A bearded lady is the only thing society should fear.
She does not see ugly in the mirror anymore.
She adorns her glorious mane with blood red bows
and braids in the broken promises of her father.
Razors were once used to chop herself down to size,
make it easier for men to chew her up.
For her thirteenth birthday she was given a pack neon Bic’s.
He started to call her beautiful
but the kisses always stopped at the stubble.
It only took a few weeks for the blade to find it’s way
to collar bones,
wrists.
and hips.
It took her a few years to realize
her demons could not be shaved away.
She learned eye contact is essential in taming the beast.
Everyday, it became easier to love her scruffy face.
The pink guillotine has now found its way to the bottom drawer.
The scars are starting to look like kindred spirits
and her beard now reaches down to her belly button.
It is a testament to how many days she
has survived without your grace.
A bearded a lady is lady saved herself.
Be afraid.

Last night, I heard a little girl whisper under the previews “Mommy, can we move seats? I want to be able to run in case someone starts shooting.” I did not have the heart to hush her. I never thought growing up in the nineties would feel like a blessing. You see, I lived in a world before 3D bullets and mass murders. As a kid, I witnessed more miracles in movie theater seats than I ever did in church pews. My bad guys stayed inside the screen. I believed there would always be a Jedi waiting in the wings and that everything would turn out okay in the end. How dare you break that sanctuary. I did not ask for your semi-automatic reality. Because of you, my daughter is going to grow up in a world where bullet proof vests come in child sizes. I will have to think twice before sending her out on her first date, less concerned if he will bring her home late. I will wait up wondering if a bullet kissed her forehead during the credits. You did this. Families are taking day trips to the shooting range and some nights I wonder if what they are doing is the responsible thing. As if it was as normal as buying a Prius. Hell, maybe they are more right than me. Maybe you have made us all into madmen, willing to shoot at anything that moves in the darkness. I like to think though, that the good guys have broken the forth wall too. Maybe I am naive but I still believe there are more super heroes than villains. You can not take this away from me. There is a special place in Hell for people who are caught texting during movies but the men who shoot into the audience are reserved the center ring.

The ice is cracking. It has always been. When I was younger, I used to let myself believe that the low groans were the voice of my father calling me home. No one ever told me my feet weren’t supposed to blister like this. I thought they were shedding. I thought I was growing. No one ever told me you could pick the way you died. When my brothers best friend broke through my parents said it was an accident, hoping we would never become curious with cold water. We visited his grave the day after Christmas, it was still covered in poinsettias and Pokemon cards. I shuffled my boots through the snow, while my brother hid the hockey puck of a lump in his throat. I don’t know who he was trying to protect. Because we both know it could have been him. We both know it still could be. Debts are yet to be paid and the knives in our house have always been sharp. Trust me I have checked. He could still dive into the water with him. In the car after, I asked if he was scared of dying. He took his eyes off the road when he said he was more afraid of the people he would leave behind doing the same. At the grave, I mistook the envy in his eyes for sadness. I think there was always a part of him that wishes God had a different intent that day. That he would have frozen that December instead of Tommy. These are the wishes we will never put on our Christmas list. These are the the dreams we will never chase on account of the other. He turns up the radio before I can tell him how proud I am to have him as a brother. That he will be one of my favorite things. I want to tell I am so glad he decided to start ice skating again. As we drive home it starts to rain. I think of spring and safety and melting and mending. The ice is thawing. It has always been.

Electricity has always seemed like magic to me. So when the lights in my house started flickering I blamed it on the angry spirits. You told me all the ghosts were in my head, it was merely weak wires. When you were standing on the chair, screwing in the loose bulb I realized that maybe we aren’t magic either. There is a chance we we will burn out too. Last night, I was still awake when you started to cry. I saw all of your lights fade out. My spine bent as it heard your ugly gasps. Every inch of my being told me to keep pretending I was was having another nightmare. Then I remembered when I was nine. My father took my brother and I out barefoot into the backyard to teach us how to find the north star. He pointed to the brightest one and called it home. Even then, I knew that it could never be that simple. We most be allowed more than one sanctuary. I mean there were millions of stars. Heaven couldn’t be that greedy. I ran to all the neighbors houses, like a persistent salesman, trying to make them buy my black out. I wanted to see all the stars. I wanted the whole map. All of it. And now I am lying across from childhood wish wondering how I ever loved before I sat with you in your darkness. I clutch onto your forearm and tell you it is okay. That I love you. That sometimes my wires get weak too. Sometimes the ghost escape my head and come to play. Sometimes I wish we were still nine years old and could pretend that if all of our toes stayed under the blankets we were invincible. I can not pull you out this, we all have our own boogie men behind the bedroom mirror. But I will promise to not be scared if it. Of you. I will keep the power company on speed dial and play board games by body light until you decide to flip the switch. I used to think electricity magic. I used to think you were the light of my life. I know better now. And that’s alright.

Sometimes I eat pizza at one am and begin to feel like my grandma would be really disappointed with me. When I talk, I either ramble a lot or I become as quite as a church the day after Christmas. Never in between. Either way, the right words never seem to make it out alive. There are moments I wonder if purgatory is real because sometimes I only see in gray. Sometimes I think we’re already there. I get really scared. The clammy kind. Sometimes to the point where I take really long showers and say I’m shaving my legs. But we all know I’m convulsively crying on the egg shell colored tiles, the walls are thin. I like to pretend my father can’t hear me though. There moments on the sidewalk when I want to turn to strangers and ask them if they are terrified to become just like their parents too? Sometimes I build levies around myself in hopes that I will keep the floods out. Or maybe to try and keep the salt water in. There are days I don’t want to open the closet or the curtains or turn on the bathroom sink. Sometimes I think I have made myself into a giant metaphor and that I was always asking for this. Sometimes I make myself the victim. Some days I don’t even make it out the door. It’s easier that way. Sometimes I wish I would have given you more. I have begun to think that life will always be this way.

I developed a habit of stockpiling letters in between the binding of my Bible, only half hoping God would be able to translate my wayward cursive. Some days, I leave them scattered on your bed side table so that maybe I will not have to keep whispering my confessions into the back of your neck at four am. I flush at the thought of someone hearing my inward sins as easily as understanding the movements of my pen. I quiver at the idea of forever and fatal flaws. I hope you understand I do not think myself weak but sometimes I do shake like a leaf on an autumn nights. There are days I don’t think I have the power to get out of bed. Please, do not hold anything against me but your body. Please, understand I am still collecting bits of heroes in my pockets so that one day I can build a better me. I know it would be easier to walk out of this abandoned church, blame it on the creator, but I hope you realize sometimes the softest prayer sounds like the holiest of choirs.

I am a misinformed martyr, willing to die for a cause that no longer exists. Somehow, even though waiting for you is like singing hymns to an empty pew, my palms are still open. They will always be reaching towards you. Sometimes, it feels like I am making love to a cracked mirror, an altered version of myself. The morning after an encounter I pick thorns out of my ribcage and find lashes on my calves, Still, I place you on an altar. I idolize you. You are my anti-hero. The bringer of my end. My own personal cup of hell. The apocalypse begins at the curve of your lips. Yet, every time I see that grin cut across your face I swear I am in front of the savior. Somehow, you are still salvation and I doubt there will ever be a day that I stop kneeling towards Mecca.

Most days, I wonder what is left of me. What shreds of skin still remain to be stumbled upon. I fear that maybe I have undressed in front of two way mirrors too often and that maybe I haven’t left any secrets, even myself. What if I am another America? Have the pioneers already come? Has the gold already been found? Have I been conquered? My words, my feelings, are they now easily explained in textbooks, mysteries solved? Can past lovers now easily dissect my short comings as if I were a lab rat? Am I merely another moon? Another myth solved? Another magicians trick? Maybe this is how the gods felt when their lightning bolts were demoted to electric matter. Maybe our secrets make us matter. Maybe they make us real. Maybe I am thinking too much. Maybe I always will. Some nights though, I think that there are still parts of me left to be discovered, fossils still waiting to be brushed off. Some nights, I know I’m not finished yet. Some nights, it doesn’t hurt to grow up.

I keep finding myself attempting to write metaphors about trees, thinking that somehow over-symbolized branches could begin convey you. I feel so stupid for thinking I could cut you down to shubbery. I just want you to know though that you are not weak. You are so much more than maple and evergreens. You are stronger than any birch, any oak. You are the strongest man that I have ever known.

let your insecurities make your body blush. have them all kiss the crevices that the lovers could never find. let your lungs collapse in a battle cry that the matyrs all would envy. you are a temple painted with bullet holes but damn those pinholes sure can light up the night. there is no fire escape. no back door promise. no tresure beyond those gates. you are the destination. you are the prolific prize. you are your own saving grace.

Every human has their tides, there is no way of winning against the currents. Trust me I have tried. I have waited on the shoreline with thumb tacks and good intentions in hopes of pinning lovers down for just a moment longer. I have watched friends and family drift through my fingers as I idly grabbed at the ocean, trying to hold on to any part of them I could grasp. Pocket holes. Curly hair. Wrist watches.  Sometimes I even press conch shells to my ear, hoping to hear the lost voices caught amongst the coils. If the ocean has taught me anything though, it is that nothing is final and everything is permanent. That sometimes we find the ships, years later, only to discover they no longer sail. We are all wrecks beating against our pasts. Let go. Let go. Let swim. Let live.

My favorite spotlight is the bulb that sits in my refrigerator. There is a certain way it catches my hunger, the ugliness of my 3 AM gluttony. The only other act that has ever come close illuminating me so truthfully is lying next to you in bed. Before, I had pulled blankets over myself like cheap paint, Babels wall, barriers on top of bullet holes. There is a honesty in nakedness. Forgive me, I have mixed up my words again, a nakedness in honesty. I used to be uncomfortable with the secrets I hid under quilts. Other lovers saw me in pieces. An elbow, 5 rivets of my spine, the corners of my hips. Never all of me, never at the same time. None of them had ever managed to completely unravel me. Not like you. There is a certain way you hinge on to me. You expose me, even the parts I would rather only display in the darkness of night. You let me dance in it. Feast on it. Learn from it. You are the refrigerator light.

Forgive me. I did not mean to swallow the pill that quickly. I thought when we said we were going to try again we would move at a mountains pace. I did not let myself think that Everest could ever be conquered in a day. On the ride in, my mind did wander to the promises that Spring might hold. But I thought that my hair would be far past my shoulders before I even thought of those long forgotten words. Only weeks ago they tasted like a foreign language on my tongue. Last night, I found myself tracing them into you spine as we pretended to sleep. I never thought I would hold you that way again. I never thought that you would dare to embrace me at the train station, letting me sink into your woodwork. I assumed we were older than our emotions. Somehow though, we have mended like magnets. Darling, before all of this, I had all but stopped believing in magic.

If monstrous waves come to tear us apart tonight, I want to tell you something. Thank you, for teaching me how to play rummy on my grandmas cellar floor. Thank you for never mistaking my crossed arms for boarded up doors. Thank you from here to there. Thank you for loving me on my bright days and for still loving me when the sun wasn’t there. I hope that you hear me over the hurricane cries. I hope you know that every time I prayed for stronger tides to pull me away they always brought me back to your front stoop. The salt water always helps me find my way back to you.

Our bodies fit together like chainsaw teeth to a tree. You cut me down with rusty machinery. Wear plaid and make me pancakes. Let’s live like wild men, you and me.