in happiness

I attempt to write in happiness, not cynicism of life as I usually do,
but all that comes out is a contemplation for what cannot be.
All I see is negativity. It is comforting in response to my happy soul,
Rain pouring softly on my neck and down my spine, falling in puddles
at my feet.
I cannot stomp, satiated, into dry grass.
Only when it bubbles below my pressing toes and desire, rising up at my will
can the words be owned as I command.
There is a safety in sadness. Here I cannot fail.
Here, expectations like hope disappear, and every twisted stomach
can relax into deflated desperation; find true solace in the pit-fall that is life.
My eyes open staring at ground to which I long ago surrendered,
finding muddy dirt at their brim, stinging. It is painful here, where all the trees began,
though easy.
Only hands can help me up, but my own are dirty and immobile.
So I lie, cringing, and try to sleep, eternally.

the pretty dresses

I always drew the pretty dresses because those were never the ones I had. I drew the pretty girls because my face was so plain, and clothed my barbies in scant promiscuous clothing made of stupid stapled felt because I never could find the courage to venture outside my baggy masculine pants. I wanted so badly to wear red because that was forbidden, even after I'd received a bright pink hand and a sour tongue, the result of painful soapy scrubbing of both fingernails and mouth. I drew charming princes taking blushing girls' hands because I couldn't open my mouth around boys, and girls with bright hopeful eyes because mine were dim and cloudy. I always drew the pretty dresses because those were never the ones I had, and I always drew the smiling girls because I was always crying.

In the sand I drew the figures of laughing children, as that was all I saw around me at recess... The stick people disappeared twice a day when the whistle blew and my school mates drug their running footsteps across the sand to get to the teacher. I drew the figures and my fingernails gathered dirt and my mother, oblivious to my pitiful state of lonesomeness, merely sighed. I sat by the kitchen sink, knees bent on the metal frame of a chair as she stood over me, gently dipping my hands into a tub of hot water. At least it didn't hurt this time, I thought, recalling the red nail polish incident, closing my hand tight into a fist in the water. She said, "it looks like you've been playing in the dirt all day..." as of course I had been, always drawing the smiling school children. At least it didn't hurt, I thought again, eyes closing around my tears.

At least this doesn't hurt.

It didn't hurt all the way through elementary school when the boys called me names and pulled at my baggy clothes. It didn't hurt come junior high, when my leg pants got too short on me and I pulled my arms tighter around myself. It didn't hurt when I passed the nail polish I couldn't own or the pretty dresses I couldn't swirl around in or the makeup I couldn't wear in the store front windows on my way home from school, not hurting even more when my face started to break out in horrible pimples that I couldn't hide, that of course defined me as a person, not worthy of the time of the beautiful people in my drawings. It didn't even hurt the day my mother cried because my nieces and nephews were being taken away from their mom. Of course it didn't hurt when I broke down in the shower, crying because my mother was supposed to be strong god damnit she wasn't allowed to cry. Not when my tears that I couldn't stop were indistinguishable from the water on the wall, and not when I wrote a note to God begging him to kill me. Of course it didn't hurt when I found the blade, when I sliced open my skin and further, the blood dripping down the tile wall. When the water accompanied and it swirled soft into the hot, wet drain. it didn't hurt when I realized the pretty dresses wouldn't cover up the scars on my wrists, nor when I realized I would never wear them. The pretty dresses were in my head and now they were fading because I no longer cared about them. I didn't need them. I had the beautiful red I had wanted instead... It had been inside of me all along.

where has the good gone?

You hadn’t seen anything special in her. You’d seen the same things everyone else had seen. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that caught just your eye. What had caused you to turn in your walk from your general path of ordinary passage to class that morning had been what caused every other male in the vicinity to do the exact same thing. It was her beauty, it was her confident stride, and it was the way that suddenly, everything made sense just from the certainty with which she looked ahead, knowing that her future was one of hope, but one not to dwell too much on either. It was the present, it was her rapture, and it was a forever changing now. But that now was nothing new, caught like a butterfly pinned upon a display, pinned by every metal assumption, every stick and every tool. You knew what you had seen, and for this you were crushed.

You traced her body with your mind, finger moving slowly and unconsciously in a slight hourglass formation, tucked away from the world in the pocket of your corduroy nerd pants. Alas, their ends stopped several inches above your ankles, and this even though your mother had let the hems out last spring. For this reason you cursed your very sight, your very luck to glance her way, you cursed literally and under your breath and loud enough that her attention was caught, as always it had gone. After all, the present was where she was living and now you had just become a part of it, whether you liked it or not.

After a scan that trailed your head to your hairy, bony ankles to the whole at the front of your shoe that was your big toe, at the same time taking in the library behind you and the hill that trailed into the nothingness of a sunken world, she walked toward you and took something off your sleeve. You froze at her touch as anyone would have and you thought your heart would stop working and, naturally, you would die, but as the hair fell from her fingers to the sidewalk beneath you realized that you were still unfortunately alive and this you could not be happy with. You wondered silently where the good had gone, even as she gestured with her hand toward yours, even as her smile shrunk her eyes upward, the lashes uniting over her irises for the moment that her laugh came out slight and beautiful, even as you shook the hand and stopped breathing, thinking that though you could not control your homeostatic instincts of flight or fight, these reactions to a situation your dreamt nightmares of every night, would perhaps be the end that you wanted.

But you were not original. You only saw what the world saw.

A sunken chest whose burial dirt could only be the dirt that would be your end. You saw this as your eyes closed soundlessly and you did not let go, holding on to the only hand you had ever taken. The hand was harsh though, the skin not soft like you hand imagined in those first seconds of unconscious intrigue. Where had the good gone, you thought when you realize that softness did not always follow suit with assumption. You were let down as you always were, and as you opened your eyes to match level with her own tear stricken ones, you realized that you had ruined everything. You hadn’t seen anything special in her. You’d seen the same things everyone else had seen. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that caught just your eye. She could not believe that you had assumed. You saw this in her eyes and in her now and in the silent way she dropped the only hand you had ever taken. As you let go the mask fell off and the pin dropped and splattered its cushioning water on the glass that surrounded us all. You saw her grotesque face and her pleading stare as around us the world stood attentive and critical. Around us, the world cried.

how I made you.

Little bits of floating fluff upon a summer’s day,
I catch you with my earnest grasp, you cannot fly away.
Gently like a butterfly, caged with finger-bones
But sitting, brushing on my palm with plain choice of your own.
Little bits of floating fluff upon a winter’s day,
Cold enough to bring the snow, but warm enough that it can’t stay,
I lick at your sharp center as the blood begins to flow,
I could not bruise you if I tried for if I did I’d let you go.
Whiteness is the purity of ownership and owned.
Freedom as we fall away, away from those we’ve known.
How I made you with my hands is still a mystery,
Perhaps I merely caught what’s there and let it sing and let it breathe,
Words upon a page, pretending innocence of youth,
Coming from my heart-- I only try to speak the truth--
Coax me into thinking that I’m something more than me,
Make me think there’s something more than just a girl that bleeds.
But these few words are merely those that I found lying there,
Words that had to come together, this one here and this one there,
Floating all around my head, more with passing days,
White like blossoms, white like snow, white like gentle haze.
And even when the words begin to turn to gentle songs,
Taking on a new found meaning, internally longed,
Notes that flow the circle of my mouth and circled breath
Ride the wave of my tongue’s changing syllables to death,
That place they reach at their one end, when life begins anew,
The life I breathe into your mouth, the only thing that's true.
I know that you are something more once I have had my way.
Still it’s hard to think much of my carefree, child’s play.
When words are beauty in my ears, howling, strumming, soft
I want to own them, make them, mold them,
Want to beat them till they cough
And if they start to bleed
I give them sympathy
But there are prices all must pay, anyone who disobeys,
Anyone one who cannot see when looking back when, free, we flee
And it is me they must obey,
me who disciplines,
Or maybe it’s just me that blames the words, the world, for my own sins.