Lips and Fingers

 Letter from my fingers to my lips:

It is ok to make mistakes

To stutter and stagger down stairs of thought

Only to find an old closet at the bottom.

It is ok to smile visions no one else sees

It is ok to let your heart spill

The wrong words at the wrong time

In your too lurid, shattered voice

It is ok to kiss with chapped lips  

Letter from my lips to my fingers:

It is ok that you are too slow to carve the worlds I taste

It is ok to touch the swelling,

To gather up every crushed crumb  

It is ok to leave warm, still damp fingerprints

Your scarred knuckles a testament to others’ wounds  

On Not Smoking

The times it's so cold
Your breath is whiteout
On the blue inked landscape
The times all the maddening mediocrity
Makes you crave a little sweet nicotene
The times you hold your pencil
Bitten and cracked
Ready to set fire
To the entire place

To the twenty two year old girl with army boots and glasses

When your father tells you your butt is too big

Eat the last piece.

Do not look down.

When the girl with stripper heels gives you the up-down

Do not punch her in the face

Laugh

Do not look down

When the cute boy with the girl friend blocks you in the stairwell

Duck and run

Do not blush.

Do not smile.

Do not look down.

When he gives you bruises

To match the roses

Leave.

Lock the doors.

Call the police.

Do not look down

When they mock you for too big clothes and dumpster diving

Do not apologize.

Do not blush.

When he offers you a drink

Do not say yes

Pour the whisky down the drain

When you’ve worn out

Your last welcome

At the last friend’s house

Go to a gas station

Ask for a quarter and a phone book

Go home

When they say you walked out of a magazine

Believe them

When the homeless man asks you to marry him

Do not say yes

Give him a cheese burger

And a sleeping bag
When your mother tells you she has cancer
Kiss her
Do not cry
Work, cook, clean, pay the bills
Do the laundry
Do not let you baby sister miss one piano lesson

When you see the mugging

Do not intervene

Call the police

When your father tells you your butt is too big

Eat the last piece.

Do not look down.

A love letter from a pencil to an eraser

Dear eraser

I need you

To erase to erase to erase

My mistakes I have to face

 You left the best there was in me

Scrawled out in little napkin notes

And neat lines

And then you ran out

Leaving little pieces of you everywhere

 That I cannot erase erase erase

We fit together like number 1 and 2

I was your number one

And what you meant 2 me

To be number 12

Without you my apologies are dark scribbles

I can’t erase erase erase

You said

If loving me meant getting dirty then bring on the grime

Do you need me to spell it out for you

Together we make cosigns and portraits and love notes and call numbers and phone numbers and

Read between my lines

Without you they blur.

To the fourteen other people that sit at my desk

Timothy, please disinfect this chair after you sit in it.

Joe, no I will not respond to the love note you scraped on the inside this desk.

Susan, I appreciate that you take the time to brush your hair. Please stop brushing it here.

Mr. Thompson, that homework that’s been due for two weeks really was stolen, signed and turned in by Shannon in 8^th period.

Greg, this desk is probably the only place in this school where you have not left your initials.

Megs, your old gum stuck beneath this seat has the janitor mad at me.

Mrs. Angela, I will not tell you that this is where I keep that bathroom pass that’s been missing.

Benjamin the AX smells delicious, just don’t kill the allergic kid that sits next to me.

Jamie, were you the one that put a crumpled ball of paper under one of the legs so the desk would stop wobbling? Thank you.

Ethan I can always tell when you’ve been eating skittles.

Chloe, is it true that you’re the one leaving lipstick marks on the bathroom mirrors?

Olivia, do you still have my sparkly fingernail polish from that time we painted each other’s nails?

Alexander, I could inform a dental team with the pencils you leave behind. I use them anyways.

Will, I still miss you.

The blood-sucker

Today I committed murder

Again

Your guts

On the soul

Of my purple high heel

Book Mending #2

Like a coal miner
I drill
And breath in
The dust
of old pages

Book Mending

The Unity of Luke's Theology
Pages falling out
Sections out of order
Oh the irony

12 am

The couple
Fighting
Outside my window
Lying
There thinking
Never never never

The Activist

Your computer
plastered with stickers
And I wish
I had a cause
To advertise

Summer time

Pressed translucent petals

Fall from Pride and Prejudice

I touch

Last summer

Whispering between their silk and velvet 

February 14th

Lie!

Right I love you.

You


reflect tcelfer



                me

Today you said

He was staring

At me

With one sentence

A stranger became momentous