Undone

You asked me what the metaphor is in falling from the moon, and I told you it was your eyes.



"Its the way when you're happy, your irises breathe butter scotch columbine as if the only way to be balanced is for being loved to balance out how alone your rib bones feel inside. It's the whispers of the oxygen scoping your veins for mercury and making my fingertips an invalid along the way as they trace the freckles on through your belly button, as if constellations in the northern hemisphere. It's etheric moth wings slipping pills laced with lactate lithium into celestial slots empty beneath their ankles and spine. It's how when I kiss you, paprika is the norm, and when I can taste consonants littered with celestial adjectives, I can tell your sad, and I only have to close my eyes to see yours become Nordic blue, too big for our atmosphere."












I held your hands and asked you to define 'pre-meditate’, and your volcanic lungs contracted first smiling, and then suspicious asking what the catch-22 is. I told you it had to be in terms of childhood, and growing up and falling apart, and it couldn't be morbid, and you weren't allowed to quote C.S.I



"Waiting. It's dreaming about a carousel spinning on planetary orbits around dandelions and red dwarves, and cotton candy Ferris wheels. It's running through the leaves and standing at the edge of satin dominoes bellowing into the shore on the back of hurricanes and summer storms, its sneaking into the water as if being quiet will teach you how to swim, and beginning to tread water casually. It's erupting onto a tree-backed island in the middle of the lake, and stealthily watching your footprints recede, as the storms get closer and closer, and hiking to the quarry in the middle. It's standing at the edge of flooded mines and watching tadpoles stampede to the bottom towards turning lights projected to your retinas while neons blasted away your vision. 



It's jumping, and waking up, and researching abandoned ruins in the middle of distant waters, hunger eating away at your stomach lining, an obsession you can't quell just like you couldn't forget the specters hanging from the willow trees, when you stumbled on them in sixth grade. It's waiting for weeks to figure out where it is, and saving up winning science project money to take a summer trip there and go on the carousel, and being scorched by the lack of rain while you wade through the result of water deprivation. It's seeing a dead mackerel on the beach and wanting to cry, as the discharge from the rocks into the pond is silver faucet droppings, tiny dewdrops and the carousel when you get there is tone deaf. "





I almost shake my head, and quip that you call me a 'pothead' but then I don't when I see how you believe it.  I glance to the outline of your nose and when I see your eyes are closed, I slip capsules full of lollipop lithium into my vocal chords. You think you get me, but you are so so wrong.














"Define ephemeral" but I know you are just waiting for me to fail, to cloud the galaxies with wrong answers the way my syllables always seem to be full of. 





I swallow back sordid tears and decide to prove you wrong. 









"It's the way garter snakes and swan wannabe ducks create an atmosphere and lifestyle out of seawater ponds and almost invisible algae. It's the way abandoned wings once taught high tide flooded lagoons the quadrant math of flying, and taught them to pass it down to the caricature of their future. It's how December rain bombarded silt covered stepping stones with corrosion and the winds ripped the ground bare of sweet grass, and filled it with zero fresh water. It's how despite the fact that chaos lived in cerulean dominos and lighter fluid just half a mile closer to the ocean, broken wings taught themselves how to be survivors and learned to find tart pickle grass and castaway driftwood tasteful.





They built a galaxy out of nothing, and taught themselves how to weave tactility into their genetic traits, and then we came along, and humans took the pristine environment and desecrated the chaos of winter storms by creating sandpaper woodpiles complete with the fumes of nicotine and barbecues. They built flaming bits in the middle of the shore using the floating seaweed and fallen trees as charcoal, stealing the beach's capacity to protect itself, by raping the sand dunes.



Hourglasses diminish when you tip them and seep footprints and teva sandals all over their bodies. Then people tried to paint signs and act like they cared having stolen from nature, as if the ocean was the only ecosystem between the hills and the end oft he earth. Their feel-better guilt trip ways of 'saving the environment' was a fluke, I've seen so many toddlers crawl up the dunes and slide back down in circles, with the parents smiling; ignoring the irrevocable cycle it would fit and increase. 





They built flumes into canyons to create a division between smoke towers and olfactory pollution, dredging the preserve with a vehicle to take the aluminum can holders to the ocean, infecting the Pacific with modernization. 





Ephemeral is the funky way beautiful things never last, and good things exist only to dissipate later on."







All you did was smirk and turn away, as if you expected my words which would be catastrophic to the idea that I know who I am, because I had no idea where any of that came from except from a childhood I'd long forsaken in exchange for concentric meter and poetry that rhymed with the bottom of my clavicle. 



















I questioned you in specious terms, littered with the organza my fingertips wove into my shorts, and a dire need to devastate you with simplicity the way the space between your eyes can debilitate me instantaneously. 






You tell me I'm naive sometimes, and you act as if I'm not blind but illiterate, even though I can clearly read the way death litters your eyes, as if it lives there, and the way you refuse to expiate yourself for living. 

I fed on the hatred lying dormant and spasmodic beneath your collarbone, even though I knew it wasn't for me, but for people who leave, and people who make choice and forget that babies mean responsibility. 






But still I knew how to hurt you, how to ask you the one thing I knew you couldn't answer, how to dominate the next month of yours with searching for blank pages and for an understanding built into words that sound like 'home', words you treat like swear words. 







"Who are you?"






Somber streetlights illuminate your freckles, and I feel like we are playing battleship, guessing, and guessing where the trembling scars are being hidden, and when you hesitate, I know I'm winning. 





'You know, I don't know' slips itself into my veins, suddenly making the coral tubes sterile, in the way they haven't been ever since I met you and learned vulnerable can mean endings. 






Pepper lines the sky as you move my head from your chest to your lungs, while the trees hang themselves from the stars. Your voice quiets the mockingbirds lisping into the night at how crazy we are to be lying in playground sandboxes, during 2AM summers. 





Silence echoes in your bones while I try to seek the rhythm of oxygen, and peril embeds asphyxia into your freckles, but you just probe the comets to see how many secrets they can take hearing. 











"I know if my life was quintessential, ephemeral wouldn't be the word I use to describe the woman that used to be my mother. Do you know what ephemeral actually means?"
 


I blink, and for a second I'm bleeding the dynamics of being oppressed, but I don't say anything because provoking you shut you down. And anything I could say would be to in genuine for your standards.




It’s just a fancy way of naming something that's breakable, finite, and constantly in the process of falling apart.



If geometric formulas were enough to keep the universe from killing itself, I wouldn't picture castanets and multiplication tables done to the rhythm of Spanish dancing. Or skirts flying on the legs that would carry me home that night, and whisper slurred lullabies when I couldn't sleep.



If the celluloid burned in a camera lens was enough to depict more than a single moment anyone could guess the story behind, I wouldn't feel like cauterizing all the people who told me in my eighth grade collage,’ How nice, you look like such a happy family in those pictures."


Maybe 'cellulite' and 'temporal imprisonment' wouldn't be the words that come to mind, when I look at her inept photography and her phony boyfriend hugging me around the shoulders while we 'smiled' in front of her new salon.



Her 'boyfriend' who she trusted to keep her loaded in 'faerie powder' as long as she gave him the nights of her life, and handed over the key to her body.




In that picture, he had just told me to shut up or my temple would see stars and everything in between. She had just hushed my rage at their engagement as 'autumnal stress' and that moment was the catalyst for my rebellion for the rest of my life.

After I pulled the fire alarm four times in elementary school, the counselor diagnosed me 'mentally stultified' due to poverty and a lack of identity and all I could say was 'Hmm... I wonder how you came to that conclusion."






  I tried to be stoic when she pleaded with me to stop acting like a fanatic when I first saw him hit her and wouldn't talk to her for days for staying with him. He went into frenzy because I had talked to 'state people' and geostrophic hurricanes couldn't have stopped that belt from extracting the skin off my spine. He was afraid to touch my legs because the 'elite prep middle school' my mom made him send me to, required all students to participate in P.E, and because I could still walk; my mom told me I was being stupid and to be more considerate of other people's feelings and how my words had damaged her.

She determined calling her a 'slut' a fair trade for the tic in my nerves every time I bent down for months.





I didn't see a picture of my dad until he died, my mom's link between me and priority was tenuous at best, just like her understanding of reality. When I was little she called him the incarnate version of Cupid and that's how she got me but when I asked her if I could tell that story at his funeral, she told me we wouldn't be going.

        They called her to organize his affairs because he had her name tattooed onto his hip, and she told me there wasn't money to pay for him to be buried but someone called and donated so he could have a gravestone. When she learned the money was in her name, she called and tried to refund, to see if she could find a way to get the cash, but 'boyfriend' whined about it being a 'dead man's money' and he felt bad.






    I cracked up, that she wanted to shoot up blood money powder, probably made of incense and sage into her upper arm, and he was superstitious about
the diabolic spirits coming back to haunt him for depriving them of rest...

I told her to just deport 'boyfriend' and then apologized because I forgot that he'd been born in a trailer in Texas, and she says she kicked me out.

    But truthfully, I just ran.








I'm a hybrid of inbred vices, addictions and burial pyres afforded on indebt credit cards.


I became an orphan the day he died, I always knew he was out there, alive and away from her, and she hadn't been my mother in a long time. I believed in him like the Greeks believed in the Pleiades we read about in English.

    I don't belong anywhere- and all I am is mismatched."










        I didn't know how to answer. I knew his mom had died in the middle of ninth grade because she was sick that was the exoteric story.

    The esoteric story must have been that she had overdosed, but I guess no one even cared to know, until now. 

    Suddenly, I was afraid of what winning meant.






            "Me too." I whispered, knowing he'd smell the burnt fennel and opium on my breath- knowing his tepid fingertips would fall away from tangling themselves in my hair, and our lungs would reach an infinite fermata, back to our oldest argument.





          Acid gorged itself on my bloodstream, mangling my spider web veins sticking out from the outer reaches of my clothing, creating an exquisite pattern of cosmic like bruises running from hip to hip.
         
      "Cheyenne" was all he said, breaking me from my stupor and it made me want to delete my syllables even though I was only trying to tell him 'you aren't the only who hurts'.



          I watched the clouds chase each other through the sky, but was surprised by their torpidity, normally they move so fast I can ignite my palms into almost catching them and still pinpoint their cosmic coordinates.

          "Why aren't having knees painted with colors that don't stem from paint enough to incite someone who’s already bellicose to use pistol metal to save themselves?"




                  I wanted him to be mad at me for refusing to let him be alone, and hurting, instead of just full of this unquenchable sadness, and indigo wasp eyes.
          I hated being upstaged, but at least I knew once, I had a center.





      " It's the way the people in gangs who fall to the pincers of violence first, aren't always the bravest, or those so full of a need to hurt everything good.
They are afraid to keep taking alive, they might be the angriest but they don't survive the tempest because they know, 'nasce morire' born to die.
   
  Its in the blind fortune tellers who make a living out of telling lies, and rewriting memory because they believe planting star seeds in pimples of hope can redeem themselves for never saving the ones they love.

Because sometimes it takes a victim to retire from continuing the derelict spring board that keeps catapulting people to live with the idea that they are, insoluble, unfixable.

      Your mom was cornered, Luke-"











  "We aren't talking about me," you snarl in my face, and I see who your mom was afraid you'd become. I flinch from your arms and sit up my back to you, facing the parking lot and the outside world. Anemia derides my willpower, as I shiver at mist stimulating goosebumps, on my limbs.





      "She didn't want you to grow up and be with a girl like her, like me. My mom, she left my dad because she knew I'd grow up just like her if I ever knew her. She knew I'd love broken boys, and I guess he preferred I love tiny little boxes filled with lithium instead.
        At least your mom kinda loved you, she may not have been a good mother but she believed you were strong enough to be something without her, that's why she hurt you and pushed you away. If you got close to her, you'd turn into your dad, or any of the men in her retinue.
       
      I'm sorry that I'm as immersed in the realm your mom wanted you safe from, as you can be at seventeen, I'm sorry my body is a relic even though I've slept half of my life.
        If my dad only castigated me, slipping solipsistic words into my spaces, I'd be grateful. If someone told me to be more considerate even though they had etched wheat stalks filled with hard labor into my tomorrow, I wouldn't need to be pacified.

          Carpe Diem- live in the moment as best as you can, you own your body so that's actually possible for you."














            He calls my spine a broken staircase and I know he's eyeing the way my bones are raw, and affront to the way his back was beaten straight.







      "As if you know how to live.  You tell me I can be someone, portending that trying to watch kids swinging without remembering what it's like to be there alone, could actually change anything that's happened.
          My mother was a wanton bitch, who slept with mongrels and Mafiosos, and fulfilled her carnal desires by having her nipples hanging out and wearing as few clothes as she could.
          You act as if it’s abominable to hate my mom, when sending me to private school was a guilt trip.
You never knew your mom even.” His voice lowered to a vestige of where he was a few seconds ago.








“I wasn’t talking about me, Cheyenne, I was talking about you. The cacophony of caterwauling trails through the paper-thin walls, and I’ve stood outside your house after taking you home. I can hear him; it starts the moment you’ve climbed in your window or when I’m still standing in the door. You don’t have to expatiate about it to know what it sounds like when pickled arms throw their daughter against the wall, for things that don’t come close to qualifying as delinquent, for things that aren’t your fault.



      What does it take for you to fight back, even if it makes it worst, even if the zeitgeist of today is to hide our heads and pretend we don’t hear anything?


          You could control your body if you wanted to, impotency shouldn’t define the way your ribs are crooked, or the exogenous effect of having broken eyes.”




      I shake my head because I don’t understand why he’s fighting for me.











    “I was born more than one color, and don’t tell me to fight back so as to just dose him with more dopamine, and then criticize my way of numbing,” I’m yelling now and I feel foolish as I stand up my hair stringy against my shoulders in the middle of a sandbox.






        “Don’t just say to stop igniting marjoram, dill, and crushed Tylenol candies in dorky calumnies because you don’t know. You don’t know what its like to be the girl aching with so many bruises that wearing fabric makes your skin burn, and so you peel it away slowly and try to be as close to the sky as possible, but that just makes it worse, and now strangers only see your lack of clothes not the bruises they have stopped hiding. You even crawl to churches, and the mosques and then stupas in the hope that someone will decide you are worth saving.
     




        I have never owned my own body, it’s never been mine, and always someone else’s to stare, to love, to break into pieces, and to paint colors that shouldn’t exist on a human.”

      He buries his face in his hands, and I’ve never seen someone so beautiful when they cry, I’ve never seen someone so afraid to be vulnerable, give up like him. He looks like paper stained by italic ink, and I probably look a lot worse.




                  All of a sudden, I’m running my footprints blending with the tanbark and I’m hobbling to grass and hills and trees on the edge of the horizon. And I’m leaving, and he probably hates me even more than he already did.
         






        “Why do you hate me?” I turn around and nothing makes sense, the comets are trailing moon bitten stars down my shoulder blades. And it hurts so so much.

          And I’m kissing him, burning my lips into him and I don’t care that half of me is purple. I’m trying to ignite July with our December limbs but his cheeks are wet still, and I’m leaning into him as he anchors us to the ground. He won’t kiss me back, even with my freckled arms around his neck he’s trying to push me away. I remember I’m a slut, and start to walk away again. He’s sobbing, and his words are suffocated and tense.










      “I don’t want to be like them Cheyenne. I don’t want to be like your dad, or mine- I want to be someone different. You are the reason I stopped believing in God, after what happened to me, I somehow retained a childhood ability to believe even though my childhood had dissipated with winter storms. I don’t want you to follow my mom’s footsteps; I’m so scared of losing you.
      I don’t want you to be ephemeral.”








      Our foreheads meet, and I don’t have words to give him, all I have is whatever’s still whole in my lungs.

         






          “My prayers are the reason God passed way. You      are the reason I’m still praying.”