Your eyes are so dark
that I cannot distinguish
the pupil from the iris.
Sometimes I lie down inside of them
wearing nothing but the body I came in.
Is it the sea which rages inside of me
or is it only your pulse compressed?
I have erected your monolith,
I have taken it into myself and desecrated it
while screaming nonsense at a sky
which was too dry and too flat to belong to heaven.
We met face to face in an airport,
the distance between us only as wide
as our clothes were thick.
Night after night I watched you
quietly rearranging the stars
knowing, all the while, that our lives couldn’t fit together
without a foundation of some kind.
It’s not your blood that drowns my sorrows
but your laughter and it’s not your shadow that eclipse me
but your hands and only in the best possible ways.
I have come to know your name
as intimately as my own heart.
I have shaped it in my mouth
I have chewed it bloody,
I have tied it in knots
using only my tongue
and my teeth as a ballast.
Love used to be an act of invention
now it is only the reiteration of our breath.
We no longer need an excuse to touch
and as your smile edges closer to mine
I recognize in myself an awkwardness
that time and familiarity have yet to extinguish.
Everything we do is inaugural, avant-garde,
essential to the distillation of our tears.
Nothing loved can ever become habit.
mindlovemisery 