– Araki Photograph Studio
Your voice spills through my scars
as if they were veins and all that darkness
rendered feral and inert is galvanized
by the light of your smile.
It is in the act of loving you that I feel most alive.
So if you’d let me I’d take you in edges and all.
She is the accoutrement of a cage
clasped irrespective of occasion.
I carry her pale, tremulous fist
aggrieved by the imperatives of war
in my sacrum as if I were a basin.
She is sacred, rareified water,
the salt that signifies entanglement.
She clusters at the end of my pen
the perfect cheat, the myomane
with a heart the shape of a strawberry.
Her wide grin swivels and floats away.
I sew her runaway feathers into my back.
To know freedom is to love
with the lightest touch possible.
–
the first half is from an older poem and I continued it
1
There is something inconsolable
about immortality the way it accelerates
the death of all that we hold dear.
There is something oppressive
about the sky when it remains too long unbroken.
There is such a thing as storms of necessity.
2
Our broken hearts are invaluable,
for it is only when we risk breach
that we can truly love.
3
We do not want happiness everlasting,
but a passion worthy of revolution.
Straight lines are indicative of death
and perfection is a waste
of a perfectly good personality.
4
This moment, full of unexpressed gratitude,
is not an intermission
it is and forever will be the truth.
–
This is also an edit from an older poem. I am extremely stressed at the moment. Something came up last minute and it is pulling my attention hence my distracted writing. I will probably have to rework anything I work on now due to choppiness but I am still getting a fe
They say that lust is antecedent to love.
If true then it is not my heart
that is wounded but my ego.
By that logic I should be able
to find a substitute for you.
Yet you continue to occupy me
day and night the way that rain
makes a home for itself in every hollow.
A choice never seems as such
the moment it is finalized.
I could wait but waiting
feels a lot like penance.
Sometimes patience
leads to obsession.
I didn’t die the way I planned.
The chains were too thick,
the armor too heavy
and for all my inventions
never once did I think a door
would serve a purpose
other than invasion.
My heart is a well
and every night
I reach into her depths
in search of water
to quench my thirst
but there is only
so much blood
one person can drink.
You were supposed to love me.
Not because I willed it
but because I gave you an invitation.
How can I follow you now knowing
that I am just another shadow
dragging behind your back?
–
I saw this in my list of poems to edit but I could not find the original in its entirety. You might recognize some lines from it.
Sharon McCutcheon
I had a dream about you last night
in which I felt your presence
wring the air from my lungs
like wet laundry.
Your smile was so tight
that it split my heart
right down the middle.
I tumbled backwards onto the bed
and you fell upon me like a wave,
invisible, implacable, inchoate.
I called your name and received no answer,
but you were definitely there.
I felt as if I had touched
something forbidden inside of you,
as if your name had unleashed
something forbidden inside of me.
Against me you lie shut as a door
and I opened again and again
just to hear the creak in your bones.
I find your eyes rise into being
at the strangest times
and in each instance
another piece of my soul
is taken hostage.
If I keep breathing your air
I will forget how to breathe on my own.
When it comes to you
I don’t know what to do with myself.
I want to empty my entire vocabulary
into your beautiful, heart-shaped mouth.
I want to feel your soul weightless
and interspersed like a dream
throughout my metaphorical darkness.
I slide you half-undressed
across my reverential palate
drinking of your punctuation,
of your intermittent breath
finding new ways to fill
and expand your margins.
If your tongue should make skeins
of my thoughts and leave me
uprooted and untethered
I would fashion of your enigma
a satellite and let your gravity
toss me to and fro like a storm.
–
On February 1st I will be featured in Spillwords!
Juan Davila
I wonder if your lips taste of the stars
as they fold in and out of an ether-laden chrysalis.
If I could kiss you, I would kiss you
until our pulses collapsed on top of each other,
until the only shape your supple limbs could compose
was the outline of my body in juxtaposition.
I want to fill my dreams with you,
to find your eyes gazing back at me
through a tremulous darkness.
We could make love with our souls out in the open
and our hearts naked as sunlight.
We could make love in the recesses of our psyches
free of affectation, in a place where magic is still magic.
If my life were truly my own you would be ubiquitous.
I would sink into your horizon each night.
our auras so concentrated, so unanimous
in their occupations that our seams would overlap.
If only it were as simple as calling your name.
A name which I adore.
A name which I whisper alone in my room
until it lodges in my throat like a heartbeat.
It’s true that one can feel a connection
even in isolation, that they can happen
upon a face in a crowd and find in it memories
that have not yet been assigned.
Perhaps we knew each other in another life.
I watch you clawing
the corners out of the room
and the space opens
curved and white
like a China teacup.
Each step I take draws me
closer to the center
and to you with your myriad eyes.
I watch you, watching me.
We linger a long while
and although we don’t touch
my body grows warmer.
Your smile seizes my heart.
and in one grand gesture
plucks out the woolen stitches
which give it shape and dimension.
Each lobe unravels and falls flat.
You place your own heart on top
gathering up the loose folds
into a makeshift bag.
You are the substance in me.
We huddle together
staccato and pale
like two landlocked ghosts.
Pressing secrets into each other
with tremulous lips and hands;
we speak and listen in a room
full of white noise and stark, windowless faces.
Now that it has come to this
we might as well run away together.
–
ran out of time
When you enter all the shadows march
single file out of the room
and the pressure inside of me
increases exponentially.
You walk over and I can see in your eyes
that you don’t see anyone else.
You clasp both of both my hands
in one of yours and I can just intuit your scent.
All that anyone can see is your shell-shocked mouth
trembling against my ear like a lunatic moth cauterizing
its broken libido over a comma-shaped flame.
I can feel in each ancillary caress an intimacy
which speaks of lifetimes shared and renewed.
We have only just met and yet I can’t keep my heart off of you.
(I am struggling with writing today. I have a lot to do with the book just now. Also I will be going to Paris in a few months for a mini vacation. I am trying to learn a little French in preparation. I am extremely excited!)
In me you see only a passionless epitaph
shucking shadows on a cracked concrete altar.
I can’t bare to be thought ordinary, least of all by you.
My thoughts are drowned out by your nails
against my heart, by the squeal of blood
as you tighten the stitches holding me in place.
There is no fire in your roots, no fertile underbelly
ripe for admonishment. If you were less immaculate
we might still collapse together in giddy agitation.
Your hands seek only to domesticate.
I make of your ashes and tears a rosary
but my prayers remain sullen and unrequited.
mindlovemisery 