this is some writing from a friend of a friend that i recently stumbled across and i liked it so i thought i'd share it with you...


three hours and eight Heinekens ago


i sat down here to write something that would make him
understand the things i said, the things inside, language
that might fill in four years of unfair, unexplained, highly
predictable distance. the billions of things i wish i could
say to him tornado in my head, and yet, i am speechless.
i have no medium, just excuses. i bring myself back to a
conversation we had just yesterday about ranches and
moonlight, open roads and unmarred trails. i still lie
to him, still wear the mask of cinderella me, feigning
beauty, my laugh almost too obvious. he sends me these
notes written by the pen of a poet and i cry with the delivery
of each. maybe to feel sorry for myself for having found
serenity in the dark side. maybe because i know that while
his pen penetrates my skin, his masculinity saturates
the insides of another.

i shower for forty minutes with paint thinner and steel wool
struggling to remove the scars and the ink and the disease
that has become the only evidence of my existence. i bleed in
midnight gray, the warmth having left me many fixes ago.
i do not want him to know that i still wander unpaved streets,
that i wouldn’t mind waking up in the foothills of hell , that
when i do wake, it is next to the skeleton of the living me.
i wonder how often he reads the white space of me. i want him
to pray for me, for us. i want him to touch me gently. i can
barely remember the last time i was touched gently, the last
time i walked gracefully, danced relentlessly. i do not want him
to see the scars of disgrace that i wear on my eyelids, the bruises
of temptation upon my breast. instead, i want to airbrush myself
in his beauty and walk through a mirror straight into his arms.

-jen zamarin