1. |
sleeping candy
03:16
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I had forgotten to dream
Weeks before I met you
The characters I created had tunneled through my ears and landed on my shoulders
Eager to escape the gray block in my head filled with broken social cues,
pools of regret dotted with dry wit
They were over the chemicals,
tiny ovular builders reconstructing my thoughts like plastic smiles,
Like vomit the janitor covered with sawdust
But you kiss me to bruises on my neck that cover the scrapes the angel makes
As she punishes my wrongdoings
You steady my face to ease their travels, calming waves of seasickness
You pull my body close to form ladders from our hair like silk turning into houses for spiders
Ladders where trapeze artists can swing from your head to mine and grab my mouth with their magic hooks
Stretching to happiness
Finally breaking the skin I'd glued over thousands of times for good measure
You are the sand in my dreams
The obstacle between me and the oceanic darkness of my slumbering thoughts
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2. |
god's waiting room
02:12
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Repentance, repeated
Until we are all lambs in the eyes of god
So gravity fails
And the path to him becomes the whitewashed walls
Of the hallway between death and its row
And the pedophiles run rampant among
Cancer-ridden children, fever high with holy thoughts
They wash their silken robes in tap water dosed
With the poison of
Cumulonimbus clouds
Perversions of the sky carrying
Men through golden gates
Would it be,
That he were real,
Playing house with Abraham Lincoln
And the man who invented ribbed condoms
Exactly what are we living in fear of,
Flipping through magazines in God’s waiting room?
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3. |
3
02:09
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When I was too young to read
I fell in love with the lines on the palms of my hands
Because, apparently, they told stories of fevered sex lives and good fortune
My kindergarden teacher told me that life was a book, all planned out and predetermined
That god had gifted me with life and he had spent an eternity authoring its chapters
so, okay
god had personally written for me
the first time I cried in a bathroom by myself
how the day I learned to read was the same day my brother had gotten his first A in middle school math
and that before I turned twelve years old, four of my classmates fathers would never wake up again
he copied and pasted the nights I laid in bed with my own dad, feeling his heartbeat
keeping count until I fell asleep
he wrote a few hundred pages where I made friends with scarred children
the ones who became teenagers who never went to class and started taking dramamine too early
the ones who quoted modest mouse only when they were documenting drug use
and the ones who's friends died of overdoses before I was ready to deal with death
he called this chapter "the good times are killing me"
he had transcribed the draft of my life story into the pores of my skin
so people like you could read my biography while you were watching my chest heave
or biting the skin of my neck
you could know all about the biggest parts of me
even before I began to laugh with my mouth wide open or kiss you in the morning before brushing my teeth
so when I begin to feel safe enough to let go of the secondhand trauma or self-conscious leftovers
the author of my story is still the man who etched the lines into the palms of my hands
but you are the ghost writer
and the story is already changing
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4. |
pickpocketed
01:48
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later, when her brow furrows
the straps of her tank top puddled across her spine
interrupting the celestial landscape dotting her back
she realized she had just spent her first time
knocking knees with a
stranger
and she watched him sleep under her in bed
his legs lit pink and cosmo'd
by the stargazing night light set to safety next to her mattress
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5. |
now
01:45
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She is two years old
And playing with firetrucks and steam engines
Sitting knee deep in Barbie doll-clothes
Crayon wax mixed with the sweat on her fingertips
Now,
Bottle tops to bottle necks
Her body dressed for nakedness
Now, the Crayola-covered skin nineteen years dead
Nerves paved with tar
Now, she remembers herself at twelve years old
Practicing with candy cigarettes smoked and eaten
Now, her bad habits sprinkled on the floor
Torn underwear mascara rabbit’s feet and lead-stained phone numbers
What it is to be big, to feel varicose veins
Hiding beneath the surface of the skin
A lover without a face
A steady job at the call center
That is being old
That is being alive
Welcome yourself to it.
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Cecil, be more. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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