5:03

There are loud voices all around me driving me mad with their inflections and elongated pronunciations like there are other words underneath stretching out the sentences, about the universality of life: loneliness, the delicacy and fragility of time. 

I need silence and novels and whiskey. I need this storm to be the only noise in my head as I become wearied of the internal-speak with its flashing memories that are totally useless, telling me things of childhood and cutting me open so that the ghosts that try to get inside my hips and float between my fingers can pick inside my stomach for the food I have swallowed because they are not strong enough to hold their own. I am reading cards over coffee and learning Muslim stories, writing prayers to Joan of Arc for people who may have not existed, but who want to have their lives told to those with different shapes of arms, clear faces, people who did not come out of the sea but sprung from jagged rocks and soil. My words may not make sense, but I promise that they will form into proteins, clouding your eyes while you sleep; you may see redheaded women with bruised teeth and grotesque, mutated animals in your dreams. Think of me in the future when the doctor pulls the milky cataract out of the lens.

Assist the things that terrify you with their power, work with your fear, stretch its plasticine and chew its calories. Whatever causes horror in your animal-mind is simply trying to welcome you back to what you are.  

My bestial temporal lobes are full of lunacy, an ecstatic form of sanity; I am a true lunatic, talking to the moon.




I do not know what I am writing I do not know my body and my mind I do not know gender or the ecosystem of soil but I know the rotation of emotion in the color of sonic, neon blue that exists in the ridiculous gray matter that sends electricity into my spinal fluid. I will raise my shirt and show you my breasts and the glowing indigo in the curve of my back.



I leave my journal open on the back porch and ghosts come out of the fog, wanting to read my work. 

"No," I say. "It is not ready yet."


I have to write of the things that wake me from sleep and leave me alone at 3 am, cold in the cruel July heat, all of my dreams sucked from my ankles. Writing is the only thing that saves me from death. I am inundated in my own sensuality, I have fed my blood to demons and flowers and replaced it with chemicals; I would not have survived any other way.


I am a witch. I belong in water. I have created my own personality, carved the angel out of marble, freed Botticelli from Hell. 


There are oceans turning on Venus. I live for beauty and freedom, two words I cannot even define. I hear the singing of androgynous women and see a person with dark circles underneath their eyes move their thin fingers and write poetry in the air that I can only read when I sleep, words my mind wrote while I was busy living. What is inside of me?





Women who pray often wear veils. They split their knees on the floors of holy rooms, tearing open their skin to be like a dead prophet, their wrists and foreheads dripping onto the ground.

Abyssus Abyssum Invocat. Christi crux est mea lux.