burning like a bridge for your body

seasons and seasons stretch on me and change their shape above me, and i can't seem to morph quickly enough to catch up. chemicals in my hair, cuts on my legs; you can try as hard as you can to cut open my sternum and push my ribs away to take that gem, but my skin is thicker than it used to be, dear. i have more than your shower songs, your long legs, and your thick hair. i have more than what he gave me last night, that secret sin, it is a pact i have made with myself to ignore. his picture fades quickly and quietly in my mind, while i battle what i have been trying to forget. what has he done! i am innocent in my own infinite dilemma.

journal #11

i have led a life much like yours, so overcome by the love you have for someone who fucked you inside and out that every breath you take is another wish to bring them back to bed. but i am not here, my dear, to replace her. i am here to be the person who needs replacing, however impossible it has been for me to take that role. i guess my timing, it's always off, isn't it? "behave yourself." i am not her. i can battle on my own, i have my own army inside of me, i need no assistant general.

i was eighteen.

the waves of my hair rush over you like salt, like peroxide in an open wound. my fingers, graceful in their movements across your eyelids. yours, clumsy and long, peel over me like a knife. getting buried by you was a fate too fearful to overcome, and that was what i went searching for with those big binoculars i had, those tall black boots i wore to trek through the grass of heartbreak and hole-filling and accountability. and i gorged my stomach out to fit you in, but i guess in all your glory you exploded inside of me, and out you came through that mouth of mine, and back in i was, back in my own natural desire for honesty. deny myself my basic human instinct because it isn't real. but this is who i am, all dread and grey pencil line lies, this does not hurt anyone but me. i am the child inside of you, i am the girl you kissed under the covers, i am the woman who's authority defies you. "the art of the woman is to make the man believe he is in control." the art of the woman is to burn down every city you've held in your hands.

your every breath is a gift

we closed our eyes in that empty pool, while each wave that crashed over us resembled more and more a hand or a hat, a music note or a cup of beer. and as i let my hair run free on the floor of this musical watering hole, my thoughts traced the outlines of your face. blue eyes, green rings, muddy hair: traits reappear like a print through the press, back light on your limbs makes you look 10 feet tall. but under the airwaves of sound, i slept, and she was next to me, she helped me to remember that she was all i needed on most days. but my eyes always turn north from my friends, and i watched people make beds around us. i recall settling into you like they settle into the concrete, and with each pull forwards and backwards there is a sense of carelessness. but we are born again in our ability to forget; calm in that quiet city you said "you gotta leave 'em hanging like men from a tree," these men who have done no wrong like we have done. but i ain't saying i'm sorry baby, i'm saying it's time to turn around and remember what it was like before i was your easy way out. and your call from the couch pulled me back in like a bird's lazy song, and what mistakes were made! but these memories today glide out of me, as you did in your pool full of chlorine and alcohol, like fire you breathed.

'"I'm yours alone!"' you swore. Given cause to doubt you, I think less of you, dear. But more about you."

wanna line up all my memories and pull a firing squad on all my regrets. every minute under your godforsaken covers is a minute i wasted. every minute my hands sped up or we pushed ourselves further into each other, generating all that heat between us, i wanna knock to the ground with an AK-47. like the expert i used to be, my destruction was an art form. but i abandoned my post long ago, and today, i have nothing left to give because i realize now that i will waste my time and it will be another moment i could have been fucking someone else. right? but no, because i couldn't, because i'd hang myself with my own shame and guilt, and bind my own hands with the veins of my heart. my own, my own, my own. sacrifice myself! a concept i've nursed for too long, kept so close to my breast that it feels unnatural to finally peel it away. i understand, for i am a myriad of personalities and i have a certain way of looking at you with your own eyes. more or less, i have forgotten myself beneath the layers of soil throughout this state. my foot falls and a piece of myself disintegrates there, and it becomes the dust you breathe in as you trail me. i can't even separate this between him, you, me, home. cannot order what i've written, cannot tell you whom this is written for, if you were to ask. i suppose that's what they call a gradual descent into mental abandonment. into a trap door beneath my cerebellum. fill myself up with narcotics and look at you with those dead amber eyes of mine; even in my clouded mind i see the truth rear it's ugly throat, and i am able to silently dissect you as you plan your hand's movements, deep inside the threat of my leave. it is a shame how i will forget you, how i will leave you behind. how many men have been between the day i met you and today! how many men will be between the day i leave you and the day i open my throat to choke out a legal promise to another! leave, not in the sense abandon, or break apart from, but emotionally detach from. this exterior houses such a disgrace of a woman. my ability to blind myself from the wrongs of the people i love. they all leave me in a fury, a fuss, or a fear. yet i allow them inside when they cry for my forgiveness below my third floor window, where i hid inside my childhood. i allow them back into me, for i am weak at their promise.