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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They are profoundly present,

an army of eyes

ever protesting, ever vigilant.

Beggar’s brown and puddle blue

I can never escape

their instinct to congregate.

–

They fear deviation,

the alternate view,

the unlit road

that winds itself

tighter than time.

Their sameness

is the same everyday

but it is without reassurance

or comfort that I slide

in and out of their routines.

–

All they know of me

is my nervousness, my downcast eyes,

my sideways trajectory.

To me they are as familiar

as the seasons or the weather.

I inhale them with every heartbeat

and in each step I touch upon

some mundane instance of them

which is and ever will be off-limits.

–

I exist but they would not have me

in the same room or any room

which they have inhabited.

Even their secrets are boring.

That is the worst part of it.

They have lived

the whole of their miraculous life

simply repeating each other.

–

Photo by M Liisanantti on Unsplash

Vengeful Spirit

I could be a chrysanthemum

in the hands of a child

or a bronze bell

sitting stupefied in the shrine

of any number of saints.

But I am more like an unshakeable ferocity

that forms itself again and again

in the jutting of hips

and the gnashing of teeth.

–

My emotions are vengeful spirits,

torches burning blue

in the fanatical condolence

that is sleep.

A heart which is part stomach,

a pelvis gutted like a Jack-O-Lantern,

a fan of hands which sweep away

the remains of a day

that ended on a sour note.

–

Happiness is rage.

Sorrow is a kind of seething hatred.

Intimacy can only be found in softness.

To overcome me

is to breach the invertebrate shell.

It is the palest of deaths.

–

I have given birth to infinities

and to a thousand screeching indignities.

The waves are restless about me.

I travel beneath them

like a hunter whose only weapons

are that which can reasonably fit inside the body.

Blood, bones, and organs.

–

Vulnerability cannot be extinguished.

It is the best and worst of what a man can be

and the sharpest of blades.

I have tasted and tortured.

I have walked up the wall

and back down again

without a sense

of where I am going.

–

-Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Need to Breathe

I am a whale,

a sound from the other side,

an interstellar traveler

who has kissed the precipice

of an intermittent eternity.

–

I am all love,

the gaping, invertebrate silhouette,

the slowly blinking eye

of an inferior but congenial God.

Wherever my hands pass

there is a gathering.

–

I could fill libraries

with the irrefutable tragedies of man.

There are curiosities among us,

individuals so difficult to realize

that we rarely if ever

encounter them.

People like me exist

solely in the imagination.

–

I am all endoskeleton.

My exterior is

notoriously naive.

Sometimes I go around

imagining that I am

immune to everything

and sometimes

I simply succumb

to the intricacies

of certain constellations

of events.

–

I live in a pig’s ear

and bathe in droughts.

I am only lonely

on the inside.

It is as if I were a sieve

shifting detritus into powder.

There is little of me

by the end of the day

but even that

is more than enough

to encumber.

–

Breathing is the ultimate sexual act.

Letting the naked air fill you

with its life-granting transparencies.

I want to fit with you just so,

to feel you settling in on me

from all angles like a religion.

Yes, even I need

to breathe sometimes.

–

Photo Credit: Photo by Eugene Chystiakov on Unsplash

Desire and desire alone exists.

Birth and death are simultaneous.

I have seen the spiral,

the ineffable,

the innumerable, existential sins

which empty false hearts

of their reserves.

–

We are womb-bound,

vestigial little strokes of nothing

imbued with genius.

All genius is, in fact, savage

in that it consumes

without remediation.

–

I have touched the inside out

brought forth the clay man

and wept for hours without reason.

–

In the dark our screams

are another’s crescendo.

Some people have a taste for fear.

I myself prefer the scent of butterflies

and the brittle light of a pencil

that catches unremorsefully

on my innermost something.

–

I could tell you that today

I was supremely ordinary

and that, in and of itself,

is an achievement.

I could tell you how

I lie awake at night

silently praying for an emergency

to justify my vigilance

but what I most want to say

is that I know someone

very much like myself.

–

She occupies the same

imperious suit of flesh.

She worries

that her desperate,

middle of the night tirades

have been witnessed

and that her body

is slowly but surely succumbing

to the ravages of her mind.

–

Dying isn’t such a big deal.

It is perfectly natural

and as subject to change

as any other state of being.

No one really knows

what goes on in the minds

of children and Gods.

–

Sea grass and fireflies

what more can one soul contain?

The primordial “oh”

that tears the seams of one man

and empties him into another.

I may be obsessed with love

but there are worse idols.

–

Photo Credit:

Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash

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

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.

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.

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.