Postcards from Purgatory, 1

It's almost too much
Hiss of a held breath a punchline hit hard square on a locked jaw
No doors unlocked for a painted face work
Of art such as this
And we all know art is hard and art is ravished with damage
Should have stayed in the shallows indeed
Did meaning ever exist
Well did it ever

Ever did I love it
Did I pedestal and skyscrape towards rain clouds and
Did what I used to do transcend the word
Party, China doll she did not eyeroll
At my existentialist rants
Or my insatiable desire to break the nearest heart where

Where is a heart that beats to the tune of my internal comedown
 Sugared serpent lick as always
As ever I am embers dulling
The smoke the mirrors the middle finger
Kiss my culture you dumb fuck
Hey it's ok to
Fragment the death sentences

To slink in a state of forever he who shall not be named

Once wrote, strung out and strung along 

Jacks hard drive indeed what the fuck kind of dream catcher was that

The bones and the bugs and the forever feeling

Of swallowing hair wish I could squeeze a tear out of my tetanus face 

This is awful ever have I flatlined sidewalks splattered with vomit disco

How do they do it the beige the bland the hip bones connected to the 

Ether and something expanded when it stopped I shone

I grope for a similar skeleton, and internal mess also on fire

Also laughing like mad and there is a serious lack

Of sleepless nights these days I was a fucking rock star 

No pun intended in the end it's all bullshit

Or was that the beginning [British accent]

I'm not dead I'm not!

I'm getting betta! 

There Will be Pomo

This is how you end up titling on the edge of your bathtub late at night
Smoking with one hand, a razor blade in the other
Blade stares at your feminist leg
You just missed the feeling of war and the scene
Needs dressing, you light a candle for ambiance and you think about
The sexual revolution and women looking at their vaginas in
The mirror you do this all the time and don't feel revolutionized at all

They were learning to love their vaginas
And to understand them and here
The speaker implies that the two are mutually exclusive you look at

Scars on your legs nobody knows your legs like you do and you just
After griping and wearing stockings and having to make up stories when people ask you what happened to your legs
Holy fuck speaker of the poem will you ever quit drinking you just
Like the idea of permanence now or actually
Loyalty it's rare and it's hard

To come by after work to feel slow again and to be conscious of your body you touch the place
Where your ribcage used to be you have tried so many things on
Your body your temple you think of Indiana Jones and doom you begin making

A list of things to do so that you don't do the thing
You could paint if you had canvas you could work
On being beautiful but that would require the thing
Because solitude and it's just a burning
That you missed your body was never a temple but an extended metaphor for a perpetual emptiness
You were in love with seeing your bones because you were in love with the architecture and the structure of things here
The speaker of the poem is trying to see how much bullshit she can
Get away with this

Is how you end up naked and googling
Are there calories in promethazine
What wine goes best with codeine and the speaker of the poem is trying not to rhyme and trying to excuse the habit of
Oh I once upon a time had a horrible cough and it's back and oh
I have a headache yeah
Right it's a really bad headache and thank you for the
Oh I just felt so full I was just so
Full a body is a body is a body is a body when you close your eyes
You are letting him you hang
Limp on a crucifix no sound comes out of your sleepy mouth your breathe gone from lashings
Out of your stomach comes the only noise you can make
That internal organ yelling at least
Your mouth salivates and you work on that list

Cinnamon and Speed

Vinyl records getting dizzy from giving
Me the run around drunk on portable clock machines
Love me forever promise and swear and curse like sailors
Read at night read in the morning
Sharing favorite authors and secrets and sharing sweat
Forever promise always I am getting too old
For this maybe but they don't put a representative number of candles on my birthday anymore
I'm sorry for chewing and spitting in front of you but at least it made you believe
When Nicole and I were little we used to stick
Pretzels into our sandwiches

Happy birthday darling we love you very very very very very much

What the shit is a reference I still can't
Leave the house every piece
Of clothing hurts my skin I just want to be underneath
Your Christmas tree when you wake up as a ten year old who is still excited
About life and has never been arrested for illegality or the way
You were arrested when my eyes met yours
On a sidewalk that once felt like it meant something

Shameful Doorway

Sally is sick again and her feelings towards doctors are causing a huge fuss at the hospital
Too many times she has been made to lie down and hold still
Sally is nauseatingly good at keeping secrets but cannot keep a journal or a boyfriend anymore

Paperweighted down by postcards from fugue states, blank scantrons with no black
Bubble-lead eyes hint that Sally has 99 problems and intimacy is 97 of them
It was backbreaking work, relearning how to just be present inside her own body

In a newspaper and toothpick tiara she waves and smiles neon vacancies like a pornstar
She would rather have memory loss than world peace
Sally startles incredibly easily but is not afraid of men, the way we all thought she would be

Vultures get doodled in the margins of her sunshine  and
She staples dew drops symbolizing drool to parking tickets
And is half asleep always and used to imagine naming things after witch hazel

Selling her soul to buy a vowel, to change her name to Gretel
Her definition of PTSD is too similar to her definition of nostalgia
Her insomnia to good use, she murdered any photograph of herself as a seventeen year old and swallows fingernails as a penance for everyone who the nights got taken out on

One Hell of a Drug

I am hardly lucid
And am trying to tell this pharmacist my date of
Birth understanding the politics of being human
Is trying to find a parking spot anywhere where
Nothing rhymes with six o clock

It took me two whole heart breaks to find my car
This is the tenth circle of hell
The damnation of those
Who lust too romantically
Or whose gravest sin is irrevocably poor
Time management skills


But patience is a virtue
My second-person silence is silver
I want someone to shut me up
Inside a cupboard forever
I auditioned for the role of the good china
Speechlessly I imagined the audience in their underwear
And got cast as the secondhand table
A chest full of secrets and not a leg to stand on

Explicit and unhealthy
Coughing along to British dramas
Shot reverse shot medium shot
This is how conversations are filmed
I still know the formula for everything