I take off my shirt, I show you.
I shaved the hair out under my arms.
I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair
on my legs with a knife, getting white.

My hair is the color of chopped maples.
My eyes dark as beans cooked in the south.
(Coal fields in the moon on torn-up hills)

Skin polished as a Ming bowl
showing its blood cracks, its age, I have hundreds
of names for the snow, for this, all of them quiet.

In the night I come to you and it seems a shame
to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man.

You recognize strangers,
think you lived through destruction.
You can't explain this night, my face, your memory.

You want to know what I know?
Your own hands are lying.

-Carolyn Forche

---

Today you were full of lies, and all I wanted to do was yell in your face to be

honest, be honest, be honest. be devastatingly honest. i didn't mean with me, but that's probably what you would think. and you would say things that would prick and bruise and beat my self-esteem to the cracks in the floor.

i meant be honest. because yes, even your hands are lying. and you think they're being truthful. that they're reaching to grab hips and thighs (but never hands- oh, no, never hands) that you really craved. like a cigarette. problem is, lovers don't have convient ashtrays. they smolder indefinitely

so maybe you shouldn't have lit up in the first place, but you did.

no, i meant, be honest. crack yourself open and figure out what you want, and not the flesh and bones want. the wants that lurk in the crevices of your mind. let them come pouring out and turn this honesty on her, like a sprinkler. let her get soaked with your truthfulness and if

she can walk out the other end laughing, then it'll be all right. and you'll have your 2.5 kids and a dog and a twostorybrickhouseonthecorner. but what if she doesn't laugh?

what then, what then?

this is what i've been asking you all along, selfishly maybe. i thought i'd lead you to it, and then you'd discover that i was lying on your bed and i blended in seamlessly and i fit and i came out laughing.

....

i'm in my first creative writing class. english 311: writing poetry. and it's good. and it's fine, but it's only been one day and tomorrow morning i have another class, and i'm looking forward to it

but

soon we're going to have to stand up and hand out copies of our work and stand up and read everything out loud to a class full of 18,19,20,21,22somethings and i'm nervous.

because sometimes secretly, i write about the way my lovers taste and i'm not sure this is something appropriate for 8:15 in the morning for a bunch of strangers who won't understand...

it's different here on deviantart. i'm unknown. you can see in me whatever you wish. but in class? i'm just me. short and with a little girl voice and wide eyes and maybe a pimple on my chin, and how can i talk about everything i fail at, how can i pass out my failures?

what if they don't like it? or worse, what if they don't understand?