this infection

Every night is Christmas Eve
when I'm waiting for you to
come back to me,

and every day is Christmas Day
when you have come back
here to stay.

I got my clit hood pierced last week,
I drove five hours to get it done.
I shaved myself til I was sleek

and then I went to have some fun.
It happened very quick, and I
was pierced by someone else's son.

I cursed and swore but did not cry.
It hurt at first, and then did not.
I'm sure you want to know just why

I even had this foreign thought.
The answer is, I am a freak
who finds herself in body mods.

I've always had a wicked streak.
I got my clit hood pierced last week.

I vomit into paper cups,
I pierce myself with safety pins.
The wastelands are where I grew up,

the wastelands are where I am thin.
A burnt and barren place of force
and hate and rage upon my skin.

It once was green. It's since been torched.
There is no water. I'm unwashed.
The flesh is sick. My heart's been torched.

I keep my pain upon the cross.
I add and build and reconstruct -
I'll take it all, at any cost.

Your coming here was quite abrupt -
I didn't think that you'd show up.

The girls are talking in my head.
It's something that I keep inside.
I won't record what they have said.

every month it starts like this -
something breaks inside my head.
i start to bleed from out my slit,

i start to wish that i was dead.
the tides don't stop and they are mad -
i cannot swim. i'm made of lead.

i just become so fucking sad.
i don't know how to make it stop.
it makes me think that i am bad,

it makes me feel like we have fought.
i always have to take the hit,
i always have to take the shot.

every month it starts like this -
i start to bleed from out my slit.

fat flakes fall and scorch my
face with the promise of the
cold, and it awakens an age-old
thirst in me

but i can see what others do not
see in this terrible snow-scape

and i drink a disguise,
poison-white.
i am dry, and i drink,
although i die.

i was never one to heed
warnings. it's the danger in these
things that turns me on, although
i must pay. i always pay for
the mistakes i make, and this one
is no exception.

strychnine.
the shards of your fine
china cut me up inside.

it is a terrible thing to have
gone this way, without heeding
the caution tape, without heeding
the signs, but it could not have
been prevented.

my fault, my fault.
so this is how it must end,
a ruin, a blotch on this fine ground.
do not walk over me. even though i can't see
i can feel your every reprimand

as it continues to snow.
soon, i will be buried below and
hidden from sight. they will not
remember the girl who tried to fill
her thirst with some bad trick.

they will not remember the way i died.

Where is the fanfare?
Where are the streamers, where
is the champagne
to announce to the world,
I am here?

It has not been that much of a
celebration this year.

I tell myself it's because only the
important people care,
that it's garish to display one's age.
My hair may be gray, but I still have
the same fresh skin that I
had at eighteen,

although I smoke.
(Someday, the years will catch up to
me. The day I stop getting hit for
ID is the day I act my age.)

If I am so grand, then I have to be known
and it hurts that I am not so large to the world.
I may be deluded in my importance, but today
was supposed to be about my name,
and it wasn't, and so I am mad.

Standing in the bitter cold on the
corner of Gottingen Street, the transfer
truck caught my eye from
it's sheer size.

I looked inside.
The carcasses of cows, split
in half, filled the back.

It took two people each to
unload them. I saw their great
ribs, curved upward,
a tangle of hooves, and their
parched dry insides.

A butcher shop delivery,
highlight of my day.
I have never seen anything
quite like that before and
probably will never again

and I remember
that fresh, sharp smell
of meat.