Trauma Note

I always wanted to be a UFC fighter, but I lack discipline. See how I give that lion that lives inside my body to you, so lovers may slaughter and mount its head. UFC fighters have beautiful limbs, bodies that splay open and let their ugly dreams course out.

I’ll make it sexy for you. Once I wrote a poem where the I was getting fucked doggy style. It was vivid but used the phrase from behind instead of fucked. A mentor said I would regret publishing it, to take it out. I obliged because I am a scared person whose wants to please everyone and do a good job. Fuck, she was a good poet. She quit writing a few years later, probably because it was so easy for her. That’s what happens when you have money.

I’m a glorious lion shot out of a canon aimed at the moon, mane blowing and wisping, only to discover upon arrival that it’s the sun.

There’s a shadow here I keep mistaking for a person. Two dead ends make a straight line.

I want to be a self I say to the money whose teeth bite me. I want to go back to the crosswalk and pick up all your parts. I don’t know how to sew a body back to breath.

Look at my accessory game, I say, sashaying down the walk in my hot rod cage.
I spend a lot of time editing the inner world out of poems-- mine, yours, theirs.

Think of the cash I could have made
submitting enemies from this position.