Status Updates From Brute: Poems

Anguish--I divorce thee.
I divorce thee, I divorce thee whole heart;

from the wingbone of a vulture,
I've made you a harp.

Of all the washed-up terror prodigies in all Underworld--
I need you especially to stay the fuck out of my iPhone.

My mother says Why not date yourself for a while.

It's the first year
you've been dead longer
than you were ever

alive. What
would you say
about that?

I was 10--
I looked up suicide
in the dictionary--

I didn't know
anything. Without
you, we were

heavy, divided.
We knelt down
in the dirt

where the roots
were suspended
in water.

why am I the chased thing horrified
to overtake myself in the brush?

Here I am as a hairpin curve.

I woke up on the dirt floor of the old cellar I had new limbs
New inadequate gestures of suffering

. . . you are the holy thing I look to. . .

A man on the boat follows me all day, just one question then I'll leave you alone. There is nowhere a girl can go that a man like this won't have a question.

. . . when did I begin to choose this type of man who loves to "protect" me
from himself? Lately, I hold your name in my mouth
like a talisman because we are never afraid of the same things.

Nothing was so underpaid as our attention.

Just once I wanted
to hit & hold the person
who could hit & hold
me down.

In defeat I was perfect
the luster & the grime on me irresistible
Bright landscape with the sky blacked out

Stone after stone, I'm defacing the river of being in love with you.

Outside a teenager shoots a teenager shoots a teenager.
The cops come to measure the street. . .

When he comes home late from his fight at the bar,
I hold a cold rag steady to his knuckles. I think I can love someone
who cares enough to bruise for me.

He touches his thumb to the corner of my mouth,
pulls back my lip to consider my teeth.

When I tell my history, I can't leave out
how I hit that man in the jaw,
that I wasn't good at mercy. . .

I can't skip to the end just to say
well it was fragile & I smashed it
& everything's over, well now I know things
that make me unlikely.
What am I supposed to say: I'm free?

I was learning
how some of us are made to be carrion birds

& some of us are made to be circled.

It’s scary how relatable this is-

Painfully mediocre.