The Champagne Soapbox

  • sunset boulevard

    I don’t know why I’m frightened. I know my way around here – the cardboard trees, finger painted seas, the aforementioned enlightening and storms of overdosed pleas.

    The early morning slurry and late evening scares. I’ve spent dawns trying to ignore fantasy and dusks painting new realities. Reassuring myself with touching toes and successful stranger conversations. I’m coming home to stability wanting to stretch to feel my silenced being.

    This world has waited long enough, it begs me to come home and break my thirsting fast. Can I stop my hand from shaking? Can I run away and expect my things to stay? Maybe they watch over my things expecting me to return with new things, tools or bangs. 

    Women who run like the wolves and stretch their chest to escape moonlight tides or banging tools. I’ve felt eaten by emotion, magic in the making, a life I’ve dreamed of creating. Has there ever been a moment when I stopped thinking of goodbye?

    Maybe now it will be as if I never knew goodbye.  The handshake can be firm. The familiar blue of the sea found in similar hue of our morning sky. My legs can cross without feeling constricting,

    My arms can hold without convincing, my eyes can speak things without stating meaning. 

    You can me fly without any fear of my weight failing, watch me cry without fear of my joy weaning, watch me fall and cry and snort and laugh. Maybe succumbing is just practice for numbing that running feeling. 

    I’ve tried to look beyond the clouds, up and down, and all I’ve learned is that I don’t know clouds at all. I’ve rushed love, when tough or neatly bound, and all I’ve learned is that I don’t know love in it’s all.

    I will buy the nice blender just to continue twisting our tongues and words together. I will work the mean thoughts apart just to buy more time forever. 

    Help me! There’s no comprehending just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes and the lips you can get;

    And still feel so alone in this generational class,

    And still feel related in past life.

    I’m not a hit and run driver. I’m not sure of being hit by red lights, running past green lights and feeling safe in the driver seat.

    Help – I held the deer right in its conscious lights, detected its emotion, its nativity reminding me of you. Maybe you should drive, I’ll be the deer. Be totally smacked with love by you, picked up by you, taken care by you. I can tell stories of how I could run, it the disillusion of finger paintings and crafts.

  • stomach box

    Smell the dust of what I left. Lay my head. Recite echos of old insane melting the dark crevices of flesh brain. Pick apart the same ending from dead meaning. Same meaning to the dead end. Melting rain and embrace your never-end always going.

    Pre-meditated rehearsals of competency and my cat is scratching the gray walls like he’s found the princess blue beneath, the mint that once woken me. Stare into the lighter part of shadows and expect figures to come running after me.

    Find that under layers of paint, I’m made of projections. About thirty percent of those are white-gripped etchings of shit pre-teen poetry I wrote not expecting to be seen, except by my mother. 

    I could’ve been just thirteen. 

    Maybe twelve. 

    Smash my feet between the recycled mattress and painted yellow pine.

    In another world, I’m my own daughter. I don’t even recognize her. If I were her, I wouldn’t be me. Maybe similar tragedies. Sparkles and hurricanes. Smoke weed because it pisses his mom off but it’s fine now. We learned better. Punch the door behind me, when he was looking at me, still a few inches shorter than me. Still young, like now. Flapping hair slapping on the window, creased ponytail on the come down. Minor drunkenness, not the kind I learned. My sister cried because she didn’t recognize me. I test the drywall, and ask how to cry again?

    To be soft and defined again?

    You cracked your lips just to feel alone again?

    Tarnish my memory with provocativeness. More makeup, a push-up and a sports and a pinch and a cinch. Bounce and move, tumble and run. Gossip and text and smack, they’re having sex. Distaste for lunch. The mirror looks different. Streaking away from headlights on an abandoned road, dark of course. Secret footage, of course. There’s an innate swollen energy, a foreign body chewing on my inside. I ran, because it’s not the kind that’s learned. We kind of just do. I wear silver.

    I don’t know what to do with my hands anymore. My feet feel too free. Wiggled toes to find a grip on the leather curved seat. See my digits and their stick on the dashboard glass plastic. Comfort is temporary, it’s all overcoming. Eat it to release.

    I want to change. I want to grow. It’s impossible not to question what I know, the things I want but never fully get, seek attention until it’s critical. I lose myself and find her when I finally let ego go. A different sort of glow coming from the shadows when hiding below.

    What if it was all my fault?

    What if I drove you to it?

    I’m guilty, aren’t you?

    I look so much like my mother. 

    I absorb people’s hardness. I wake up greasy. I’m not nice to myself, the plush femininity my soul finds easy to give to mouths with rotten breath. The smoothness of innocence, all that I have learned and figuring out what’s left. I forget to breathe when I run. It’s never been this easy before.

    Grind my mouth bones for hours, swallowing their dust. Gather the dust and fold them into a pretty stomach box.