One thing you can be assured of, Candice will give you intensity in every read. Enjoy!

Body

Body

I have abused you

when the day seemed eternal and the night longer

I threw myself into the ether and struck the match

body

I have loathed you

picking apart the various seams with the ingratitude of the well

complaining a luxury

body

I have shunned you

railed, swore, sucked in, brutalized with curses, prematurely ageing

the right for skin to breathe without shame

body

I have denied you

pleasure and equality, I wrote the rule book and it

held no regard for your right to be beautiful as you were

I said instead

you were thick trunked, imperfect,

unwanted, freckled, pallid, flabby, old

yogurt nobody wanted to eat when pancakes were at the table

I spent many years envying and giving away

years like dance cards

body

now you wear down, tired of my eternal scorn

you talk in collapses

here take that says sciatica

you think you can shun me? Says paining stomach

you can’t outrun your design, hisses genitals

we will drop you in it, whispers loosening skin

see if you live well then, without us, cries bone

remember the ten year old who has hidden

behind the folds tucked away

remember when you just ran out

dressed silly and not caring a jot

and the world was kind to you because you were a child

they didn’t point at your flaws

but gave you ice cream on the beach front

did you hate me then?

When did you learn to use dislike as a language?

Did it make you happy to?

Did you forget how to just be?

Who taught you to loathe so thoroughly?

Is hate the legacy you want to excel in?

And my hand holding the quill piercing skin.

Body

forgive me

even as it’s almost too late

and you bear the scars of my dismissal

my unkindness, my neglect, my fury

forgive me the error of not appreciating

you held me up

all these damn long years

more gracefully than I ever had

a right to

Sentences aren’t only written on paper

What do you resort to?

If you’re eaten inside out
And the garters of your guts pinch hollow cheeks

What do you resort to?

Listening to time perishing the rubber life raft keeping you afloat

Holes the size of mouths . Holes the size of mouths

A day is exhaustion
The gluttony of energy

Fragile in her deluge

She gives and takes like unstable drug
You watch the faces of those who should care
Because they’ve worked with you for years
Because they share your blood, your bed, your humanity

Still
Still you matter no more than
A stranger ordering tea will matter
The drink cooling in frigid hunger
For the next minute, the next chance

O to be seen without unkindness

You live in the cavitied mouth of people waiting for thrills
Cheap tricks
Expensive mistakes
Just excite me
Please, now, yes, harder

Be different, be worshipful, be erasable or fashionable

and if you can’t please us voraciously

If you’re just you, well then …

You, don’t thrill us one bit, you remind us

Of all the things we don’t like about ourselves

The wan face

The unbuttoned exhaustion

The pockets filled with stones readied for a-sinking

There’s nothing fucking new about you

We turn our eyes away, as we would

Our own reflection, a dog minding not the sharp

Whip of indifference

If you stand in the doorway like you did as a child
Waiting for tenderness
You’ll die standing there
As an old adult with sunken features
Trying to hack it in a cut throats world

Are you fucking kidding?

Even your mother doesn’t like you
What the fuck do you expect
Pariah
Hear the guitar, it sings your dirge

It is a horse and the night is a filigree tambourine

And you are a colander without holes
Whole without leaking
A spinning void unable to give birth

Counting your tarnish with slippery fists

You stand in hallways, wait for time to arch backward
Where you might be able somehow
Undo those wrong knots
Find the way you stop dying as you live
Feel whole without bones
The carpet of your skin a loose mask
That despite itself

Keeps slipping slipping slipping