iron man

there’s more than one kind of armor. we’ve gotten good at welding over the years and we’ve made ourselves suits out of steel and cynicism, greaves and pauldrons shining and bright and keeping the world an inch of metal away. we know too well that there are a million and two ways to die, that our flesh is prone to parting, that the best defense is a sword and a shield against the greater darkness. we enlist our demons in our service instead of running from them screaming and if the price to pay is sleepless nights, well, i’d rather scream in my sleep than fall when i most need to stand — there are worse things than nightmares. and i’d rather be hidden behind a helmet than let the world break me in two.

we may be broken inside but we’ll be damned if we tell you so.

carry on, my wayward son

you lose your way,
and in the thick of the forest
you think you’ll never find it again.
you’ve got to climb the trees
to rise up
and that’s when
you get your wings

look at you with your broken feathers
and your heart
dripping from your hands
because you gave
it away
put a monkey on a pedestal
and handed him
your most precious organ
as if he knew what he held
in fingers not adapted
to the holding
of hearts

look, look,
with eyes not heart,
and if you can do that
you’re half a step closer
to peace

keep moving forward

sometimes you don’t realize your mistakes until you’re neck deep. i came home a different person from the one who left and there’s only so long i can hide this new face — i am not the girl he never loved and i am not the child they had to hold. and i’ve never been good at the transition, or perhaps i’m too accomplished, too prepared to cut the strings and leave everyone i know for something new, but turns out you can’t teach an old dog a new trick after all. i am malleable, ductile, pliant. i am the fire that rises and the wind that moves. people look at me with shining eyes like i understand the world more than they, and i don’t, but i’ve seen enough of it to hazard a guess. i am impermanent and ever-shifting and i have never been able to keep what gets left behind, no place in my dusty heart for sentimentality. i can only move forward. and you know the motion dulls the pain, you walk it off under the desert stars and lose your demons somewhere in the mountains that bar the way, let the new ones clamber from the oak trees down to your shoulders to hitch a ride. we’re all running but it’s no secret there’s no escape — we may be born innocent but we damn well don’t die that way.

summer storms

it’s not unlike floating, sluggishly drifting with the hot breeze and dreaming of cold desert nights, this feeling behind my eyes. i might as well be a cloud tumbling over the ground, feeling blinder than love is fabled to be — i am made of water vapor and the barest shapes of a prenatal dream, i am malleable as the clay that prometheus used to mold this body that lies dormant under old porcelain skin. there used to be a fire in my lungs and a drumming in my ears; there was thunder in my belly and lightning in my breath and a chain around my ankles that tied me down to this green earth. there were hands not mine to hold me in. now the heat has set in and my chest is tight with humid air, the sky on tenterhooks, ready to split and roll and release the tension i’ve held in for too many days and spill me out into the waiting arms of the earth and remind me i’m only human. it’s been a long time since i’ve been thunderstruck.

our time is running out

we throw our lives away so easily, after dreams we blow out of glass pipes. chase down the smoke and find it’s dissipated and then four years have already gone by — no more time to fuck it up again, we’re adults now without ever having passed the bar. our parents found each other so young and then there’s us, trying on new lovers like flimsy sundresses, and some of us just settle for sweatpants. i’m watching them throw their hearts off to the wolves and taking as much pain as they can to see how much it takes to break the heart of man. and you know, i thought we’d be young forever. i thought someday i’d be old enough, that with enough years on my shoulders i would learn less of fear and more of love. but there’s no such thing as old enough. only older than we were. the days are settling down around our feet and it makes us anxious to live before we die, to move within each other and feel something dark and deep stir from the sleep of accumulated years. where’s the wiser path here? we throw ourselves down these corridors and i’d rather just sit and wait for daylight to come, but which of us is truly living? do i guard my heart in vain hope or let it break my chest and feel something in the blood dripping down my belly?

i don’t want to rip myself apart just to say that i did it.

somebody that i used to know

in the space between the cracks in the sidewalks, that’s where I’ll always be seventeen and crazy, where the wet moss thrives in the summer drought. we pounded paths in the cracking concrete until our feet went numb trying to find their way home. we loved before we knew what it was. we loved under summer’s stars, under the archer, under the water-bearer and the light of the moon, and if I could wipe the tarnish of years from your mind we could love like that again, simple, clean. we would have set the sky on fire just to watch the beauty in the flames. the desert could burn around us and we’d choke on the sweet smoke of our own ignorance and asphyxiate with a smile - but now we know the prices paid and now any price is more than we will give. we were beings of potential, of infinite jest, but now we finally feel the steel on our wrists and ankles. but once we were more. once, we were so damn much more than this.

mortality comes knocking

my father almost died yesterday,
four days away from may.

they cut him open
and missed
and tore a hole in the vena cava,
and one-point-five liters of my father’s life
ran out on the table
and covered the hands
of a well-intentioned man.

my father lived yesterday
because of quick fingers
and a steady hand.
do I thank jesus for my father’s life?
do I thank the doctor, the nurse?
do I thank those who prayed?
do I thank the fates?

should I think to thank at all?

when I close my eyes I see it,
my father’s skin too pale
as blood overfills the wound they made.
when I close my eyes I wonder
if it had been a second less
if my father
died
yesterday

i would think not to thank, but to curse, to rage, to die.

but my father is not dead today.

vivisection

if i could lift the lid off your skull to see your mind
what would i find?
if i could dig my hands into your intellect,
pick your brain for tidbits
that i have never heard before,
trace the corpus callosum with a fingertip
and see the colors you see
and hear the music you hear
sweet and clear —
would it sate my desire
to know you through and through?

if i could crack your ribs and open your chest
what would i find?
if i could take my fingers
and pry open your heart,
bare its chambers
and peer into the aorta
and lay all its secrets out on the table,
shining in a row,
tidy and ordered
and waiting for examination —
would i find the key to loving you?

your body, closed, is the greatest mystery,
and i want to know its every curve and plane,
the delicate machinery that propels your hand to mine
and draws me in, magnetic.

pathways

smaller than we have become, we looked up and told the world who we would be someday, tall and beautiful, poised and sure and greater than we were. and fifteen years later we have found ourselves: a little taller than we used to be, a little shy and sad of eye but wiser than we think, are we. oh, we thought we could change the world and we thought we’d thought wrong too, we thought we could have saved the lives we lost and turned the clock backward and made the wrongs righter. we thought we’d found love all shining, nice and clean. we dusted off our fresh pink hearts and pulled out the daggers they pushed inside us and thought we’d bleed out for sure, but our wounds scabbed over and now the scars are old friends to us — they make our hearts our own. we’re bigger than we used to be and we know now how to smile through the pain and spit out the blood. and the paths we walk up these hills and valleys are budding with dandelions through cracked pavement, and at the top of the hill we can turn around and see ourselves behind us, small and pure. could that child be proud of who we have become? can that child see me now, the scientist, the student, the lover, the writer, the cripple, the depressive — could she ever be proud of the woman she will find herself becoming? could she even understand the flaws that make the woman who she is?

the woman can’t know, and the child can’t say. but the only way to go is forward, the only path from here leads up, and i get the feeling — she might be glad, someday — of what lies ahead.