The Right Questions

They very next time I sit with you for two hours and some minutes at the top of a stairwell, crying alcoholic tears as you talk about your mother, you will find yourself kissed.  

Like the skin of a lady by the summertime sun.

Or my brother by my mother after every basketball game.  

Yes, the very next time, I will put my hand on your shoulder and kiss you with my eyes closed.

And you

will kiss

me back.

Because that's how I want it.

Like magic, or something

In his world transition lenses were the coolest thing
Smiling and laughing only when others did
Not knowing at what
But in the sunshine, the lenses got darker
Nails eaten down to nothing
Teeth only brushed when it's convenient
Clothes aren't dirty until he can smell them
Content to relent to the television remote
Friends are anyone who will talk to him
Without him talking to them first
School is a way to occupy time better spent than sitting alone
Transition lenses for a birthday surprise
Time better spent than sitting alone
And in the sunshine?
The lenses
got darker

Johnny, tell me what it's like to die.

"How about I tell you something? I used to bleed and then rub it into my skin until I was red. Like an apple. I used to obsessively slice away in compulsive threes and watch the blood bead up and trickle down. Like fucking economics. I would touch it--taste it, even--just to see what was keeping me together. This precious liquid of life that kept it all in motion.
I was apple red with some kind of something. Where am I now? I would push as hard as my anger would allow and listen to the fabric of my brownberry skin rip like canvas. First I'd see the white, followed by styptic red.
Growing.
Spreading.
Constantly expanding like a universe of worth, of uniqueness.
Are you scared now?
And then there was the night in my parent's bathroom when it happened all at once. No slow escape, but a rush instead. No rip, but an
EX
PLO
SION.
A moan, a fall, a discovery, a memory, now. Then what goes on? All the wrong things in my head, in the room, in the whole wide world oozed onto the floor. I had to yell. I had to bear down with everything left inside of me. I had to collapse, and stare, and cry. I had to."

"Did that really happen?"

"I don't know."

A Fucking Poem (or A Poem About Fucking)

But that one time you told me
It wouldn't mean anything in the grand scheme
So I guess you're a liar with a mouth full of fat you're just trying to chew
And you told me, that one time,
We wouldn't remember in the morning
So I let you fuck me hard and slow with your hands on my wrists and my eyes on your face:

TEETH-biting bottom LIP
EYES-closed
NOSTRILS-flaring and collapsing as you breathed in and out through your NOSE