A Plathian Brag

Wrap me in a winter night.

I am not cold, it isn’t winter, I just can’t let my skin touch yours.

I cannot let the wind let go of space that is still there between our thighs.

I do not want to spend the nights, I do not like to waste the days in

daylight I once had faith it would hold me longer than darkness,

but then it went away and learned the emptiness of betrayal from its parallel.

I inhale smoke, your thoughts are cigarettes I do not want to burn.

But I do,

it is the temporary beauty of your mind that holds me,

it is the only way I can be in the company of your

ideas.

They are the breeze that move the swings but never let them creak.

But my mind,

it creaks,

its emptiness is air

that feeds that lustful fire,

a desire

to be.

It wakes me far after twelve,

and leaves me hanging till next day’s noon,

it is the twilight that never sheds its light, it is the broken

afternoons.

I am a china doll, so let me drop and crash and fall,

for after all,

it is the only way to be,

un-free,

in a world where free is chained with possibilities.

I am the face of your last dream,

it runs away, you chase the thought of it across your memory,

and then you let it be,

unchanged; un-free.

Your thoughts they rant, their voice sounds so familiar to me.

It is the holy embrace like that of God when he came last time to un-visit me in sleep,

he let me wake from his own dream, and didn’t think to sit with me.

I felt a rush, something velvet, like the torn curtain drapes of your half-built balcony,

the one I always ran towards and then fell short of thought to complete.

I’m falling through the walls, they do not cement me,

A sound that goes like the Plathian brag “I am, I am, I am,”

but all I am is your misery.

Skipping Time

Dear,

listen to me,

I have not walked the Earth long enough that cemented roads seem,

to be,

just the same to me,

I did not follow my dreams and will and aims and goals and things they told me to write down on lined paper in second grade because I did not see,

what they did with words on paper, what they did with words at all, so please,

understand me when I say, I do not know,

it is not me you see waking up to mirror reflections of her ego so big it radiates in a circular dark halo around her throat,

it suffocates,

she suffocates,

on words and poetic conventions, she does not believe,

in broken science and perfect rhymes and adultry,

never has she walked away from anything, simply,

because of its familiarity,

and this, her rationality, was merely,

true.

They told her describe yourself in 5 words,

but words just too big, too small, to fit herself within,

she felt the echo of the space left within the letters she could not utter,

the fitted words she couldn’t crush her thighs to fit between too close a space for parked cars

she never knew how to be,

and she made revelations on the idea of her mere existence early in eighth grade when she was told she could not be worthy,

of letters and bodies she did not have,

and she believed.

Naive, naive, naive,

she runs and plays with ghosts of her dreams,

she knows, she knows, SHE KNOWS, how to build her own delusions,

strong enough for escapism and fragile enough for penetration.

Later throughout the years, they asked her what kind of person she wanted to be,

WHAT KIND,

and she did not want to be, she did not know how to want to be,

she stared at her blank paper and drew cubes all over,

tall modern skyscrapers of the new world that met Greek architecture of fountain-ancient times,

she wandered off between the lines, tackling ambiguities she knew she would never conclude,

she knew that at this point, any question raised in history class, was merely for discussion, it was not to know for sure,

how her own skin, like red ribbons wrapped around cake, could tear at the sight of existence itself.

Her existence remained a haunting ghost that never stopped at the threshold between reality and delusion

But oh, in eleventh grade,

she walks in to sobbing, and black, and all to her disknowledge of life,

she encountered death,

not anyone she really knew, just someone who knew another someone who had a mother who had a daughter whom she lost to medicine that was still too retarded to save from developing drug-resistant biology

the date and time for funeral life was sent across from face to face I couldn’t escape, what was this they told me of?

I did not go, I only traveled there in thoughts of what might’ve been a realistically painted Audrey Hepburn portrait of the scene,

All black, because sorrow came in colors and clothing,

All sobbing, because melancholy only manifested in tears,

All good memories, because remembering was only for the dead,

And all along, the faces she never knew of, came to condole her lost member,

Sorry if I’m intrusive, but honey,

none of this makes you feel better,

not coffins and roses, or spoken verses of religion can really help you through this, and most definitely not people who never knew her who act and sob and cry,

you are here, and he is there,

what is there to be so mad at God about,

what is there to be so sad about,

it is all gone, and this is only irrational.

When I die, when a dear friend or family member dies, I will not invite, I will not pretend to know the people he did not know while they offer their fake condolences,

Honey, I’ve met you once,

over lunch because a sister of a friend knew you, and happened to run into you one day,

and so we talked about background, horoscopes, and names of friends, we both did not remember,

so when your husband dies, I will not be there condoling you because if I open his coffin next to five others that look nothing like him, I will not be able to identify him, because his features along with yours are merely names smudged in my memory,

I do not know you,

and I will not fake sorrow for your day, your week, your month, your year in black just because you’re too emotionally distressed to understand where I’m coming from.

In twelfth grade, she was revising all profoundly-held ideologies, there was no going forward beyond this,

this world of Socrates, Descartes, and Heidegger now suffocated her, in all aesthetic ways of course, she knew she would forever admire thought,

but how she thought these thoughts, it killed her,

going back and forth on something she knew she would never knew,

little words of knowledge were so beautiful, but she’s grown tired of beauty,

her face has already wrinkled from anxiety and too early knowledge of all things of life,

it’s like she skipped high-school altogether and was walking into her fifties all dull and tired.

A grandmother to none,

she hoped to bore no children in this world of misery,

I did not want to bore my children and their children with my forgetfulness and incessant need for care,

I simply did not care enough for my grandmother, and expected patience to have a shorter time span at my time,

I just wanted to die next to my morning coffee and book,

looking outside my window, and letting the china cup fall and crash in my mind while it rests peacefully on the ornamented glass table,

I just never wanted to encounter my own anymore,

for this little fragment in time, between life and death,

let me have the peace of not knowing who I was and who I will be, and not caring enough to know, to have let go of all knowledge and all memories, and floated in this, just now.

Routine Vomit

I don’t know.

A day in every month, I do not know.
Know what, I shrug, not even that I know.

I cough but it isn’t blood I see spilling up from my guts, an endless push coming forth. It isn’t that. It isn’t the vomit that surges as the nerves of my stomach gag. A reflex. I do not know of, because that wasn’t it.
It wasn’t that of hoarse throats and empty winter nights that beg for warmth to come at midnight between the silk sheets; her thighs are shivering. But that is not today. That is now how she feels. And she cannot put the words in paper thoughts. She cannot run from it, it doesn’t go.

Every month it is not her 28 day schedule that strikes. It is nothing she can ration.

Every month there is a day she remembers him but that is not the feeling of him that seeps through her thoughts, stripping her naked of all viable security. That is still not it. She thinks and thinks and knows it will not stop today.

It will sleep within her growing and maybe only the taste of it on her tongue will last the morning after.

She does not know how to rest her head and let it go.

She just dissolves in thought, the salt, her skin, peels off in memories, water, that washes off what didn’t exist in her past.

He is there.
She is shivering.
He offers his jacket, she gets colder.
He holders her, she is still the same.
She walks away, and there she finds some comfort that is agonizing.
She learns how to rest her head without the colors in her mouth.
She rests.
She dives deeper.
She looks to the side and wonders, will she ever be better?

Her Second Love

She races her shadows, slowly. Through the night’s hours. Her stilettos two sizes too big. Black, from melted mascara to sheer tights. She is not too young, just too little. And yet her persuasion seeps through push-up bras and her seduction exudes from her tightly positioned ass.

She has wondered through streets with nothing but cigarettes and golden earrings. And the way she smokes and glances, the way she tripped upon trivialities has always found home a captivation.

The first night was rough. An infuriated man who just recently removed his ring, for as she jumped back and forth, his finger holding her small sized breasts had a seemingly lasting mark. She felt his supressed fury in rough gestures that seemed to have pleasure merely marginal.

A night along her second week included an unexpected masochist who asked for more, and payed for such. The marks lasted for the night on her, all over her. But she didn’t even feel the pain, which infuriated him further. He lashed more, he tried harder, but no squeals were even merely audible. At the recognition of his pain-pleasure complex she then merely faded a couple of screams and only then did he penetrate. Arched backwards she felt not even humiliation but exhaustion from such ways. She remained unamused.

Then, three months later, came across one of those facades she recognized and tried to prevent encountering. She tried to walk closer to other cars, show disinterest but it only provoked him further. One of those chase-her-until-she-stops-running complexes.

Well-dressed with eyes that gleamed with false charm. She might as well experiment. She has already ridden most types of cars and this seemed like a fairly good challenge.

First she felt unprecedented tension, and then he lit her a cigarette. This was unusual for her. They usually drove rapidly while finding their way under her skirt, feeling her thighs for pulse. But he was intimate. He wanted to invest in feelings before pleasure, and that confused her.

In her childhood she encountered several love stories but none of them lingered on, she always shook the memories off her mind. She never understood how they loved until the one time she truly loved but still then she shook the memories more violently, hitting her head against her beige unembellished walls. But she never spoke or thought of it again. She never wanted to feel these things. She chose to merely wander, from ride to ride, street to street, and aimlessly from face to face. It was not a desolate love for strangers, nor was it for pleasure, but both surely rose as side-benefits. She just chose to do these things and never know why. She was aware of an underlying reason for her strongly held belief in science, but she hoped to never know it.

This stranger however, wanted more of her than her body can offer.

He spoke to her.

Words coming out of his mouth.

Words not gestures.

Feelings not fingerings.

She remained unamused, but felt merely estranged by this sense.

The sex was okay I guess. She said to herself. But only inside of her she did not understand. She actually did, but she was still confused. She understood the reason why he did what he did, but she just did not know.

She never thought of it again.

That was her second love.