sweet plum, apple and pear

i'm going to rip your tongue out and keep it

relic i want it, i want you and your eyes. i want to squeeze vitrous and aqueous humor inbetween our fingers and dabble you with blood. you are the most sickening person.
i want to pull at your hair until i find the roots and when i find the cities lurking in the madness under your skull i will, i promise,
carve out every single follicle with my nails and spit in the dirt and climb in.

your hips pistoning, your mind boggling.
bones and cerebellum all asking of me and faith will find me.

(last year you promised. you promised me. you told me i would be out of this place, you promised i would be wearing blue and red and whateverthefuckiwanted. not white. white is too virginal for me. do you see my hands? do you see their color? white. i am as pale as the gown and i told you i would rather die than live forever masked in a color i cannot come out of.)
.
on the car ride to michigan when i was ten years old i knew that i would be insane someday. it seemed so pretty.
i walked into the horse-sweat room you called a bedroom and you were there with a woman under you, and she was making noises i'd never heard or imagined in my life. she was hugging her skirts around her ribcage and making noises through her nose and mouth and she pidgeoned every which way.
you were one solid cold strong motion, slamming everything you had into the girl.
she looked maybe ten or eleven but for all her youth and ardence you were concentrating on something really far away, i could see your eyes closing so much you might have been asleep if it weren't for the movement, the violent pressure you put into her,
the girl had a red mouth and red hair, and the way of looking through me. her hands trembled when you were done with moving your whole entire body into her and you put your head against her. and she turned her head and her hair stuck to her forehead with sweat or tears or water or gravity.

outerspace could taste like flavored ice on her tongue that night.
she rolled her head and looked at me with some kind of pear eyes. she was a fire burning out, a girl who would burn out before you even had a chance to look and see what it meant that she cried.
she looked at me with some kind of smile, her mouth bent but honestly it was the saddest thing that i have ever seen.
"the luckiest fool ever," she whispered to me.
i nodded my head and went outside and decided that i would be insane someday. that was exactly when. i went outside and pretended that i was a schizophrenic and the girl's shrieks and animal moans were coming out of the purple trees and swaying and thinking that the louder it got the crazier i was.

but really, honestly, truly. when it gets silent is when i am crazier. when i forget about her pear eyes and the look she gave me, that is when i have lost it entirely. that is when i will be gone.

(you brought me an apple the last time you came. i placed it on my head and the nurses let me sit like that, waiting for someone to shoot it off, for weeks. maybe they didn't because they saw how sad my smile was, or how honestly i was bearing my scars, how carefully i was shaking.
finally someone with a mask came in and shot it off and your stomach flew out of it, stacked with razorblades, stacked with playing cards. i laughed so hard that i fell into the floor, falling into it and melting with the tiles in a pool of mirth, miraculous golden light falling under my eyelids and for the first time in a week or a month i slept.
thank you for that apple, daddy.)

you never made me angry when you told me about the planets and the meanings of words. antarctic means without bear and arctic means with bear and that constellation is orion. you can keep all of the stars in your stomach if you know how to take care of them.
you can hold some things in your stomach so long that they will grow inside of you like a baby. do you want to have a baby, elise?
i shake my head and you smile a weird way and i can feel the train coming. midnight at the train station means stars and travel, some of my favorite things. my bones rattle and hold me into a coma state for three seconds. poison like a best friend, i feel sleepy and low all of a sudden.
i want to crawl in the boat hold of your brain and sleep there.

(the nurses keep doing things like checking me medically, and the other day they checked for scar tissue somewhere deep in my voids and i imagined tissue boxes full of slivers of skin, all scarred skin. and i think of the scars you gave me. the time you left on the heater while i slept and i tossed and turned in my dreamworld and the heater burned me when it fell against me, so bad i had to go to the hospital, like the one i live in today. i told you it was your fault, the burn. you said it was an accident but i'm sure that you had some idea that it would kill me, burn through my muscles and bones and sear a hole in one side of my heart, infect it and grill my fingers into little black crisps.    in a tissue box.)

"you have such pretty red hair," monica told me one day. and i didn't have to say any words to that so "how do you feel?"she said with a hopeful voice.
"i want to go home," i say simply.
"you will, soon."
it's been so long, i want to scream, but my throat stops up when she says this depreciating little "i know, honey, i know," and pats my knee under three miles of white. i want to strangle her, she knows nothing, she is so stupid and if i clawed a hole in her head it would make no difference. she'd make no difference dead.
you, however, were brilliant.

(when you lied you'd be so convincing to a child mind. you showed me your new house and gave me a place to play and i asked you to play with me and you were so, so sleepy so you couldn't. you were sleepy and the alcohol throbbing and gnawing at you from the night before stapled you to the bed and "i'm sleepy honey" and i knew what you meant and so i tangled things so much into my hair that tears prickled into my lids and i yelled for you to help me as i yanked out some of my hair. you were so so sleepy. i pulled and struggled and you were sleepy. i went outside and i wore only a t-shirt and ran around the block like that and you were sleepy.)

the nurses have been telling me words like trauma and i just laugh at them because one of them has an apple on her shirt and it has a worm coiled in it, somewhere, not in the picture but you know it is in there and it is long and black like a dark unpleasant hair. it will come out when she eats that apple and she will wrinkle her whole nurse face in disgust and then your stomach will pour out of that apple and i will die laughing. i will.

i will finally die and not remember the outerspace taste of sex and flavored ice. you bought me a flavored ice that tasted like sweet plum and you paid twenty five cents for my purple lips and tongue. you never paid me, though, for the out-of-body experience.
you never paid me for when

in the horse-sweat room you called a bedroom and i was under you, making noises i'd never heard or imagined in my life. i was hugging my blue skirts around my aching ribcage and making noises through my nose and mouth and i pidgeoned every which way.
you were one solid cold strong motion, slamming everything you had into the me. earthquake storm monsoon
i was only ten years old but for all my youth and ardence you were concentrating on something really far away, i could see your eyes closing so much you might have been asleep if it weren't for the movement, the violent pressure you put into me.
i had a red mouth and babysoft red hair, and the way of looking into myself. my hands trembled when you were done with moving your whole entire body into places i never remember and you put your head against me, sweaty and dripping with a weird cold feeling. and i turned my head and my hair stuck to my forehead with sweat or tears or water or gravity.

and i knew i was crazy because my own shrieks and animal moans were coming out of the purple trees and swaying and the louder it got the crazier i was.

but really, honestly, truly. when it gets silent is when i am crazier. when i forget about the words you told me and the taste of plums and the idea of scar tissue, that is when i have lost it entirely.

that is when i will be gone.