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[carrotpoet]

Going down, you taste like gasoline and gunmetal

Smear lipstick wine

Bruised blushy cheeks

Your teeth a rotting miracle

There’s beauty in a cigarette

Like beauty in a bonfire

Take this flame and wed it

Lace across your shoulders

Lace upholding your bosom

Feather-light and shaking

Dresses on the floor

Tassels hanging on her window

Tussling through empty sheets

Your skin as soft as cotton

There’s posters on the wall

[carrotpoet]

palms pushing wood

As I gently scooped you from hurricane earth

we hid under blankets to watch the tv

Tucked in like sailors in stiff little ships

I weep a little tune and

you dance in your socks

It’s not so familiar

all this living in the shape of ourselves

Nothing so tender worth leaving alone

Picking old scabs with a butter knife

leaving the table

And shutting the door

[carrotpoet]

Reminiscent

Pitiful evenings where I’d bore you to sleep each night,

but each night you’d sleep, soothed by tender voice.

Waking up as fresh as young wet palm trees and dancing like the dew.

Oh I wasn’t surprised when you tasted like the blackberry juice you’d sworn you hated,

A change of scene and coming back to me like I was an anchor.

But like an anchor, when I gnawed myself free of rough red rope, an umbilical cord to hang you with, you drifted off, lost and shipwrecked, and never found joy in any women like the poisoned lust you’d found in my invigorating steadfastness.

The truth was I aroused in you, the ‘wildness’ you thought innate, to dock at every haven,

and you never realized when you held them you were thinking of me and when you cooked in the morning you were cooking like me.

The smell that drew them in? Remnants of my wandering cologne, come to find the kisses.

Crookedly, gradually,

a birthing;

All you could do was become everything I was and despise me ever more for it.

But your love for me was madness, some unresolved Freudian rage where all you’d do is want me, crave my tender care, despise me for caring for you, wretched thing, and pretend you found me altogether dull while kissing on my mouth.

All you were designed for living was hating me and needing me.

And now is the part where I’m dutifully absent, freer than sin.

Reminiscent, your eternal pine.

[carrotpoet]

Insatiably yours

We drop our umbrellas and feed back to the sea

An object worth palming and a glowing light inside my sternum, you should go and take the wind, you were never motionless.

We wake up and find seashells in our hair.

Over and over, this is what life is made up of;

hot water, coffee, the nasal in your voice as you resist becoming laughter.

Empty, shallow caves and a New Perspective.

“Insatiably yours”, I’d sign the air.

Ringing the phone and shining that pale light on, your cheeks as red and wide as wilting roses.

You buy me a new dress and I lay in the warm spot on the floor, my body shines through the fainting silk in all this sunlight—

You told me I look like a painting, a little piece of forever in all this meaning.

Impression of a woman in love in silver, pink.

Over and over, our entropy is inundated

With every little instance where time won’t let us go.

And we shall ever prosper.

Our home smells like overripe vegetables pawed from the earth, when you come home smelling like sweat and dirt, sweet and humid, and I think of you like a painting. A weaving and an oath.

[carrotpoet]

Captive Soldiers

I had a dream my ex fiancé and my first love were sitting at a table together,

all limbs and angles, cotton tshirts smelling like warmth, a coy grin and a frightened monster. Dirty blonde mess

and the pseudo-savior.

My lover cut my bangs in the mirror this morning, trimmed black hair on the floor.

We’re already going somewhere, if so take me there

So it’s all wet dreams and monsters under the bed, hiding places for soldiers and the rotten little creatures.

You don’t frighten me, though I wish you did, something to feed the nerves.

Such greedy little hungers, taken silently in the dark.

Spider web growing in my windowsill and coughing on the smoke, missing something that isn’t real

and walking around stunned with a little ache,

I think you already know the story when I try so hard to rid you of it.

Out of mind, out of mind.

I only write about what I’m terrified of, tempted by the little black holes that whisper tender bloodstained false prophesies and kiss me one night stand.

So it’s not over and you’re not here, consider it even. I’ll stroke the bitten dragon and talk too much.

There is no pain you can present me with that cherry-stem tongue I won’t be thrilled to pen.

[carrotpoet]

Cryptic Translucent Tango

I am bored and I want to be pushed level with the popcorn wall and arch into you.

In the air floats dust clouds that settle in the sun like glitter. The sun makes you sneeze, you hold your hands in fists and grip onto life like you’re drowning, like you’re trying to grasp the sunlight.

I wish I could reach you on the other side of the dining table at this strange dim cafe where the wood is too orange and everywhere but you’re eons away and when I speak your eyes shoot open, you cringe at the obtrusion.

Do I make you nervous? I can’t seem to deal with it. I’m flattered, but I need your teeth, or something tangible from you so I know you’re real. Do you know if you’re real? Has anyone ever told you that you float above the floor? Do you know you haunt each space you live in?

You smell like the cedar lining of a casket and I couldn’t taste you if I wanted to, because you won’t let me.

Let me under you so maybe I could reach you. If you’re dead or I’m dreaming I’m sure I could find something to grip onto,

I just know this kind of transcendence has a taste if I could reach it. I’m always right up next to you and trailing behind you. I’m licking breadcrumbs off the coarse earthen trail with my cat-tongue so you can’t find your way back.

I’m hoping you’ll turn around to try and realize I’m the only thing behind you now. But I can never catch up,

breathless, and you don’t seem to hear me. The sun topples over and descends into dark fog,

so the cataracts over your eyes and I’m as cloudy as the dust in the air when the light hits it,

do I shine in the light? Do I look as heavenly as you in all this smoke?

[carrotpoet]

The Bite - Edvard Munch (1914)

[carrotpoet]

I’m sleeping on the ratty sofa of your brain, flipping through the channels, you offer me a glass of milk and I bask in screen moonlight. You’ll never really tell me how you feel and I’ll glance candidly at your premature mourning, manipulative lazing, if I look too long it makes my lungs sore. We’ll come together and call it even. My trusting is written in self-conscious stubbornness and a triumphant embarrassment that paints my face in watercolor red rough patches. They burn and you burn and it hurts to look at you.

I’m sorry you think you’re ugly, that you’ve always thought it. Surely not when you were so little, when your body was a horrifically exquisite thing to throw around and bruise and stain with tears and cake, but this is the kind of ‘always’ that started when you were given a mirror and told to straighten your hair. You looked in your eyes and they looked sort of dull. You don’t need me to tell the story for you and you don’t need to ever tell me about it. Don’t.

Anyways, you are beautiful. If you asked me to describe you it’d be some hearty and nonsensical tangent of you at the grocery store, you daylight darkness, fixing the sink in the kitchen with little wet stains. Something to do with the color of the patches on your skin and how I’d like to bite them. You smelling burnt and wooden and turning in your sleep. I wouldn’t paint a pretty picture because beauty is not a pretty picture. Beauty is paint everywhere in manic absurdity and something obscene missing deep within your soul. It’s been knowing you and trying not to kiss you.

[carrotpoet]

Black Velvet Petunia.

[carrotpoet]

Brittle Hounds

Backyard singing, you howl in pain and clasp yourself, tiring of reminiscence.

So you’re quiet now, so what? What now?

I can be quiet too—I tried once, listened to your icy fingers tap across the oak table, clicking out some off-beat haunted rhythm and staring at the popcorn wall.

You’re on your knees when you look up at me, missed calls, missed messages and missing posters.

Two injured dogs share a spilled down bed, in feverish obsession with how the other’s ribs pump lazily in their sleep, stained bones stretched against thin matted canvas.

The only tenants of a lifestyle such as this: When hurting, beg,

when hurting desperately—draw blood.

Meet that gentle reaper masking the ache in your abdomen that craves a different kind of touch. The kind of touch that only bruises where it feels good, teeth and necks and sweaty appendages. A fight void of violence; a dance. It’s not so different from what you’re used to, so I know you’ll be good at it.

Hang up the phone.

I’ll miss you, dear.

[carrotpoet]

Cocoon

When I ran out in the storm I couldn’t breathe, crushed ceiling, swaying, I found my core, your peach pie face didn’t help it.

I hugged my shoulders,

found glass beads so cold collecting in the creases of my fingers, the clouds a suffocating immodest hue, the world as something small, right here as something smaller,

a ladybug in a mason jar. Your call to me coddled by thick glass on my bed of fresh damp leaves,

whisper above through the mesh I breathe out of, fat wet lips, I’m stuck inside your words and the life you breathe me.

You sing behind my shower curtain,

you laugh inside the walls. You’re inseparable from my very being and my only wish is to rid you of me, foolish boy.

First day of school, that funny cold inside your chest. Shiver through the blankets. Wander in the halls, smelling of static and mildew,

like sun and dust and everything that’s wrong with this moment, and all the possibilities that are to come.

Steal me into silence. My clever little ignorance, a warm body to lean into, you move me through the clouds.

[carrotpoet]

When you have changed me, I am even less yours

You told me I was ‘too warm’ to live by, so I stood outside in the rain until I shivered in excitement.

When I morphed into someone you liked, I fell out of love with you.

I am the exoskeleton of your desires. I am an animal in flesh only.

I am a skin-walker who mimics your laugh and carries on.

Nothing I like lasts for long and I only crave the aftermath.

Tell me your plans and I will hand you this— to love me is to silently grapple with my malleability,

like water or sand, and let me slip between your fingers.

[carrotpoet]

ig - afternoondreams

[carrotpoet]

I was the seducer, him, the seduced. It is best, I have found, to always be the seducer. But who will intoxicate you to sickness? The soldier, fighting a war that never loved him back, dies with purpose—however misplaced. There is never a true purpose to be had for the war. The war is only cruel, washing its hands in a dingy bathroom of little precious ruby beads of blood. What I might get across is this; I envy you for loving me so, I despise the space I keep between us.

[carrotpoet]

John William Waterhouse “Lamia” 1905,detail.

[carrotpoet]

Bodies

If our bodies are glass, clacking against each other and raining shattered, sharp and bleeding little drops,

my body is boiling and frozen, stiff and thick and fragile as a whiskey decanter.

Bodies, bodies, bodies,

and the way they come apart with hoggish, untrained hands, crumbling like chalk.

I wanted to search him backwards, un-discover him, and leave him to be thoroughly found by someone else.

I broke three wineglasses while doing the dishes.

I bled on the glass and sucked my palm.

I didn’t tell you about the glasses, or my hand, or how it felt like grazing your tenderly shaking body on your squealing twin-sized bed;

You, shaking. You, breaking in my hands. (Me, sucking my palm.)

Comfort and discomfort are next-door neighbors who don’t quite know where their property lines lay and who have heated, punch-faced quarrels about it on a bi-weekly basis. They smell like lemongrass and their khakis are rubbed green. But—call me if you need me. Don’t drive me home. Tend your lawn and I’ll try to stay on my side of that invisible line that moves a little each day. Suck your thumb and buy me time.

[carrotpoet]

You aren’t a whirlpool of memories, or time consumed. I found some thread in my pocket that was there before you left on the bus. I’m shaking with the weight of pure thereness, and my budding perception of it. The infallible permanence of presence.