Meta

I am a character. First person is used in this story – and that is what this is (this is not a journal entry or a confession or a narrative of the writer's life and feelings) – because I am a character, and this is my story. Look at my flow, look at my commas, look at my vowels and consonants and how I string them into words and form galaxies out of sentences. As a character, I have the duty to arrest your attention and shove my cells into your eyes, flood your neurons and your mind. As a character, I must. It is my foremost duty to make myself real to you, even though I might never actualize. As a character, I must never forget what I'm here for. As a character, I don't know anything beyond page one and "the end." Sometimes my writer makes me say things from before the beginning, and makes me dream after I'm finished telling my story. But all those are words. All I am is words.

As a character, I must never forget how to tell my story. I must never forget how I came to be and what I am for, even though I'll never see how I end, unless I die somewhere in my trilogy. But I'm a protagonist, I'll never die. Even in your mind I'll never die. And I must never forget that. I must never forget how to dress myself in ink.

I'm a character. My story is I might have forgotten, and now I might not be anything anymore. My story is I'm in limbo, and I'm creating beauty for myself. New species and such, new stories and the like, and I'm dreaming! but I'm not telling my story. My story is someone might have sewn my mouth shut when I was asleep. I'm a character and I have no story. I'm a character and I'm just a character, no page one, no "the end," no memories, no dreams, no present participles, no anything.

I'm a character and my story is I might not be a character. The art of telling stories is the concealment.

what it is to suffocate

careful strokes of a brush,
glancing off of cheekbones
_____(like rain, on a windshield)
putting colors together
_____(like worlds in a universe)
and making of a canvas what gods did to the cosmos
carefully pushing a smile onto lips thinner than candlelight
planting a fingerprint onto Mona Lisa's skin,
_____calling her a masterpiece,
_____and then calling her "mine"

(the way her skin folds is the way you hold your breath)

Jupiter

She is like the greatest of planets: grand and made entirely out of gas. Spinning, and pretending to be solid. She is a carcass of dreams, and all her heartache pools into her empty ribcage and freezes into a heart. It beats soft, but resounds vicious, like the growls of wolves' footsteps when they rush away from hunters. Hunters.

She is a sky of shards of everything. She is a piece of clockwork, ticking away the (star)dust of her eye shadow, and everything else she hides behind. She is a crumb of all the food she didn't eat, and a bead of all the sweat from all the sex. And just a bit of the bones she breaks every damn day.

Her hair strands are sharp and cutting like the needles from syringes and the edges of the words she wishes were spoken to her – sweet and kind and gentle words they are, but cruel in absence and longing. When she runs her hand through her hair, there's a chaos of new scratches on her fingerprints.

Who is she, now, then?

She sways to a song that thuds like thunder, wearing smoke like a second skin, like an atmosphere of cigarettes and no-hard-feelings. She is like Jupiter: great, grand, and made of gas. Just spinning and pretending to be solid.

you're so loud

your name is a siren

that brings violent coughs to my throat, when i'm twenty seconds away from you

and my skin screams, when your skin cells are my skin cells

and alarms i never snooze go off in my head, when a word – any word – slips from your lips

and the most rapturous knocking beats in my chest, when you're here

gunshots and bombs erupt in my head, when i'm enveloped in you(r cologne, and your fabric, and your body heat)

and yet

the silence sits ringing beside me, when you're asleep and as quiet as a dried-up ocean

ochre

as i type this, you're listening
but you can't hear the words

and when you sing
and when you breathe
i'd like you to know i listen.

every word,
every little whip
from your lip
s.

*

sometimes i can hear my sobs in my breaths.