21

i sent you something for your birthday and i pray that it gets lost in the mail, and you never see, touch, understand all the little things i needed you to know.
i forgot for a moment that we are no longer the same people.
to you i am everything you find unattractive, to me you are a nervous twitch, black coffee at noon, bruised legs.

well HA HA i am the horrible one for losing a sense of self, and needing to find it
in all of this, where the fuck did YOU go?

i watched you spill your drink in my shoes

if i had my way, no one would have ever stayed as late,

my door would be yours

and i wouldnt have skinned my knees everytime we said goodbye

i confuse
i confuse
i confuse
i abuse
fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck

you look like the hungry state line

art imitates life imitates art imitates life imitates what the fuck am i even talking about? teeth, nose, face? My mind is in that hazy state between sleep and conciousness, writing gives my unsteady hands purpose, a reason to shake while smoothing the curve of a g and spraying the rest across walls or paper or limbs or lids. Jump up on my lap, curl into me and sleep forever, crawl inside my womb.be my first kiss, sloppy and sweet, pulsating with anticipation, or a hand in my shirt. oh, i have become completely innapropriate. all i want is to sparkle and drink and moan and when i watch the street lights go out on my way in, think of nothing but the few slow seconds i will spend infront of my door, counting to eight, remembering what it was like to have someone to thank for the night, say that first goodbye, and endup fucking and scratching,and praying for no end, but never calling back. i miss waking up to dirt under my nails, gluing twigs to my fingers incase i broke them, burning incense and hair, draping my legs over the side of the bed and singing to the world moving past my windows. Be me, not mine, but me, a verb, live and do. love me more passionately than we can understand, larger than i care to know.
THATS IT this is it, ive over romanticised everything as an attempt to validate the fact that i no longer care enough to differentiate my personal concept of right, from wrong. i've given up trying to not drink before three, i want to be distant, vague, make a million men fall in love with one smile, take the train for free, win goldfish for batting my lashes. i want to taste a thousand sunsets, to feel summer in my mouth, to explore thailand in shapes and colors, i want to function without a heavy mind. function. i want to function. i am scared of the moons raping glow. even more terrified of feeling something real for anyone. i make eye contact with passing men, try to see how long until they look away. i've fallen for winter and nativity scenes. i decorated my living room with golden calves, golden calves,you were my golden calf that i rode away from this whole fucking gypsy city filled with empty circles of sallow girls blowing kisses into closed fists waiting for a camera to catch them in the act.
fishbowl eyes, cheeks sinking, lungs filling,everything pouring into me, filling myself with everything around me, safely living inside everyone i meet. destroying them in such a timely manner, because being a part of my life has been described as the act of swallowing a diamond ring. all i want is to go to sleep at 8 and stop scrathcing at these phantom limbs that kick and beg for a second chance at living outside of myself. outside of this mythologized world, where chainsmoking and bad credit are glamorous. where i wear fur coats in the summer and cry over how beautiful my hands look underwater. i want to know what i'm told to know and never wonder if there is something more, or if god is the homeless man on the corner. i want to be detetched, get my way without the lovelines that rum in bed brings. i want so much less than what i have created, because no one wants a girl that pukes on your sheets and laughs during sex.

what do i have to say about all the abandonment i have been victim to?
yes, please, run, if not, in the end i will abuse you. i'll introduce you to heroin then take it away, simply to watch muscles tense while your body shakes.
victimize me before i do something worse to you my golden calf.

Darling,
You have to know that River can smell all the states we have been though on my jeans. He was none too pleased that we slept through Massachusetts with no intent to ever actually make it to Boston. Lowell was a nice substitute, but the city was too small and filled with tiny girls dancing at street corners. Feathers, missing teeth, a parade of first place ribbons, and a funeral procession of losers.
I have since washed away any scent of unknown highways, but River sits at my feet and whines about never seeing the place he was born, but I have to wonder, were any of us ever born? What is our connection to life? Certainly it is not a puppy that is wiser than his helpless disposition lets on.
Darling, please hang your clothes to dry outside, i think we both need a scent of familiarity.


Kristen.

my thought process has become sloppy and vague. i've been stealing pieces of strangers conversations and making them my own, yet as fragmented as i am everything always comes back to one plot. the same story line plays out day after day without interruption. same characters executing each mark perfectly;

a boy, a cat, the faceless lush.

a boy, a cat, the faceless lush. a boy, a cat, the faceless lush. her lips,cat tails, lights out dress to the ground, a boy, a cat, the faceless lush. so it goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and so until i can find exactly where i placed the beginning or the middle i cannot bear to finish the part where the lush blacks out and the curtains fall.

i felt the doors dragging behind while the seasons blew in a northern wind, like any good daughter i forgot to say goodbye before i left to spend my last night in town lost in tunnels underground, banded like gypsies with an italian romeo and an albanian philosopher, trying to find that house in a hole.... i've never felt as comfortable as when they noticed something wrong with me.
" you dont sleep"
"you dont eat"
"oh god, i'm in a blackout arent i?"
romeo tried to pull apart every beauty mark or shifted glance, his smooth face holding back a gin mouth from calling out every over exaggerated feature i used to get where i wanted to be: drunk on the E train at 2am, making eye contact with foreign men, trying to make it to a bed that would only get me naked and fucked up.

ive stolen three hours for this, wasted days on the wrong train with a man that allowed me to vomit in his pocket, now, in front of you im so unsure of what needs to be said or done, or which bricks i should move to watch you tumble down without any clean break from yesterday or today. you're a house in a hole, where i've got my hand on the wall and a foot through the door,nothing left on the table but piano keys, layed out like an unwritten song, so we strung our guitars with christmas lights, falling over notes, we sang off key until our voices melted into one. you are the prettiest owl i ever did hear, i pull your breath down through the sheets, with my legs through the door you could call me a theif. destroyed the stair case in hopes to keep me around, turned the lights out and the pillows over neither of us expected the night to start like this with knowing how it would end: tiny paper notes hidden in my shoes; kicking up leaves more uncertain of what season is to come than my bending limbs that drag me further away from the part of who we were that made us a "we"

now be done with it, take my name so i'll never remember how i was so unashamed before you wore my skin.

francesco where are you?

holy holy

darling i was so much better with those needles in my teeth,
falling over you somewhere between brooklyn and 3:30 am.

imploding suns over 9:58

remember that scarf i lost at your place? well i heard that you sold it it to your ex-girlfriend for a bag of rice so you could feed me last night.
well i didnt eat it, i fed it to the fucking cat, threw the lentils to the pigeons. i dont want to eat your overcooked shit, it tastes almost as bad as your come in my mouth.
this is it, our terrible drunken goodbye sex, only instead of standing over you, naked as winter, scared of being seen at a bad angle, i'm laughing at how mad you get every time i interrupt to ask for another glass of vodka
what? you dont like a drunk easy girl, laid out across the boulevard? oh i think you do.
NOW... about that scarf, are you planning on getting it back? i never wanted this shitty dinner anyway, just like i never wanted to wakeup in the same bed as you for more than one night, or how i never wanted to watch your mouth form the lines and spaces that you forgot to fill with anything but p's and q's and fuck you's. No, i'm not saying this out of jealousy, i'm just reassuring myself that seeing your lips move in an empty fashion is just as bad as feeling them brush against my legs. Clumsy, Clumsy, wheres my shirt? how do i know which girl i am? Monday, Tuesday? Oh where the fuck is that calendar, you know..that calendar? I need to know which day is best for making up better reasons why i should control all of my judgments, and watch you pull my hair across your eyes when the lights come on. How long have i been in this same room? Three four five months?
i shouldn't complain, i mean the sex was always good, mostly..sometimes..well, whatever
Can you remember when i was plowing through streets, a quarter of the bottled down, half naked barefoot and drunk, wild and dangerous. I never caught up with whatever i was chasing, so like a dog in heat i ran circles around you instead. You took me home and undressed me, i never felt as cheap as i did when you didn't even touch me, just put me to bed, wokeup the next morning and smiled. " I'll see you later this week."
you are a lazy liar. you wont. you'll be seeing some other girl spread her legs while you ready your lips to fuck with her expectations.










"Theres alot of dead birds around your place this time of year."
" You are one interesting girl, an exotic bird."

forgot about you
remembered someone new
filtered my spit and drank the rest
oh what a battered city i've ridden into the mountains,where no one croons like the homeless do
settled in nicely to an anonymous life where i went to government parties dressed as a scarecrow, where i danced in circles around the politicians wives , drunk off every slack jawed male. i met you there, you, with your leather coat and nine-to-five complexion.
i gave you all my devils, took on a new vice, held hands with city hall, and fell into you harder than my mind wanted to allow
you there, my wild face, all framed with unclear intentions
fingers all painted black drifting over our clean sheets, patterned domino's drawing the curve of your face on my pillowcase
i fell asleep with my lips pressed to your ink outline
closed my eyes, tiny broken bulbs,because every time i opened them i saw everyone inside out, there was a woman with a doll house for a heart standing in place of my reflection
i woke up inside out and read in the news that you fell five stories without bending your smile, took a cab home and got stabbed over five bucks and an expired train ticket
i missed you last night at the governors ball, turned my eyelids out and faked a frown, because since you first wrapped that leather coat around me , i've been known as the prettiest girl in town.

we laid in a bed of spanish moss

I killed a white rabbitt while riding a black horse. tight spun organs unraveling with such a terrible speed. his race out of existance left my mouth dry. with nothing to drink i put my lips to his spine, lifted the fluid over my tongue and swallowed an exotic burbon. decades passed in that one taste. i pulled back feeling savage, wearing a crown of feathers, cradling four limp peacocks.

nothing leads to nothing leads to sex

i've seen it, your peak of perfection, your still death under moon slit eyes, naked as yesterday.
a pale decay at the corner of our bed, three broken ribs under my pillow
your breathing sounds like dragging feet across the brooklyn bridge
wishbone lockets thrown ontop of the radiator, the burning marrow soaked in cat piss
flecks of your curiousity trapped inside of me, a snowglobe of unconcieved children
still i'm here, spread out across the floor, a bear skin rug, too bare to trap the mud from your shoes, parchment fingers too curled to pick the secrets from your laundry.
that snowglobe turned to a woodenstove, sorting through each object you left behind. burnt hair and candle wax. you cant have the part of us that grows on the walls of my chimney stack. theres no us, only me, scraping away at my internal tombs tangled corridors. how are innocent people formed from the vile acts of spite and liquor soaked nights at such young moments? apple cores got planted instead of seeds, and this whole rotten city was birthed in return, is it the same with dogs or birds or children?
on the count of three darling we fall out of this together, both waiting on the terrible anomie we'll slide into, only i've never been good with numbers, and i can't say things once over, so lets try six, or twelve or whatever it takes for us to dismantel our rare bodies that hold together in such odd forms.





i'll see you next september, lets make it a regular thing: me forgetting my shoes, you forgetting to pullout.

some verses

i can be your favorite color.

i can fill your glass
i can be the state line ( and i can move it 62 miles north)
i can be your whisky face
i can be your winter sleep
i can be your america
i can be your one drink too many
i can be your morning wood
i can be your 7:39
i can be your broken lense
i can be your painted walls
i can be your columbia
i can be your hollow words
i can be your teeth
i can be your lost keys
i can be your high tide
i can be your tired eyes
i can be your train home
i can be your hide-away
i can be your frostbite
i can be your broken fingers
i can be our new york.

i can hate you for it all, cant i?

strange views

heaving virgins with grass stained knees, swearing that no man nor child nor animal could make them open wide. fuck. fuckfuckfuckfuck

i cant write

i cant think

nononononono

i dont know where it comes from, where it goes, who i am, and whats the date? have i asked the time yet? maybe i should do so, is it eastern or rather pacific?

how do i know which ocean to touch just to get the god damn clocks set properly. who decides what letters form numbers?

how do i have so many pointless questions, yet not a single statement to make.

what do i write(type)?

do i speak of my year without words?

it was a year with no depth. simply a year to let my hair grow longer, to tangle more people in it, to forget what it is to know. to just fucking know.

i've been dead, i've been insane, i've been in love.

autumn came fast, and i learned to fall out of love. i learned to run circles around men[never turn my back], to break them and laugh.

i've learned a million different things, fucked a million men, burned a thousand bridges and still, nothing to say.

am i bone dry at 20?

i've been wandering hospitals at night, breathing deep.

i need a disease. fatal. i need a death rattle to wake me up every morning. shake the bed.

piss stained sheets.

keep me up, hold me down, beat me to keep me in my place.

anything, i just need a connection to life.

fuck

oh

i've gone insane again.

how many

no

how long

wait

what was the time again?

78910, i'll break my own fingers so i never have to write again.

pour salt in my eyes and cry like a saint.

i tend to get drunk off holy water and call preists pretending to be less damaged than i am

laughing until i cant stand to pray about it anymore

i pretend to be gay and ask for forgiveness, breath heavy into the reciever and moan

"i am sorry father, its just forgiveness gets me hard"

i used to go to church to have a sip of wine, only a sip turned to a gulp, and i got slapped by a priest.

berry stained lips behind a hymnal, where i'd dream of virgins stomping on grapes, their tender touch in my mouth

i wanted to taste nothing but their chastity.

i couldnt eat

i still wont eat, i just dream of being untouched again

"hello father..when i bite my lips i feel closer to god, if you bite my lips i can be god."

am i worth seeing?

ask for blindness

erase my name

forget my face

what is my connection to life?

i held hands with a stranger and watched a burger place burn to the ground
her car was in the parking lot, flecked with ash, smelling like branded cattle
i got home with a handful of ash
she got away with my number

atleast tonight made sense.

luxuria, invidia,gula,avaritia

VII

i will acknowlege my vices,

while you walk on like a saint in may.

everytime i try not to be invisable someone steps on my toes

i was never the daughter of a virgin, and so i have never known modesty to be a virtue. is it so difficult to wrap your mind around the fact that i was born a lush. i came out of the womb and into the world kicking and screaming for another man to break, a final drink to finish, a last look at a world not round enough to fill with my secrets.i've grown into a tangle of frozen ropes wound tight over broken kettles. my mother is a starfish strung from a ceiling rafter in my room, cut off one limb and she grows ten others. i am parasitic and numbing, decent and graceless. i was once an island, filled with natives and generations of godless wars, until i became notoriously androgenous and sunk to the oceans floor. no more men to decieve, just time without numbers, and forever felt like forever, because ugly things never tire.

phantom limbs

VIII-III:

we lay inside drained city pools until our bodies became the pavement

held hands outside of hells gate, breathing in the smoke from your lungs, talking about ghost lights over the east river

walking through a sleeping burrough of frowning stone faced houses you asked how i want to die, i asked the time.

you fucked me on a white bed of ash while calling out shapes and colors of passing clouds

there were cats fighting beneath us, screaming louder than myself, or simply, more passionately

i watched all the tiny pieces of myself drift apart through the floorboards and cracked walls that night

onto damp streets and subway cars, away from the place where i knelt to repent my sins with a mouthful of holy water and a headfull of rum, away from the boiling blue irises that started to feel like home.

a lovely twitch

thank you mother for the harmonic sighs

but please close the window, your heated breath was keeping me warm.

city inside a city

one eyed cat, telling me to push it back
its little sloppy bones clicking down the stairs
tiny arms pulling closer to his bed
black birds on a broken sill, screaming open up
open your mouth wider so i can crawl out
i cant be your teeth, your jaw, your tongue
this old hole, you call it home
its a snake den collecting dead skin
i've got alot to lose, and a tight face of young flesh
one eyed cat, licking spit from my chest
whiskers dipped in come trailing the length of my side
whisky tits held with inserted finger tips
your a raw saint when i'm on my knees
spilling prayers into my mouth and on the sheets
only theres no god to hear us while we are tasting tongues and teeth
just the children with their mothers in the street staring at every decision i forgot to make
i've got a brain full of liquor and i'm moving slow
theres no god, only a one eyed cats tiny paws tangled in my hair
i'm wearing his calico tail like a halo tonight.

He grabbed her tunneling in and around his fingers are a longitude,tracing paisley linen as the contours of africa or a part in her lips like the dead sea.This body reaches out to life like the earths collapsed edges touching time.She held out her hands while he took notes on star trails and broken glass. Bottle hits pavement like Orions Belt. They are map makers for the illicit and wedlocked virgins, for the infants drown in a river between organs and oxygen,left to suffocate or choke on broken bone. He's a maverick of geography, shes learning her name in 27 tongues."Amour Propre"

wolves licking feet

i could tell she never had a dog, mostly by her dirty fingers. Had she been fortunate enough to have one she would wake up daily to warm thick saliva running over her spindly little hands. cant you see her eyes are lit by a sugary maddness? she would sneak him cookies under the table,raisin mostly ( who wants that shit anyway). A rich chocolate cookie may just make its way from her mouth to his, and her maid would find her dog like a deflated mass of fur in a pool of vomit. dead. her generousity and his greed reflected in his marbled pupils.
her mother would have the once winter white carpet of her 8th floor apartment on the south side of the trump towers repaired by a man that didnt know how to properly use tenses.
Past is present and present is past to him
Which is funny because isnt that how it is for the dead?
the little girls fingers would remain dirty, and stray hairs from her deceased dog would stick to her lollipop stained palms. a shrine to her missing friend.
she would grow up and fall in love with a massochist
they would fuck and scream and she would gag him and smile at the sound of him losing consciousness as she wraps her scarf tighter around his neck
he would beg for her to stop, but she would touch herself as he clawed for air
when she finished she would unwarp the scarf, while making him lick her raisined fingers
freudian doctors would love her
in fact, her masochist would be one
i looked at the little girl on the street harder as she twirled her balloon sring around her fingers until the tips turned blue
and thought to myself
maybe its better for children to not have pets
they wont have to learn about loss so early in life
of course
in that case
we would all be so normal
so vague
and these days
who doesnt want to be sodomized by a girl that killed her dog?