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
I Write Her 