Bare

I know what it’s like
to have the sea kiss my sand-stained feet…
to feel grains of sand filter through my
fingertips like feathers born
from the ghosts of cigarette ashes.
I know beauty and I am not
ashamed.

I know what it’s like to dream sideways and
in x-ray vision, to stab ceaselessly at poetry
but unveil only prose.
Damn, karma's a bitch.
I understand high expectations and know what it’s like to
be vacuumed of decadent potential.

I know what it’s like to yearn
for love, for lust…for anything
that will make me fall to my knees
and cry or scream or laugh.
I know what it’s like to
ache with desire to brim, 
to overflow with an eloquent something.

I know what it’s like to hover
on any given Tuesday,
where you can find me waiting at
an imaginary bus-stop for a chariot
that will never arrive.
I'm familiar with the flawed nature of fairytales
baked in the sun too long.

I know what it’s like to sin and
I’ve learned how to
skate over the indiscretions locked within the four
walls of my cookie-cutter existence.
Use Crisco, baby.
I know what it’s like to spit fire and wit,
to chirp sarcasm and pretend to enjoy it.

I know what it’s like to lose:
plane crash jargon sprouts from my fingertips
like reincarnated daffodils, slow and painful and unexpected.
I can’t bear it and it kills me to understand
the primitive nature of killing.
I know what it’s like to sob over death, divorce and the delicateness of it all,
and I know I’m not the only one.

I know what it’s like to see darkness materialize.
Not the proverbial, cliché blackness that
assaults lined pages of tattered notebooks,
teenage angst and charcoal hearts scribbled in the margins.
This is a darkness so hollow and steep that
tears never echo and the ocean
lives on as a figment of my overactive imagination.
I know fear and fear knows me.

I know that I’m just a grain of sand, a ghost of a cigarette ash,
a girl longing for resplendent everythings in this world of naïve nothings.
I know all of this nothing and
I know what it’s like to be utterly human
…and this scares the shit outta me.