OPEN-BRAIN SURGERY

fingernails

pink fairy-flossed colors glide over lips and fingertips and i begin to find a home within myself 

but i know better than to 

glow within my own skin so i close my eyes and 

breathe in sweat and coldheartedness 

over black silence and body spray that poisons more than it projects 

or attracts 

drench every movement of my spirit in the masculinity that makes this world 

go round/ so bitter. 

( —maybe this will make me a real boy) 

mama says a boy shouldn't cry as much as i do 

something about feeling things pushes me over the very sharp edge of man and woman, 

it is an edge that ends in hard death, should you fall off 

(my father hasn't felt anything in forty-five years) 

he is the king of the edge 

and he says  

that's what makes him so handsome 

(burying things in the bottom of your ribcage adds lines to your face and grey speckles over your heart. this is my father's brand of handsome.) 

i think

my father is lying to himself. the absence of emotion 

makes not a man great 

makes a man stony  

makes a man ugly 

but 

i keep 

my thoughts to the quiet corners of my mind because 

there is nothing worse than 

finding out you've been taking the wrong medicine. 

(pills for loneliness. vitamins to strengthen a steel heart.) 

but if he is right 

(and if he is right, then there really is something wrong with me) 

then i'd rather be ugly than handsome. 

i think, the feeling 

the empty ribcage 

is nice. 

i think 

that's why girls are so beautiful — 

there is something marvelous 

and strange 

about giving yourself the liberty 

to be real.