last night write

We're not crazy simply because we wander the streets talking to ourselves. It's just too hard to keep these lines inside, to silence poetry when it's meant to be said aloud, shouted; we could even sing it if we hadn't let our voices go so long ago, when the crowds looked on as if we were angels grasping stars like pearls from the sky, laughing at the way the blood on my thigh runs down like three tears, surrendering to gravity and asking why it didn't happen sooner, the salt washing in waves into my wounds, between my lips, and a girl birthed from the surf as if she were part of it and had always known, her thin hands pulling me back to shore, a city that is a tiny piece of a very large island, reminding me that the whole world is an island floating across the universe, running in circles, trying to find an anchor, chasing the speed of light but never quite fast enough. I am an island, the water on all sides begging me to let it swallow me, but I stretch my neck as far as I can before teeth clamp onto it, taste me so they can't ever forget and neither can I because I know my flavor is warm between cracked, cement lips, searching for the rest of me. My bedroom lights blink off and on, a silent signal to the stalker, the predator, unsuccessful camouflage for my glowing skin, and I pray I start to rust so the street lamp's rays don't bounce off me so well, the memories of when I was pretty projected from my eyes so anyone nearby wants to tear them in half or run grubby fingers across these images, thinking what it would be like to feel them in all three dimensions, my apricot breasts shriveling under a thirsty gaze. So I shroud myself in rainbows to scare them all away until a color-hungry monster feels the growls deep inside, wants to strip me of my skin and hang it out to dry in the sun, watch me age before my time, a raisin that used to be a dream.