Now

Palms pressed

to the moon-soaked pavement

I pray for the momentary

captivity of a witness

whose soul stretches out

like a field

from one horizon to another

without ever collapsing.

–

Breath tethers me

to gravity’s dubious game

but in the interim,

whereupon dreams exist,

I float above the wreckage

and find that my soul

is too vast

for a single body.

How did I ever fit

within this self-conscious pincushion

that is the human experiment?

–

The stars churn overhead,

their unresolved laughter

jettisoned by leagues and leagues

of untenable blackness.

Your words make it

impossible for my heart

to stay in one place.

I want to live for as long as possible

even if my life is nothing more

than a series of abused commas.

–

Only my eyes dare to bridge

the chasms that exists between us.

Scars hold the silence together.

Some day when I have become an abyss

I will drag you into me

and kiss you until our senses

fuse together.

–

I stand naked

under a sheet of ignorance.

You don’t know it yet

but your love for me

is unfinished.

I will carry with me

the sunset and leave you

with the sunrise

with hardly any space between them

you won’t even know

the difference.

–

I promise you

that for every prayer

I will find a heart of greater measure

to test it against

and for every strand of hair

we will find a woman

breaking herself open

in recognition of freedom.

Heaven isn’t a place

it’s the space

we make for love.

–

You are the deepest

of all shadows,

an army of wildflowers

and every afters

dropped one by one

into a manic sea.

I watch you

pulling fish from the water

with your bare hands

and I am reminded

that every thing you touch

is broken by the primitive application of time.

–

I am alive. I moved back to Sweden. I am trying to find a job. I have to go to the doctor again tomorrow to see if I can figure out these health issues. It is not even just the relentless heartburn or the stomach pain or the weight-loss I have also lost a lot of strength, particularly in my upper body. I recently started studying to become a yoga teacher and beginning exercises, exercises I have practiced for nearly 20 years are really pushing my physical limits. I just don’t have any strength in my upper body. Pumping myself full of B vitamins has helped my energy levels and focus somewhat but not my strength. I know my poem is disjointed but I like it and I think there is something in there that wants to be expressed.

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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.

Invisible Girl

Photo by Serhat Beyazkaya on Unsplash

There is a moon

in my heart

that rises up

in the darkness.

Silver and chaste

it trembles

like an enigma.

–

I can feel it swelling

in my throat

like a great, triumphant OM

and I want the world

to stop for a moment

and listen to my voice

not because my voice

is the most remarkable

but because there is

a message inside of me

that is more precious

than life itself.

–

My life is just one

eclipse after another.

I know where the pockets are.

I know how to walk

from one end of the hall to another

and align my feet precisely

with every shadow and prominence.

I know every secret,

trick, diversion, feint

and all I can say

is that I want to be seen.

–

I might run

from one end of the street

to the other with a wave

and a smile so light

that it catches in the breeze

when what I want is to sing

and dance and tell stories

about beautiful, uninhabitable places

like those inside of my own mind.

I want to be heard.

I want to be known.

I want to stay wild

even as I flit between

the domestic and the mundane.

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.

Wildfire

Photo by Malachi Brooks on Unsplash

I am not a solitary flame,

a candle shivering demurely in a sedate

but nevertheless captivating darkness.

I am a wildfire that chews up

continents and constellations

without so much as a breath between.

I am the kind of fire

that turns everything

around it black.

–

My whole life

I have been a warrior,

charnel ground,

a crumbling tower of a person.

The kind of person

that consumes oceans

and hearts and stars

for the sake

of its own continuance.

–

Numbness is a lack of space,

a crowding together

of emotions and thoughts

which have yet to reach

the stillness of being.

–

You can’t squeeze an entire universe

into a poem, a suitcase, or even a body.

Emotions have no language,

no barriers, no bones of any kind.

–

My loneliness is so vast

and so obliterating

that I can’t even find

myself inside of it.

–

I am struggling a lot right now with abandonment issues and dysregulation so my emotions and thoughts are a bit all over the place.

Wordle #285

Photo by Christopher Parker on Unsplash

All the flowers in the garden have been plucked and repurposed into halos, vase-fillers, and oracles. None of which have served me particularly well. My life is mostly decoration and sleight of hand. People enter. Bridges burn. Hearts puncture (my heart has more holes in it than a colander).

I still view everything through the speculum that is trauma. I am vulnerable. I am exposed. I am open from the inside and stretched to my limits.

I am an ordinary person living violently at the bottom of a well. I have no outstanding features, unless by outstanding you mean distinctive. I am a pile of bones woven together with flesh and red string. I would rather be a kite than a thimble-full of brackish water. I would rather be a catalyst than a consequence of reason but you can’t have everything and that’s why I settle sometimes. If I could have everything then I would have a cabin in the woods, an attentive lover, a Pagan wedding, the soul of a poet, and the heart of a dog.

The sky is gray and gluttonous I pour my sorrows into the rain and the mud that wallows underneath my chilled feet. I have no stories, only rancor and a vague but unshakable sense of hopelessness. The only service I am capable of offering is lip service and like anyone else I search for meaning wherever I can find it. Mostly my life feels like a series of roundabouts and one-way streets. I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast. I dance when I hear music. I think in words. I feel in words. Sometimes my soul comes loose and I drop to my knees and wait for the moon to strike me dead.

Just gibberish rambling. I have been writing intensively for several days and now I need to recharge myself.

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.

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.

Rainbow Adjacent

Photo by Rhett Wesley on Unsplash

Never surrender to pretense

when there’s a door

or a window or the faintest flicker

of the vacuity and vastness

that is conscious awareness.

–

Let your laughter dissolve

the clouds that overshadow

the fiery indolence of youth

and lie down with me

on a sun-saturated patch of dirt

underneath a tree

who speaks to God

about the seductive wisdom

of certain fruits and reptiles.

–

We can get married

and arrange things together

in organized piles

and pretend that wishes

are our best kept secrets.

For example I promise

not to test the water

before drowning

in any adjacent rainbows.

The only halo

I want wrapped around me

is your smile.

I don’t have wings

but my hands

hardly ever touch the ground.

–

There are so many ways

to strangle the life

out of a relationship

I never thought

that my love for you

would become a weapon

until I realized

that its content

was mostly rocks

and that what I took

for sophistication and spontaneity

was just a sly way

of crossing the street

without being recognized.

–

Magic like everything else

turns out to be real

right up to the point

that it enters into the eye

and in that still, viscous pool

everything takes on

an air of artificiality.

Deep down I think we know

that nothing is real or realized

outside of ourselves

which is why

you are an angel

and I wear a grin that looks

more like a bread knife

than a waning crescent.

–

This is the third poem of the day. The others I am planning to submit. I hope this one came out okay!

2nd Poem Published “The Taste of Winter” in Do Not Submit

The Taste of Winter by Candice Daoud

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash