What can words convey
that a gesture can not
more aptly translate?
Last night you spoke to me
but I couldn’t make out the message.
We were lying face to face
in a dream too real
to be dreamed in isolation.
Your beautiful, mysterious mouth
hugging the curves of every
vowel and consonant
speaking in a voice
too distorted to belong to you.
Perhaps our tongues
are more articulate when touching?
I trace your lips with my tongue
unraveling myself in your mouth
as if I were a molten skyline
or an orgy of juvenile lust
scribbled between
the fine blue margins
of a hormone soaked diary.
If it were up to me
you’d drag my body
speared and piecemeal
from room to room
and fill me to drowning.
Your green eyes loosening
the threads which hold
my sense of self intact.
If I were made of lace
I’d come apart on top of you
like butterfly wings
in a child’s hands.
I never thought a figment
could go so deep
but the bite marks
in my heart are proof of possession,
proof that you have altered my design.
If it is the chase you relish
then I have already lost
for love could never be a game to me.
I first want to start out by congratulating you for surviving childhood. There were many years when survival comprised the totality of your existence. It might not be much conciliation when you reflect back on your life, as it was, and realize that huge chunks of your childhood are missing but somehow despite everything you came out on the other side stronger. It can be difficult sometimes to recognize the strength within yourself when at the most vulnerable points in your life you were preyed upon by the people you trusted most but you’re clever/industrious/wicked creative. You found ways to protect yourself. You created force fields. You turned inward. You built an entire world out of nothing. A world that allowed you some semblance of safety and joy.
What I am about to say to you now won’t make much sense given all the effort it took you to create that world but here goes. I need you to tear down those walls. I need you to deconstruct that world and join “the world”. I am not going to lie to you. There are monsters out here. Monsters in the guise of men. Monsters are in the minority though and you already have plenty of practice slaying monsters. You are ready. The world needs you because it is people like you who are capable of doing the impossible. The thing is you were always stronger than your father emotionally/mentally. You broke the cycle. You stood up to him. If you stay locked inside your fortress you will become weaker and predators prey on weakness. The fortress makes you more visible to the wrong sort of people, to the monsters. Monsters love dark hiding places. You are in hiding. It’s time to switch from survival mode to living mode. That world you created for yourself was made for a child. It doesn’t suit you anymore. It’s cramped. It’s dank. It’s boring as fuck. It’s full of bad memories. Every morning you wake in that cocoon that you call sanctuary and you relive a little bit of that horror. A horror that has seeped into the walls. When you built your fortress you didn’t add any windows because, at the time, the sight of your own life was itself, trauma. If you had built windows then you would be able to see just how much your life has changed. While you’ve been growing up I have been out here building a new life, from scratch. Thing is, if you’re not here with me, how can I possibly know what you want? I think I have done a decent job, in any case, it’s a start.
If you are still feeling trapped. It’s not for a lack of options/free will. It’s because you are still crammed into that smelly shell of yours. A shell which is so tight it is cutting off your circulation and making it harder to breathe. Those feelings you are feeling which you take to be proof of an ongoing war are actually just claustrophobia and atrophy. There is a solution for those painful/uncomfortable feelings. Get naked. Go outside. You’ll feel better. The abusers in your life created a script for you, an identity. Have you read that script? It’s shit. Write a new one. Create a life worth living in.
I find myself pitted
against the darkness.
A darkness that holds
within as without.
Every face I meet is cracked
when reflected in my eyes.
Every whisper is a scream
that fails to reach the surface
and there is nothing cathartic
about a fearful silence.
I have glued feathers to my dress.
Feathers that do not hoist.
Feathers smelly with improvisation.
I blink but the tears still come,
a parade, a phronesis
of well-meaning advice
that bites but does not
serve to amend me.
There is a skein in my heart
that snags whatever it can from the ether
as if one could subsist entirely on potential.
Deep down I want to suck you dry.
Deep down I want to feel
the source of all creation
spilling down the back of my throat
hot and instinctual.
When you think about it
we make perfect sense
the truth being itself an abstraction.
I shrink beneath the curve
of your baffling Mona-Lisa smile.
I know that you can feel me,
even when I’ve lost the thread
of our conversation
in favor of your perfect mouth.
Every night I follow you
to the other side of the moon.
The sky spread out above us
volatile as water
and infinite in its manifestations.
Sometimes I forget how
various we all are.
I could be anyone or everyone
and yet it is you alone that I want.
The night sky
is already a graveyard,
a graveyard on fire,
a graveyard like me.
My nightmares do not dispel
on waking, they take root.
My body is an iron maiden.
My blood is a wax emblem
tugging closed the pale lips
of a mouth that will never open.
My hands are two doves shattered
by their own reflections.
The more I struggle
the faster it all slips away.
That’s the thing about feelings
they have to be felt
in order for the heart to open.
Most of the time I feel
too unreal to believe in anything.
Sometimes I crush my feelings
against my spiraling fingertips
and rub out my own
metaphorical constellations
in an attempt to be closer to God
and by God I mean you.
Sometimes I sob breathlessly
into your outstretched heart
as if I were a man riddled with war.
However, protracted the death
I always rise up
with the next intake of breath.
I am my own legend.
Some weapons are made of blood
and some of the most violent wars
I know take place between
a man and himself
when no one else is watching.
Thousands of tiny crucifixes,
my fears, burn through my boundaries
It’s as if my body were made
entirely out of sin.
I write from the inside out.
I write until my fingers burn
and my naked heart chaffs.
I write on the burnt husks
of my exorcised demons
and sometimes I feel
so much that the threads
holding my organs in place
give way altogether.
All I have are impressions,
sentiments pressed into paper,
floundering hailstones
in a crucible of grisly white.
Your facsimile drips from my fingers
unbridled and contagious.
Everything I write, do, breathe
has been infiltrated
with your electric blue aura.
Do you ever feel claustrophobic
knowing that you are inside of me?
All day I sit hammering the keys
and gnashing my teeth
in search of fire, in search of peace.
All night I lie peeling back the moon
so that I can count the stars behind it.
Do you ever wonder how my haggard heart
goes on beating despite a skein of impenetrable scars?
The better part of me
still seeks the extraordinary
in what others call mundane.
I have not forgotten the magic
of two people meeting
for the first time
only to find that they have met
hundreds of times before
in ways that they cannot
possibly explain.
I love you in a way
that deepens each day
but never elucidates.
I cannot define you
as if you were inert
when knowing you
makes life feel more alive.
I cannot define you
as if you were one way or another
when you are everything to me.
Your smile cracks
against my knuckles
like a pagan sun
newly exonerated.
Knees pinched, I wonder
what your words would feel like
gathered on my tongue.
If it were possible I would
fossilize every touch in amber
and create a menagerie
of moments that are uniquely us.
You assemble me in your arms.
Heart chopped off at the wrist.
You give of yourself willingly.
I wrap around you
like a length of rope
too tightly situated.
I never thought we’d meet
ironed into a dove grey sky
with the masses scattering
over the streets like fog.
Let them gawk and cringe.
There is only room enough
in this interval for the two of us.
The ground beneath us
gives way to aperture
and all that absence
rendered unbelievable
is palpable as a song.
We stand clustered
in an ocean formed
entirely of whispers.
I have spent my whole life
debating signs in search of tokens.
I have spent my whole life
taped into the creases
of inferior lovers, waiting
for my dreams
to rise to the surface.
There is something
almost holy about the way
you move across my mind.
A sultry crawl, a bolt of lightning,
a disembodied voice
splitting each ragged breath
strait down the center.
My nerves yield to parchment.
Scribed in fire each second
fills me like a heathen mist.
My soul shifts to the outside
and with your fingers deftly curled
you weave our roots into tapestry.
What is a demon if not a man
churning with buried rage?
I see my future scored
by your melancholy fire.
I hear your murmurs
give way to screams
and tight-lipped diatribes.
I speak only for the sake of levity.
To say a thing
and have it mean something
might be taken as an act of war.
I don’t remember
the precise moment
when your eyes
turned to ash
only the bitterness
thereafter.
What you cannot define
you obliterate.
My soul.
My dreams.
My beliefs.
A high, breathless sigh
squeezed out through
the hole in my chest
is all that I can manage.
Chased by your idle tempest
my heart echoes like a chime.
Shrill, lonely, hollow on the inside.
I carry your smirks,
like razor blades
underneath my tongue.
In the shower
I let the water
exhaust my tears.
Tears which sting
as much as if they were
made of blood.
Love hurts
and what does not hurt
scars into carapace.
I never learn…
–
sorry for the delay sick
One by one my thoughts
interlace with your fetish.
I find hints of you in everything,
a disembodied smile,
an abbreviated sentence
whispered from the inside out,
a sense of connection
abstract enough to deify
and yet too imprecise to define.
I pass my nights in fitful dreams
and my days wondering
what it means to leave a lasting impression.
How it is that you can be both
integral and inaccessible at the same time?
I want to welcome you into my life,
to tuck you into my heart like a battle cry.
In other words I want to feel you,
all of you, in every part of me.
mindlovemisery 