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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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

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.

Crazy Does It

Today I want to bare my soul to you.

First things first on December 15^th I will be undergoing a colonoscopy. Recent blood work showed an elevation in both Eosinophils and Ferritin levels. This could indicate all sorts of things from allergies to cancer, from inflammatory bowel disease to diminished organ function. It could even be a fluke or a sign of a temporary infection. Lately I have been putting on weight. I have been constipated mostly. There were a couple of days where I experienced intense dread and hot and cold sweats when using the toilet but now it is just normal sluggish digestion. For me sluggish digestion is kind of my default state so in that regard I am “normal”.

I have started a yoga course. I have completed about 70% of 200 hours. After completing the course I am eligible for certification. I am not sure if this will open up any exciting job opportunities but I have found that just having a clear goal is rewarding in and of itself. The course is online. In the future I hope to attend a retreat. That’s the dream, at least, one of them.

I write intermittently but I haven’t really produced any finished work in some time. I feel like there is going to be a breakthrough soon, I hope so.

So now that the update is out of the way it is time to bare my soul.

My mental health has hit an all-time low. I have engaged in self-harm a number of times. I have intense outbursts of rage. I have suicidal thoughts. Sometimes I sob uncontrollably for hours. For a long time I tried to convince myself that it was trauma, PTSD but after years of working with my trauma and talking about my trauma and exploring countless therapeutic modalities for trauma I have come to realize that I am mentally ill. My maternal grandmother struggled with Bipolor and Bordeline Personality Disorder. I have skillfully eluded these diagnoses by directing everything toward the trauma and omitting certain details about my life and about my personality. I am 42 and I haven’t really had a job, like a decent, long-term job. I love my friends but I can’t honestly say that I am reliable or consistent (something I am sure you have all noticed). Romantic relationships bring out the worst in me. I am not sure if I will ever have sex again. I have no idea how to connect with other people.

My living situation definitely has its challenges. I am living with a man who does and doesn’t want to be in a relationship with me which is emotional torture. I won’t go into too many details about that now but suffice to say I am not exactly moving forward with my life as I had hoped. Worst of all my partner doesn’t want to move forward not with our relationship and not with his own life. Sure he has goals (lots of them) but he doesn’t actually want to heal. He’s had a broken heart for years and he wants to keep on having a broken heart. He’s not ready to let go of his own misery. The idea of having partner that not only isn’t ready but doesn’t even want to move forward in the first place is devastating.

A few days ago I had a conversation with my mom. She owns a tiny house. Right now she doesn’t spend any time in her tiny house. She has a serious boyfriend and things are progressing. She has offered to let me have her tiny house. It is already furnished but I am free to change it as I see fit. I only have to pay for the basic utilities. Living there would be cheaper than renting a single room where I currently live. Significantly cheaper. She also has connections and there’s a possibility she could help me find work. Recently I prayed for a tiny house and the significance of my mom offering me a tiny house within a day of my prayer is not lost on me. I have moved overseas three times. I have started my life over more times than that and each time it is terrifying. I am scared. My ex held my hand through most of my major life changes and my mom is willing to hold my hand but I have to get there first and that is really daunting for me. I haven’t told my partner yet. I have this intense, almost reflexive loyalty at times even if it is not returned. Even though I know he isn’t really serious about being in a relationship I still feel like I have to preserve the illusion that we are in one. I mean sometimes that illusion is very comforting and there are things I will miss. Like hugs. I am really going to miss being held through the night.

I don’t know if I can be a good friend to him but I know right now that we are in this weird predicament which leaves us both feelings uncertain and insecure and therefore possessive, jealous, and unable to really communicate in the full, rich, and meaningful way I had hoped someday to communication with someone. I see myself making all the same mistakes I made with Sam in the beginning. Can I actually function in a relationship? I am not sure.

I do, however, have goals now. Before I just sort of had shared goals. Now I have my own goal and that’s a pretty big deal.

Anyway this is what I am going through at the moment and I could really use some hand holding.

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.