your spine can be that pretty

Your spine can be that pretty.

























Sometimes when I’m sitting behind people I try to read their books. I try to peak through the cracks and see what they’re seeing. I’m either testing my eyesight or getting a new perspective ,or maybe theirs is always more interesting than mine, maybe the grass is always greener, maybe mine is never good enough, a.) your flaws are miracles, b.) your skin is made of milk, c.) you’re a bitch but a character, d.) maybe I’m a wooden box and my heart is made of furniture.

You will not close your eyes at night you will look at the walls and pretend you are a ghost.
So when they come, you won’t be afraid. They will hold your hands and you will all haunt yourself.
You will not close your eyes at night you will look at the walls and watch how pretty patterns darkness can be.
You think, “I wonder if my spine is that pretty.”
When you close your eyes you do not slip away. You will only see the insides of your eyelids.
The night is honest. The way your body twists and swallows the bed like a cacophony coffin.
Your shoulders are daggars into the beating bursting heart of sleep.
There will be no celestial down pour tonight, dear, instead there will be nothing
But a broken windmill wind…a voice form within..

“He cries fire. He cries fire. HE CRIES FIRE FIRE, HE CRIES FIRE, HELP THIS BOY HELP HIM, THERE’S FIRE.”
But glaciers, there are glaciers in his eyes and I can only see a part of the whole.
A PART OF THE WHOLE, A PERCENTAGE.
His eyes are avenue amputations.
His alligator body appendage.
All the words, all the smile games, all the gestures come flowing out as knots of rope
I simply can not climb.
There is no recipe to bind the battered dalli dynasty
No second coming. no soft solution
You will not find traffic lights in the mountain.
You will not find panthers in Charlestown.
You will not find me crying
In a chair
In your room
And a cigarette I needed to smoke into virgin lungs.
The past is an absolute icing of cold windows and legs
Hanging
Hanging out of the cold windows.
Silverware bodies set for a table of children
Young children like young music
like smashing pumpkins like eating away away
at our metallic.
How do you think cancer tastes?
How do you imagine the moon?
How do you paint a picture of loss?
What did you lose?
Do you know that the cancer eats at the moon and drips like a painting of picture?
Warped like the contour of your back
Deep grey, deeply grey- just the same
The rings around your eyes are this color and I would remember this
-just the same
As an inmate to his cell wall.
Cold. Grey. Past. Glaciers. Amputations.
Masks. Wearing masks, mask maker.
How easily mesmerized and remember grey ice.
Remember grey eyes.

When you cried fire and the children eating you cried fire
I said “shh don’t try to be pretty, you just are pretty. Your spine has spilled like wine and everyone will drink you.”
In your scream vampires escaped with your long fingers
And took refuge in the walls of your room
Because together we built a tomb
And the walls are important.
But I am not, and you are not.
Remember we are neither here nor there passed.
You see, I said when I look into your future I see violets
But they float in the air and I’m not sure they’ll ever grow again.
I fed them pill bottles to fill in their blankness
And they turned into the land of plastic swans and tall grass.
Where the leaves fall like scabs…
Or pretty snowflakes in a glass.
And we are neither here nor there passed—