accidentals are always involved
ruminations on finals, home, and hope:
See, I’d like to think
That I can break them, shatter, bleed the behemoth dry
Of hatred and misunderstanding and everything complicated,
Of fused and confused and mis-carved ideas
From the stone blocks I never get to touch cause I’m too violent,
Cause I might make them into something more beautiful,
Because they don’t know but I know what fire feels like.
Not the good kind of fire, not the spark of love or the roar of lust,
Though I know that too.
I know how to walk on the hot coals of prejudice
And face the heat of intolerance with the stone-cold focus
To not get burned anymore
(I taught myself well);
And because it takes one to know one,
I guess I’m dangerous
(To the stones).
But the pillars of society are chained behind walls I can’t get through
And my tools of beauty hang useless by the door.
Inside I’m a screaming child,
Dropped on the stovetop with skin peeling,
Struggling with every agonizing twist to settle the flames;
No matter how many layers of armor I’ve grown,
There are gaps,
There are gaps that go all the way to the center.
So forgive me if I forego activism for the day;
The thing about pillars of society
Is that someone shaved away many layers of stone to make them.
Your face looks younger, like the drug just carried you into some beautiful, babbling parallel universe (and the light almost shines through from it). One of these days, your face won’t look younger anymore when you do this.
I wonder what Basil Hallward would have felt like if he had lived to see Dorian Gray stab his own picture.
when I say that it’s ok to feel like an utter and complete mess this week because it’s Holy Week and the proper time for important things to die, and by Easter time maybe I’ll get reborn too.
but I don’t want to pretend my week parallels the death of a deity. I just need to believe that this sliver of my past is enforcing a due date on the universe for giving me a little bit of peace. Easter is on the way.
and we spend our conversations discussing this person and that person and this insignificant text and that significant word and the spiraling intersections of lives in our own miniature universes, tiny balls of energy in which
every word is weighty and
everyone is obsessed, but
let’s be real:
we are all such goddamn tiny specks that
the only reason words matter so much is because they’re all we can actually wrap our heads around.
i love words, but sometimes they are too much for me
because i try to make them big enough for the universe and
they always fall short.
“…even if you are both completely indifferent about the other in the long-term, why become a couple? Why give your time, romantic energy, or half-hearted commitment to someone you don’t see yourself ending up with–for what are likely completely valid reasons? Why stay in this limbo?”
- http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/if-theyre-not-husband-or-wifey-material-theyre-not-worth-it/
because there is nothing i would rather do with my heart than use it to love another human being, even if it’s not necessary, even if it’s not perfect, even if it’s not going to last.
it’s not about being able to tell other people i’m in a relationship.
it’s about opening up and living, instead of shutting down and hiding.
i like every kind of love.
in a room dark with the anger of loneliness, I held your sharp small waist, I looked for a handle on reality among the glass shards bleeding from your skin, and I reveled in the coercion of buzzing limbs and foolish friends. I danced with your lips in desperation,
I danced with my toes only lapped by the ocean until the sharp sting of sobriety, looming, roaring, left me buried in the sand, my mouth sore with salt water. my teeth chattered with regret and I wheeled in the night sky until the sun’s breath and freshwater blood smoothed my creases. a new-born piece of parchment. I began to write, I began to write with feverish strokes, skintight calligraphy, etched on the inside so that the marks can’t shine through for everyone to see. I sought to hold the ocean in my soon-tattered paper hands, to protect the tides, to save every tiny creature scrabbling in the salt to safe landing. I began to care for the waves boiling about me, the waves my burnt-paper hands had not touched before that day, and I underestimated your whirling power.
so when the seams ripped and the tsunami came, I thought my half-formed levees were to blame for the rushing seas. I thought that I alone sank, buried under the storm. I thought that when your twig-walled houses foamed and shattered that I should have held them close. I thought the wild lost lovers were mine. I tasted guilt for the first time on the scaly ocean floor.
but I was flying, I was not the boundary against the storm but the wind that whistled the final note composing it. I was merely a glow on the sunset of your troubles, hastening to drop below the horizon even as you broke over the remnants of a life un-cherished, gleaming on one single wave-crest as you bore your tides home. I was not the architect, nor was I your failed lifeguard. I was nothing but a whistling wind among many others, and I hope that the storm in which I penned the final phrase will bring you clean air to breathe.
i want to know
if you are standing where i stood
if you are fucking who i fucked
because if so
i want to let you know that i stood there
and maybe you’ll tell me
what is the view from the other side?
but my request is far too unreasonable.
I love you with my feet, glued to the ground where we walked together for two short years, ever returning by chance to the red clay where our love first lived. I love you with my toes, curling out from under the edge of the blanket especially when you kissed me, curling back and arching like me next to you, where I love you with my skin, the largest organ, greater than my heart because it remembers you every time I lie, lying under someone else, and my heart only remembers you in how fast it beat the first time I touched yours, terrified, white under the moon. I love you with my legs, the way you said they were sexy whether I shaved the stubble or not, the way they stuck to the seat in your mom’s minivan in the drenched air of August when we sat in the park that one time together, that time that should have been the first of many, that time when you were already planning our anniversary, that time that was not meant to be. I love you with my waist and the feeling of your hands on it the first time we danced together, the way I pretended to be okay, the way I cried to you that night but couldn’t form the words to explain why, the night that made me realize I was in love with you even though I wouldn’t tell you so for four more long months. I love you with my hands, forever in your soft brown hair, forever reaching across the quarantine line when you had the flu and I was sure my symptomless sickness was the same but I couldn’t tell the nurse that because then she might have known and it was difficult enough to love you on that ground, it was so difficult that the bittersweet secrecy had perks that I didn’t want to throw away even though I missed you already. I love you with my voice, that wrote you songs, that still writes you songs, that sang “500 Miles” while crying alone in your college dorm room a week before we spoke our love aloud for the last time. I love you with my eyes, that remember the mirror of yours, that remember everything, crying for far too long, crying after I had stopped loving you but when I had still not stopped loving altogether, that will keep crying for love even though you have ceased to be you and I have ceased to be I. I love you with my mouth, hurting with the energy of holding back tears, hurting with the stumbles of my tongue when my loving voice was not enough to hold onto you, my mouth hurting with desperate efforts to replace you that left me bruised and hollow. I love you with my fury that your car was in the shop the one time we were close enough to touch again, if only over coffee, if only like people grown, because maybe it would have helped me stop looking for a replacement for you. I love you because I know no other way to love, and because new-me knows no way to live but to look for new-you, the rebirth of love in new bodies and places that will finally fill the pit that dropped in my stomach two and a half long years ago. I love you with everything I have that nobody is prepared to hold, and I love you in warmth and security that all the hurt I own is finite because you no longer exist, past love of mine.
i kind of miss the days when eating, sleeping, talking, running, shopping, singing, hugging could fix any problem, or at least i thought they could. this was about two months ago.
emotions, let’s dance. i think it’s about time we got to know each other better.
