Category: Poetry

i sleep recklessly like a child
conquering the territorial land mass of her crib
and lately i alternate,
making you an ally
or an enemy in my quest
as i reach for you
while nuding you
from yr rightful half
of the bed

and when we curled up
on the floor last night
perhaps my waking
in the panic of discomfort
sprung less from the awkward,
less-than-nestling concrete
and more from
the insecurity of disarmament
with so much new land to secure
and my favorite axis
undefeatable without my
favorite weapon: the edge

but in my sleepy wonder,
i noticed yr hand
found my back
each time i rose my head
like somehow,
you are aware of me
despite the lack of tripwires
in our new barracks

I’ve learned you first in the context of our bodies
exploring and discovering the physical nature of want
so as i find myself desiring you
in the quiet mements of falling asleep
i lose myself in the dream of what it is we have to learn

you could convince me of the truths i hold within me
the first being that i could be complimented
behind the habit of my awkward glance at the floor
whenever i hear a nice word said about me
exists the memory of a time when i could smile and respond
and in yr voice, i hear honesty, or at least
a twinge of truth ? i want to believe you

you could convince me of the truths i hold within me
the second being that i am not a whore
when yr hands hold my hips in whatever context
i feel pristine and untouchable
as though those who came recently
were only the clients in a cash transaction
paying for my body with insincere emotion
until i let myself feel a brand new sense of presence with you

you could convince me of the truths i hold within me
the third being that love means something beautiful
while simply being the glorious word we use
because i find myself unable to communicate
that look behind my eyes,
the one which over dinner says i only want to be yours
until the end of this conversation
and i hope we never tire or run out of things to say

my body, like clockwork, requests you
in the steady tick-tock of our hearts
the pendulum sways with opinion
moving quickly from good idea to bad idea
and returning to settle at
four : forty-seven a.m.
like a kind of off-quarter charm
saying the best answer to indecision is action
and seeminglyu suddenly,
the only place to look is your eyes

this is not the poetry i am seeking
but i sweat through it and in the struggle
to remain vaily quiet i let go of something
in the rhythm of our passage of time
i see myself reclined in the half-moon shape
four-to-five-to-six
i wonder what words are spilling from our hands
but i’m almost sure i hear the sing-song tales
of an innocence untainted
by these childish games we play

but, then, if even the most traumatic moments
are beautiful in their poetic form
then surely we can reset
the choking phrase of one-night-stand
in the romantic movements of your fingertipos
as yr right hand slides from left to right
in the cupping of my body at the shoulder
and the ring of a brand new alarm

i’d send you my apologizes on the tips of yr fingers with the slow kiss of my lips
but you won’t give me the time of day
and by night we lose ourselves to the melodrama that defines us–
it breaks my heart that we are just our game
of fuck-over vs. hard-evening-fuck vs. any less scary option
than the full actualization of us.

i meant it when i say i only want to love you.

my menstruation announces itself
first, by the slight smell of power like rust
and then, the hallucinatory spiral in my pantiesi fall into the vision of my womb
displayed within the glory of my blood shed
dying and regrowing in the life cycle
and the death cycle of our human failures
i blossom in the regeneration of a new month’s mistakes
looking for an alternative
to this dogged obedience to my cunt
((he’s correct when he says i no longer speak of feminisms))
i only look for some new strategy
i want independence, unjudged
remove me from the society whose barriers i ignore
my demands are for liberty or death
but let me acquiesce,
i give myself my own death
holding the bitter pill between my back teeth
and scraping away the poision with the tip of my tongue
until my heart is so numb i’m left motionless
my brain pulses in my skull with the wonder
within the WHAT HAVE I DONE i take my last breaths
i close my eyes into the painless void of my gut
and all this to overcome a little blood
i reject the failty of my existence
desiring a new identity
i fuck with the empty simplicity of escape
and love with the meaningless motion of leaving

i’m plagued by you in my sleep–
tossing and turning through dreams
of simple conversations,
but the panic is more than i can handle
so i wake, relieved
to realize i never actually see you,
and all of this bad news
may be only be a reality
my subconscious faked.

i crawl through shelves
searching each book
for a collection of words
which maybe predicts us
but finding only tales of other lovers,
i begin to write our story myself
–paragraphy by paragraph
turning pages into chapters
until i realize i have yet to know yrhalf
so i return to my quest,
tracing a globe with relaxed fingers
i explore my wanderlust
with the expectation of finding
something like home
the farther i stretch my hand,
the more places i travel:
kansas, missouri, alberta, africa
and i cannot always name the language,
but i know i would lose myself in it
forgetting mastery and fluency
,and relaxing in the hollow noises
which protect vowel sound from vowel sound
escaping in a foreign tongue
and finding myself not alone

wishing ever harder that i could accomplish the complex art of painting,
i imagine my body stretched out cold and blue over a canvas
the brush from yr fingertips painting me as i am: fragmented.
a haphazard collection of appendages all thrown together
connected by a skin so ill-fitted it took many years of tears and sutures just to heal

as with all feelings this month,
i experience the snow from behind a window
leaving the cold touch of winter to other poets
willing to dwell on the icy embrace
and when warmed by the fires of love
i choose the same distance
exchanging soft hands for
the avoidance of passion and risk
of a love which transcends the tangible,

we dance loosely around our tendency
to reject regrets and look only toward the future
while the past heals itself in jagged scars
around our necks and stomachs
so many little bites that never meant a thing,
but, darling, the more you fade into one collective memory
the more the trace of yr fingertips remains distinct

i want to know love that leaves my back aching from the arching.
my fingernails rounded from the subtle filing against yr flesh
and my throat made to speak only in echoes
as my brain scrambles for the poetric recapturing of this slippery silence,
i will let you take every word of yr poem from my lips
in several long kisses, one at a time, one at a time
you’ll erase each stanza i’ve found to complete our moment
and rewrite it in the pulsing of our hearts
beating quickly as though to escape our chests
in order to tangle with each other

you and i will accomplish the tangle
you and i will embrace the metaphor
and hours later write the words
of the time we found love inside of ourselves
just inside the bones beneath the pulsepoint on our wrists
and i’ll lose my will to protect myself within the slow reaching
of your hand to pull me closer onto you by the back of my thigh.

i look for you in my dreams
and find you happily awaiting me
somewhere, with lots of silly jokes
which make me jealous
but comforted, knowing i’m the one
you’ll come home to
again again again.

i look for you in my waking
and find a poem which i do not understand
i see so much of me and so many hints
of someone else, and i know who
i don’t say i love you out of habit
i mean it.

i love you,
i love you,
i love you.