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 Sep 2014 Brandon Navarro
L
One day
I’m going to love something
and it won’t break
under the weight
I carry
of every monster
who tore me apart.
Scientists estimate that you will fall in love seven times before you get married.
That 42% of these marriages will end in divorce.
That lesbians get their sexuality from their fathers inability to
Maintain a platonic relationship with a woman
Pram pushing into bedrooms whilst our mothers clean
With wine stained pinafores and nicotine laced lips.
They remove their motherhood camise
And hang it on the banister one day after school,
Her fatal attraction to the bottle and mine to the silk touch of a woman’s fabric being the perfect childhood cliché for a
chronic homosexual.

My mothers is still there like a scare crow to heterosexuality,
warning off all my seven deadly loves that could have come from man but now come from the caress of a woman’s cheek but still,
I am afraid of wearing my heart on my sleeve
In case I shrink it in the wash so I place it in my rib cage
Captive to the beat of my own heart grieving.

You are my second love and according to science
I am therefore chasing something that cannot be caught,
Something that has an expiry date before I can even co-create this thing called love  

So when I sip seduction from your navel,
When I unwrap you like the present at Christmas I never got,
Untying the ribbon as I undo your jeans,
Just know the only I do I will say is when you ask me if I think you look pretty.
Or if I want a brew when we are lying in bed puffing smoke rings
Around our impending sighs that float over us like rainclouds,
Drips of fate falling from these skies dampening my desire.

So forgive me if the only aisle I will see you up is the biscuit aisle, Pulling the fabric of my non-wedding dress around my slipping tights.
Forgive me if I trade in the sweat on your neck
For the salt side of a tequila
As sometimes I like to use the wool from over my eyes to knit me telescope so I can look at the stars between your thighs,
But what no one ever tells you is that when you wish upon a star,
That star has surely died.
  
Because I want to fall in and out of love 7 times.
Correction: I want to fall in and out of love with you 7 times.
I want to press you, not in a book, but against me.
Imprint the lines of your fingertips on my ******* like maps of Atlantis because I want to go places with you I never knew existed.
I want your nails engraved on my back like constellations of stars
So I can always find my way back to now. To then.
The present. The past. That very moment where Greenwich meantime got it wrong:
Those seconds were longer than any before,
And my life has been full of seconds.
Second child. Second best. Second chances. Second love.
The third the forth, the fifth the sixth but the 7th, the 7th time you tell me is no longer reserved for you.

You tell me the 7th time is for me to fall inexplicably, uncontrollably in love with myself.
So when I walk myself up a different kind of aisle I can do it with you by my side.
And I’ll stand there, lifting the veil from over my eyes and I will tell you, Darling, second love, science is colourblind.
It doesn’t see the colours of the rainbow like I do.

Because yes, I do.
spoken poetry
The first time I went down on a girl she had the delicate flavour of bergamot.
I was so addicted to her I could brew in her imperfections,
dream of sugar mice in her navel.
she had given me the most dangerous sweet tooth for the freckle on her forehead and her bergamot scented bed.

Tracing the crack on the right hand corner of my mouth
I left her kiss behind, a ***** secret
fading like the silhouette of a flower at sunset,
darkness closing in around my naked body
that was a canvas I refused to believe was still art.

The second time I learnt not to stay too long,
to leave my socks on
to escape out that 4 minute exit  window
so I don’t infuse my heart in this metaphor we call love
I wasn’t strong enough for this weight
upon my shoulders to remain
the perfect convent school girl I was taught to be


so I begun to shrink my body
to fit in the comfort of a waistcoat pocket
amongst demin in a closed closet.
People begun to notice the cage I kept my heart in was growing bigger,
or I was growing smaller,
trying to break free from beneath my skin,
stretching it thin so you can trace the lines
I’d learnt to repeat: do not eat. Do not eat.
Do not let anyone in.
Do not let anything in.
There is nothing worse than letting someone see what you look like on the inside

you cannot make love disappear on command
like you can with a one night stand,
you cannot control sexuality like you can control your calorie intake,
restrict your appetite for more of her taste, give yourself space,
shrink yourself to give yourself more space to waste
and keep looking for love in all the wrong places
as one day your prince will come.

Keep looking
In the company of men, in the bottom of a bottle
blur your eyes so you can no longer recognise
who it is who lies beside you
who that person is in the looking glass,
there is no reflection in the mirror when you
starve yourself thinner and thinner
become the skeleton in your closet
to hang the girl they condemn and call a sinner
but a different kind of hourglass will count
down to 6, not the size, but how many feet
you will be in the ground.
When they open the closet door,
Your bones will no longer be there to be found..

No one tells you can’t read love like the fairy tales beneath your bed.
that your prince may wear a dress and listen to Nirvana,
the heart has no pronoun for a reason
love is not an etchasketch you can shake to change,
it is a kaleidoscope of every colour of the rainbow
with hundreds of different variations
an each one is beautiful


The sixth time I went down on a girl I told her I couldn’t stay long.
That I had to wash my hair, purge myself of her sweet touch.she held out her hand l
like a compass pointing north to home
and said every person has their own northern star
even stars fall.
No one asks them who they are falling for.
Instead we hold out our hands to catch them
And say come as you are.
spoken poetry

— The End —