Z.

But the next time I saw him, he looked so different. Apparently, in the few years we'd spent not talking, he had gone and slept with two more of our colleagues (one of which was an actual public relationship). It was incredible--the amount of gossip that went around in a tiny office like ours. Every single disagreement was documented. If someone made a small snide comment under their breath, everyone would've heard of it by lunch. Everything was everyone's business. And--it was known--if you didn't want people nosing around, don't bring it to work. 

Anyway, so, where was I? Right. I was nosing around in someone else's business. This is just, you know, what I heard. After his affair with J ended (with her moving 3 cities away, taking her kids, and dodging any attempt he made to contact her), he slipped into invariable anonymity at work. Everything went on as it did, and it wasn't until I left the company that I heard anything to do with him. 

We had, well, one of our senior team leads, she was a larger woman. I'm trying to be nice, but she was morbidly obese, let's be real. She wasn't the most charming lady either, okay. Overall, not really 'girlfriend material'. Maybe not to most men. But! You see, our protagonist here isn't most men. He didn't see an overweight overpaid secretary with less than ideal honesty issues. He saw an opportunity.

/

 

Here comes the slow-down--do you see it? In the distance, not so far now, walking hand-in-hand through decades. The excitement we have turns outward. Everything is still wonderful, in new ways all the time, and the colors so vibrant. And not just blue.

You paint the mountains yellow and he holds you in the night. And when he crosses the river, you carry his body in prayer. You hold him with your faith. And on sunny weekends, you sit on your porch and rock together. 

You realize the world isn't that wide; it is two people. Everything else crumbles and still, he holds you. Still, you make him coffee: whole milk and a pinch of sugar. The beach in April, right? The mountains in May. Around you, there's love tucked into the cupboards, hidden in the corners, hung over the doorways. And when he looks at you, it is always a soft but certain yes.

Peace that burns through the night and welcomes the morning; a place where it is always summertime.

A.

 Vanilla Twilight 

we were so happy

xiii.

it seems i've made a habit of slipping into borrowed spaces 

lovers

i hold my breath when I see them
they're my favorite person

Deicide

n.: 
the killing of a god or divine being

kenosis

we were all created in the image and likeness / temples

/

proof that i am still alive / an admission of guilt 

/

Living vicariously and invading privacy / piracy.

/

hands that wake the dead, tenderly
grasp for something lost

a boat on a still lake rocks quietly
as the impenetrable night hums

soft in black water, he
grieves with palms pressed

her tongue moving, wet
in the language of fallen gods

a prayer for forgetting, weighing
like wisps from the mouths of ghosts

i am not your animal, honey
dribbling from the hearts of  their bodies

honey: a crater brimming with black feathers
cradling a small wooden tree

and the dying of something unnamed
in the swill of the sway

he begs for return, he opens his hands
the boat is empty, the lake is dry

a mess of a post: really old draft i'll eventually work on again

I am always dreaming of waking up; as if resurfacing.

a Saturday morning, dewy skies and September, an arm around my waist, a leg between my legs like papers haphazardly folded together then smoothed, coming off clumsy. My hair a black lake on the pillows and your fingers palm fronds on my hips. Outside there's a city kissing your window as you press your body to mine, still lost in sleep, slowly brushing back branches to wakefulness.

xii

of that night
what i remember:
the warmth of your chest
and your heartbeat.
temporal dimensions bent
hanging off the rungs of your rib cage
and the desperation of your hands 

the truth is we were made for each other, and i say this only because i'm coming to terms with the fact that i am a monster and am losing my mind in the process. i keep falling in love with people. i keep trying to make people fall in love with me like i'm trying to prove something, tying strings around my fingers, tying strings around their wrists and knitting a web of loves i can hardly keep track of. i am a prison of a human being. i am a spidery prison of a human being. tying strings around their necks, pricking them with promises. stay here, i love you. and then i leave them there, their lives now woven in and tangled with mine, un-unravelable almost. held in place by the hope that someday i will love them more than i am afraid to lose them. someday they will squirm so violently their bonds will asphyxiate them. and so i figure if i should love someone, it might as well be you who cannot look at me with anything but hunger. who cannot give himself, not careless enough to be stolen. i cannot have you which is why we are perfect. are you seeing it? is it making sense to you? i am collecting lovers like flies. a proposition as much as a warning. perhaps an invitation. i bet you couldn't stay even if you wanted to.

vii.

He was struck by her softness, scared as if somehow it would subsume him, like if he held her for too long he would begin sinking into her skin. To melt into the pillow of her embrace the way water envelopes everything it touches. He looked at the fullness of her, the happy gentle way the curves on her surface touched his spindle fingers. The sea that drew him out in the twilight hours of day. He would wade in ankle-deep; sometimes feeling brave, he'd let the waves lap at his knees.

misplaced

Desperate Tuesday nights: every revving engine turning into your ride home, every passing car another half hour stranded in the company of someone tapping his foot in anticipation of your departure. It wasn't always like this. 

Strange how much happens in the passenger seats of cars when you're eighteen. That age seems to coincide with internal vehicular tension, I mean heat. I mean drunken somewhat conversations, leaning against each other and eyes barely on the road, speaking in bodies, or something. But not tonight. Tonight, you're sitting at a gas station and he's unbuckling his seat belt and you're doing the same, first to mirror in response but also because you feel a little short of breath. You debate staying versus jumping out and walking to the nearest coffee shop or bar, anywhere well-lit and still populated, really. 

You think about everything that's happened and not happened in the last three months in all of five seconds. You have to sit in this car for another twenty minutes maybe, and for all that time you'll probably be wishing humans could manifest into another substance, something small enough to tuck into the crack on the right side of a glove compartment. At a loss, you try to make yourself as small as possible; you crumple your legs into the seat, fold your arms across your chest or tuck your hands under your thighs, try to rest your head against the window or just look down.  He's paying the gas station attendant. You think about jumping out again.There's still time. 

Sobering anxiety. You're flushed and pale at the same time and aren't quite sure how that is. This boy doesn't want you. He doesn't want you here.You're trying to figure out what to do with yourself, how do you perform an amputation in a car, how do you cut out the rotting ache before it sets. He's starting the engine you're bleeding all over the seat; it's going to take weeks to get out the stains.

~ 
You look really sad. 
Mmm.
I mean, you're really quiet. A lot quieter than usual.
Um well... how are you? How's everything?
Really? 
What do you want me to say--

resignation. hopeful for the dissolution of this body. and that i might forget this night ever happened.

~
Are you sad because of--? 
Yeah, a little. 
Do you want me to kill him for you?

i keep thinking it's stupid and that i shouldn't be sad, but i am. and i'm allowed to be sad. i'm allowed to be sad about you even if it makes me hate myself to be so childish. 

Ketamine

I cringe when the word comes out of your mouth
                                                                                  -- love;
it clings like taffy and festers like a sore. I think about it 
sitting in your teeth 
                                       waiting to be said, 
ready at the back of your throat           as if a threat, 
crawling out of your lips like poison or suddenly 
                                                                               like a gun shot. 
                                                                                                        And then 
I'm bleeding again -- 
                                 (and it's you and not you at the same time)

monotonous

4 weeks in.

A.

it lives and dies with this

insomnia

eyes sunken so deep
they devour oceans
catch the night on their lashes
pull it waking into blindness