it's funny,
how the will yearns for broken layers
of a worn out lie, how i search and search
for the lost years of my tender youth
and pick out letters and dates that i think
were relevant, but in the end they amounted to worn out
ink stains and perverse intimations towards
what i thought really happened, but never did.

i think that it was some marked event,
and we gathered, after driving our parents cars
in the back of a supermarket and it was though
dionysis sat in the background and gave directions.
how the boys sat with their shriveled genitals,
thumbing the deepends of their pockets
and taking cues from the movies they watched
about greasers in sweat-stained t-shirts and slick hair.

johnny came up to me and told me that he liked my legs,
and the way he said it, as he folded his hands and cracked his knuckles,
"girl, i just wanna touch you all time," his right hand on my knee,
quivering up, epileptic fingers as i opened my mouth to him
with no reply but my salivated tongue.

i wanted to be the sort of reckless that i envied
in older women who wore heavy eye liner
and cried about things i'd only imagined in street sob stories and
brooklyn romances. i wanted to be rebellious and condemned
in every sobering story about what it meant to be the lost
or uncivilized. the kinds of girls who you heard about
on badly acted ads before the feature presentation,
the way you'd roll your eyes as though good advice
was a pressure point that stung.

it was around that time that i started cutting my clothes into shreds
and shortening my skirts, wearing scarves to cover love/lust blisterbites
and made the school day last much longer than i was used to.
oh, i thought i loved every one of those two-bit fantasies that wronged
me time and time again, got with my ex-best friends and told the other ones
that i could give great head if i were drunk enough.

you wanted to straighten me out the moment you met me,
the way you pressed your cool palms into my forehead
and called me sweetheart in a way that didn't outline the dick in your pants,
but meant every word and seething gesture.
you said that you could love me, and i remember laughing in your face,
the earl grey teabag floating buoyant in the mug that you handed me:
"drink up."

i wanted to change for you, be the end of the after school special
and start wearing light pink and clean sneakers, finding some hope
in finger puppets or red wax candles, anything that defeated the need
of survival and its rampant destructives. you wanted to make me believe
that there was more than yellow-tinged light bulbs that hid
in bathroom stalls and the endless retching tingle that took my frailties
and turned me into shadows.

06/09/2008

Posted on 06/09/2008
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