Tag: love poem

 

you can find me in complete silence
in the corner.
medicinal fingers curved into myself,
into claws so no one gets the love.
I’m triggered by the music and pacing
in 9.9 cubic square feet
of psychosis.
I’m feeling my nails dig into
my palm.
you say hello.

you can find me frozen
one week later,
 woven in an opalite tapestry
spread across your floor.
I understand confession.
I’m Catholic.
I ask for judgment,
not counsel.
some retribution.
let’s make this clear.
let’s make this public.
 I’m stuck in a projection
so you barely have a face
that isn’t my reflection.
at least I give you transparency,
moping opacity.
my veins are bursting with crisis,
with clarity.
you walk across my pubic bone
uncarefully.

you recognize me months later by the wallow,
 by the
 chewed straw in my hand,
the callus in my palm,
the bad polish job.
I tell you what love feels like
based on the time I first noticed
an open space between two
wants.
it was five seconds long
since then and now,
I’ve grown so much
I can fill your whole pocket.
what a fertile experience you are having    
I see the grin of a horizon
upon us.
Look,
I’m reassuring,
I kept God,
as you rise above the clouds

this time, I made you
the sun.

“the light” or “the men who look like mirrors”

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I used to be an empty room.
Now, I’m filled with things,
stored with things,
other people’s things and
so many things
to dust.

I spent the winter
dusting,
rearranging.
I spent the winter
lost in a learned childhood drawl
where I mumbled yeah,
uh huh, where I hid my hair and
 pants behind my dollhouse,
where I was on all fours in a daybed,
where I was stuck inside a moment
like a picture
except it all moves past you and
you stand,
captured


 watching him; his
 excerebration process,
mine,
without anesthesia or
any explanation.
don’t touch me anymore
what becomes of disorder
when ignored,
when resolved?
unhinged.
remembered hair behind the dollhouse,
remembered yeast infections,
temper tantrums “without provocation”
they said.
remember you never learned to trust.

I started roaming giant sandboxes
underground
following the Atlantic’s soporific
siren voice
to find something that called to me
long ago.
Something vague.
Something warm.
I’m unwrapping the resin layer,
I’m coughing up the heads of dolls,
I’m moistening the cipher.
I’m coming back, I’m coming
back, bandages
off.
I’m walking forward.
This is how they’d rather have it.

I once was a space of
 bright, blue lakes,
but now I’m
bursting with black magic.

“the unwrapping”

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you’re wild eyed and
doleful and
absolutely beautiful;
an encumbrance to my chastity.

you mention  my smile
is bright and sharp,
threatening to steal the star’s
twinkling thunder.
rocks come unraveling but I’m focused
on  the way your
mouth talks about me.
you move closer and I
move behind something.
three billion comets crash the sky
but I’m focused on my knees,
how they feel and how they
look in moonlight.
my mouth is a river of whispers;
body deep blue and
impenetrable.
your crystal eyes flare when you
talk.

              Look up!

the moon has caught fire.
your hand retreats from my lower back
and I glare at the adversary
 that has stolen a second of my night,
a second of attention away from me.
today is special for two reasons so
I stay crouched and
the sky flares like jaundice and I
retreat to a past life.

I look like a year ago Sunday,
like a shadow of a hugless child,
a big, bawling bowl of acerbic bone ash,
like a forest fire fixed in a flicker
caught in a speck of my dead brother’s eye.
I look like a mirror of someone
watching her own upsurge
of implacable sorrow.
sorry,  I let go of his hand.
I’m always so sorry.
so hurriedly racing memories against my
own borrowed time;
so sharp and sore and
mostly unheard,
so tangled in pieces of us.
so now what?

so now you play mortar:
you keep it together
so I can  finally come undone.
I’ve always got running shoes
and an idea
and one rolling tear I’ve got to get
away from.
so very torn,
so splintered and hefty,
so tempted to hold this
just as it was that
final Christmas
but I’m too
slippery palms and
soft-eyed and strident and
sidelong gazing and first uncontrolled movement
 of the century that renders
me suddenly
 I have to tell you something.

absolutely
inconsolable.

“lyrids”

1

restraint is an art
I intend
to master

but my jealousy is erupting
into fits of flowers:
yellow roses for the look,
it means friendship
jasmine for the scent I wore,
one vine of honeysuckle to
to bind you to summer where I was
wet and still and your personal
swimming pool you could
wade through,
catch some respite,
use.
I’m sending her a bunch
with no clear note
attached:

(forget||forgive||forget
them)

the scent is drifting through your
bedroom and the bouquet is
sitting there, getting sun
at noon and
much like the way I sit:
cool,
carefully arranged
and full of
tiny thorns waiting
to be grazed with cheek
or thumb.
waiting to be praised.
waiting to be
buried.
waiting for the stems
to be cut carefully
and braided
through your lover’s
hair so when you lay
down in the park
and hold her hand
and kiss her neck
and let your face rest
on her shoulder,
you are reminded:

you can smell me
everywhere.

2.

(the red book)

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miseries I keep:

seasonal allergies,
pictures of me thin
and  tan and
glowing
 at seventeen.
dormant addiction.
overwatered plants that are never
bringing buds to blossom–
never springing back.
shards of broken glass
in the carpet
somewhere missed ;
then in heel,
then too late in trash.

insatiable sugar cravings and
the cavities they take,
insomnia and the
quakes of sobs
repressed but twisted
into nightmare at the
first minute of rest.
the first taste of irreversible loss
(my brothers ashes swinging
from my neck),
a hex in teeth and
ideas of you glancing towards me,
towards us,
just that once.

me,
back turned
at the time.
me, always clouded
in black.
me,
opening my mouth
and releasing it.

“memory”

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perhaps I will live like this forever,
insatiable,  never satisfied,
a bit Veruca Salt.

I am not my habits
although they are intrusive,
pernicious and aiding me
through letting go of something
larger: the need to be seen in every instant,
pet and validated,
but left long alone
also
and to be cleansed
unremittingly.

if there is a safe space,
it is here, in writing.
if there is a true amends,
it is change
but my lion is indebted.

when they ask what you are,
tell them humbled.

“Venus in Leo”

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I derive so much from one word.
the license plate that careened into the pole
instead of me that night read
“ prisons” and
I knew instinctively how he felt and
tonight I’ll do:

a spring equinox meditation.
brush my teeth.
cut grapefruit for the morning
and ride the waiting out
pay homage to my Pluto
and my Pisces and
my twelfth house
of self undoing.
i’m becoming a panacea of my own:
memory, tincture, flowers everywhere,
the fuss of first love never leading anywhere but
here in another meditation
on the river walk
and

draw my poems out of the older sutures:
undo, redress, pamper the wounds .
think about it.
send you a letter.
remember the way grief sits,
unsettled, right after dusk,
right under your chest,
right under your breath:
a blue river from your fingers.
send you that letter
with my wounds
pasted
in the margins.

reminding you to
think about it

pay homage to your Venus.
she is out,
casting cars into ditches
while you cautiously watch the lights
change.
you are holding selenite in your pocket,
standing where they
are now sitting and wilting
in screams, the way you asked:
one more chance please

you snap and they lose their
breath just like that.

“prisons” or “Venus in the 12th House”

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show me how to be an angel,
sky,
I think I’ve been there
 before        before I found
what my hands can do
when they’re not pressed together
anymore:

bring donuts for the office.
offer silence in embrace,
holding space or advice
if they say help me get through
it with action.
paint houses, mend fences.
pull the nails from my true love’s feet:
I placed them everywhere and
I make contracts,
real amends means I wish you well
and won’t ever
contact you again.
smile openly at strangers,
hold the door and inner weeping.
stop repeating anecdotes that expose the
 dark recesses  I’m engulfed in so I can
stop
passing this on     so I can
save face, space for
longing, mystery, idleness.
it’s the surprise that I can’t take.

I invite them to dinner:
ask them to bring a favorite song,
one dish and
a defect they love.
I like strings and female wailing;
chords that are long, surfeit with
 unrequited love.
I want it to sound like a heart that’s starving
 for admission but will take it slowly
 with a snare drum.
I apologize profusely for how bright my
 apartment is these days.
I know you expected something darker,
I say,
 but I prefer a blinding scripture to the days I
waded in shade and open constriction.
they understand the situation,
my indifference and malignance.
they offer me some gifts to assuage
me and I waste the night
with demands, scrutiny,
verbal inspection:


show me all the books you love.
recite your favorite lines.
I think the world is crawling with caged geniuses
 that got lost along the way;
are you a lonely prodigy?
I need to see your insides;
 palms up to show
 you aren’t hiding anything.
are you the predator or prey?
do you believe in martyrs,
more importantly,
 do you believe that the devil vets the saints?
 I’m no killer, I promise, but I’m not the easy way.
do you believe in chance?
I once watched my fate unfold across my eyelids:
 two parties coming together in black and white,
a future that was possible but someone whispered:
 it is better to ruin this thing.
I believe in lessons.
I believe in dormancy.
there is no such thing as a mistake.

they show me teeth, piano, films:
Begotten.
I laugh, I’ve seen it:
I show them the drugs I bought,
my darkest cackle and matching garter.
show them a dozen ways to trample gardens
with a notepad.
do you see how I can write the future?
 look, I planted bombs everywhere.
 I show them demolition.
 I show them scribes can craft the wicked.
I show them altars, smitten
eyes and a tongue that’s wound around
the Earth.
I show them what my insides look like:
wounds and trillion year old dirt and
I light three candles,
wear them like a rope.

have you ever let a thought just pass?
one interrupts as I dangle over his
crown.
let me down.
and I repeat to him what I meant to say
 the first time we met to explain the danger
 of restriction:
it is nothing,
time    a longing
and I wait.
I say

will you teach me how to wait?

“ricochet”

0

this is the edge.

that place we walk,
that line we pace
where we are crossing borders
but we aren’t ready to let
go of the hand on the other side.
a tightrope and I’m a leo
so I want you to see me
learn balance,
learn control,
learn poise in public agony.
there is no point without an audience.

so here comes the men.
the men.
the men.
the men.
and so begins
the slaughter,
dripping red,
the men.
me, my insides;
them, their insides,
us together in a swirl of
chaos of my choosing.
the three phantoms beholden
to my unceasing confession.

“And why do you tell these men
things long after they’ve left?”
my therapist asks.
tell the truth.

(Because I miss my fucking brother)

But what I say is much longer.

“the men”

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it wasn’t just about us,
it was about everyone.
the way I’ve touched everyone,
or better,
the way I ripped myself apart
in front of them.
to pieces.
my self deprecation intertwined
with resentment.
they say i’m bitter.

you say I’m graceful
but you have not seen me undressed.
you say I know you
but you have not seen me undressed.
you say you’re naked
but you have not seen me undressed.
not the way they have.

and that makes you jealous.
you want to watch me rip my hair
out and tell you to tell me to
stop.
oh, maybe wait a while until
I fall in love with someone else.
I’ll hit you up years later,
suddenly, in a panic,
so I don’t confess to the wrong person,
I’ll slit my throat and tell you
whatever comes to mind.
tell you everything about me and
tell you to tell me to STOP.
they say I carry myself with grace
but there are men in this town who
hold various secrets about me,
various veins I have given them
in an effort to assuage the dark
thing inside of me:
my impatience,
my want for everything,
my lack of trust,
my water spells,
it’s the feelings I can’t take.

you haven’t met me undressed yet.
and the third phrase I have written over
and over again in a patient way to understand:
I come over wearing everything I own
so it takes forever to get to the bottom
of things.

“the rose”

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