Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Do No Soften.
Always Remain Hard.

Hard to understand. Hard to take. Hard to love. Hard to accept. Hard to hold. Hard to forget. Hard to embrace. Hard to keep up with. Hard to hurt. Hard to feel. Hardened emotions. Hardened heart. Hard head. Harder than before. Harder than ever. Harder than every voice that ever told you otherwise. Harder than the easiness with which you can be wasted. Harder than yourself.

Just Be Hard.
And forget softeness ever existed. 

You Are Not Hard Enough

Did you consider that I might be the hard one? That my muscles slid under my skin with the strength to save you? Did you see the fire burning in my eyes? The blood already on my hands? Did you assume that you were the one when I was already standing in the middle of that Hell cutting a deadly path towards you?

I am the rider. Hell follows me, not you. I descend on enemies like a plague. Vile in my own right. I lead armies over black hills like swarms of filthy insects. I lift the skin off of heroes. I slit the throats of lovers and sink into the bloody ground grateful for the mud and mortality.

I am the hard one. You are soft. Your soul lingers to closely to your heart. You cry at the pain. You cringe at the blood. All the while I devour those hearts with fanged teeth and all light dies within me. I am the black whole. The destroyer of worlds. The dead of night. The cold finger on your cheek. The reason you are hiding right now.

I may have obscured all that from you. Attempted a semblance of humanity. But all the while I was just burying my true nature in soft femininity. I lied. I am the killer you feared. The nightmare that nipped at your heals. I tried to be nice. I tried to be soft. But I hated every minute and my thoughts always lingered on a vision of all those sweetest Hells creeping up onto the Earth and my hands itched.

Do not doubt what lies behind these eyes. Do not doubt that I would gouge yours out in single sigh. I am the Heart Eater. The Destructor's Kiss. Kali in a Pretty Dress. The Hater and The Hated. They never saw me coming and the world shuddered as it held its breath.

I am hard. And I never lose.

To Hell and Back

“You reap what you sow,” and with those words she drove the blade deep into his stomach and yanked upward. His eyes nearly bulged out of his head. He moved his mouth but nothing came out but a gurgling bloody foam.  She withdrew her blade and stepped back. He looked downwards and in the last seconds of his life got a full view of his guts spilling onto the floor.

Too Dark Heart

Don't smile at me with your too white teeth. I know you are absconding with my best friend on a chilly Saturday night and filling him full of drugs so he'll see you all rose coloured. I know your thieving ways. I've experienced them first hand when you stole my heart and failed to return it. I know you've let it rot under your bed next to the big bag of mescaline you've forgotten all about. Just so much trash now.

Don't fucking spread that too wide grin in my direction. I've seen it before and felt the ice in your touch. No heat I radiated was going to melt that snowball heart of yours. You froze me through the summer and nearly killed me in the winter. You are much too handsome to be trusted.

There is wire missing in your fucked up head. The one that links love to emotion to somebody else. You dwell in yourself and try to rip yourself apart rather than accept the love that surrounds you. You are leaving me out in the cold. Leaving me unhappy but numb. I'm starting to go the way of rejection to the outside world. Why leave here when out there I can feel them thinking and hear them breathing and feel their distaste for me? I want to rip those stupid smiles off. Everyone of them. I want to rip out those frozen hearts and show them the reasons.

I see you there; smiling. I see you. Drug happy and nearly stupid with selfishness. I have my anger to keep me warm; to keep me company on these long nights. It whispers in the sweetest homicidal voice you ever heard and sings me to sleep. It cradles me in burning arms. Wraps me in immeasurable fondness. I call myself Monster and with crooked stained teeth rip my dreams of you to shreds.

For a Woman Impossible to Love

I do nothing in halves.

When I love, I love with every sinew of my body. I consume like a fire; burn up the room, the house and the trees around it. Intensity settles in on me. I do not fear the all or nothing. I love like a storm. A disaster. I see everything in your eyes and feel every little twitch of emotion that fills your face.

I love like this because I have lacked love in my life. I have been tortured to the point of near death. Hated. Reviled. Feared. And I struck out. I built walls so high that no one could scale them. I grew the thorniest vines up the sides. I stretched out badlands all around. And I drew away. I protected myself. I still do.

I do not love easily. To let someone in the glass fortress that is my heart is the biggest risk. It could shatter with the slightest prick. I am scabrous on my exterior; thorny, sharp but delicate as fading rose petals on the inside. I feel too much and to be broken desends on me like torture. To be left at the roadside staring at those tail lights as they fade into the distance relives that torment; that abandonment that brought me here in the first place.

If I love you, it is with everything. Very few can live under the weight of it and none have succeeded so far. I am a woman impossible to love so I retreat further into my caves. Block the light out. Shut the world off. I crawl further away and wrap my heart in layers of spit and tinfoil. Hide it in the back of my ribs; bury it under rock hoping no one will ever find it again.

Because when the light of minor pinpoints starts to pry it open and pain ultimately consumes it in the end, I become the monster I always thought I was and set to devouring the world one little death at a time. 

Still Breathing

"Everybody hurts. Everybody yearns."

There are tears trembling at the edge of my eyes. They have drowned my cheeks, smudged my mascara, sent my green eyes glittering. I am lost under a wave of tears. I'm planning on living down here for awhile. I can't see where else to go. The way out has gotten blurry. Rippling under the water. I always found it easy to drown. Just breath in and let the water do the rest.

I didn't want this. I just wanted you. But the reality of me is heavy. Distant. Pregnant with need. Isolated. Violent. Difficult to understand. And even more difficult to live.

I will pray for you to come back. I started it and I ended it but I will never lose that love. It is a weight that lives with me forever. I never forget. I never have. Years later, I will take it out of the drawer I hid it in and look at it. Turn it over in my hand and miss it. Like I miss you already.

It is true. I am the monster. Ugly. Unlovable. Hated. Unwanted. Unneeded. Unmovable. Sickening.

I will never not be... wanting...
I am still breathing but sometimes I'd like to stop.

Suddenly Lyssa

I want to scream in your face but they taught me to be silent. Removed my tongue before I could even form the words. My love is so full of rage and hurt that I am consumed. Eaten away like the fire at the edge of the drapes. I have things I want to say to you but if I open my mouth only mud will fall out. I'm drowning in it. Gurgling and sputtering. Thrashing about like a black scaled fish on the shore.

Eat my flesh and know me. I am your green eyed whore. You'll thrust into me and then curse me as you trip out the door. I bend my will and have no idea why I grow submissive in your presence. I let you get away with that acrid taste. Stealing my candy. Ripping me up. Hanging me over the edge of some foreign mountain. I want to burn in your place. Drip blood down on your head. I want you to understand the effect you have on other people. I want you to understand your own malice.

Sometimes, I turn murderous. Quick. Hated. Angry. Alone. I stand here alone. On the edge of this fucking bleak world with nothing to hold me down. I rise up like a balloon full of hot air. I set my clothes on fire just to stay warm. I smolder. I sting. I cringe. I'm thinking of you and you barely notice. You are not to be trusted with such things as my fragile vessel. I am quick and I am dead. I feel  myself dieing ever second of every day. Slowly rotting from the inside out.

I am worth nothing and you should come here to end me.

This Failing Night

I want to feel nothing.

I want anything but this inertia. This statis. This hiding in plain sight. There's an eye I'm trying to catch. To pin under my gaze. I lit my hair on fire. Ripped the pages from my journal. Wrote a list outlining you less attractive traits. But still love worms into my already riddled heart. So full of holes. Like Swiss cheese. This love is all I have to give. I grew it myself. Planted the seeds in the mud and waited. Nothing took root but I tried. I'm just not very good at it.

I want to feel something.

I want your hand in mine. I want your lips on mine. I want your body against mine. I want your words tangled in my own. I want to feel you out there thinking of me. Why do I do this to myself? I hear you. I hear you. I hear you shrinking and thinking and darkening on the edge of a bright day. I can't even trust pain and violence. It gives me up to the authorities and rakes me back against sharp little blue pills. I can't trust my words. They keep failing me when I need them most.

The Destroyer

They should have aborted me when they had the chance. Now it's too late.

Cocaine Skyline

He hurls the motorbike into the sharp highway corner, skipping gears as he leans the bike to the side. His knee almost grazes the pavement. The speed whipping his long hair back behind his ears. The wind drying the tears from his eyes. He's not running from anything. He's not running.

He's not running from his pretty rich boyfriend on the other side of town. That perfectly angler face and full lips. The way that pretty boyfriend slips naked into bed and then into him. He's not running from that pile of cocaine sitting on a mirror on the coffee table or the insessant ringing of his cell phone. Rich junkies are just as shady as poor ones.

He's not running from that professor he's having an affair with when her husband is out of town. So much older than him, but beautiful in her experiences. She talks about philosphy and poetry over breakfast. He sits fascinated but soon enough is weaving through the heavy traffic back to that those moutians of cocaine and his soft lips.

He's not running from that innocent girl in his calculus class that keeps batting her eyelashes at him. He wants to taste that virginity dripping down on his tongue. Finds himself staring at her, imagining what she would look like with her knees in the air. That school girl look crumpling into sheer hunger. He shakes his head and is running agian.

He's not running from all that Catholic guilt his mother bestowed upon him. The guilt that eats at him like the cocaine eats at the membranes in his sinuses. The guilt for every moment of sexual bliss. Every moment of druggy release tearing through his veins. The guilt pushes the bike faster. The yellow lines become a blur as they rush by. Faces in passing cars become streaks of light and flashes of teeth. The skyline darkens; the night takes on a blue hue. The guilt takes flight as he goes faster still and all the weight lifts up to that dark heaven.

He's not running. He's just trying to find the fastest way to his own destruction.

The Holy Wasted

I would stand at the cabin door watching the sun rise over the valley mountians. The tall golden grass stretching up the feilds to the tree line. There was coffee on the stove. Crickets jumping in the creeping sun, singing their 'come fuck me' song. The drowzy bees tumbling into the morning glories shading the windows. A fawn dog at my feet listening for approaching footsteps or rumbling motors. The creek rushed by with a constant white noise; the new sun filtering through the overhanging canopy of leaves to dapple down to the smooth peebles and darting fish.

I'm not there anymore. I'm here in this city and you are out there somewhere doing your best to ignore me. I see the night now like ink instead of pierced with a million trillion stars. It has its own wildness here. Bums in the alley, wild cats under the deck, broken bottles sparkling in the street lights. I feel you out there. Just tell me what you are thinking. I can feel it anyways but I need to know what it is.

Sometimes all this humanity is a little too much for me. All those emotions and thoughts beating against my brain. Sometimes I feel like a beetle trapped under the glass. I just want to go back. Maybe I stay here for you. Maybe you could come with me. See the reality of those places. Understand what made me this way. If you would just ask. Ask me where I came from. Ask who shaped me. Ask what they did to me. How I got here all those years ago. I want you to know but I feel like I talk too much when I get around you and you wish I would just shut up for a second. I have all these stories and no one to tell them to.

Lumpish

I wish I was dead.

...
Wait...

I'm probably just being overly dramatic.

My muscles aren't fitting right. The government is taking all my money. My lover doesn't love me. I don't have no booze in the kitchen and I can't even get drunk. I smoked all my drugs up. These pills the doctor gave me to pull it off don't do nothing fun. The phone refuses to ring. My teeth are clenching and won't stop. There's a dead horse in the ditch outside. A hooker stole my shoes. The junky down the street keeps singing off key and I forgot the words to those hangman hymns. The dentist called me all angry that I hadn't paid my bills. I'll owe student loans still in my grave. They will be taxing my headstone. I've got my soul on the lay-away plan so I'm having trouble feeling anything clearly. That tree I planted last year in the yard sprouted up a thorny bush. The fucking condos are creeping up the street and blocking out the sun. My love letters get returned unopened and with postage due. I've been hanging out with the ghosts downstairs too much but they have better cookies than I do.  I have a gun but it only shoots water. I can't afford the bullets.

...
Wait...

Maybe I do wish I was dead.

Seeking the Skin

It feels like my nerve endings are dancing on fire. It rages out of control around the edges of my skin. It tingles, it pricks, it seers. I convulse involuntary like a marionette with the strings cut.

These days drain me down. It's like someone plucked my batteries out and I'm slowly coming to a stop. Like molasses on a cold day. Underwater and trying to run. The inertia stealing the strength from my limbs until I collapse in a heap.

I reach out in need of you and find you at the door. Running your hands over my legs makes the nerves finally settle and sleep. They have been creating a storm for days. I haven't lived without pain for decades. Living is pain. But you hands moving ever so gently lull me back into my skin which I have been trying to escape from all week. Your fingers tracing the edges of my face give me what I need to make it through the night.

I would tell you that I love you, but I don't want you to leave. Your hand on my hip as you gently breathe beside me all night keeps me here for one more day. I might not be enough, and I might be damaged beyond repair, but tonight with your hand in mine I feel like I've finally come home.

The Failure of Love

Let me stay the fantasy because the reality makes you sick.

Stupid

Sometimes you just need someone to acknowledge your existence and prove that you are actually rooted in this reality.  You need fingers running through your hair as you cry bitter useless tears for no good reason. You need calming breath in your ear and gentle words tickling your neck.

Sometimes I am such a stupid girl.

Ugly Girl

I was not born pretty but purple and choking. I've spent a life time trying to be beautiful and failing in your eyes. I have no soft personality nor a small waist. I ooze into the space around me. I fill it up. I am ugly. A wicked witch on the outside of the outsiders. I never really belong. Not in your bed. Not in your head. I am never enough.

I twist all ugly. My spine has bent. My insides have ruptured and turned on me. I have spread. My belly hangs limp and my breasts sway as I walk. I am heavy with unwanted thoughts and ugly love. My own mind revolted and held me down under water. I drown in a world that seeps beauty out your skin and the looks people give me when they see me kiss you.

Why can't I be beautiful?
Too difficult to love.
Too crooked to follow.
Too hard to understand.

Bury me in your smile and keep my bones in your throat. Tell them about the homely girl you used to fuck and how tiring she became. I'll be waiting twisted just under this purple ugly world.

Foolish

I try. I really do. But I'm kind of an idiot when it comes to these things.

Monster Tongue

Everyday I step up to the mirror and peer to the other side. That big monster is always waiting for me with a lulling grin, waving excitedly at me. It's long tongue slips out its mouth to moisten its lips revealing razor sharp teeth and red gums. It looks hungry. It looks right at me. Slowly flutters its long eyelashes. Blows kisses at me through the reflective glass. Teases and flirts all ravenous; its tummy grumbles expectantly.

I would hide, but I'm rather hungry myself.

Little Pill

My mind no longer feels like it has a weight pressing down on it. A slowness thickening it. A constant heaviness like being pulled under water. Caught in quick sand. Mired in the swamps of my own feeling. Slogging just to make it out of bed every day. Giving up after only making it a few feet. Inertia. Unmoving. Stopped.

I feel lighter in thought and spirit. I am not different but simply a slowly unfettering version of myself. I no longer feel like I am drowning in clear air. My lungs aren't filled with sand and my limbs actually move as through clouds instead of mud. I am not pulling heavy chains everywhere I go. I have movement and momentum once more. I go forward.

Things are not easy but they are better.
I think this is a good thing.

Unwanted Gifts

I thought I was giving you so many things. That I had so many things to offer you.

My body. My heart. My mind. My love. My poetry. My emotions. My gentle caresses. My adoration. My help. My kisses. My sex. My longing. My quickening heartbeat. My gentle murmurs. My long caresses. My goofy laugh. My silly smile. My dancing mania. My want. My stories. My gazing deep into your eyes. My senses all clouded with you. My heat. My magic. My softness. My emergency booze. My stacks of books. My missing you when you are not here.

I thought I had so much to give you but jewels turned paste and my eyes died as the sunlight slipped behind the mountains. I only have tears to give you now and deep wishes for everything to just be better. The waves crashed into me nearly knocking me down. I came here to drown in your sharp words and that salty cold ocean. I will never come up for air.