this finch is for tidbits as well as fully-fledged poems; i often forget and feel that what i have isn't good enough for you - regardless of past misconceptions of my self-determined purpose, i now will amend this sorrowing pattern. some crumbs for my bird-friends, come and nibble:

December 19, 2010

There’s no truth in a calendar. There’s no love in a relationship, there’s no safety in being surrounded by lights. What is the point, then, in living?
It’s intrinsic. You’re intrinsic.
 

January 17, 2011

I came to Starbucks to avoid my guilt and it’s sister found me here. I can’t overcome self-pity through cleanliness and work today; I am going the other route – excessive caffeine, temptation of all schools, scathing at the filaments in people’s teeth. Obsession with the girth of honey legs, operating on a level high enough to be nonexistent, focusing on the wrongness in all you do.

I used to have people as friends,
Then I had cigarettes as friends,
Then I had words for friends.
Now I have coldness for a friend.

January 19, 2011

I tried to express myself and some called it perfect and some called it word vomit. Being thought repulsive and making people shake with anger is fine; I think it’s the discrepancy in the way that we love that caused this that I can’t stand.

February 1, 2011

The problem with afternoon naps is that you never quite wake up from them. I don’t feel much like writing, or doing homework, or reading what I usually delight in; things feel heavy and lacking, like a bag full of wet sand. What is the fun in that? I want to drive over the speed limit to Laguna and kick in the white powder and gasp at pretty dresses and pretty paintings and fill my stomach with sweet hot drinks.

February 16, 2011

A marked rising in the contentment with which I wander: eighteen months ago the night hours creeping in around the window with fingers of rain stabbed me back into fetal position, bumpy knees met wavering face and grasped for any bone. Relentless, darkness attacked, and soon he came to feed on soft grey matter more often, until he settled into every space in my head, acting the character of dark matter.

Then for a time there was a great grey line, and I toed the line, moving my slippered feet back and forth across the line with mind and will, like an overgrown Matilda. I was nearly close enough to see across, but unconsciously I was towed back – again, and again, and then once more. I dressed as the dew slicked itself over the grass one morning, replaced my shoelaces and bracelets, folded my jacket around my fragile cage further than the seams allowed, and careened onto the plane of lightness, leaving the great grey line behind as recklessly as I had approached it. Into sunlight, onto photosynthesis, keeping eyes steadied on blindness.

Three hundred and seventy-seven days I have been striding straight, showing my teeth as threats of real love. Now I am safe from darkness and his grizzly appendages, I curl in an overwarmed bed with greasy hair, twitchy fingers, everything to say and no method to match my diminishingly beautiful madness. My knuckles chew on the faint colored lights hovering at my forehead, meanwhile, the hours crouch, waiting not to pounce but to be redeemed. The hours believe they are worth a prize, and the longer saved, the heavier the sand-filled glass given in exchange will weigh on the bearer’s arms.

I have entrapped the hours, snared them in the scents retained in the memories of my nasal cavities, and they may sputter into glare and eclipse me any day now, but I hold no fear tucked into these twitching fingers.

March 9, 2011

My bones ache. I’m not saying it metaphorically or because it sounds good. The curve of my pelvis that frames the hollow and most of the unstable greetings in my spine and my femurs, they actually ache. My elbows are okay tonight. It’s been easy on the murderers. 

It feels better to say it when it’s real. I can feel words in my throat, eyes, feel them clogging sinus tissue, feel them stretching my stomach’s capacity and choking the air from my biceps, but that’s all artificial, the outer yet infinite skin of their power. When something is real, laid out in facts and textures so tantalizing your fingers are begging to sweat, it feels better to say. Then the words don’t slide down as crude oil into any waiting bucket, they’re not rolled around between sticky palms, they simply sit and sink.

Over one-point-almost-eight decades, they’ve sunk into my bones. My bones ache. I’m saying it truly, to nobody, to you, to the oil because it’s already caramelized in me, to grilled onions on a free and blustery Thursday night that hasn’t quite existed yet. Maybe it’s a Monday, or a Tuesday; maybe it’s a Saturday. Does it matter? It is one night, and it empties out of me as the tickle of hope's ribbon weaves in.

Slowly, gently, the love tiptoes into me.

Once again, we will be simple with each other.
And if my bones ache, they ache for nothing but what I already am.