Words

Foot bone to the gravel-calloused heels (with which my sadness treads) heel bone to the loose, intoxicated ankles (through which my sadness bends) ankle bone to the purple splinted shins (my sadness grows tight if you do not stretch it) shin bone to the skinny, pointed kneecaps (if I lay down I can move my sadness with my fingers) knee bone to the smooth hard thighs (with which my sadness keeps its lovers) thigh bone to the mother-soaked hips (from which my sadness sprang) hip bone to the rigid, sultry back (my sadness asks me to touch this in the morning) back bone to the broad, soft shoulders (where I carry the world my sadness brought) shoulder bone to the bruised, kissed neck (with which my sadness shows off its lust, love) neck bone to the skull (there, my sadness makes its bed rips up the carpet hangs the wallpaper and a sign on the door reading home is where-)

and by “I” I mean this whittled being shaved inside my skin, stripped down to what takes so little space to exist, and sawdust falling like clothes around its feet and a creation everyday creating, some hole in the universe from which I pour and by “love” I mean that thing with hands around my throat, and what pretty legs wrapped around my veins, and I hope you don’t die, and I like it when you kiss my belly, and when your hair falls on my face I don’t want to scream and by “you” I mean a warm spot in a cold place, strong thighs and soft hands and a thing between my fingers that does not fall through and a pool in which to dump myself until all that is left is the whittled being-

and by “too” I mean ears patient in the waiting room, their hearts squeaking on the plastic: a rough sharp painful naked slippery squelching hateful thing like hope.

The secret to being a Bad Ass Bitch is to wipe the spit off your chin before the writhing wrists of your best friend have time to reach back into her throat and pull out the skinny from her esophagus. The secret to being a Bad Ass Bitch is to pull your ankles out gracefully from the glass frame you jumped into like a swimming pool, to repair the picture with a placating scribble I’m Sorry and the soft kiss of a stomping mother, only sorry for the floor you scattered with sharpness and solitude. The secret to being a Bad Ass Bitch is to tiptoe across that stiff-necked bobble of a broken father barely breathing nodding off into your hot wheels birthday cake, cracking up while the liquor-quenched breath of the rich aunt soaks your neck. The secret to being a Bad Ass Bitch is to never wear a coat that doesn’t squeeze you harder than the family at a funeral for someone who’s never died yet to haul the hand-me-down mood swing across the grass gripping your feet begging you not to leave this place these people these things- The secret to being a Bad Ass Bitch is to stay and love them.

I want you to add the 10pt. space next time you write, I want you to be comfortable with the room you give your words to breathe in. God knows this bedroom isn't enough. I want you to take that stopper in your mouth string it to the trigger in your fingernails bite hard and let it pop like the wooden cork shotgun your mom never let you have because we don't play with guns I want you to  play with every gun, but only the kind that is firing from your tastebuds shattering your teeth telling you you can't shoot because you don't have the right morals to say the word bullet much less shoot one you found in the gutters of yourself nobody has the time for that kind of wound anymore. I want to remember, when you fire, You don't always have to move people, they don't always have to borrow your truck every time you read them a line they don't have to place their bed inside strap it down and take it to the next place you go. Most people are just fine where they are. I promise. You don't always have to run to the bathroom when you start to cry during sex because you can't forget the sadness of the hands that have touched you before these how your first kiss stuck his tongue in your mouth at a movie theater held your hand died how your first kiss has had his last everything, and you can't find time to remember more than his tongue another thing with bullets inside. you don't always have to pretend it's allergies, or homework, or that you want to go to the party, or that your writing is about anyone other than yourself, or that your writing is any good, or any bad, next time, I want your poem to stick it's tongue in someone's mouth wiggle around and make them uncomfortable. Next time, I want you to clean the gutters of yourself and dump the muck on the neighbors’ lawn so they, too, can ask why people have to get so dirty inside why our blood turns to litter left behind by our mothers and fathers why we bring the bad guys in to pick it up but only in chains Next time, I want you to get the fuck up, I want you to point your teeth in my direction and I want you to fire as hard and as fast as you can right here at this fucking line until it is over and you are empty and you are crying and you are spilling and you are fucking someone that loves you and you are dumping yourself into her and she is touching your teeth without bleeding and you are going to the party.

Learn from spider to string yourself back across where she dismantled you with a cold morning stare in a bed you made warm together

learn that when you touch her she may break the home you built to catch her with and you will be left swinging but your fists will be too small to bite her before she is gone

learn that when you build a fragile house the walls will fall quietly and no one will hear the shatter

learn that when she runs straight through you she will leave marks on your back and these are a place to start spinning

learn that to love her is to relish in the feeling of falling apart that to love her is to begin again.

and when she runs straight through you

learn to be thankful that she touched you on the way.

She keeps her promise beneath her fingernails- swears it across the ridges of your small back the way a pinky would,                    hooked into you,                                     pull. the way her spit would,                       in your palm,                                     linger. She buries her tenderness beneath your skin- unearthing the redness inside of you the way a fresh patch of dirt                            in the cemetery                            takes weeks for grass to cover and you will claw at yourself to find what gentle thing she left in you. And there it will be. The reason she loves to hurt: because there is a softness                                    in blood that only the bleeding can see.

I can hear the dog chewing her hide from three rooms away I, too, know what it is to taste the marrow of a by-gone to rummage through a heart with my whittled tongue and find, in the pores that open beneath the influence of my own saliva:            softness in a girl made out of bone.

If you ask me about my heart I will tell you it grew above my head on a pre-spring dogwood, unadorned forgetting that it used to bring the birds down from the sky used to suck in the clouds, leave them condensed in tiny puddles in its lungs for the birds to sip. If you ask me about those birds, I will tell you how they nibbled at my heart when it was just a fruit dangling from a pre-spring dogwood: a red fleshy thing with seeds inside waiting to become again. If you tell me about my heart, I will open the mouths of birds, ask you how small a thing it is to love.

You are once and then for all, dangerbird. dead mother in Native eyes, mustached father in hesitant touch, you are a weak heart turned sunstone, dangerbird. Fondling the lace on Queen Anne’s middle About the heart, you say, It’s never been broken. When we are alone I stick my fingernail under the lie peel it from the splitting wings, beneath, the heart. Plucked clean, thank you for the feather, dangerbird, but thinking, what’s left to catch the wind About the heart, I found these veins in my fingernails, pulling since you were once trying to snap your feather from my seams but knowing You cannot break for the unraveling, dangerbird Leaving me with more                                      more                                                more of you to shake from my fingers I still cannot find out where you end or how much you will give to me for all to keep from snapping those veins that wrap About the heart, you say, It’s never been broken. I know because my fingers are feathers soaked in blood and I am no longer sure if it is yours, dangerbird, or mine.

I have descended into such a sweet array. The pots and pans are caked with wet yesterday, leftover in the sink, and I hold the girl between the glasses and the rice. I go to our room download a bunch of Radiohead I think you’re crazy, maybe you’ve got something on your mind maybe someone slipped something in the poetry. I’ve got about ten good ones another fifty for myself another hundred in the basement with the spiders, they write their own lines in, something about the smell of aged wood, corner real estate, how it feels to be feared when you have no self perception. “Love” calls a cardboard box with old mixtapes in it “Thank you” calls me to the bugs “For not listening to those.” I cannot help but think they deserve more legs for all the heartbreak I left lying around for them to build their lives with. But then again there’s an old soda can beneath that table full, but open: Somethin’ sweet for tomorrow.

If you could slip around yourself not like creek water cold about bare feet but like a curl your old bouncing across your new a spring to be pulled and let go, if your head could fit beneath your arm tucked and carried or continue spiralling to kiss your knees, do you think then you could stop asking yourself how you got so far from her.