to rape her. He had his arms around her waist. He was pulling her. She used her super human instincts and picked up the stray rock, she held it in her hand, and when he had reached her she didn’t think before splitting his face. But today is Monday, they don’t let you pummel in the office. She knows outside these walls she’s hurt people, she’s taken a beating, she’s gone to the pavement with blood dripping in her eyes. Inside she types her reports. Inside she makes the calls. Outside she can be whoever she wants to be, it seems her imagination runs away with her. She’s starting to believe the world is the way her dreams are. This is dangerous, because one day she’ll get called out, one day she won’t have a brick. One day she’s going to end up dead. That’s what she tells herself when she feels the real rage pushing her to fight the dregs, when a man disparages a woman she jumps at him. One day she will jump at the wrong man, and he won’t mind hitting a girl. She pulls on the latex outfits she picks up from the sex shop where she works weekends. She plays their games at the bars, she takes them to the alley, they try to fuck her and she knocks them one in the balls, steals their wallet and they cry. This is her life until there aren’t anymore bastards left in the world who want to get inside her thighs. This is her Monday, where no one knows what she does outside the cubicle walls. One day she says to herself, I’ll either grow up or I’ll die at the hand of someone not worth the vaginal secretion that wells from a hot night of sex. One day. She picks up the phone and smiles for another dial, another day, another chance to be normal.

Feral Hysterectomy

the karma wolf is at my door, waiting to sterilize me. fix me, rip out my female bits, teach my insides a lesson. there will be no legacy for me, it all dies now on the feral fangs of lustful fate. eviscerated, a science project. my anatomy leaking onto cold tile, i hold the severed space between my legs and cling to identity while he howls only a few steps behind, the messenger of my actions, exercising the punishment of self. mother, it says from bloody pile of spilled ova, mother i am born to show you how to die.

Southern Reasons

so still breathing for jesus

neon red cross and fingers crossed

i dont believe in god

i dont believe in the earth or purpose

its only to be happy

i smiled

you are so naive

dont know nothing

that cross isnt salvation

listen to the brush lullaby

listen to my heart

beat

we’re warm blooded

so we can bring each others bodies close

when death cold spreads its

ice cracking spider veins

over the weak white

flesh

i dont believe in anything

i believe in everything

reasons and being and you and me

we’re so wrong for each other

but i know why im here

sometimes you need a little

miracle 

proof of faith

to make them stars shine

other wise

it’ll all go dark

and i choose the light

always the light

on these city nights

truck stops with your buddies

they give you different reasons

ideas

wild turkey and a trailer

you could do better

but you never let yourself

i take your hand

run my swiss knife

down the center

i push your blood in my blood

those headlights

theyll bring you back to me

run free

i can follow your blood

youre a piece of me

and if i believe

then you’ll believe

preaching isnt my job

and praying isnt yours

thats why we belong together

and why ive got to save you

from this field of briars youve thrown yourself into

The Mountain

theres a blanket of ash

where my covers used to be

i remember you over my bed

looking down at my nakedness

breasts

you

cupped

you

licked

you

sucked

layered in the falling debris

of a million cigarettes

smoked while we contemplated

pita chips and lesser beings

while you let me kiss you

down there

we talked about the mountains

the mountains

that rain fire

but they are cold

and littered with snowy carcasses

of the final battle

i think i’m an angel

and you were my devil

tempting me in eden

when i couldn’t say no

but maybe you loved me

which is why

you spread this soot

to keep me warm

while the war of heaven raged

we lost the good fight

you and i

we the lovers

who could never be

but somewhere

theres a mountain

with our names on it