I don’t care how sorry you are /

Because I have seen now /

The error called “us” /

Is bigger than we are. /

Our tiny insignificance /

Has already burned and turned to diamante ash /

There is nothing to say, to ash. /

It is my wish /

To rage in smoke /

Just as I learned today /

Babies born of smokers /

Usually end up with emphysema /

End up with holes in their lungs like lattice work in chantilly lace /

My least favorite thing is to think of the future and its slick, short, night-clubbing inevitability /

It looks like a darkening banana skin coming down the elevator, hitting basement on repeat /

Vanquishing hope to avoid the insouciance of age, invisibility and the dreg of illness. /

Sometimes I let myself briefly wonder /

What I will die of? Will I be alone? How much will it hurt? Why do you never get used to pain? Is it any wonder they strive to build artificial life? /

Other days it is hard to keep from dying, like the flower opening her lillied face to a desert and seeing the absence of nourishment. /

As I stand /

In ash /

Waist high /

You were /

Not as important as I led you to believe /

I say this, not to crush you /

For I have refused that need to inflict hurt /

On anyone but myself /

You simply never realized /

Because you’re not as brilliant as the outline of hot wax on fingertips /

A well shined bronze, shadows of madness, cages in novels /

That I was half a person /

Unable to understand how to inhabit a world of well oiled souls /

Where people work out to avoid cellulite, even if they are dissolving like white sugar cube inside. /

It’s what you do /

All of you /

Automatrons with data phallus, souls without windows /

I used to think it was real brave or real, real /

To wear my hemorrhaged bandages on the outside /

But it wasn’t. /

There isn’t room in this crowded world for the sick /

Let alone the well /

There wasn’t room for me /

In my parents marriage /

In my well brought up friends houses, with straight backs and braided hair before seven am and tepid eggs in their fragile shell /

No room in my own life, of empty vases because I don’t want, have never wanted, to pick the flowers, the wild scent /

I can’t even kill ants, swarming me, biting my frigid skin at night /

Like once you did, train track lover /

When we were demons and goddesses and liars. /

I wasn’t tutored in appreciation, or deception of how to survive the hanging /

Life bequeaths those of us born in violet hour /

And when I was born, my mom /

Lit up another cigarette and looked outside into the bleak world of wards and cut up hearts /

Not wondering how I would survive /

Her yellow child, her wallflower bride /

But how she would. /

When I was old enough I wondered how I would too /

Over and over, like practicing ballet will invariably deform your toes /

I grew misshapen in my ghosting despair /

While all around me, others who were well and adjusted and filled with jam and feathers /

Wondered what they’d have for tea, who they’d go down on at the office, where they got their hair dyed and how to fix the run in their cheap stockings /

How to bottle it … How? /

I am flying above the world on the key around my neck, the lock is in my bones, it rattles and disturbs me with its pricking /

People tell me to remain calm but I am already doused in gasoline and alight on the lyric pyre /

You watch with a bucket of water at your feet. You stand still and unmoving like every time, nothing is done to save /

Choose a side. Choose a side. Choose a fucking side! /

My nails grow long and bullets make polka dots in my dress like punctuation without sense /

Once more I am the young girl trying to dance away her hurt. Once more the Winter is hot and nothing freezes to kill the pestilence /

A man said on the TV the other day that he had no desire to better himself. A cult leader told us we could become gods if we just lowered our cameras. /

I wanted to learn to tie the knot in my core, right. /

There are golden tickets in the sky if you look long enough /

And it is not even bloody /

Fireworks night Charlie. /

I don’t care how sorry you are /

Because I have seen now /

The error called “us” /

Is bigger than we are.