Again I will avoid your gaze
Again I will avoid your uncensored pride your judgment
shape-shifting reckless torment graceless in armor
somehow I lost my armor
it couldn’t stick to this much me

Sticky is sweet and sweet is suffering
and suffering is the stick of skin on skin on skin
my own traitor skin folds like paper like flying letters
like blackened paper planes and bat wings and snake skins
and old women’s basset hound hangdog faces
and other things from nightmares
left in closed bright childhood from eras
where dances were not sun-stolen
dreams somehow still remembered
once they stared at garish lights

yes dreams and nightmares too

I am my own nightmare of skin
and I cannot avoid my gaze my judgment
my longing my failure my fatal envy toxic hamartia
my trashed peculiar mix of DNA natural
disaster on submolecular thrones

all hail treasonous nucleic acids
all hail the self made dungeon
all hail pipe dreams flicker on and off like lightbulbs
like lights off sterling silver of a knife I pressed
to the meat of my stomach too shallow to cut
too-timid hatred left only the thinnest of marks
the slimmest of raised welp trails like apples iron bars
blood soaked spiderwebs on the thick of me

If I could condense to fit that mark
I’d be knife sharp oh how sharp I’d be