got enough to keep me going, keep me from the brink, as your bones grew, why did you become you?

I've been thinking about skin a lot lately. There are nights, God, there are so many nights where I will lay in the dark for hours and think about the language of bodies and try to speak to my own skin. I will ask my skin to talk back, to say something, to say anything. What language does my body speak? What would it say? And then I’ll think about other parts of the body and what they would say if they could speak. The spine is the most constant, the body part most willing to tell me it loves me, that it will hold me up despite the weight gain, despite the years. The jawbone would talk about words, endlessly words, how much it loves them. How much it despises them. The lungs and heart are a package deal and will not go anywhere without the other. Their love is the kind of love I want. Necessary. Unfaltering. The kind of love you can feel. The liver will talk about his drinking problem, how he’s in love with the pancreas but she won’t have him because of the alcohol. He will die alone and seems to be accepting of this. The appendix just wants to be important. Crucial, even. The kidneys are ten-year-old twins and talk about holding on even if the other one can’t. Or won’t. The large and small intestines don’t know how to survive without the other. They know the body well. They know its corners and edges, have spied the bottom-most layer of skin. They dream of togetherness. The knees, elbows, wrists, and ankles are mostly silent but they wear their scars proudly like medals from the days of bicycles and games of kickball. The throat, tongue, and teeth try to seduce their way out of answering. The eyes can’t stop talking about the sunset from last week. They all revolve around the bellybutton, the epicenter, the beginning. The other organs and the other parts of the body view the navel as something of a god, a miracle most miraculous and I think that maybe the body is multilingual, communicating unsaid things—things we can’t say, are too afraid to say, to hold onto, to keep.

your love is an old friend who's running around with a pocket knife in a shotgun town.

I would like to take up residence inside of a library. Make a kitchen among the cookbooks. Set up a bedroom within the fairy tales, old and new. Perhaps make a children’s room and have C. S. Lewis and Roald Dahl for my company. Store an extra sleeping nook with all of the poetry books for that one friend who lives nomadically. Have the living room in fiction and a study in non-fiction. I can think of little better than actually composing a home out of ink and paper.

I have all these fleeting stories swooshing around in my mouth. Characters and dreams crashing against my cheeks in waves. And when I open wide to take a breath some of them rush out before I can focus on them, before I can put them down, settled. It’s terribly sad really, all these things I think that never got to a place somewhere tangible. I feel that every time I lose a story I lose a bit of myself. Little pieces of me are floating in the air, dancing down the street and into other people’s windows. If you happen to find one, please send her back. I’d ever so appreciate it.

Sometimes, after reading something I have to get up, shake the book off. Sometimes, while reading, I have to get up for fear of losing my way in the book. I come up for air. Sometimes, I don’t want to tell anyone the book I’m reading, why I’m reading it, how it makes me feel. It’s mine, don’t they understand? I’m horribly possessive.

I want to write poetry that’s violent, that wounds. Bodies will look back years after eyes drink their fill to find skin lacerated, an anthology of scars with my echo. Retribution for the marks I trace on my thighs or discover on the pinched wings of my shoulder blades, even though it’s not anyone’s fault that I branded them there myself. I’m an addict; I stick the needle in to induce pain, to induce pleasure. I don’t want to harvest poetic flowers in the notches of my spine but pull out raw chaos from my organs, terrible and beautiful panic. But I am not a haunted night where beasts roam and growl and sniff and track, but a Sunday morning. A Sunday morning with nothing to do, that spins around the house in silk and tries to spin words into gold only to come up for air with hands full of breakable string.

I pushed my insides outside living here for far too long.

Everybody has a bag. It's everything you need for your day, for a night, a week, an indefinite period of time, forever, enough space to add in all the things you pick up on the way. It has no size, no volume, just a random decision making process so that what should be carefully chosen is stacked up with everything else, that sits in order for the fewest creases. Nobody is exempt, because even not caring is a point of view. Shoes at the bottom, socks and secrets bundled up and shoved into the toes, sitting heel to toe so as not to scuff together, making sure that the new roads have confusing messages about what to learn from the older ones. Then the bulkier items that sit to the bottom, that sink to the bottom - jeans and sweat pants, the issues you got from your family, and the names of every person who ever broke your heart. That time you had a breakdown in the street. The bar on East 5th that you only know you were in by the hangover sticking around three days later. Shirts line the top, tucked in with the stories of what happened when you were at primary school, and the casual Chardonnay and dinner party issues that look even better at 2am underneath a neon light. Ribbons of film reel, quotes and song lyrics wind around the collars and cuffs, promising revelations later, but only once everything else has been unpacked. Underwear carries its own secrets, tucked along the side, the mouthwatering bruises buried in the black lace, and the stupid life choices slipped between satin.

When I was eight, I had a recurring dream that happened two, three times a month. Filled with tigers and the threat of evisceration, I couldn't stop what was happening and every time I'd get a little further into the jungle, just a little closer to dying. I read page after page of books, keeping myself awake and away from the world of claws and savagery, decoding past, present and imagination to see if there was some kind of message and getting nowhere. It took years until I realized that the tigers couldn't hurt me, and in dreams I couldn't die. One night, I learned to ride the tiger as though it was a horse, keeping hold of fistfuls of fur and trying desperately to keep my balance. I didn't fall off and until the moment I woke up, I was filled with the most euphoric sense of freedom. I never had the dream again. This is what my brain adopted as a process - finding a challenge and working out a way to let it cripple me until the arbitrary day that decided I could win, trading in books on dream analysis for poetry collections and friends with limitless patience. Cashing in the tigers of my dreams for wolves that howled at the door. Leaving anyway.

In the nights that came later, that I never told you who I was in the moment, only the few people that I'd been before. The ones that wouldn't cramp the space where where we weren't hungry but still just sweet. My head finding a place to rest against the fine bones of your wrist, your watch ticking, near-silent but precise; a metaphor in the making. The bag, sitting in the corner, full of stories of people I never gave you the chance to know, instead presenting it as a collective Past over which you'd triumphed. In spite of that, the bag still swollen with secrets, ready to betray like an overripe fruit falling out of the bowl. I wake up to the sweet smell of fermentation and rot, and sometimes you caught sight of my face in a mirror and we both understood that you'd never know what you were looking at.

Because I've always needed people the way that a junkie needs a fix, the same amount of fear and trembling, and it's painful, and exhausting, and exhilarating. But at the end you'll wish you hadn't, and I tell you that the day that I realize I'm picking up a darklight frequency that I could lose my mind over. The day that I realize I've already started to feel the pull of the undertow, and the thing about revelations is that they're a shining moment of revelation in a sea of darkness, and they change nothing. It's a way to let yourself off the hook from having to do anything more painful, like believing yourself, or giving other people something to believe in. Still, I want the truth not to be a hand grenade in a crowded room, or an AK-47 at a wedding shower, and part of that comes from knowing how to speak it. Retraining my mouth, because the thing about selective honesty is that it's the biggest lie of all. So I give you the full story, and I let you make your own mind up. It's starting to be terrifying, but it's a more powerful shot of something than anything I've done before.

I pack a bag in the dark the day I leave, so that not even I know what's inside it. It turns out I fill it with nothing that I need and everything that I am. I don't mean to set trip wires, when the past present future sit and wait until everything ends up being a question of now. I don't open the bag so much as kick it over, throwing everything in the air and letting it fall when it will. The conversations are had, and the options are to stay or go. You pick up the bag, and what happens next is up to you. The bag is just a bag. It means as much as you want it to, but there's nothing in it that's worth as much as the feeling of being here.

learn to fly, show the world how you try, but don't let go until you know me.

I love sunsets.

In sadness, in happiness. The beginning, end of a year. The middle. When I've barely awaken, when I'm almost retiring to bed. On my own, with others. With others next to me, with others in my memories.

Today's sunset will be unlike yesterday's, nor tomorrow's. I will see what is there, I will see what is not. What is essential is invisible for the eyes, one must see clearly with the heart.

I haven't a heart. May I use my soul?

I love sunsets and I love sunrises. I love the fresh beginnings and the bitter ends. If sunsets shall symbolise sadness, would sunrises represent happiness? Hope? The dark tints of oranges breaking from the midnight blue are not enough to slip through the folds of my mind, not today. Neither is the chemistry that made up the chardonnay stagnant in my glass.

But I do love sunsets and sunrises all the same. There is rarely any red in them. Pink, orange, yellow, purple, lavender, blue, white, black. But rarely red. There is rarely meanness, anger.

I will not wear red today. I will not wear blue today. I will wear yellow today.

Daybreak. Freshness.

Though first attempts are rarely successful.