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.