Last Kiss

No one knows

the precise moment

when a fantasy

goes from momentous to ordinary

but everyone knows

that desire is part absence,

part acquisition.

–

I found myself

everywhere I went

and I lost myself

just as often.

It was you and you and you

which took me

the very edge

of my skin

and broke me apart

like a watermelon.

–

Where was I born

and into which darkness

do I nightly succumb?

These little deaths

gather in me

and out of me sprouts

an entirely new way of being.

–

Today I am the sun,

tomorrow the moon

and one day

I will be the flower

in your fist,

the delicate silence

which echoes

between a lover’s confession

and the fatal last kiss.

–

I just randomly wrote this, took about 2 minutes, no idea where it came from I wasn’t even planning to write a poem just now

Photo by Klara Kulikova on Unsplash

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Real

I am thinking

of a four letter word

that starts with C

and ends with indifference.

–

Your cold eyes hint

at the assassination of angels.

Those eyes,

full of mirth and mayhem,

which have held me

to your every word and gesture

are startling enough

to incapacitate.

–

At night you pour through

my open window

sinister and feral

like a bespoke moon.

–

You pull off my skin,

the sacred skin,

that keeps my heart

from shedding its scars

and you kiss me

with your weight above

as if I were

a horse or a monument

and I let you do

whatever you want.

–

The birds in my hair

have absconded with my senses.

All that remains

is the chill of a secret

which is too vague to question.

–

You haunt me,

not as a dead thing,

but as the soul haunts the body.

It’s all real.

It’s all real

and I have

the passage of time,

the lotus breath,

and the wax wings

to prove it.

–

Photo Credit: Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Vagina Song

Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash

She is cool and precise,

a vision of emptiness

swaying gently behind the eyes.

I have seen the whole of her

inside and out.

We are not the same species

so there is nothing to compare.

We each have our someones,

the same someone split in half.

She is a damp, halting apathy,

a pretense, the antithesis to intimacy.

I pity her because she starves.

I pity myself as well.

–

I am too many things to be exact.

My creatures are all at war.

I am too much. I am all nerve endings.

The funny thing

is that she isn’t even here.

All I ever was, was my devotion

but he kept on dragging her up

from her little coffin

and forcing me to kiss her mouth.

That’s why I ran away with the Devil.

–

It was only me and the Devil

in that room, on that occasion.

We exchanged hands over tea.

I let him undress me.

My panties were wet.

My lips were red with hunger.

There were three windows and one door.

All closed.

All leading inside.

–

The Devil took me down to the cellar

and filled me with angel tears

and blasphemous psalms.

He pressed his monstrosity

at the mouth of my abandoned womb

and I forgot all about

the little, half-boy

that sings in a choir.

–

Is it wrong to say that I love

the tongue that feeds me

more than the smiling mouths

of good people?

Is it wrong to trade my false lover

for a light-extruding myth?

All operas have lost there meaning,

only poetry speaks to me these days.

–

I may be a pariah

but I don’t want to be alone.

The Devil occupies my thoughts.

He could just as well eat me

but instead he breaks open my bones

with his sinister, seductive laugh.

I am happy

when it is just the two of us.

I am happy to be the bride

of a willing groom.

–

The Devil doesn’t love her

and that consoles me.

She is too clear for him,

too wrath-like, too fastened.

He loves her

but he doesn’t understand women at all

and he can’t sustain

his own heart for more than a beat.

–

The Devil doesn’t have

horns or cloven hooves.

He wears a loin cloth,

or a top hat,

or peacock feathers sewn into a dress.

He is not the subject

of any particular book

but his presence regularly

sparks debate.

–

The Devil is mine and mine alone.

We invented each other.

Sometimes he carries me in his arms

and speaks to me in verbs.

I know what he is capable of

and what he isn’t.

For us there is freedom in union.

For us addiction is a kind of paradise.

I don’t need to excuse myself

for being rotten or ordinary.

I don’t need to apologize

for my vagina.

The Devil gets it.

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.

Black Hole

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

I am one of those witches,

full of resentments,

that mumble darkly

in the cradle of night

Love me, love me, love me!

–

Desperate women are dangerous

they carry hell within them.

They are, themselves, a kind of hell.

Wild as fire and rolled at the edges

they move as cold breath,

warm, white, and weightless

into the wounded arms of fate.

–

None despair so much in love

as those who desire it.

The oceans of loss

I alone have wept

could drown the stars.

–

I subject myself to death daily,

to the tortures of the unkempt mind.

I have terrible thoughts, thoughts

which gain weight and density through repetition,

thoughts which suck the marrow out of everything.

This is how a man becomes a black hole.

WIP

Photo by Claudia Soraya on Unsplash

She sits pale and sinister in our windows.

There is no escaping her, her hideous smile,

her gnashing bones, her nothingness.

On those rare nights when she is invisible

her phantom still rejoices in your great, hanging shadow.

She is your moon, the impenetrable heartbreak

which holds us hostage in a nightmare of togetherness.

The Thin Places

For every fire you drive into me

another quietly perishes.

Of all my selves the one

that you most occupy

is the least recognizable

and it is for this reason

that I love you.

–

Arranged by you, for you

I bloom, morose but wild

for it is chaos which feeds us.

My heart gives way

first to a garden and then later on

to a coffin of unrequited stars.

–

It is in the thin places

that I will make a home

for the two of us.

–

Nothing is real

least of all the taste of you

which falls over me

like an avalanche

of sweet, sullen dreams.

–

I touch the darkness

with my naked skin.

Your loneliness,

is heavier than my loneliness

because I am after all here

even if you do not see me.

–

I am forever consummate,

forever yours

and if that matters to you

then I have lived enough

for one day.

Dragonfly

Photo by David Hofmann on Unsplash

We dance together

underneath

a murky, blue-black sky

praying that the stars

will align in our favor.

Whether delusion or gift

I offer my wings

for a taste of the earth.

–

Your hands press into

my curves and indentations

with mammalian intensity.

I am wearing only

the heat of your skin in proximity

but somehow I still have this sense

of wanting to undress myself

as if I can’t abide the barriers

of flesh, blood, and bone.

–

The moon languishes

in a nest of loose, gray wool.

Like a dragonfly

she anticipates our movements

and wherever she lands

madness soon follows.

–

I am wearing only

the impressions of our bodies

as they twist and turn

to a savage chorus of heartbeats

and stomping feet.

–

I want you to gut me

like a small fish, metaphorically speaking,

so that nothing remains concealed by a veil

of materialism and objectification.

I want to be loved at the marrow,

in the buttery richness

of my innermost voids.

–

I need a man who understands

all the shapes and dimensions

a soul can assume when paired

with a human body.

There is a whole world

of experiences eager to pass

through my senses.

Sublime or savage

I want to move as the moon

through the tides, phases

and erotic overlays

of an imprecise darkness.

–

My stomach issues have returned after a rather short period of remission.

Animal

Photo by Donnie Ray Crisp on Unsplash

In the half darkness

I sleep naked,

your body

wrapped around my body

like a fisherman’s net.

–

We fill up

the whole bed

with our animal heat

but there is too much

punctuation between us

to ever find that familar

animal rhythm.

–

I close my eyes

when you masturbate

because I usually can’t shake

the humiliation of never

being chosen.

–

The room

smells

as if it were

an extension of us

and most nights

you press your face

into my hair and breathe

in my scent

as if it were a drug.

You seem to love me

but not in all the ways

I want to be loved.

–

I miss you,

not because you are

absent

but because

you are not all there

you are not

in everything

you are half-way.

–

Some nights

I am so there

that I can feel myself

merging with your pulse

and the shadows

which crawl from one corner

of the room to the other.

In that sinister state

of primal alertness

I want things

to happen to my body.

–

So I sleep

and I dream about you

and for a little while

it doesn’t make any difference

that it’s just my imagination.

–

I don’t want

to stand still

forever

I need to be seen,

known, experienced

in order to feel

that I am alive.

–

Love is not a game

of paper, rock, scissors.

Whereby I am always paper

and you are either

abusing or abused.

It’s about communion

and there is absolutely nothing

unholy about sex.

Growing Back My Virginity

Photo by Oscar Ivan Esquivel Arteaga on Unsplash

In the blank, covetous darkness

you reach down like lightning

and the whole of my soul

surges forward in a greeting

that is simultaneously

obscene and disconsolate.

–

We both know that nothing

will come of your touch

but for several minutes

we bounce gently together

our bodies pressed tight

as a stack of porcelain plates.

–

In the heat of starvation

we evaporate slowly

and I hate to say it

but months of anticipation

have turned to something

that feels a lot like

dread and indifference.

–

If you crack my bones

you will find nothing

but ink and the cinders

of a once formidable fire.

I don’t want to be

forbidden, excepted,

a penumbra suspended

fitfully between two worlds.