_razorblade stanzas.

Have you ever seen a razorblade
Swivel its hips across an ivory dance floor?
Waltzing across bare skin with steel stilettos
Leaving bloody passion and pain
Blazing across the floorboards.
Humming to the melancholy of her family’s neglect,
Her friends’ goodbyes,
And the somber soundtrack of burning bridges
Right until the music stops.

Her heartbeat.
Bumping a bass line rhythm
For the dancers to lose themselves in
Marching in file down her wrists
Like a barcode of all the memories
She wishes she could buy back.

Hands and feet shackled to better days
But the silver lining’s auctioning off the rest of her
To a father that sees the bottom of a shot glass
More often than his family
With a fist that falls like comets
And paints her face the same hue as the night sky

A mother reborn as a renaissance of a woman
But the only role she ever gets to play now is “victim”
Lips stitched together in gun-cocked silencers
That never betray the burdens
That her tears point fingers at.

And a brother that used to be
The only good thing she ever had.
Until she came home from school
And found him hanging in his bedroom.
The trauma screaming from the walls
Witnessing her brother turn into a statistic.
She misses him.
And sometimes she wishes that it would all end
Just so she could say hi again.
Like life…is just a race
And the winners only sprint their hardest
To get away from what’s behind them.

So she cuts herself another slice of heaven.
Because in this whirlwind of a world
That swirls crazy in her veins
It’s the only thing she can control.
Baptizes herself with her pain.
Blesses herself with the blame.
Slicing her skin, scorching
Across the meadows of her arms
Like burning crosses
Asking God to admit all the mistakes He ever made.

An inhale of fresh air
From the darkness so thick, she thought
That she would suffocate
Back breaking under the pressure
Of carrying a building bricked from all her regrets
60 sob stories high and wide as the night sky.
Singing a lullaby to her heart
That replays like shattering glass
In the crook of her smile and the breaks in her laugh
That she wields like a mourning star.

So how do you tell a broken woman she’s beautiful?

You give her roses.
Not blaming her for having thorns
But thanking the thorn bush
For giving you something beautiful
That pricks your skin just hard enough
To help you understand her.

_heart gallery.

My heart hangs hundreds of portraits
On the walls inside of my chest.
All of the same girls.
Smiling in their frames
Like they knew they tiptoed in my dreams,
Haunting me for giving them the code
To unlock the cryptic tick-tock of my pulse.
A nostalgic hum of could have’s
And should have’s
And would have’s.
Exhibit numbers in the corners
Like there were expiry dates
Tattooed on my heart
For the place I reserved for each one of them.

A. With the dimples you can stand in
And a laugh like ivory piano keys.
She stumbled in late by accident
But she was the first.
The first to Jackson Pollock cupid’s blood
All over the white walls.
The first face.

B. The girl with the crooked grin
Hanging lopsidedly like it was trying
To pirouette into a perfect pose.

C. Eyes like a labyrinth
And the fire of a minotaur.
With curves like an hourglass
With too much time on its hands.

D. A smile like a lighthouse
Unpredictable gale on a summer afternoon.
Handed me cocoons made of telephone wires
Built to birth the butterflies she left in my stomach.

E. The biggest portrait that hangs on the wall.
Paint still fresh, abstract
Like the most intentional of mistakes.
The painting that calls me out from my dreams
With a gentle breeze on her tongue
And passion painted on her lips.
Unnatural in her natural beauty.
Clumsiness choreographed with the grace of her walk
And a style: half smarts, half substance
Half hidden in her smile.
The last face.

The echoes in the halls of my chest
Like the cavity was a woodwind instrument
And they still know exactly how to play me
Like favourite love songs on repeat.
Memories mass produced in the factories
With molds for hot blooded molten metal
Dripping from my forehead and drenching my spine
In all the seconds I spilled from my fingertips.

And my heart refuses to take them down.
Frames them in my regrets
On a mantle of missed opportunities.
Masochistic in its stubbornness.
Its idea of beauty.
The beauty where the art comes from in exchange.
Where the words band-aid the scars
Where the pain is a pigment
And the canvas bleeds beautiful
But I can’t get them off the walls.
Still hangs onto the nails I drilled into my back
When each one emptied their feathers onto my lap
Just to remind me it was wrong
To try and go too close to the sun.

_my first girlfriend.

I have decided that my first girlfriend will be loud.
She’ll whisper like a megaphone in a mausoleum
And sing with all the finesse of a jackhammer.
More Motley Crew than Madonna
Ink running through her veins
Tattoos sprinting across her arms
Like she wanted the Sistine Chapel on her skin.
And her earphones sing the steel hum of heavy metal
Speaking enough gut wrenching chords to drown in,
Beating cymbals and hi-hats on her eardrums.

 My first girlfriend will curse like a Death Eater
Punctuating her phrases with all the profanity
I never had a taste for.
She will have an affinity for blood and broken windows
A shot glass full of poison and tequila
And she will look like a model
Waltzing down a concrete walkway
Doing her best impression
Of everything she tries to hide from her bathroom mirror.

 My first girlfriend will be honest.
She’ll tell me things like:
“Your poetry doesn’t make sense”
Or “You’re all talk, all the time”
And “Don’t be so afraid to take a chance!”
She will walk with the authority of Eve
In the Garden of Eden after the feast
And she’ll be confident.
Knows she’s beautiful.
Knows she’s smart.
Knows she can play your games better than you can.
And doesn’t care about any of that.
She’ll bring up death, bring up life
And she’ll look up and ask what heaven hides
Like she knew that there were angels
Playing peek-a-boo through the cumulus.

 My first girlfriend will be half Asian
Half “who gives a shit?”
And she will have a name like Catherine.
And Catherine will love spicy chicken wings
And extra sour Skittles
She will never like pink or purple,
Has this odd attraction to the colour crimson
And be fascinated by broken sand castles and cracked clocks.

 And she will confuse the shit out of every girl
That I’ve ever known!
Like “Why her? Why that dark crimson woman
With all that anger and electricity in her tongue?
Why her with her painted limbs, the sharp wit
And the thunder in her voice like a rock anthem?
Why not someone like her?
Or her?
Or anyone else!?”

 And I will reply:
“Because she’s not YOU!
And they weren’t her.
Or her.
Or anyone else!
Because she’s here.
Because she cares. Because she stayed.
Because I’ve tried and I’ve always failed.
See, I tried being your favourite love song
Your gentle symphony.
The one-man band
With the bass line of your ballad buried in his heartbeat
Trying to keep tempo when I could have done better
With a woman who wears the electric screech
Of a broken guitar riff instead of an acoustic melody.
A girl…so wrong from the get-go
But we jigsaw into each other’s arms
Like destiny painted us in a constellation
Too close to the sun but too far from the Earth.
All that warm sunshine with nowhere to go
And all the time in the world.”

 My first girlfriend will be different.