Tongue-Kissing Teena

    Tweak will leave you charred and raw inside; you hands and genitals will fuse together,
chafed raw and oozing so you'd think the skin would join.  And there's no joy.  
There's no joy in anything after a while, and quit or relapse desire stays the same. Frustration, rather.  The last time I used, a whole summer ago, and I went home tic-eyed, white-tongued stuttering speechless and miserable. I'd smoked rounds of hours and 40's worth and it never felt good.  And my fingers still itch for the feel
of a slimy glass stem. 

Damn the Roses

    My eyes burn and I am weary of thinking about You.  Whiskey changes nothing anymore; I drink beer like the inverse of  cola, growing mildly sleepy, diffuse.  Ativan doesn't soothe nor xanex comfort--- and I have stopped wishing on stray eye-lashes and the color of robins' eggs, the sleeping-pill blue.  I have stopped wishing for You.  Perhaps this is the point You arrived at monthes ago.  Perhaps I really don't exist for you, anymore.  Perhaps I never did, or not for a very long time, anyways.  Maybe that's what you were trying to tell me when you kept harping on my being away so long.  But it all seems so far away, seems not to matter, and sometimes I think if I was there I could think of nothing better to do than throw  a match into the pile of accumulated dirty laundry, tacky Christmas gifts, paperback books, and get out.  Walk out, stroll out.  I don't mean to need it to burn exactly, just to get it behind me.  And again, that may very well be the exact same way that you feel about me.  But there are the notebooks, of course**,.  The notebooks, the music, the letters from H.  Breakups prioritize possessions.  I am too raw and tired inside to even begin thinking of the letters from You.  And there is the computer and the speakers and...and...etc.  There is the fact that we did live together for over two years, and there is the raw and chafing place where I remember You talking of marrying me, *** of saying you would make a proper woman out of me, and of how I was always afraid to talk about it, afraid to jinx it, because I wanted so spectacularly for it to be true.  Did I believe you, exactly?  Is that important?  I called You my Beloved,-- no I named You that, and that**** is not a name I have used before, not even in my own most private thoughts.  Not even for any girl.  For anyone.  And I wonder if You were ever really as jealous of other people, other sexes, other friends, as you made yourself out to be, but again it seems unimportant, a thought that is hardly worth sustaining, a line of questioning that bores even me beyond tears.  It seems too soon, somehow.  It seems unlikely, as though I should still be mourning for You, sighing and sobbing and rending my heart and my hair.  Which I have, naturally, considered shaving.  Again.  Especially if I go visit S. in Mexico, where I understand the shower arrangements to be somewhat primitive, and it takes forever and a day to wash my hair now as it is.  Not to mention I can put it off weeks at a time, which probably is not a good way to be, especially when one is a guest in someone’s home.  And then I remember one of the last times I talked with You on the phone and you were sodden, drunk, but not angry with me.  Only regretful sounding, only hoarse and coarse and chokeful like you were saying hard words despite regret, or like your pain made made your words somehow stronger, lent them credence, honesty,  importance, like your pain in speaking thus negated any discomfort I might have in listening -- that You always pictured my hair down and loose and myself bare-chested with my hair in long curls, locks of it resting against my breast and "tickling a tit."   That was how You wanted to think of me.  It was not exactly an odd conversation for the phone, but not one that I would have chosen to remember.  Something is growing slowly, fibrous, over the part of me that still loves You, and I don't know if I want it there or not.  
















****[take out 'have' from that sentance]  
























***["there is nothing i want or need that we can't have together..."

Fistfuls of Silence

Nobody listens when you talk.  Nobody listens when I don't talk is the problem.  Nobody listens to the things I'm trying to hear, the sounds their own words make, their stories uninterrupted by queries their abrupt disruptures by my silent response.  Nobody listens when I don't talk.  Nobody lets me listen thus to them.  I like the ways that I hear silently my thoughts less curdled when there is no need for words.  For gestures even, for the facial pantomime of interchange.  Nobody listens when I don't talk to share the hearing of things I'm silent for.  Nobody listens when I don't talk about my parents: my mother; the ogre.  Nobody listens when I don't talk about the pills.  Nobody listens to my undrugged silences.  Nobody listens to the keywords I know not to say My stories, my language, obtuse abstractions.  Nobody listens to the directness the unconvoluted.  Nobody listens to the things I have not to say.