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The way I splash your relentless name In shivers about me. Watch him wallow. If he tastes mud as bitter as this poem   Of mine, then I win – and you love me.

Jericho Brown, Grip (via: skinthepoet)

You will reach

for a door and suddenly you’ll be out in the wind touching all the

horribly beautiful things. You’ll say this moment is not my enemy and

sometimes you’ll believe it.

— Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, from “What It Takes To Leave A House,” published in Lambda Literary

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air

Sylvia Plath, 1962 (via: skinthepoet)

thoughts on youth & this dusty skin. fear of years. a mirror maze. how great to drift in a city with no name. alone. 

💪🏻💅🏻👯 I love girls

Dance is a body’s refusal to die. But, oh, your gone hair. The flame & orange flare. Our forms, our least known selves— barrel, sugar, & stench. Your pleas, looped in writing, the stutter of a body’s broken grammar. —Cathy Linh Che, from “I walked through the trees, mourning.” published in Poetry Magazine

skin the poet

skin open the poet to find out how books have been deceiving you: not all hearts pump blood; some, expand in rhymes & contract in line breaks.

skin open the poet to confirm the rumor that between the liver & the spleen lives a tiny being; an imp, absent in daydreams -a social drinker- & a lover of the sax.

1.- take the poet's arm, & rip off a tear of skin. behold a waterfall of metaphors soak your shoes in summer's breeze.

2.- on a surgical table, lay your poet down in such way that his pointy nose threats to drill into the ground.   & with the help of a sharp knife, split the meadow on his back into two nations that might have lost it all in war. proceed then to spread open these lands, & discover that a poet's spine abides as marble columns once did in falling rome: oh the burn or the glory? 3.- light a match & heat the poet's earlobes to 95 °. careful, the smoky smell of blue winter shades might stupefy your brains   whilst the poet's head gets caught in flames. if so: no stress, your poet's mouth muscles might stretch into a smile, but do keep in mind it's just an involuntary contraction. or not.

4.- once the fire's out & the buzzcut's ready, grab your baseball bat & crack the poet's tibia by the half. hollow bones & secret chambers. see that rolled up paper hidden in there? take it out & read it to the skies; correct, it is nothing but the transcripts of the poet's conversations with the moon. tally marks for bleeding hearts.  

5.- as a final act of this medical extravaganza, severe the poet's head & hold it between your hands. do you feel it slowly floating, as if being drawn toward the clouds?   stitch the head back in place using a silver needle & a thread of slurred speech. remember poets heal on empty illusions & broken things.

that is all for poetic anatomy 101...   ...now wake up the poet.

- @skinthepoet 

The letter be

I do not think I’ve ever told anyone this story. Right after it happened, the memory lived then left, trespassing the dark edge that neighbors the mind: the void at the back of our head. I once read somewhere about a neurological effect, one in which memories forever stay inside our heads; they linger camouflaged into the wallpapers of our minds until abruptly popping into thought again. Like this morning when I woke up to the bright lights of this story you’re about to read; it seemed to be the only thing to fit inside my head: omnipresent as the blues in the sky; self-evident as sin in a church.

It happened in New York City a while back when a lady on the N train sat by my side. Books laid on both of our laps, only none of us read. She asked me if like her, I stopped my reading when the tracks of the train rose above ground. I can’t remember what I answered, but next thing I knew her words were walking me through her world: 67, a widow, avid reader, a walker when her knees cooperate.

She seemed to have a predilection for the affirmative; a sort of soft spot for full stops. At some point in our talk she voiced “You’ll think me a lunatic, but I’ve spent a great chunk of this day thinking about the letter B”. “How it comes second in the alphabet; how nobody acknowledges its prominence despite being of more consequence than any other letter there is. Do you ever think like this?” I said I didn’t, her eyes spotting my lie.

“It has become my favorite letter, the more I think of it” she added, then moved on to explain —through the deafening shrieks of the tracks—how many words beginning with the letter B were pivotal to illustrating the nuance of a life. “Think of the bright & the burned, the born & buried, the blessed & the blamed, the bountiful & the broke, the balanced & the belligerent. It goes full circle, doesn’t it? A cycle where opposing extremes slip their skins into the same gown. Black & white, beginning & ending are just that: sisters” Her eloquence, exquisite.

I stopped listening to commuters and their pressing chatter, the train’s wheels in the tracks screeched the weight of friction. My thinking surrendered to the dragging strengths of the wave this lady had spilled out of her mouth. I flicked through a million thoughts. “You’re absolutely right” I uttered.

“And isn’t that how we conjugate an existence? With the verb to be?” she topped her previous words.

This lady's imagery & clever murdered me unready. For a split now the world paused, our bodies yanked to the rhythm of inertia bred by our train hitting the brakes.

Awestruck & blank, I didn’t know how to react. Her analogies were skilled.

“Oh BBBBBrooklyn, this is me”.

She walked out, sly as a cat, and stood on the platform looking back into my eyes. Her lips spread a smile whilst the MTA guy begged for the 50th time to stand clear of the closing doors, please.

As the rubber edges of the doors rushed to a close, she mouthed:

“BBBBBBYE” & laughed.

Which would you choose? Olympic National Park, Washington