Crystal, Gold and Neon

I lie and say reality has become so troubling that I need a break from it, dipping my nights in poisons encased in crystal so they catch the light and make me think I've found gold. I lie and say I love the nights I spend forgetting the days I've spent failing to grow.

I wander back to a warm bed or a warm couch and find myself curled up in the arms of people I love, whispers in my ears of how they’ll never let me go, but the back of my mind has a digital countdown to the day they see my mess as nothing more mysterious than a sink full of dishes (the day they make me someone else's problem, the day they give up).

Because where I'm from we hide the mess. We rake the leaves into neat piles to be picked up by men with trucks and carried to somewhere with high fences, meticulously repainted as soon as weather starts to wear them down. We hide wire and cords behind plaster, laundry baskets behind doors and garbage bins in little wooden huts. We have rules about neon lights. We use fake grass, or truck it in from a farm upstate – purebred like our blood and our pets that cost more than your annual salary.

It's not so bad, to drive along and not see the dirty laundry, to walk among beautiful people with beautiful clothes and beautiful cars and consider myself among them. It's not so bad until nightfall leaves my room lit with starlight and I have to escape out the window to breathe because the voices in my head have taken up all the oxygen. It's no so bad until the idea of feeling beautiful has faded along with the green in the grass and the life in the trees. So here's my mess, my dirty laundry. Here are my wires and cords, my imperfections, my scars, my neon lights. I lie and say I'll never change.

Imperfect Stranger

I remember the day I learned your last name.

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t,

so I could keep pretending like it wasn’t your name that day.

Because before then,

before then…

you had barely met me,

and you read me like a bedtime story.

Each of my complexities

turned into a toddler’s words in a pretty disguise.

With each meaningless word I spoke,

you knew me.

You guessed my secrets,

recited my dreams,

drew my memories,

like in some other life,

we did it all together.

Then I saw your name

in the wrong section of the local paper.

Sidewalks in the Rain

There’s something quietly beautiful about dirty sidewalks in the rain, mud and cigarette butts floating atop the dips and cracks, flitting like disoriented houseflies, the gray a fitting reflection of the darkened skies. Noise settles into a numbing whir for the moment: car tires rolling at slower paces, more people braving the streets alone, or maybe just more obviously alone, as they angle their faces down, dancing, as it were, from one square to the next to keep their feet dry inside their silk socks.

The rain finds the open space between the cotton of their shirts and the warmth of their skin, and the last droplets come down with an uncomfortable shock at first, eventually adjusting to something almost sensual, trickling down spines between tensing muscles as the air around them dries and quiets.

Necks start to unfurl, eyes admiring the passing clouds that, in their rush to keep up with the wind, expose bits of uncovered sky. The trees begin to lose their weight, and their branches get thrown, leaves like static on a television screen, synchronized motion in too many directions to seem cohesive.

The calm of the storm seems more present than the calm after, as people start appearing in more doorways, breaking free from their moments of reverie and introspection, refocusing their thoughts to routine, more aware of the dirt beneath their feet, unaware that they, too, are quietly beautiful.