Where is your God now?

Someone once asked me, "where is your God now?"
so I
asked the monsters under my bed
and closet critics in my head
and they all insisted that they hadn't seen my God.
The Church told me to look within--that God
was hiding in my skin--
that the Holy Ghost was just the wind
that lived within
the billows of my lungs
so I
walked up to my parish priest and bared my chest out to him
and asked him why I had to cover up God's resting place
with a bra.
My mother told me I was a whore and I swore
that I was so much more
I was God's resting place, I said. I'm the temple whore.
In my father's office was a metal safe and I cracked it open
but there was no God amongst the valuables and
the passports insisted that they were more important.
Someone wrote some dirty notes and stuck them on
a wall
they had pictures of tits on bits of bible
but that didn't stop some junkie animal
from pissing on the wall.

There were witch burns across my skin and
pentagon scars where I had been
branded like a sacrificial cow.
I looked for God in prison cells
and wedding bells,
but the closest I ever came to finding God
was in futile prayer
on my way to Hell. 

Vicodin

Everyone of us is a battlefield and there is shrapnel
in our bones that rattles
when we sing, reminding us that once there were
no guns
no ammo
just soft and silk and powdered kisses on milk-white skin.
Forever ago and for days after that I thought
that the sun had fallen behind a cloud
like pennies behind the couch
and if i looked hard enough I would find little
couch-cushion treasures buried in pillows and used up
memories.
but the sun never came up and I supposed that it got lost
in rain filled clouds and maybe if i cried
and unburdened the skies
the earth would fill with sun-kissed spills
and the sun would come again.

Yesterday I went up to the moon and yelled at him
for stealing all my sunshine
and he laughed at me with twinkling eyes
and a cheshire smile
and told me to look inside my mother's closet.
I dug up the dregs of DNA files listed as classified--
they were in a wall safe behind the skeletons--
secrets--dark, deep--
written in chromosomes and protein signatures
that told me I would die in a vicodin-induced
sleep.

Potpourri

I found potpourri on a night stand all dried and dead and diffusively divine and I watched
dry-eyed and wide-eyed as the once-petals disintegrated into ash and
fragrant lies.
I am so much like that potpourri, but so much more like what it was before it died. In its afterlife it had a name....and so did i.
I called myself a certain thing and lived inside this person's skin but
I don't believe i was really me
until I dried up inside.
now I'm barren, now I'm dry. I've shed my skin--my borrowed skin--
and pressed it into the leaves of books along with
rose petals and honeysuckle sprigs.
Somehow between then and now I've become
an urn of born again ferns I've
metamorphosed from stone
into potpourri.

Breaking

I am drunk and angry and I want to scream and I know I'm ungrateful and I hate you for taking my innocence. He took my virginity he took my heart but you. You took everything that was pure and clean about me and drenched it in leach infested gasoline
and set it on fire and oh GOD I HATE YOU. I want to fall apart
I want to fall apart I'm about to crash and burn. You know i'm about to break. I'm going to break I'm going to break oh christ I can feel my heart start to crack in the spider web of gentle invisible lines I can't come to you every time i'm mad at him and OH GOD I'M SO ANGRY and ashamed i'm so frustrated with you and him and this awful mess I wish I could talk to you but i'm so scared that you'll scoff and tell me to grow up because what else is there to do in life but to grow up and grow old and wither away and to die alone always alone we're incomplete all of us. We live all our lives searching, stretching, fitting square pegs into round holes or worse forcing bigger rounder pegs into smaller claustrophobic bodies you are my bigger rounder peg and i'm too small to contain you--you stretch me out and leave me cracked and chipped and radiating fracture lines outward reaching for something that will finally break me whole and turn me into a black hole and then, maybe, I can fit you and you and you and some of him or all of him inside me without breaking.

Residue

There's a pin in my shoulder. It's a metal pin, titanium.

It pulls me down and holds me in place but when I stretch,

I wince. 

It's a minor thing, this wincing. It's a barely there, hardly worthy

mention. But still, when I breathe, I wince. 

It's the same thing when I talk. My lungs pinch. 

They pinch me like they're trying to hold the words inside....as though...

well, as though they want only the sound, only the essence to escape my throat

and leave the residue of alphabet to coat my throat. 

Again, it isn't something that impairs my life. It's just a trickling, trifling afterthought

of discomfort. It's a barely there, hardly worthy mention. 

There's something else inside my skin, just like the pin, just like the pinch.

It's a nagging, probing itch, the kind that wakes you up

and won't let you think. 

I can scratch it all I want but 

it's always there. 

Sometimes I forget to scratch, because I think I forget--at times--

what it's like to not itch. 

These are trivial things. Barely there, hardly worthy mentions. 

But still. They are, simply, the symptoms of living. Of living

the way I chose to live. They are the cigarettes and the street fights

they're the rope burns and needle scars. 

They are, like you, residue

of a life I chose with you.

Confession

I have a confession waiting under the hood of my tongue.

I'm going to chew it, gnaw on it, tear it down with my teeth

but I pray, tonight I pray that instead of swallowing it I will instead

release it into the midnight air and let it breathe.

 Oh lord I've waited. I've waited so long my bones have turned to glass and I've melted

into the satin silk of my wedding gown.  I've grown fragile in the sun, brittle.

I was strong once, so strong. Like the trunk of the mystic oak and now I've been weathered down, beaten. 

Perhaps, if there was a fire, a bonfire a wildfire, something ANYTHING

to get me to lift my feet, my roots if you will and MOVE.

I'm so tired. I'm so tired of watching the grass grow old and die at my feet

and me still so tied down by some unknown non-relief. 

I pray. Today I pray that my confessions and my sins will fall into the earth

that having given birth 

I can finally be free

and claw my way

out of the dirt.

Amoeba

Let’s fall backwards through the cloudy air 

and crash into the street

gently so that when we hit we split

into our separate selves and like the amoeba contract 

back 

into one pulsing, breathing blob

shapeless and fragile. 

We’ll slink away down a drain and

mutate into an incurable strain 

and take over someone’s desperate day.

We'll remind her what it's like to try

and why tonight is going to pass them by

while he fumes over unpaid bills and

she cries over spilt milk.

Let's lose ourselves in a teardrop and

follow that broken girl into her home.

I'll slide down the chipped coffee mug

as condensation

while you chase me down the porcelain walls.

And, if there’s time, I really think 

we should make our way back to the

street and let ourselves absorb the rain

before it washes us back

down the drain.