One night, while I waited for you
I sat in the midwest summer heat, hot and sticky
like juice from a sun-ripened peach-
a balcony in the city, a small temple amidst the headlights and occasional sweet, gasping breezes
the house was asleep, settling in its aged wooden bones
while I wrote you poetry on its back.

you never arrived, but I felt somehow better for it:
the warm and pulsing beauty of my silent night's watch.

Until today, I never understood heartache.

I never understood that thinking about you (how the thoughts come unbidden yet so welcome entrancing encompassing dizzying worrying wonderful) -
your name
your voice - strong and low, speaking softly, only for me
the thickness of your hair, the way it feels against my fingers when I hold your head in my hands
the way your skin tastes after a night of making love
the warmth of your hands and your mouth and your laugh
your scent, that somehow reminds me of both my childhood and times and places I have never known

the feeling of you inside me, molded close and perfect, and the way you toss your head and ***** up your eyes while we're at our peak, as if I were the one who was so unmissable

- could make my insides curl and twist so hard that I have to stop what I'm doing, set down my glass or pen, stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk.

I am drowning in you, taking in deep lungfuls of you, absorbing you into my bloodstream.
The sweetest little death I could ever imagine.

i am writing poems just to make You upset
when i should have learned from the lesson You taught me
transparency hurts more than a punch in the *****
You can bet your life on that
guess what?
even though i know all that
i'm still trying to find a way NOT to hurt You


maybe I'll punch you in the ***** just to make sure

I am not the ocean.
The ocean cannot fit in a drugstore at nine pm, blinking up at fluorescent lights
hearing giggling
being ashamed.
The ocean drowns the people inside her, if she wants to or cradles them but, I?
I am drowned. I am cradled. Held and held down by so many tides, so many hands,
ever-changing never-staying.
The ocean commits herself, she stays put, she holds open her palms and whispers
"I am not afraid to let you stay here. I am not afraid of you, exploring my depths."
I am not the ocean.

How could I forget
a clenching ache so horrible and sweet
sweetly horrible
horribly sweet.
I am afraid of what will happen tomorrow, once the shock wears away.
How could I forget.
I am afraid.

I can feel my hopelessness in my legs
They’re all sort of settled, sinking into the bed like logs into soft loam
burrowed into by all manner of insects,
hardening their tongues into little tubes and ******* out my flesh with a mighty slurp.
I have found that I exist in a perpetual sigh
apart from every once in a while, when I pause to eat and sleep and watch a car go by with one headlight out at 12:53 in the morning.
I whisper a heathen's prayer that this gross longing exists somewhere outside of myself. I have to find a wall far away and break it down. I don’t want to get trapped under my own rubble anymore. Better to be drowned than crushed.

My heart is curled in my chest, sitting low; it can't be bothered.
You and I are both deaf. You cannot hear me screaming for you and I cannot hear myself wailing "STOP."
Even the tips of my fingers cry out and good lord does it burn;
All of this is deliciously hateful and ******* it - it should be illegal to make another human being feel this way.
We are no longer a mixture dear, we are a solution. I am saturated with you. There is no going back.

Why do I want you to write psalms on my body in ink blacker than night?
Mark me up, please.
Cut, cut, cut.
I am whining and desperate for you.
We are inextricable.
Oh, you must abhor me!