Down with the ship

“ Haul Once and Twice Again” the sailors sang,

on a boat run aground on an iceberg made of the

hardened bits of birthday cake you throw out only

after it’s been sitting on your counter for a week while

you’ve been too hungover to remember it’s still there.

“Confound it! Not Again!” the captain screeched,

but no man listened, too busy bailing out buckets of

rancid popcorn oil, the kind that coats the floor of the

movie theater and somehow clings to your hair even though

you only had a piece or two since you’re on that new fad diet.

“Starboard and Port! All hands on deck!” the crow’s nest cries,

as the oil rises to knee level through the cracks made by the cakeberg

but the ship’s Chef just hears the “port” part and thinks “WINE” and like any

reasonable human in his situation gets as drunk as you did at your ex-boyfriend’s

going away party your senior year of high school and we all know how well that turned out.

“Goddamn it! This is not a good time!” yells the second-in-command

who had lately been getting frisky with the chambermaid in cabin three

as he runs across the deck, half pulling up his pants as he goes like that time

you accidentally walked in on your sister and her idiotic boyfriend who thought

you were your father so he vaulted out the window bare-ass naked across your yard.

“Terribly inconvenient, terribly inconvenient” the chambermaid chants

as the oil rises to thigh-level and she gives up on holding her skirts up high because

she can’t even find one of her petticoats, which she supposes is a hazard of finding the

second in command attractive in the middle of a popcorn-related emergency which

reminds you of the time a fireman asked you out when he was supposed to be stopping

your kitchen from burning down so you had to sacrifice your beloved sweater to the

popcorn-related flames.

“Fucking ridiculous”, the stowaway sighs,

hearing all the moaning from above as he sits safely in the storage hold,

all the cracks plugged with half-chewed Bazooka bubble gum, which every sailor

worth his salt keeps around for emergencies because the gum turns to cement within

three seconds, which you know because of that one time you forgot to take your gum out

before you fell asleep at grandma’s house and couldn’t pull your teeth apart for one whole

terrifying minute, so really it’s only good for the comics, which the stowaway thinks

says something about life.

Bad Lighting

Men made of paper have come calling for me

Each with his name scrawled in ink on his side

They have come for the light and the heat but

There was a quick burst and a shattering and so

I am no longer the bulb, but the flame.

And they reach and they reach and they slide

in their blindness across surfaces thought to be

familiar and safe, smooth etchings on plaster

But I have been steadily consuming and am no

longer content to sit and burn with so little filament,

to remain always untouching. 

“Be aware” I whisper in half-hearted warning,

“the end of your world comes in electric flames”. 

Longing

I have been half-awake, dreaming of you,

of the pictures you’ve painted across your biceps 

and down your spine in greyscale and multicolor,

the way they tell the story of your yesterdays and 

your tomorrows but somehow never your nows; 

of the way cupid’s-bow lips never made sense 

until I saw yours, until I memorized their deep dip

and flare, the precise inequality of the full lower lip

over the top which came of your habit of biting it; 

of the calluses and scars which hug your fingertips,

products of repeated singeing on the barrell of 

a gun or those old cars you refuse to give up on,

(you won’t tell me which) and how those same hands

trembled as they reached towards my face, in the dead 

of a winter so chill even the wind shivered. 

Don't crack the porcelain, darling

I met a fellow poet, several times,

he had half his head shaved and wore

ugly short sleeve button ups ironically and

considered some things too mainstream to speak of. 

The problem with poets is,

we’re nearsighted,

we race across the rushing ground, losing ourselves in

the caress of the wind

oblivious

to the brick wall twenty feet ahead. 

I have long been made of secret things

 of tattoos covered by clothing and

piercings tucked behind hair and 

rings worn band out.

Hidden disasters, hidden rebellions. 

And he looked at me like he’d never seen me before,

nervous and shy and unsure of my being, believing in 

a purity of self I no longer possessed. 

Conservation

To save myself the paper 

I won’t tell you that I love you. 

I like this notebook and

there’s enough terrible metaphors, I think

about broken promises and broken hearts.

I should know, I’ve

written a few of them. 

All I know is 

I’ll never love anyone the way I did at fifteen-

naive but fearless. 

So to save us the energy of 

lifting your baggage and mine,

of screaming matches and

of meeting your mother

I won’t tell you.

You’ve heard it before, I’m sure, from 

some other girl who looks a bit like me,

(I snuck into your drawers to see her photographs)

so that will have to suffice. 

Besides, behind the candles and the roses

and the glow of adoration 

circling around your irises,

I can still hear the echo of 

“emotionally unavailable.”

Respirate

There’s a dusty trail that leads to

the end of the world where every blade of 

grass isn’t green but 

has a scene of your lifetime

painted in microcosm and we 

walked to the cerulean edge but I couldn’t

look over the cliff so 

heavy boned, we lay beneath the giving tree,

just as it burst into flames,

or into fall,

basking in the dying warmth of almost october

I never needed reverence so badly

hands and lips and cheeks and 

something like healing

something like loving 

but perfectly,

not. 

Sweet Tooth

When I was small my fingers were thin,

sharp like spider’s legs and just as clever,

and I would pick the lock on the candy cabinet

after bedtime and lay to waste my freshly toothbrushed teeth. 

It’s how I think of us, mostly. 

How I sneak into your darkened room and

lay to waste my freshly confessed soul with 

your dark chocolate hair and toffee eyes

sweet cinnamon sugar hands and that jawbreaker mouth,

touched with licorice lips that beg me without sound. 

We’ve all got a weakness.