directions on relocation

Don’t worry about the gray lick
of diction, the sweet pink
panopticon. Besides, they'll
let you keep all the furniture.
You'll scour your memory and wish
you could describe it, the
seams seething and serrated, the
parking lot filled with dead sedans
and rotting pumpkins. You know
there’s a girl somewhere trapped
in a portrait and she’s not
waiting for anyone to save her
but her breath catches all the
time. Live on mints and pixie sticks,
the coffee pot smelling of
cigarettes and ditch water. Keep
maps and metronomes in the glove
compartment, the broken
radio of your sex. You never
learned the way to a man’s
heart but you'll learn the taste of
his distance, warm and melting in
your stomach. Your lips so blue they
taste like cold. Run to the beach
and there’s a shipwreck, watch it sink
from dead seashells and fissured
piano keys, from purple slushees and
slanting rain. Soon you’ll learn
girls like you are slaughtered by the
strong, the moons of his fingernails
slaughtering your heart. You'll moan
for him in your sleep, wake up to the
sound of whirring vacuums.
Beyond the incessant hum
of dust-caked floor fans you can hear
the racoons dying. How it makes
such a beautiful, decaying picture.
Makes you scream to the bone.