Hematoma

I have forgotten myself

in the abyss

of your unstruck heart.

I have forgotten what it is

to be a universe

but I can’t credit you

with a broken heart.

Pity is a wishing well,

dreams cast and unspent.

Pity is a merciless God

chained within and without.

–

What lies down with us

when the grave

becomes our home?

Is it regret or the loneliness

that is born of sanctuary?

I watch your smile

sliding back and forth

like a guillotine’s verdict

and I think of your unfinished kisses

and how sincere everything is

at a distance.

–

The fire that holds us

burns our edges black.

It hurts to think

that your love

is not like my love.

At your deepest

you are still repressed,

still a machine

cold and purposeful

and at my deepest

I am a wound

and a centrifuge

and an ocean of stars

with all the fish

turned inside out.

–

I see your fists

the clenching, the withholding,

the strokes of discord

palpitating between us

like a pale, yellow heart.

We are both hostages

even if it is only a game.

–

Bruised by morality and entitlement

you are everything that is wrong with me

not the source but a reflection,

an appetite that eats what it occupies.

I have spent myself

proving that love can be possessed

and now here I stand

my hands two empty cups

shaking under their own weight.

–

You are transcendent,

a flicker in the darkness

inchocate and invertebrate

a tragedy so beautiful

that it breaks down the borders

of one’s self and another.

Goodbye is not a sojourn or a cry for help

it is a suicide spread out over time.

–

I have drowned myself in you

day in and day out

extinguishing my breath

in your breath

because win or lose

the pain is only

the ghost of nostalgia.

–

Without the moon

my empty windows

are all eyes

and nefarious composites

of blue, grey, and black,

a silent hematoma

that covers and covets

all the spaces between us.

To have you close,

dear one,

is both a nightmare and a dream.

–

What is now dust

was once a person,

a woman in lace

with eyes black

as dead teeth,

a broken vow

cut off with a sneer.

You are everywhere

and still I feel in all things

your absences,

your uncertainty,

the frantic charade

that only pretends to be love.

–

A brief update. I still have tremendous heartburn/digestive issues but I am not underweight anymore. Recent tests show that I am bleeding internally and borderline anemic. I have to have another endoscopy to find the source of the bleeding.  Also my blood tests showed that I am just on the margins for Rheumatoid arthritis. I do not have swelling or redness but I do have terrible pain in my joints. I have some other tests for arthritis too that have not come back. Anyway mentally and physically I am absolutely depleted. In happy, strange news I am dating a 20 year old man. He asked me out. We have been on a few dates and I will be staying with him for a few days starting tomorrow. This poem is not about him, it is about a previous relationship/heartbreak that needed emotional purging.

–

Photo

Photo by Christian Keybets on Unsplash

Perfect Love

I pass through twilight

like a curse through gnarled hands.

I don’t know why

after hundreds of failings

that I begin and end each day

erecting monuments of color

from the frigid blue sky.

It is just the way of things.

–

Shall we proceed with a kiss

or with farewell’s cauterizing edge?

I want to say everything now

because I know that omissions

often reoccur in the middle of the night

and I don’t want to be stuck in rehearsals

when life, for all it is worth,

finally decides to happen.

–

The air bleeds

from our lungs

into our blood

into the mesmerizing gaps of conversation

which lay us bare.

I know deep down

that you want

to crawl over my skin

and press your secrets

into my mouth

with the tip of your tongue

or maybe even

the head of your penis.

–

We are delirious.

We are one universe wide

and longing for the rush

of a sudden chasm.

I am all edges and yet in the fullness

of your hopeful smile

I find my center

again and again and again.

–

Who says I am not fertile?

For no woman, however, desperate

carries her womb in her belly.

it is the heart

into which all things are born

and through which all things endure.

In me no one is replaceable,

in me there are no pieces

only unsustainable Gods

peering out from behind my eyes.

–

We will remain indivisible

even in the breakings and reworkings

that play out through time and circumstance

because love is perfect

even when we are not.

–

If I am too eager it is because you are

an extension of my soul

which through its shear inconsequence

is too vast to swallow whole.

I will never remake you

in the hands of another

but when the stars align

I will unmake my image of you

and fall stupidly in love

with whomever remains.

–

You see

there are no lost souls

only hearts flat as bedsheets

and tight with the neediness

that uncertainty brings.

–

I was born to be momentary,

to drift

into the singular configuration

of your arms

as they pass over me in a sudden

flash of gravity.

I am held like water in a glass.

You see me

and in the glossy black nothing

of your never-ending gaze

I am a fury

that compels you.

-Photo by Randy Kinne on Unsplash

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

Repeat

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.