Lips

mutilated lips give a kiss on the wrist of the worm like tips of tentacles expanding in my mind. i'm fine, accepting only fresh brine. you can get another drop of this, (yeah, you wish.)-ween

tentacles
(jagged edges of you) reach out
attempt to touch the insides of them
around you.
Never close enough to let them touch you back,
of course.

It was you,
planting wet kisses with your mutilated lips
on the hairy back of an unconscious feeling.

straddling its hips
you would have raped it if you could have turned it over,
could have grasped it with any sort of assurance

but it was further from you
(your sharded tentacles
your bleeding eyes
your mutilated lips)
even than that velvetly nocturnal
whole
unscathed
one you used to be

Then I say, "That could change".

Well it happens without your cognizance anyway, doesn't it? But what do you do when it doesn't make you happy anymore? I mean it doesn't make you happy in the way that you realize it never did and it's taking you so far away from happy that you'll need bus fare, a full tank of gas, or possibly a plane ticket to get anywhere close. And the worst part is that it's happening inside of you. And you can't let anyone else in to help. And you don't especially want to.

You know your mind was crooked once, and your hope was that it straightened itself out, and you know still that it's just laying dormant until nothing you expected will uncover all of the sand, and there it will be, ready to jump out and hold you at gunpoint. It's mostly about crawling down the interstate in a swirl of white, and you don't understand why feelings come so unbidden to you in your quiet mornings, with a cup of coffee and pretty music and nothing at all to lend itself to that situation. "But what happened?" they ask. "Something must have happened to make you feel this way." And they don't believe you when you say, "Nothing. Nothing happened." But that's as close to the truth as you can get, verbally. Nothing ever happens outside of you. The catalyst is something small. Something you could never even pinpoint as "the reason", because it isn't the reason. It's the little page boy sent to open the door on the avalanche you'll inevitably end up underneath. And you've never been the kind to shoot the messenger.

So you've tried the looking glass part. The "mirror, mirror on the wall". And fuck Snow White. Not for being beautiful, because who can hate because of beauty, but for being simple and happy. For singing at the well in total contentment and "Some day my Prince will come" submissive misogynistic bullshit that will make her happy, because fucking everything makes her happy, and no wonder the Queen wanted her heart in a box. Maybe she could eat it and absorb some of that total contentment, or at least bask in it in a dark room. Because who wants discontented beauty? No one wants to wrap themselves up with a distorter who will weave everything in her life into the fabric of her particular brand of demon.

Even before all of this, when you would dress up like Cinderella and Lori would laugh and say, "Cinderella, mop the floor! Cinderella, do the dishes!" just to go along with your little game, it was underneath you. Even when you would dance like an exotic princess in front of the mirror in Mary Ellen's room with her engagement ring tucked tightly in your little fist, it was there. A poisonous feeling that would rise to the surface without any warning. Love would disgust you. Any kind of love. And when you went to Church, they said it was the devil, and that made sense. Of course the devil would send you these poisonous thoughts. But then you got older and met good people who told you that everything you slept with and tucked close under your chest was a lie, and you did and didn't believe them at the same time. Logic. Reasoning. You started to see the evil in what you had deemed impenetrably good. And it was you. You were the evil, weren't you? The wicked Queen. Because who's disgusted by love? Who gets pleasure out of pushing him away from you until you see the hurt look in his eyes? You loved it, wrapped it around yourself like a mink coat, the knowledge that what you were doing would hurt them, even if they didn't know.

"There's a meaning to every fleeting action you unconsciously decide." And the thought exhausts you. Not so much worrying about how all of the hypothatical thems will interpret the unconscious signals, but because you don't know what any of them mean. You haven't located it, the source of all of the good that won't come out of you and the home of the monster/liar/side switcher who unleashes the avalanche. Was it a person, an event, a moment, a combination of all of these conflicting elements that make up your past, despite your mantra, "Your past is a story. It has no power over you. It's a story. It's a story. It's a story." Is it innate? Were you born with it? You were 15, and crying over something or other, and Lori sad, "You choose sadness. It never once has chosen you." So you can't help but think of it like the red cardigan next to the green cardigan in some department store, and the "Oh, I'll take that one." But part of you just can't subscribe to that idea when the avalanche descends and you stop being able to breathe.

So you have to keep them at arm's length, don't you? You say "So it doesn't cover them, too", but that isn't true either, is it? You're only interested in any of them so far as it concerns you. So you wrap yourself in a blanket of your red concern, and fill yourself with the temporaries. You're disturbed and disgusted by the ones who want to change you, fix you, like you're some sort of errant plane they could land. Somewhere in the twisting alleyways of your brain machine, you found a cul-de-sac, and you've been resting there. An, "I give up, let's do it this way." But it didn't work. It wasn't really a cul-de-sac. You're wrapped up in a new series of twists and collisions. "Take me home, country roads", but you don't know where home is anymore. You say, "Stagnancy is death, and I am alive", so you keep moving, but don't they tell children when they're lost to stay where they are? Let someone find you? Ha. But you aren't a child, and you don't want to be found. So maybe this is all appropriate. The fact that all of your changing comes with an eerie dose of sameness.

Cutting Ties and Making Strides and Eating Lies

You dropped the man of constant sorrow somewhere between your soul reps, the falling leaves, and your soft eyes.
Sometimes you can't distinguish between when you need to close your eyes and when you want to do it just because you can't deal with the waking things.You want to escape in dream lands with sprawling magical cabin mansions that rock back and forth on a nameless sea, and you're holding hands with someone you used to love when you were young. When things were golden and frozen in time.


When Salvador Dali was a little boy, he had a dream about a little Russian girl swathed in furs, riding in a sled pursued by wolves. Many years later, in 1929, he met Elena Diaranoff, Gala, the wife of the surrealist poet Paul Eluard, and recognized her as the child of his dream. "We fell in love instantly", he wrote. Their courtship was both passionate and childish. He wore a red geranium behind one ear, and laughed when there were no jokes. Gala seemed to have understood. "My little boy" she told him, "we shall never leave each other." Dali invented tender names for her: bee, squirrel, furbell, noisette poilue, lionelle. Their love must have seemed whimsical at the time, but they stayed devoted to each other for fifty years.

There were the little names and the instantaneous attraction and the spontaneous laughter. But then there were the threats, the screams, the hateful stares that bore holes into your skin. Waves of crushing ice water that spun you around until you didn't know which direction was up. The crushing water everywhere. The tiny icy daggers in your lungs. Then someone would always pull you out. The creator, destroyer, savior. But dependent love isn't whimsical love. "My little boy, we shall never leave each other. My little boy, we shall never leave each other. My little boy, we shall never leave each other."

This is my love song. It goes like this:

Do you think cunts have a memory? I think they must. I'm doing this again in that way I only did it once before and it's already feeling so um, fucking good, that I'm not sure why I ever stopped. The quick unleash of all my choke held thought strands. I've been stepping over words like they were hot coals, like the wrong one would singe my skin, or his or her skin, and all the while I've been getting lost inside touches.
and when have contradictions ever stopped roaring in the pit of me from the first time i tried to wallpaper my insides with a voice?

you dance seriously, like there are lives in the balance, and sometimes you find it hard to find the unattractive things about any of them.

it's not any sort of him. it's a her. no cunt memory for who was last inside me me me me me, it's a me instead. this delicious me.

you are transfixed by your eyes in the bathroom mirror, sooty and yesterday underneath the blue green. blue now, because there was water involved, and tears make them blue. the long long straightness of the hair, and when the fuck did it get so long and blond and against the sooty eyes you could be a morning marilyn or a lady of the evening, or the star of a movie you never wrote. you run your hand over the almost sickeningly soft skin of the cheek, the neck, traveling down to the left, soft: cold hand, long nail over white/smoothhill and then erect, oh still soft, nerve ending deep pink , and they're bigger, you think maybe, more alive, but no, no, maybe this is just the first time you've run your fingers over them with this sort of oh.

you see them of course, the imperfections, the blemishes. they're there, like they've always been, but they're irresistable. you have to touch them. run your fingers over the bottom of your ribcage, and down, always down, and you never noticed how smooth the ride was, or maybe you're just really watching this time, and you delight in all of it. you wish you had something, fruit maybe, and yes, fruit. something soft and delicate that you could break and feel the juice trickle around. grapes, maybe, the firm, cold skin.

it wasn't supposed to be like this. it wasn't. but it got that way, and you can't say you're sorry. you're wondering all of a sudden about the falling to pieces and that sobers you, makes you stop. you sit, and try to cry, but nothing comes out. mostly because you're in a bar looking up at a screen and you're reminded infinitesmally of everything at once or you're in a coffee shop and "i wanna hold your hand" comes on. and you're in all of these times together and apart and it's all happening now and somehow then too.

and who can blame anyone for all of these swingset existences? sometimes you want love, and sometimes you push it away. when someone is that patient, you have to love them. you are grateful to them. you are indebted to them. and then you want to hurt them.