i suppose the illegality is thrilling?

i am a poacher.

i stole my name. my real name.

i went on a name safari,
wandering through the deserts
and rainforests searching--
but i didn't have a guide

so i got lost a few times
and there were a few
mosquitos that almost drained

me completely--
hoping i would stumble upon
a name to make me feel myself.

i found one. it was so beautiful,
drinking there elegantly. gracefully

extending its soft neck with easy vowels
its smooth tongue caressing the inside
of my cheeks
at the waterhole of all the names in the world.
it didn't see me though. it didn't suspect anything.

i shot, i struck.

i skinned it alive.
i took it home.

i read once
that to
unlock a new creativity
i should write with
my opposite hand.

i tried it.



it wasn't readable.

now i'm tortured
by what i'm missing.

#maleentitlement #childrenarebrats

The mother of two
tries to encourage her children
to pray to the Christian Savior God
every day. on schedule.
To her, faith is incremental
and manufactured.

The boy child reaches for the cupcake
that the three of them are sharing.
He tells the girl child that
the icing carrot on top is his
          and he is going to take it.
The girl child says "we can split it!"
he says "no we can't it's mine
         GIVE ME MY BRIDE!!!"

The mother of two obliges him
(perhaps his screaming is embarrassing)
and offers to let the girl child
have a cookie instead.

They sit next to each other by the fire:
the boy child eats the whole cupcake
and the girl child eats an M&M cookie
with a lost, forlorn look in her eyes.
she gets up and walks away
after the boy child asks
"how does that cookie taste?"
with a blob of white icing
on his nose.

On Love and Gertrude Stein

my lipliner is. has the same shade name rosewood-- A not torn rose-wood color.-- and I wore it when i first second met him

because he understands my phrases like 5 is an even number because there's 2 on each side and two of us (and it) makes an odd pair

I turned into an amnesiac

at 10 pm on a friday.

if you asked me right then
i couldn't have told you my own name
the day of the week
or a list of random words.

but if you asked me right then
i could say your name--
          yes,
and more

but grasping for words never
was like flesh,
and a hunger for italics or bold
never matched my blood
          but metallic kind of
comes close.

i never could get into
comparing feelings to strings
like tying and knots and
connections were somehow
a bad and taboo thing...
these things have always been
the basis of my existence; i built
my strength in connections to other people
and there have always been more than two.

i'm trying to get better
at thinking before i speak:
like normally i would tell you
that i'm deleting all your text messages
even the ones that say 'love' in them
and the ones where we're making plans
and i'm erasing all the memories
from earlier today and how
you asked me my ring size
and we talked about fetishes
but now i won't because i know
that saying that
would only make things more awkward
and neither of us needs that right now.

See? growth.

A(nother) Poem

He says he was born
a robot, but
I see an inhuman tenderness
when he signals his turns
as I follow him home--
          even though we've both
had it memorized
since the first time
we traveled
together.