I can’t write a play, I don’t have any vision,
I just force myself to vomit rhyme,
spew false imageries, perfect visions that
I never thought could come true,
and they won’t.
They won’t because I’m a blurred piece of silk
in a horny quilt stitched by the silly boys
who came before us, declaring themselves
the original founders of such a lovely person.
I am not an original founder, I haven’t even
found the base of the mountain so many
have climbed in the name of love.
Fuck my unoriginality, it gets me every time.
So predictable but it hides well,
I somehow fell into the leave-covered pit
while floating two inches off the ground—
Angels fall, too, you know.
This is all so boring,
such a mundane attraction, how can anyone
think that I have a brain when I only follow
my heart—
and all hearts travel the same skyway,
funneled into the same tunnel full of whips
and teases we can’t ignore. Or pass by.
Everyone stops, all hearts— stop.
How easier it would be if this stopped,
if my internal juices quit pumping
Copycat Blood.
Someone’s handed me my manual
on What To Know When You’ve Become
Like All The Rest, like all who have Broken,
the endless line of dilated pupils searching
for the renowned Light.
No one stands in line, they all lie there
bruises slowly forming on their aching bodies,
but the whip is missing from her hand,
and in its place, a white lily, she holds;
My guts, my churning failing systems
are thrusting themselves against my poor
stomach, my heart beating too strongly
against my chest, and a heart-shaped
bruise is forming on my hidden chest,
always forming.
She will never see it.
She moves, always moving,
farther, closer, sideways, towards
that guy standing in the corner,
and towards that girl two inches to my left,
she moves in Mysterious ways,
and she fucking does, too.
O Shakespeare, why am I not pure?
I can live with purity, doomed or otherwise,
I could breathe if this was impossibly perfect,
and it’s not even perfectly impossible,
but how I lie awake at night wishing it was.
Ruined it, ruined, I wilted the blooming flower,
peeled the bark off the tree and slit
the throat of the baby lamb, the blood is in my eyes,
such pink blood—
O Shakespeare, tell me this is tragedy.
I am only sixteen, so many years older than last year,
when I was fifteen,
and the year before, I was six,
and then I was born.
Still I feel, I feel and I think and I’ve stopped
thinking about always,
because no one lives for always,
so I can’t be bothered with Forever;
I can’t even be bothered with today,
it exists only to remind me of what
tomorrow might be, but I move so slowly
through these time halls, on my hands and knees
scrubbing the imperfections away
so that SHE CAN SEE how hard I might work,
harder than anyone else,
I’m harder than anyone else, I’m hard
to work with, hard to see in the nighttime,
hard to see in the daytime, hard to move in to,
hard to imagine— and I don’t think
anyone will ever want to try (again).
It’s all right, I say, it’s all right,
it has to be if I’m staying here,
in this melting igloo of yellow snow
I pissed in after one too many Cokes.
O Shakespeare, rid me of the common curse.
Soon I’ll be feeding off of it,
I’ll think it was all worth it, I’ll close my mouth
for once to feel good for once and for once
I might feel alive for a second or four.
Until that day comes, and it will come,
I swim through the sweat and tears
of all the people who make love
while thinking of someone far more perfect.
I wish, twice a day, I had the decency
to love someone so truly Ugly;
a fresh set of problems that I can deal with.
Then might I be worthy, or worth it,
worth more than a sentence or five,
for she is a novel,
and I am hardly a line.
O, Shakespeare, please tell me which word I am.
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