Paradoxical Imaginings

hide and go seek with car horns

‘Hey girl.” they shout.
“Hey boy.” I shout back.
This one is for the boys on the street checkin’ me out lazy through the hazy film of projection’s lense. Look closer.

I pip like pipes rushin’ water but my tubes will still sometimes get clogged with bullshit, the pacific ocean sipped through straws, stolen from semi truck’s gas tanks running low rubbed raw breaking laws driving on the freeway.

I chip like paint rusting off cement, like fingernails clawin’ dirt diggin’ and diggin’ and grinnin’ I was the fool rushin’ off of a cliff at 6 years old.

I’m hip like a crow cawing disdain, my arms are crowbars swingin’ rush gush weight at the windows of old factories, bathed in the blood of weary sweat’s revolution and child labor. Late paychecks found in the teeth of sewing machines. Hear the glass break: the scattering of rat’s feet screams release. Know that destruction and reconstruction can be synonymous, and you’ll find them both in my name.

Hey boy, look left. Hey! I’m not done yet. Look closer.

While you’re checking out my ass, notice my back pockets are grass stains collected from cartwheels in graveyards. Did you know momentum can be a noun if you’d just stop being afraid of the ground? Didn’t your mother ever teach you to be polite?! Don’t forget to say goodbye to the night when the dawn starts to stretch its eager arms and you’re sneaking off scared your girlfriend’s parent’s front lawn thinking about weddings that start with gunshots.
Check out my class! In a beer-stained prom dress on a Monday afternoon, the fabric is the mess made while slurring syllables and throwing abstract philosophies as art onto the cobblestone brick of alleyways. Did you know your sleeve is the best napkin to use when the silver spoons are shouting their ignorant abuse and the forks at a fancy party reaffirm that they’re all really just the same?
Check out check out the beauty beneath the physics, my tits are nothing compared the the peacock feathers flamboyant flag waving, tucked into every pore of my skin. But you’ll only see them if you squint just right on a night where you’ve forgotten every feature of my face except the freckles, but still somehow hold onto the impossible memory of speckles of nutmeg flavouring my soul spicy vanilla, caught like a cold once in the forest growing old  when the trees were busy baking, barking wicken stories-
most of my birthmarks you can’t see because they’re tattoos on my eyelashes inked by the needle of a vicious heartbeat every time I found a new definition of “free”.
Times I learned that “fuck” might be a dirty word, but you’re never gonna be able to grow a garden if you’re scared of the dirt. Tell me I’m obscene and I’ll tell you the most beautiful blooming roses reaching their dewdrop petals towards the sun only hold so much wonder because they use shit as fertilizer, ask anyone who knows what they’re talking about. And my cunt is not torn up sobbed over magazines from times spent wishing I could be Plastic’s definition of “pretty”, so just stop there.  But I do have bruises, these trophies collected from climbing up cherry trees in the spring, finding a black horse in the wild and riding bareback free through the abandoned fields. I sear the word slut off of public bathroom mirrors with lipstick that’s red as the blood staining my pantieswith the promise life each month. No, I’m not ashamed to say this. My kisses taste like rain. My tongue twists like the possibility of broken knees and smashed in heads, like walking over embers with bare feet. Step lightly.

Look closer.
Look.
Your car honks craned necks chest bumps man grunts, they’ve all failed to find me. Even though I leave a piece of my spirit in the aluminum every time I throw a crumpled can of Monster at the sidewalk. I growl, choke, chalk up another caffeine overdose cough and howl torn fishnet dreams, using my switchblade the tear time at its redundant seams,

…And yet you’ve all still failed to find me.
Look closer.