by Halsey
I cry and there’s no burn in my nose anymore
I’m standing in the middle of a 4-way intersection
and a car is coming at me
and I have no idea which way to go.
Is this how it was supposed to feel?
EVERYTHING
Before I knew we were poor,
Everything
was magic.
An empty fridge
meant freezer-burnt Popsicles
for dinner.
Purple-blue mouths
and toothless smiles
calmed the torment
in my mother’s crux.
Everything
was an adventure.
A shared bedroom
with my little brother
meant an eternal playmate.
A warm tent,
closed off by a blanket
hung from a bunk bed
and a hair dryer
snuck under the sheets to keep warm.
Arctic explorers
waiting for a rescue unit.
Everything
was a mystery.
Voices resounding from the living room
vehemently snaking
through the short halls
of the apartment.
And then one day,
I had
Everything
And
Everything
was over too soon.
TRAVIS
Travis was a junkie
All my friends were
I was a wallflower
I watched them tie up their arms and collapse onto couches
I was never high,
and always on the same strange slow ride with them
Travis rode a fixed-gear bike
He had nowhere to live
But never went without somewhere to sleep
Travis was handsome
He had a backpack and an iPad
And nowhere to take a shower
He would meet old ladies
Whose husbands had moved on or passed
He would make love to them
For a week or two at a time
Hold them in his arms
And stroke their thin hair
Kiss their lips, dissolving vermilion ridges.
He would paint their fingernails and take baths with essential oils
They would give him somewhere to stay and a few hundred dollars
And by Sunday, Travis would tuck a perfumed envelope into his
pocket
And ride off on his fixie
To score
And he would come meet us
With department-store lipstick on his collar
And a pocket full of sour candy and dope.
I asked him how he did it.
How it didn’t rip his heart to shreds.
“I really do love them,”
he told me.
“All of them.”
ANTAGONIST
Does a ghost
know that he’s a ghost?
Does a saint
know that she’s forgiven?
If no one knows,
then I don’t know
if I might be
the villain.
I don’t trust the author anymore.
BAD DAY: 3
I’m sorry
I’m having another bad day.
My tongue is twisted
my words come out
like venom.
I only use my armor when you frighten me.
Stuck in the middle of “I love you” and “I can’t take this anymore.”
These things they come and go
and I mean half of everything I tell you.
I’m half of everything I hate,
and half of anything I create
is you too.
So I start to hate the poems when I hate you.
THE BAKER
I baked him a cake,
and now I watched him cut it open.
The first slice always falls apart.
I winced, as the pieces crumbled like a landslide.
No matter how many cakes I bake,
the first piece that’s cut
always falls apart.
The inside was cherry red.
Globular, bulbous chunks leaked from the center.
Like giant blood clots, bathing in buttercream.
I imagined I had taken my still-beating heart from my chest
and baked it into the middle.
He took a bite, and grinned at me.
His teeth stained like a row of garnets.
Now he could have it,
and eat it too.
ORDINARY BOYS
There are ordinary boys.
And then there are boys
who stick an arm down your throat
and grasp your heart.
Digging through your entrails
while your teeth rub
against the socket of their elbow.
You drool and it pools around your lips
and drips
to their armpits,
tickling down to their ribs.
There are boys
who you will write poetry for
as an offering
a gift
an insecure gesture, to say
“Please like me,
for I have gilded you in gold,
and therefore
you should love me
for the sheer fact
that I love you.”
Then there are boys
who demand poetry.
Who keep you awake
at all hours of the night,
purging your brain
of their details.
Hoping
you can capture them on a page
and then capture them in the world.
You are choking
with his hand in your neck
and his fist around your heart.
Your aorta pulses.
And so does your aching pussy.
You write to calm the craving.
To corner them in fiction
And say
Finally,
I have conquered you.
FUN GIRL
I am the fun girl.
I am the spit hanging down from your tongue girl.
I’m the choke me as hard as you can girl.
I’m the give it all up for a man girl.
I’m the plaid skirt and white knee-high socks girl.
I’m a pistol that’s loaded and cocked girl.
The don’t mind when you call me a slut girl.
I’m the smack her real hard on the butt girl.
I’m a swallow my feelings and lie girl.
I’m a lie there and let him inside girl.
’Cause I don’t wanna make him get mad girl.
I’m the better off being bad girl.
’Cause then nothing hurts when they leave, girl.
Except with his grip on your sleeve, girl.
You say yes to the threesomes and drinks girl.
’Cause you still really care what he thinks girl.
You’re not boring or mean like his old girl
she was crazy, or that’s what you’re told, girl.
So you’ll get further if you are the fun girl.
But you’ll never be the only one girl.
You’ll get older and wish you had known girl.
’Cause you gave way too much of your soul, girl.
Now you don’t expect men to be kind girl.
You just use them and leave them behind girl.
It’s so hard to grow up as the fun girl.
You’ll be trapped in your days as a young girl.
A memory, for men you loved girl.
“Oh! That fun girl!”
POWERLESS
I’m locked in the bathroom on a
commercial flight.
Hilary Swank in a butch haircut
sends a hi
jacked plane
through my cerebellum.
I am sweating.
I pull my lips apart from my
teeth like a dental diagram
and I display my gums.
I sit to piss and roll my eyes.
cuff my jeans 2 times, 3 times.
I am in my memory.
riding a man on a mattress,
back arched like a prize horse.
grinding and grinding.
tossing my hair around
and gripping tight the ropes of ecstasy.
pornographic cries echo through
my head in the airplane bathroom.
they key-change, minor 5th to
humiliation.
I shift gears.
a woman beneath me, squirming like
a slug under a magnifying glass.
my veiny arms and slender fingers
graze across her like velvet.
why is the straight part of me
powerless?
LET’S HAVE BREAKFAST
The light is creeping past your curtains,
playing shadows on your head.
I wonder how much
I would have to beg
to stay till half past ten.
You won’t notice
that I’ve overstayed my welcome
once again.
All great conversations
seem to
start in a
king-size bed.
DNA
My heart swings
in the balance
of this longing.
it is suspended here,
anxiously awaiting
sweet release.
tightly wound tension
throbs in my core.
swells
like an angry ocean.
rises
like warm bread
rich with yeast.
I tumble
weightlessly
through daydreams
of your skin.
the surface of which
bleeds
seamlessly
into visions
of your bottomless eyes
and the curve of your mouth
matching perfectly
the curve
of the small of my back.
I am spiraling
down a staircase
of lust
and comfort
and withdrawal.
I will lie back,
and slide through
the tunnel between
your double helix.
I will dive in your DNA.
I will stay here,
patiently,
comatose in the wake
of your everything-ness.
Your all.
I will make permanent residence
right here
in your acquaintance.
16 MISSED CALLS
It’s another Monday morning
and you still haven’t slept in your bed.
It’s only been 3 days
but I’m told that
Jesus did a lot over the weekend
when we thought he was dead.
FOREVER… IS A LONG TIME
I spent a long time
watering a plant made out of plastic,
and I cursed the ground for growing green.
I spent a long time
substituting honest with sarcastic
and I cursed my tongue for being mean.
Weightless, breathless, restitute.
Motionless and absolute.
You cut me open,
sucked the poison
from an aging wound.
And now 50,000 war cadets
would cower at this small brunette.
To my surprise,
not 6 feet high,
who’d reach and grab the moon,
if I should ask, or just imply
that I wanted a bit more light,
so I could look inside his eyes,
and get the colors just right.
I spent a long time
calling all my parts by evil nicknames,
and I told myself they hate me too.
But you spent a long time,
tending to a home that’s burning in flames
and your patience made me love you.
Build love, build god, build promises
build calluses, then build provinces
’cause I have found
somebody who would build life,
then demolish it.
And we could simply hit rewind,
to live it all a thousand times
find views in fucking Kathmandu,
to watch it from a different height
(and we’d comment how the sun shines)
I searched the world
to find
you hiding inside me
the whole damn time.
Weightless,
breathless,
restitute…
BAD DAY: EPILOGUE
“Swallow your apologies.
None of them mean shit to me.
And all you have these days
are bad days.”
These things they come and go
and I mean half of everything I tell you.
I’m half of everything I hate,
and half of anything I create
is you too.
So I’ll start to hate my future when I hate you.
L TRAIN
One day, just like any other day,
you will wake up
and something will stir in your belly.
It will shake
and growl
and rumble like a beast
and claw its way up your throat.
With two strong hands
it will wrench your lips apart
and force your mouth wide open
and you will say,
“I want it.”
And you do.
Painfully so.
You will decide it’s yours.
And from that moment forth
you will never be the same.
Your eyes will glaze
with a glimmering film
that lights up the dark
with its iridescent flickering.
Your teeth will grit and throb
and threaten to burst
like cracks in concrete.
Your stride will become faster,
stronger,
quicker.
Cutting through the air
like sharp shears through parchment.
Your pen will hit the paper
like a body hitting pavement
and you will scrape your knees red
over
and over
and over again
across the fine lines.
You will shut your eyes to the world
and retreat within yourself.
You will wait there.
Patiently.
Languid in the wake of your potential.
And then one day
You’ll explode.
You’ll shake your head
and laugh
and scream
with hysteria.
Every single eye
will focus on you
with laser-sharp precision.
You will have them in your grasp.
And your fingers
will fold
around them like shelter;
a dark ceiling closing in,
and you’ll keep them there,
in your kingdom.
One day you will explode.
And your pieces will scatter
to far corners of the world
never to be found again.
You will trade these pieces
for that thing.
That thing you wanted.
You traded Everything
to have it.
HIGH-FIVE KIDS
Back t
o where it all began,
this time with another man.
’Cause mine has found his place
amongst the fountains.
One-hundred-dollar wine to drink
The blood pools in the kitchen sink,
and buildings line the windows
like the mountains.
Stuck in limbo,
I’m bent backwards.
Crooked spine,
and broken plaster.
Tell me, do you know the password?
We’re denied by heaven’s master.
Back to where
the pavement breaks.
Lined all along tectonic plates.
The stars soaked in the sidewalk
spell the message.
When all your lovers
start to die.
You wake alone
and wonder why
they left you here
to document the wreckage.
They tell me that it’s art I make,
in all this chaos I create.
They tell me that it’s much too late.
To rectify all my mistakes.
The kid is dead and gone
back to the
Kingdom.
HAVING
How strange to write about
“having”
when for so long
I’ve drawn inspiration only from
longing?
Pink cheeks.
Stubble ripples across them
like a flower
still clinging to the earth
it was plucked from.
Your eyes are static electricity.
You’ve missed me.
A STORY LIKE MINE
It’s 2009
and I’m 14
and I’m crying.
Not really sure where I am,
but I’m holding the hand
of my best friend Sam
in the waiting room
of a Planned Parenthood.
The air is sterile and clean.
The walls are that
“not gray but green.”
And the lights are so bright
they could burn a hole
through the seam
of my jeans.
My phone is buzzing
in the pocket.
My mom is asking me
if I remembered my keys
’cause she’s closing the door
and she needs to lock it.
But I can’t tell my mom
where I’ve gone.
I can’t tell anyone at all.
You see,
my best friend Sam
was raped by a man
who we knew ’cause he worked
in the after-school program.
He held her down
with her textbooks beside her.
He covered her mouth
