Status Updates From Landscape with Sex and Viol...

this is the story of how I got to live

in a city that had ru one course and needed
another, roots humping

up the walkways so even sober we stumbled
toward the slowing cars which is what happens to girls

who grow up with all that poetry and carpet
in their mouths bu remember

(I almost forgot to tell you)

I lived

this is not a story about cages
and it sure isn't a story about wings

and, while you are probably waiting for confession
because you think that's what I've been doing here all along

this is not a story of how my body was first held down

Near midnight I'm held
hostage to the hazy upshock in the corner

velvet near a laced up tree and curious how I got here.

There are 24 synonyms for the word envy.
And although one of them is hatred and one of them is lusting

no one envies me.

(Once, as a kid, I was balancing on a ledge
all morning thinking no one

could see me until a man walked by and captured my chin in his grip
and called me dollface.)

    It's October, slowly

the web arch iron railings, the pumpkins appear
    like cautious, vigilant but motionless.

I would like that, my mood stabbed into me,
    triangle eyes blinking only the fire

behind them.

Inside that church in Hollywood
    you don't want to believe

what I'm about to tell you
    when you say I never speak when I say:

some boys take a beautiful girl
    and slam her against the wall.

Into the fluorescent rough country
headlong into bulks of flesh

impatient to outspend me

and who wouldn't fold real quick
under the weight of America's sales and specials.

A man in a clinic suggested I stop
    keeping secrets. So I'll share

with you my most recent fat lip how
    the new red I bought covers it

pretty good. How it hurts when you
    kiss me and I don't dare look

    because I don't understand how to deserve anything

or how misery and sunlight inhabit the same
    vibration in my skin.

There's a reprieve in knowing
    where I belong and a world of ways

to prove myself disgraceful.
    Your fervency. Your remorse.

But all I had hoped for was that you'd
    convince me I'm more than just a body

I adapt to the manifold balconies of California
as a symbol of liberation

like the sophisticate I'm not
when no matter how many rails

we could finish form the railing
or the viewshed of a whole city against the neon of a floozy motel

I am only ever trapped inside

You should have seen my breasts inside a dress so extravagant

It was rogue among a decade
of the type of electric horticulture

all these bittersweet groves were founded on so
yeah, I traded it right off my body

for a bottle of rum on the cleanest, brightest street corner
I didn't thing to guard my skin against because

I'm in love with a woman who doesn't appeal to me.

I'm a set of round, ridiculous things.
I talk claptrap in this lush

summer land of boondocks

You maybe imagined her taller

when you picture her at night
when you imagine what holding her down was like—

more leggy, less bruised
about the thighs, about the throat, less hoarse.

Cold, I bump and try to think about things
other than cold

like how once you lit my hair on fire
and I watched it in the periphery

alight to my scalp
before I realized

I knew a way to stop it.

men tell me to be honest about my role in the incident:

Okay, yes
I should have stayed inside

while you railed from the sidewalk

but my confused heart got into the car.

What happened is
I once spent too much time in the desert

so pogonip seems glamorous hung stuck in the trees
like when blood dries on skin

and I want to wear it

out for an evening
pat my hands over its kinky path down my face

I don't so much give in as give up
in a room where the chandelier

has nothing of note to shine on
so it shines on me.

Say it's the ’80s
and we're all wearing a whole lot of electric pink.

And I'm wearing it swimsuit, nowhere near the water.

Onlookers wonder how hard I fuck on gravel.

Hard:

    I am the notched cocking handle of any of your guns;
    no one can safely touch me.

20th-century libertines peer from frosted glass
because they want to learn how I triumph, so

I am going to confess this once

    and then I am going to confess it again

in different ways I won't admit to but never mind.
This won't be the last time