Little Teeth, Little Fists.

little teeth, little fists.

i never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. little teeth, we talk in small manners. cut sharp. little fists, hold on to what you know. don’t let go. we take what we want when we want. we are wanting, hungry, all the time. little, little body, draped in ugly hauntings. bite into the flesh of our wounds, ghosts claw to let the dark come out. see scars from needle teeth and swollen hands. living in the wild is what you know, hold, what you know: how to ravage. roll the skin you wear through your fingers, trick your body into thinking you don’t know. what it means that you can feel the crescents of your nails still digging in, the shine of a tooth aching with the rest of your moon-light jaw. carve your name with a knife into the trees, talking soft when you say i’m sorry, in a sharp twist spell out what lives inside, what’s taken over those ribs, you monster, monster, monster, monster thing without a home. don’t feel sorry. never for anything. not even for the wild thing eating you whole. little teeth, little fists, wanting always to forgive. forget. you could die and still you should have never once felt sorry for your wild, awful self.

G.O.D.

the g in god isn’t an acronym but if it was we’d have to talk about the a for allah and how guns and arms are too common a theme. shoot them up and all. guns and gods and girls are all the same, sawn-off shotguns pointing in no direction. listen for the crack of the bullet- (or the empty mouth, please, screaming) don’t shoot. don’t shoot. i always come back to this. or fire into the masses. after this god won’t care.

only two things make me sad: one of them is life, and the other one is trying to live it. i am always afraid of regret. always afraid of the wrong thing. too many days spent in the closet, on the floor, throwing up with my head in a toilet. hands trembling like the wind and i’m still trying to live with this. that tremor won’t ever go away. how can i tell you to live when i don’t want to? and there’s nothing i won’t do to want to. all these admissions and omissions of how much time i really spend trying to function as a human being. isn’t that what we call life? this hell we’re in when we can’t call it hell? we keep on through the precarious existence of the balance between burning fast and flickering out. when it’s beautiful, hold it close. when it’s ugly, hold it the same. if it makes you sad, cry, and i have to cry too. when i see things that make me ache, all over, and want to curl up so i don’t have to face it, i do for a little while. but i still get up when the alarm goes off in the morning saying ‘cheer up. you’re not dead yet’ and when it says ‘one more day’, when it says 'be happy’ and when it says 'ní hên píao líang you are beautiful’ i have to get up. i have to get up for all those who can’t. yes, it hurts to breathe and exist and live but isn’t that what it means to be human? breathe. stand new-made in the shivering light. 
 if you still have a day. live it while you are shaking.

REMEMBER WHY YOU BREATHE :: o.m. 2017

and yet… you loved him? -ray bradbury, “the utterly perfect murder”

even after this you loved. it took a long time. did you ever realise, in the beginning, what it meant? that no one came to your before-the-sun-rose almost morning cold glass window, painted blue with longing all alone did you know then? did you know then, maybe when you wanted to die. maybe that was a long time before you ever even thought of love. or did you know before the terrible, unutterable betrayal. did you know and so you left. and even after all this time. you held it inside of you, that inalterable past, without ever knowing why. held it in the hollow in your chest, the gap between your collarbone and the line of your ribs pressing against your skin. could you feel it when you held the edges. every morning after that you could see phantom bruises that love in the way boys love boys when they are young, you said, and evil but innocent, and evil. how did you fit such emotion inside of your mouth to swallow the pain. how did it come out in words like those. when did you stop using question marks to say why because you knew you weren’t getting an answer. did he ever call you after all those years, after all those years did you ever call him? and still you knew you loved him without ever caring when or how or why. all of that, inside of you, years and years and years- how could you stand to hold it and how, upon taking a train, bound into the past you thought could not have ever been returned to, years locked up inside your chest those bones old lives and leaving and broken windows how did you learn to let it go.

i return howling

black ringed eyes of smudged morality / questionable practises of immortality.

after ten thousand years you’d think we’d start to lose the taste / of salt and skin, lips to face.

kiss me still when i am inhuman / a beast wandering through the night.

here we are in the forest, teeth and claws and all / here we are in this dark humanity, ready to fall.

even then when i am lonely / i dream in full moons, bruised skies turned holy

i still sleep quiet underneath the night / i return, howling, home to you.

how awful innocence

you can take terrible things and use them to do good. yes, they are still terrible. but take that body and grow flowers from poison in the earth’s veins and you will still have a bouquet to heal and hold. seep aggression into poetry and write beautiful murder. kill every version of yourself that still holds scars and your weeping eyes will start to harden. from coal to diamond we turn combustion into love. firestarter heart that burns or tames; tempered into temperance from abuse. it used to be beautiful to be dying. we are still dying to be beautiful in a terrible, awful way. only innocence can think to turn decay into preservation, capture the spread of sickness from cell to bone and it looks like flowers blooming inside of shattered sidewalks. this thing is gonna kill you no matter what you hope and it’s gonna kill me too. crack the lightbulbs with a scream; turn the power out with heavy winds. open the window to run out. block the doors so no one can get in. you’re leaving behind something terrible and i’m trying to turn it into something good like you asked but that awful innocence of yours left no room for reality. you can be too good, too naïve. i can’t live up to these expectations. my terrible will remain terrible as i run away with anger and roaring winds to escape this good, your awful innocent and how your eyes looked at me weeping then turned to glass and hardened in your death. this thing is gonna kill you, flowers or not, and over your grave i planted marigolds: unspeakable mourning so from your sickness comes light. this body turned deathly into deathless.