Volatile Constructs

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

I turn indignantly towards

a tremulous room

and one by one

the ants resume

their impervious,

earth-bound march.

–

I am a solitary migration,

a winter broken in two

by the horizon.

Pauses yield to silence

and silences to rooms

thick as oil.

It is within these

volatile constructs

that my heart pretends

to sleep.

–

I miss you,

the dull, windowless ache,

the effervescence,

the sudden creak of a smile

falling into place.

I tug at your coat

as you walk away

but it is as all things

only air.

–

Somewhere a door closes

and the sudden shock

is as obvious as gun fire.

I have to let you leave sometimes

but it hurts enough to kill.

–

There are days when you love me

and days when you don’t.

I am never sure which day it is

but I am sure of the uncertainty

that moors my breath

and of a love that is

its own special kind of loneliness.

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Pearl

Photo by JJ Jordan on Unsplash

If I wait for you

there will be more pearls in me

than there are names in the Bible.

I will be valuable

but razor-sharp

in my opalescence.

–

Deep down though I will be

soft and sweet like the sea

and who among men

could sustain the currents of a woman

who seeks validation

in the bright and outrageous act of love?

–

Soon I will have more

value than substance.

Soon I will be

a wardrobe through

which the worlds of mankind pass

but never enter.

Soon I will be too lonely with war

to remember my original function.

Loneliness

Photo by Geoffroy Hauwen on Unsplash

I wait for you

as if it were myself

that were absent.

It is strange

how a body

filled with blood and air

and countless,

infinitesimally small lifeforms

can feel so empty.

–

Every moment can be

traced back to you,

especially those moments

which have not taken place.

I wanted you to be there

spilling past my margins

like sunlight through a window.

–

In the presence

of ecstatic couples

I think of how it might feel

to connect heart to heart

with another human being

and it haunts me.

–

Given the right angle

and the right intention

I feel certain

that our bodies

could become singular.

But the stars never overlap

and it seems

that I am meant

to occupy my own

solitary space indefinitely.

–

If ever my light

should touch you

I hope that you

will think of me

and remember as I do

all the things

that never happened.

Love Letter 2

Dear DM,

Today I will dispense with metaphors and pretty words. Just for now. Just because I am feeling frustrated and confused and in desperate need of something tangible. I am frustrated with myself. I am feeling stuck and I don’t know how to unstick myself. It’s hard letting go of the past. I want to become someone new. Not myself. Not, not myself. I want to grow beyond the limitations of my ego but I just can’t work out how to do it. 

I have had some time to think since this morning. I am feeling better now. When we remain true to ourselves the right people and the right opportunities appear at the right time. I keep trying to become someone for the sake of “doing something” for the sake of “being something” for the sake of “fitting neatly into misshapen spaces”. Just when I think I am finally “being” I catch myself “doing” the wrong things sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. Why must I overcomplicate everything? I don’t know what the hell I am doing if I am being honest (and having read this I don’t know what I am talking about either). It occurs to me that one can’t let go of the past from a place of resentment/anger. Those emotions are close-fisted/incarcerating. If I want to let go of the past I have to open my hands/unlock the doors/open the windows, I speak now of gratitude and forgiveness and I can’t help but feel that they are the key to unlocking all the doors within me. Maybe loneliness doesn’t come from having too little of someone or something, maybe loneliness comes from having too much/from not making time/room for oneself/from filling up one’s space and time with somethings and someones. Maybe loneliness is a call of celebration, a celebration of the freedom of self, of genuine expression. As queer and lovely as that sounds I still want to hold you. I want to give you my undivided attention, to lie awake for hours experiencing you on every level.

Once again I find my letters full of abstractions. The whole point of this letter was to admit my ignorance. I don’t know everything dear one. I know only that I love you and that underneath my knowing and my ignorance I always have within me a profound sense of you.

With everything that I am your DF

Sunday Writing Prompt “Everyday Objects”

The Window

He pressed his palm to the glass. The pane was cold, its expression sullen. The rain had stopped more than an hour ago but the sun remained hidden behind layers of ash-colored gauze. He hadn’t been outside for months and in that time the seasons had changed without so much as an acknowledgment. No one had written, rang, pinged, or visited in over a week. He’d imposed his absence without much consideration for anyone’s feelings, his own included. Even if desired how was he ever to return to his old life? He was unrecognizable even to himself, even amidst the gradations that he alone had witnessed. His beard was long and gnarled like the roots of an upended tree. Shadows gathered about his crevices. His clothes were rumpled and malodorous. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a shower or brushed his teeth. His nails were worried to the quick, coagulated blood stuck to his cuticles. His hands looked old, his face looked old, even his skin seemed out of place on its dilapidated frame. The window’s gaze was steady and patient. He saw nothing of his reflection in the glass, only his own backyard which in neglect, had grown wild. Piles of rotten apples spilled over the lawn collecting vermin and insects alike. Inside was even worse. The air was thick and meaty, food deliquesced in the sinks, discarded and unwashed garments littered the floor. Dust and decay gathered about him and he could feel himself submitting to them by degrees. A towering stone wall prevented him from seeing into the adjacent property, all he saw when looking out was his own walled in lawn, with its dying and disheveled flowers and it’s mealy, brown harvest. The window groaned beneath a penitent wind. “What have I done?” He repeated (as if in response) three times each version more shrill than the one preceding.

No Use

Is desire such an empty thing?

Each time a star falls

it is greeted with a wish

and there is no end to the greed.

–

I am a window without resolution,

a door impeded and without passage,

a slide that spirals down into infinity.

If I were nothing would you love me?

–

When I am called to action

I find myself a mitten instead of a boot.

Were I to crawl I might find my dignity,

the shards of an ego gone circumspect.

–

Why do you look at me that way?

I am not a plaything, a secret

willed into existence

by a disreputable muse.

You cannot strip me of my roots.

–

My curves have worn me down.

I am sparse, thin in inflation.

There is no use hiding my face

behind yours anymore,

no use at all.

–

Together our skeletons make a nest

but it is without warmth

that we lie frozen back to back

facing our respective walls.

–

I keep catching shrapnel.

The wars we carry inside of us

are so easily misplaced

and I am tired of being a mark.

Sunday Writing Prompt #228 “It’s All In The Title”

I am not a man who visits desire.

A shriveled fruit, a pillar of salt

my emptiness splits me like a moat.

–

I am the alter ego who got away.

a crippled fetus, a dissident fugue

the light shrugs me off like a ghost.

–

I sleep with the corners tucked in

that I can keep the darkness close

for in that darkness I have no distinction.

–

I haven’t written very much poetry lately nothing that you haven’t seen so I am very rusty

For

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2017/11/12/sunday-writing-prompt-228-its-all-in-the-title/

Wordle #266

I wrap straw into effigy,
a guise of betrayal,
a fire writhing to ash.

I pull log after log
from a basket
feeding into deplorable rage.

I like to think I tried,
that I championed
for a righteous cause
but in the end
there can be no us.

Winter remains a vestige
to a faltering spring
and within that aberrant whiteness
I find little warmth.

However, I adjust myself
the dye still bleeds from my veins.
So I smite thee, my mortified self.

 

Wordle #120 “September 12th, 2016”

A cinematic drift,
an appellation voiced without consent,
a feint of predilection.
From umbilicus to navel
we exchange ourselves.
–
Sehnsucht is the only future left.
I’d rather be a verb than a noun,
a codex of formidable integers
that glisten at mirage-like intervals.
–
I cannot express this pain,
the air settles in my lungs
like minerals, each word
a sob more threadbare
than its predecessor.
–
I barricade myself,
an unlit corridor
chased with doors
that neither open nor close.

Wordle #264

If I had one thing to say to you
it would be forgive, forgive, forgive
only then can we begin to understand each other.
–
The red thread has been shorn in two.
Destiny is not a tapestry but a threat,
her immutable filaments serve only to veil.
–
My eyes-two bees pollinating-
grow heavy with what they have seen
ignorance is not always so innocent.
–
I have chosen occlusion,
the constellations will go on sparkling
whether or not I observe them.
–
One molecule at a time we fashion
our defenses, precise as a cuttlefish,
until there is nothing left to anticipate.
–
I have forgotten the lightness of movement.
The dirt flakes from beneath my fingernails;
the worms have grown fat while I slumber.
–
Don’t be so quick to kill me off,
to condemn, we are the same
whatever the difference in our affectations.

–

I have had some very heavy, stressful, and disturbing dreams lately. I am also sick possibly from the stress of those dreams.