sunday morning sloughs / i make a floor plan of your bedroom
sunday morning sloughs
last night i decided to shed my split ends.
sprinkle them on the shoulders
of every man who has hurt me
like confetti –
made a carpet out of cuticles
to lie on in the bathtub
and it was a celebration.
i cannot sew so i molded them.
peeling hurts.
so does empty porcelain.
it was a curious thing – this keratin party
(and i haven’t even begun to mention the nail clippings).
this morning my friends took me out for coffee.
they said they were concerned and
they told me i could not just throw dead pieces of myself at people.
i cried.
i guess it’s a good thing you didn’t show up,
even though i wore my new skirt and
shed all my skin,
just for you.
i make a floor plan of your bedroom
thirty-by-eighty-inch left-swinging
double-hinged interior wooden door “silk”
white paint chipping off (i should’ve saved some
always take a souvenir)
thirty-nine-by-eighty-inch wooden
unpainted
twin XL bed with an imprint of my hand sunken
into bits of mattress foam
maple-drenched maximum storage desk
housing a pack of Marlboro’s you’ve
touched twice but claim to
be your “vice”
cracked black iPhone with a thousand and one Bumble matches
y2k-manic-pixie-dream-septum-pierced girls with bangs
twenty-seven of them with my name
fourteen that spell it the same
crumpled poems listing your
qualms with capitalism as an all-American
white boy (i wish you luck in
finding a rhyme to ‘bourgeoisie’)
orange Carhartt beanie half-covering your
Barnes and Noble bought copy of
The Communist Manifesto with the unbroken
spine (yeah wasn’t Engels so based?)
a diaphanous phantom teetering in the corner
committing the vacancy of man
to memory (i’m sorry
i have to write a poem about this –
you understand)
i hope you keep finding blonde hair in your bedsheets