I am like fluorescent light bulbs
strung together by melting elastic strings –
Melting strings stronger than his foggy ego.
But his elastic moods are cracking my glass coating,
and I’m becoming fragmented
like the Stockholm archipelago.

I am saturated and sour like a lime sky.
The clouds in the sky are churning.
They’re churning slowly.
They’re churning slowly like a milkmaid making butter.
I am churning.
I am churning faster than the carbonated,
oscillating wine
in his bottle body.
I am churning.

His bottleneck is stronger glass than my glass coating,
but I am a fluorescent light bulb
and I seep mercury vapor when I break.

And he makes me break, so he poisons himself.

Sometimes he makes me so nervous that I shake uncontrollably,
and my heart rate is too fast for my blood stream.

Sometimes I am too afraid of what he will
say to me
to say anything,
and sometimes he makes me so afraid of myself
that I think that
I made a mistake being me.

That maybe me is not who I’m supposed to be,
because he makes me uncomfortable in my own body,
and that’s not something I should ever be.

He makes me feel like I have Coca Cola colored teeth.

But my Coca Cola colored teeth
are less decayed than his personality.
And my Coca Cola colored teeth
are sweet in every way he is bitter.
And my Coca Cola colored teeth
are just indicators of my vitality.

But he makes me surrender my vitality.

He makes me surrender like I surrender to blinking.
Like I surrender to breathing.
Like toes surrender to frostbite.
Like water surrenders to reflection.
Like an island surrenders to isolation.

He makes me surrender my rationality.

I have to regain my individuality.
I have to make sure that I belong to me,
because me is who I’m supposed to be.

I know how to calm my unreliable blood stream
through color scheme,
and I know how to control my shaking
through printmaking.

I am like fluorescent light bulbs
strung together by melting elastic strings –
but the bulbs and strings are in my mind,
and I can solidify the elasticity
of the strings that translates into uncertainty.

Sometimes I fill my fluorescent bulbs
with yellow and orange honeysuckles,
and my light begins to look incandescent.

And when I turn incandescent,
I don’t have to let him make me blue;
I can make my light as warm as I want it to be.
I can pluck the yellow and orange from the honeysuckles
and wrap the colors around my hair strands.

I like to take colors one by one
from light waves
and plaster them on my body,
because no one can take them from me
if I’ve woven them into my skin.

I know that I didn’t make a mistake being me
because when I close my eyes,
buttercups sprout from my palms,
and it’s something that happens naturally.

He can’t change that about me.

I shine incandescently fluorescent light,
because I learned how to dip my bulbs in
orange honey,
and freeze the orange honey around my body.

I use the honey colored light
to warm my antagonistic glacial fingers
and to warm my body enough that
I am not afraid of what he will say to me.

I warm myself until I am not afraid.
Until my voice stops quivering.
Until I stop fragmenting,
And until I become as defined as a
continental shelf,
completely in control of myself.

But the only thing he still has over me
is that he owns my honey-coated vocal chords,
and my fear of trying to speak
is still as prominent as my yellow widow’s peak.