birth ties

I am breathing too hard for my own good,
and i am smoking too many fake cigarettes
that i rolled in the ashes of my cremated poetry,
and those of my grandmother's burial urn,

the one who always told me
honor thy father and thy mother,
for god will bless the loss of the buffalo.

my mother alway had fingers
of red and blue fingerpaints,
but they were pale and rubbed clean
only on the days when she spread her love
to not me, but everyone else who needed it.


and i cannot speak my words,
my mouth is swollen, sick, the static
at the end of my tongue is swallowing my heart
all by itself.

all by myself.



i come from the careful breeding of two foxes,
proud to be prideful, and
there is a line of women
tied to the ground by stakes and silken string;
they will always let themselves fall
dormant beneath the poison on another man's hell-smile.

grandmother was married four times,
this is her fifth, this time to a man
whose eyes feel me up like suicide in my tongue,

and mama,
well, mama always told me it was ok to be
whomever, but she let herself crack her own skull
on a man who ran away for some brown-haired beauty.

my daddy, who didn't want to stay with mama,
except for that he was scared to leave,
to live. not because he loved me,
nothing like that,
no sir.


no sir.
i will break my family tree in the woodcutter,
just watch me.