Sora-Seraph

i thought we were making poetry while we were making love so why is it that i stopped writing when i met you

If people were numbers I’d be an 8 all generous curves with a wasp’s waist. If people were numbers you’d be a 9 head hanging low with the world’s weight.

i thought it was like that moment the french call l'appel du vide, the call of the void, the lightning bolt of looking over the stair rail and realizing that you can fling yourself into nothing and become it, the tingle of your spine when you think of canting your wrist just a few degrees to the left on the steering wheel and drifting into incoming traffic, lighter than sunlight fragile like eggshells crushed in the steel jaws of two ravaging beasts, picking splinters from your skin, and i thought how reasonable, how poignant, to fear downtown to fear the clash of skyscrapers and cloud-slashers, to fear the press of skin on skin, to fear the

Tight-lipped and white-knuckled and driving too fast along too-dark streets I am hearing nothing but the whine of rubber on gravel and the crunching of gears and the heavy clunk of the transmission that is the catechism of my sputtering stuttering stammering engine because this exhausted old man of a car doesn't want to get out of here like I do doesn't want to fly like I do wouldn't last a second on a negative ten degree day like I could doesn't know the soft crush of shaded wet forests like I do doesn't know the sheer yellow sun-drenched bluffs like I do doesn't love the wind more than most things like I do doesn't want to live along the sl

Poets don't let sonnets shackle their wrists – glory nights call vanity more sweetly. Condemnation swinging immortal fists wines and dines the poet more completely. Poets suck cigars like fish do water and bourbon gives them kinder love than time. Poets offer hearts just ripe for slaughter to say they've tasted wickedness sublime. But there's reason poets drink like mourning the loss of ambrosia, lightning divine, swigging whiskey until sharp-tongued morning spits them down the unemployment pipeline.            A poet's charade? Immortality:            harder to believe with sobriety.

She wishes she was a violin so she could sing of tragedy and of sweetness and of wild beauty – so she could sing of giving and of grieving and of loss; of the crumbling of men; of the wandering; of the weeping; of her heart breaking anew at the rawness of this world. Her skin is too soft, her eyes are too wide. She is a fragile and hollow vessel. She thinks her bones are too light for these things she carries. She hates to sound precocious. She wishes she was a violin so the world could draw its fingers over her and she would weep so sweetly that I could not swallow my sadness any longer but would let it burst forth from underneath my skin.

Sometimes people tell me I'm            beautiful. They say my skin is poured cream and my eyes are rivers they'd like to drown in.            (Just kidding.            No one but me            and e.e. cummings            talks like that.) But they do tell me I'm a pretty girl,            a beautiful girl. A girl told me I have perfect lips despite the birthmark on the upper left. Despite the ugliness that spills from them. A boy told me I have perfect skin and I rolled to the far side of the bed and self-consciously touched the bumps and scars of my cheeks and chin. A man who came to my door selling a gutter cleanin

If I was Salvador Dalí I would have swallowed paint when I was a baby so my insides could match my subconscious. I would have colored my kidneys lilac and the birdcage of my ribs white gold and the length of my large intestines all the endless blues of the sea. If I was Picasso I would have packaged up my innards like Moving Day, vacuum-sealed to preserve freshness. I would have squared away my trachea in cubes, hung my lungs from the rafters on clothes hangers and draped a billowing white sheet over my heart. I would have slid my nose three inches to the left and flattened all three of my dimensions to meet your expectations. If I was

Listen, the girls swallowed by whales are the ones that grow up lucky. Listen, no one will warn you about the little boys with the magpie eyes and the fists swinging splinters of glass. No one will warn you that their smiles are sweeter than their words are sweeter than their souls are sweeter than their intentions. No one will warn you of the sheer weight of the world. Listen, sometimes girls are fragile. Sometimes girls are frothy. Sometimes girls let boys nuzzle "I love you"s into their necks and sometimes girls drink the wine of believing them. Listen, sometimes the boys really are sweet, and little girls' tart puckered mouths can't ta