a.
Sometimes I just sit
without breathing,
without breaking and try to hold my bones in.
My cerebrum becomes symmetrical,
I agree with myself to hold onto that empty space
where something’s missing among my organs.
No, let it go.
Wait, hold on!

Sometimes I disappear, and there’s someone else looking in the mirror.

b.
Sometimes I lie on the tile floor next to the bathtub
and turn up the bass of the stereo until
I can’t hear myself screaming the words. There are
some days where I wear dresses,
and others where I swim through the house in black sweats
at all hours of the night.

Sometimes I scribble on my skin so I won’t forget what it feels like, and sometimes I dream without sleeping.

c.
Sometimes the roses inject sanity under my skin.
I run velvet petals along my lips and
the dew nourishes something deeper than the body.
I live in a garden of cast-iron thorns and glass blooms;
ready to bite,
ready to break.

Sometimes every time I run outside the sun slips under a cloud, and sometimes I get sick of it raining for days.

d.
Sometimes I talk to ghosts.
They don’t answer, but they listen.
Once I tried to talk to a train as it wound over the trestle
and trundled up to the rural crossing
without gates or lights. It slowed
and screamed a wordless answer
that tore from my eardrums into my lungs,
and continued, uncaring.

Sometimes I don’t think there’s blood in my veins, it has to be something else. Star plasma, or kerosene, or mud.

e.
Sometimes we all want
to have wings made of fire,
and I still have that glass bottle of wanderlust
that Icarus sold to me for a song on a streetcorner.
It hums along when the wolves wail in the night,
and it glows fiercely when the sunrise comes through my window,
and it fills my dreams with highway lines and breathless mountain views and storms rolling in from the sea.

Sometimes it’s the little things that hurt, and it’s the little things I love, and life is made of little things that keep us from falling asleep.