native

the sky is wider

over a king sized mattress

sliding out to enjoy the view

amongst the “morenos” 

in their straw hats, leather skin

 

open air markets,   breathe

with canvas walls,   breathe

spiced rum vanilla tequila cotton

spiraling balconies of sultry sun

like a spell on barefeet

 

the waves are quieter in the afternoon

squinting for some shade

shorelines away

with empty pockets

and a liar’s conscience

 

inside a pink seashell

they roll eternal

make the oaths and

number the grains

they consume

 

 my dry skin, disintegrating.

 

Lying in the Devil’s Head

So in this less-than-perfect setting,

a stage of stolen secrets,

stewing in the scent of sin, I am wasted.

All the wisdom of the ancients,

couldn’t create salvation or redemption

from this weakness.

I fantasize that you wish to see deeper;

last night I dreamt that you could.

That despite formalities, and proprieties

there is some sinuous tension and

silent shadows, silhouettes under streetlights.

I will lie to you and me

and the walls and the ceiling I stare at blankly,

while I lie under blankets of deceit.

Just as you lie, as you lie next to me.

I’m beginning to realize that

all these obscurities are

building and shaping and changing and forming,

growing and sleeping and steepening,

and awakening and turning against me.

 

I am ashamed of my naivete.

It crawls under the lying blankets

and in between my nail beds,

and my teeth,

and my toes,

and the sheets,

and under my skin,

itching and squirming its way under.

Inside me, beneath me, between me and myself,

while you sleep.

I know you say it’s not a game,

and for awhile I believed,

a dangerous habit I thought I broke.

I refuse to be tied.

And all of your good intentions to be honest are appearing

thinner and more translucent all the time.

 

I see all three of us following you blindly,

She with the ring around her finger,

and she with the ring around her head,

and me with the ring of truth in my ears.

I, just beginning to stumble into the heat of the light,

and struggle with the fire of revenge, try to sleep,

but see only immediate opportunities of deceit,

that must be created for me to return the favor.

I let myself go quickly,

unable to guise the adolescent starved for attention

hiding badly beneath the layers of scared insecurities,

how scarred, and obscured, by mascara and sarcasm.

 

Maybe that in itself wouldn’t be so bad,

but I stopped hiding within myself for you.

I thought you wanted the raw, real, unadulterated truth,

and I gave it to you.

Against my better judgment, and my mottos and mantras,

I removed the mask and the makeup and the monologues.

I feel like a virgin, disrobed, I suppose.

A lump of awkwardness,

trapped in my lungs.

Trembling like moon beams,

dancing across undulating water tops.

 

I will have the last word.

Yet, I swallow only to find my tongue paralyzed,

in a sea of sand and grit,

stuck, sinking quickly,

too quickly for me to catch

my wit, or my reasonableness.

I count the dots, tattooed on the ceiling,

a constellation of trite, traced, and punched-out water marks,

to distract myself from the feeling of humiliation.

They suffocate, an invisible, invincible bag.

I half-drunk, stumble and grope, tearing greedily,

instantly aware of the intense weight of my own breath,

Congratulations, better men have tried and failed.

 

Outside, the crows laugh mockingly,

speaking in tongues of prophecy and prediction,

camouflaged in the night, shifty-eyed, and bright,

waves of black ocean water in the sky,

harbingers of apocalypse.

Somehow they know,

 

I will teach you why you have met your match,

and quite possibly your maker,

in a justice so sweet,

you will bleed and lie

awake weary, leery-eyed, queer-feeling,

pondering, wondering, why?

Was it all coincidence, circumstance, coalescence,

or completely contrived,

in my mind, or yours?

Guess and second guess, the incriminating evidence

and all  the clues will be gone.

Know you will never understand,

just as I planned,

you will only know it all went wrong.

self loathing at it’s best…

It was 4:47 a.m. on my day to sleep in.  My mind just kept racing through the maze of tunnels and synapses, a labyrinth of caverns and chambers in my head.  My aching eyes, and aching head, and aching mind would not let me just slip into oblivion.  One tiny seed, planted in the fertile soil, sprouts, and spreads, germinating, and overtaking everything into a overgrown jungle of nightmares and thorns.  It just kept pounding, and pulsing like a blank cursor after the words, “I have become everything I hate”.

            You have made everyone’s expectations of yourself become your own.  You are nothing, because you are nothing of your own.  A skeleton, built bone by bone of other’s words, and deeds, and lies, bones that must be broken.  Stealing your own identity with a thousand littered glances, and hopeful, puppy-dog eyed pouts, looking for approval.  Dreaming dreams wrapped around someone else’s moon, and tied tightly to uncontrollable stars.

            “Please God”, I whisper under my breath, “Please, just let me wander into sweet ambivalent serenity. Please, just make my mind stop racing, pacing from one end of the room to the other”.

            Wanting reality, and honesty, demanding it from everyone, and damning them otherwise.  Fighting, biting, battling, nail-digging with the effigy of a girl trapped in the dungeon of your lies, and disguise, and improvisation.  Leaving nothing but a impersonation, a beautifully believable imitation, feigned, bright-eyed, banal and bloodless. Containing so many inner contradictions and inconsistencies, as she is beat, bloodied, and bruised into hiding.  Hating every moment of propriety, and cheap chattering in mechanical mental anguish, yet gloating victoriously when capable of a flawless performance.  Constantly hanging, a pendulum, swinging forcefully from laughter, to losing my stomach down, into an outburst of tears.   A tangled web, gleaming with dew of fresh morning, of intricacies too delicate to handle, and containing a black, dangerously deadly secret, all at the same time.

            “Sleep, sleep, sleep. Where are you? Please come and rescue me from myself. Please, silence my thoughts, and abbreviate my torture.”

            Your genetics and heredity have left mounting odds against you.  You are an attention seeking adolescent, rife with immaturity, in the body of a woman.  Seeking and soaking up every word and wink of flattery, and flirt, and fawn.  An insatiable appetite for attraction, because you miss your father.  He left you orphaned at the age of seven, not with an absence of breath, but rather with an absence of mindful consideration.  You remember him as a removed dictator, dominating, domineering, and dead to you.  And every time a man smiles at you with approval, you imagine it is him, and he is uttering words you have never heard, words of commendation, not condemnation. In a moment the feeling passes, and you are looking for another father you never had.  When he finally dies, and is rotting in the ground, you will look over his grave in a solemnity and shed tears solely from the knowledge he never took the time to realize how little he knew about you, and there is a large void that has been in a place inside you where he belongs, a place that has devolved from slight potentiality to impossiblity.

            What time is it? When will this stop? Why can’t I make it? Just turn it off and leave it, and sleep to forget.           

            You want to be in love, not just the idea of it.  You hate how much you don’t miss him.  If this was different and your heart was broken, at least you could smile knowing you were finally cured of your disease, that brings you such dis-ease.  But he was just another tally mark against you. Another reason to tell yourself you are desirable, because you have no real reasons.  Another game, with another pawn, and more and more analysis, strategy, guile, and manipulation, and less and less genuinity, spontaneity, touch, and hallowed emotion.  You are so alone,  kneeling before the altar of self-doubt and loathing.  Keeping every facet of your being locked in a vault, lightless, void of refraction and reflection.  Too afraid to expose its angular, kaleidoscopic dementia of delusion to the world.  Knowing that to love would mean baring enough of your soul to someone that they would actually have you, and if they actually had you, when they left you would actually have to bear the consequences of their rejection of you, and not some falsified combination of innocent coquette, pouty-lipped starlette, with arsenic lipstick and a hint of sexual deviant. Hating what you pretend to be, and hating knowing, even though with the mask, you can never be exposed, or vulnerable, and never know if you could have the kind of meaning you ache for.  To just be understood, even an attempt, could be enough to win your heart, that you shelter and guard so painstakingly.  To be able to remove the shroud of security and feigned stability, and reveal your insanity, and keep his undivided attention is your only real desire.  To be with someone as yourself, and not someone else.

              An existence of childhood pleasures, lullabies, the ridiculously genuine elation that can only be found in innocence, and absence of pressure fills your dreams, and nothing else.  A time when you didn’t need to bite your nails, and your secrets were pure. You just want to be pure, a tiny girl you once were.  With ambitions, and dreams, and imagination that was not predictable, and acceptable, and realistic.  You swore you would  hang onto them; you would with an undaunted, fairytale conviction keep them safe between your sheets, at your fingertips always.  Now they are scattered like white whispering dandelion seeds in the wind, rooting themselves in the dark, thick dirt, where they grow only to be pulled up and tossed aside as weeds, and you are the wind. You rewrite your history in your mind, painting yourself as the martyred heroine who sacrificed everything to create reality out of her hopes, but the only reality that you must face is that you don’t know what you want, and you are not brave.  And maybe admitting that is more heroine than the former anyway.  So you swallow your pride, and another fifth of poison and you feel your invincibility propagate, and everything is propitious.    

            There are mornings, as this one, when you do not believe in anything.  You want to possess unshakable, biblical faith that there is always someone there.   You know that to dare breathe doubt, you will surely be damned for the smallest crescent of it, but you fall into solitude so fast, far, and frequently, you wonder if you will ever be holy. You wish you were the woman of Revelation with sun in her hair, and moon at her feet, crowned with 24 stars.  A sinless, celestial perfection.  But all you can see are your dirty hands turning the pages of salvation.

            You want to prove to everyone that when you die the lack of regret is not a lie.  To have a libido for living, five lifetimes in one, of every experience of love, and loss, and learning, and countless sunsets and starlit nights, drunk in the haze of the sweetest September air, and a reckoning with the ocean, and its harsh salt and hypnotism, and presence in your soul, watching the tiny ants build their hills, swinging on swings that twist all the way to the top, and sitting still underneath a sky the perfect shade of turquoise blue, and witnessing the motion of the clouds, and sensing the spherical, three-dimensional limits of the atmosphere, and knowing there is a God, and feeling your awe-inspiring insignificance.  Instead, you find yourself looking down at your feet most of the time, the pattern on sidewalks. It is all words in a notebook, a feeling you have grasped as many times as you can count on your fingers.  You have truly lived only moments of years of your life. You wonder if you are lucky to have them at all, or if there are people somewhere who have that certain prolonged sigh of contentment all the time.  You are sure there are, and green with envy; it angers you that there are people that live better than you do.

            Jesus Christ, I need to sleep.  So I swallow two pills without water and they almost choke me as I force them down my throat.  I wonder how long it will take for them to work.