my pulse with butterfly wings

my belly is a planet spinning on axis. i have a small sparrow in my mouth. feathers and twigs brush against the back of my throat. i open myself up like a map. i point to the streets where i have waited, where with ghost like fingers and a square mouth i wait still. this is what brands me. this is what puts me in a small corner, this is the echoing voice that will tell me to turn my face to the wall. to believe that the color is a somewhat different shade. i see things not as they are but as i am. i continue to search for solidity first, for the permanence in a fabric i know eventually deteriorates. i only judge what pains me, whatever grates against the pulsing pink center of my heart like a untuned cello, like a wave against the rocks. i say to myself, “this hurt is wrong. therefore, this must be wrong.” i grew up in a place of extremes, my knowledge has been limited and i respond to many things with a disgusting innocence, like i’ve been exposed to direct sunlight. my bones are still soft and growing. i understand what is so appealling, bodies that sweat a nectar unfamiliar, a landscape complete, an expanse different than mine. girls with dewy unfocused eyes and limbs like orchids. i will never be one of them, the eleventh bowling pin, the 57th playing card. because i am never still, i am like the moon, a onion. i have a history and some of it is ugly. i stare into the mirror and see myself as pale and erased chalk, thin as rice paper flooded with milky blue lines, as the transparent white sand that blows on a beach untouched. sometimes in the morning, i bend over and try to gather my skin into folds like yellow butter, i pull at it like i am stretching a canvas onto a frame, like i am gathering flowers. there is nothing in my hands and yet for another day i am not good enough. everything collapsible, everything forced through a funnel. i’ve felt alot like crying uncontrollably, for the things i’ve lost but still believe i’ll find. the streets of adults are gun metal grey and narrow. the apartments stretch for miles into the sky and blot the sun out. nothing is new and everything is expected. they tell you love doesn’t last because its easier not to believe it does. be apathetic.  they tell you not to fight for things, because disappointment is a part of life, it moves on. lovers are dispensible, don’t get too attached to them, they inevitably leave you. teach yourself not to hurt, teach yourself not to cry. don’t risk being vulnerable, don’t leave yourself unprotected. they say things like “oh, your face and my face have blurred and i’ve had you and there is no desire left.”  we see people as objects, we treat them like posessions. words don’t hue any longer, we begin to rot inside, slowly. i feel it even now. i want your love to continue to enter my life the way a bird enters a kitchen window.  for now i am the sparrow, beating frantically against a window.