you say the whole
world looks a little
crooked.
my head is on
the wooden floor,
staring at the bowed leg of
a chair, and i guess
it is a little 
twisted. 

i had a dream last night.
we were all vampires, living
in my apartment back at
school. when i woke up
everything was the same except
mom and dad didn’t want to
suck my blood.

i guess the earth is a little
bit crooked, tilting
at twenty three point five
degrees on its axis.

i’ve been dreaming about
death a lot recently. it’s funny
because when i’m asleep i am always
the one being killed, but
i know that what
we’re trying
to kill does not have its own heartbeat,
but rather has taken
over yours.

sissy said something
the other day that made me want to cry:
that the life has drained from your
eyes. sometimes
it’s hard to look at the beautiful gold
they have become.
i hate that color.
i know what it means.

i guess you’re
right.
the world is pretty warped.
i think you can see it better than i.
is it scary? is the world
a little straighter when
your eyes are golden
like that? does it look
a little brighter?

i’m sorry all my poems are about heroin these days // a.s.m

you’re close enough to me
that i can see your eyes,
but they are
somewhere far away
from here. and so we sit
on the couch in silence,
me reading my book, you
staring into space and repeating
the same five lines from a song
i don’t know.
i really do feel like you’re on some
other side, you know.
mom’s crying on the kitchen floor,
stabbing holes into
cellophane because
at least when grandma died,
her body didn’t haunt us anymore.

Heroin, Pt. II // a.s.m