"Open Letter to Isabella Swan of the Twilight Saga"

pretty straightforward

It's not that I don't get it...I do.
The taste of lonely gray new city is bitter
and refused to leave your mouth
and so you swallowed hard, and waited.
Skinny as the gasping branches of that
first Forks Winter, I understand you were afraid,
how adolescence and a broken home could
ugly duckling you into shattered smile, shyness,
and whippet twitch, but don't dare assume you never had
a choice.

Ask anyone your age, Bella.
High school is short on a whole hell of a lot
but always carries three in bulk, the Holy Trinity
of ninth to twelfth grade:
S****y pizza, classes the majority of the time you will not like,
and most of all variety.
As I write this I am in Apologetics and Life Ethics Class
and I assure you...
there are plenty of people
worth staring at,
worth talking to,
worth loving,
but none of them are worth losing blood.

Of course fate paired you lab partners.
Pale skin devil eyed sex symbol that he was.
You, toothpick puzzle girl and he, the boy with
teeth too sharp to be human.
You made quite a couple.
Considered page-turning worthy tension,
and vacant eyed celluloid love stares
swaying oceans of impressionable kids
via extreme close up
but in my photo frame I have to admit
I can see right through you.

For your first date he took you into the woods.
Home of wolves, the dark, and animals.
Bundy's playground.
Amongst this ritual he swore to you in steel cold
syllables that he was the most frightening in this cage,
his eyes burning black.
He whispered in your ear about
how sweet your blood
smells.
Now in my town, in the dating world we call these
sorts of things "Red Flags."
Signal flares to scorch an epiphany shaped hole
in your mind's sky.
But you, Bella, you plugged your ears
and replaced your brain with eight wrinkled pounds
of pink pretty-damn-lonely,
you called it beautiful,
you called him love,
and you meant it.

Maybe you've both been in the sun too long,
maybe you let his glitter skin shine soak
your eyes into blindness.
Fooled you into thinking this was something miraculous
a modern day mope-rock Prince Charming, eyeliner included.
Would he still be beautiful if his chiseled face origami folded
into hunger-pained throat thirsty monster you swear he isn't?
If his marble slab sex appeal crumbled into hunger dust would it still
be so comforting to his ghost face pale moonlighting
the ink stained evening outside your bedroom window?

Maybe love can't be true until you die for it,
Romeo and Juliet still linger on high school
stutter tongues, pedestal-ed as the perfect romance.
Their dead lips licked by poison, double suicide
iambic pentametered into gorgeous,
maybe you ached to free fall into graveyard,
fell in love with the cold headstone of his shoulder,
hoped if you kissed a monster he would rebirth
as fairy tale, save you from shivering lonely,
bring you back from the pale.

And so you suffered,
suffered his self-loathing, his bad boyfriend behavior
his bitter bite marked sex, and all the plot devices your
untalented author God gave you to swallow,
loving the Golem still made you wallow
in your own masochistic symphony
string section fiddling his image into
the solo solution to every problem this world could throw at you.

Bella, you misguided kid.
You tossed aside your mortality,
drank blood from sippy cup,
broke furniture with your storm sex
birthed a blasphemy,
and middle fingered any chance at seeing your family again.
Through all of this you puppy dogged his snarl,
sucked cold stones until tongue-sore,
convinced yourself he was angel
and slit yourself inside out monster bride
bleeding humanity out of canine needle marks
on your neck.

On the day you crumble,
when your soccer-mom Goddess
puts down her pen and lets your life pages
shimmer into ashes,
when you stare in the mirror
at the edge of this eternity
and see monsters dancing on your wrinkle-less
ice-rink eyes, and blood babies are born screaming
beneath your skin,
I hope you still think it's worth it,
I hope you still love him,
I silently pray your suicide
Helped.

Reviews

[Ki]

Fabulous. Check out my Twilight poems, "How to describe Alice" and "How Edward appears to Bella"