Held together with ribbon and twine,
Our childhood selves in pink gingham
Rehearsing for a musical about my 12th
Chromosome,
Who watches in the audience, less than
Delighted with my performance.
I held your hand crossing
Boulevards of performance and
Cheap accusations of raw penance.
You were half my size,
Smelled of croissants I
Never ate in Paris.

Chromosomes are a particular bunch,
Critical and essential.
My voice sounds like a plastic bag
Caught in a fan,
And my genes hiss from the
Dark dense visions
Of my warped mind.

We will grow up,
Smell distinctly of possibility,
And then flourish in fields of tulips,

Ripped apart like two galaxies

Dancing beside a black hole.

Being –
Celestial noun,
Rough neck verb.

My name crawls up the walls
With the lizards,
Dripping sweat off the S in Lisa,
In this tropical suburbia of hungry humidity.

To have. To hold.
To be bold.

Pleasure sunbathes at
the periphery of
Armageddon,
Glowing in the radiant light
Of mass death.

The work of my hands will burn.
The work of my tongue
Will breed like bunnies
In the salted bogs of blood and memory.

What is it to be a being?
Is this skin case enclosing
All of me,
Or are my more sacred components
Blowing in the billowing breeze,
Bereft of body?

Soul,
In your cantankerous wisdom,
Fill me like a breath,
so I remember
Myself.

Degenerate locks allow me passage into a haunted house of my own making. The ghosts here were all embroidered by me. The slamming doors are a trap beat rising from the fiercest fire in hell. Folds of memory, folders of poems. What is left of a lace life unraveling. I cannot leave. The pain will devour me like a woodchipper, from the toes up.

White, watery worlds of cleaned thoughts roll away from me in this universe made of my flesh and bone. The fear in my prayer. The tearing in your chest as the last leaf falls on a planet I cannot remember. Stifled bruises show up at the most conspicuous moments. I am my own gravity, drawing my love and my baby toward me eternally like a bowling ball in a water bed. All else rolls away until I’m left with a thin, shiny film of memory eternally falling into itself.