I liked her because she was brave
and fragile at the same time
--a contradiction I know all too well,
the burden to carry.
I should have known,
as we sat and we talked,
the two of us,
in the silent hours,
that even in her bravery,
the darkness would creep in on us
from unseen places,
--places I hadn't seen in a long time,
and were, tonight,
to be brought before us.
Her darkness and mine
churning the waters until they were black
and my stomach burned
and I hated us,
hated life.
Hated life because it had done this to us.
Made us real.
Made us raw.
Made us emotional.
Too emotional, for ourselves, in this small little room,
not enough space to contain ourselves.
And I wished then,
as I always eventually wish,
that it wasn't so hard.
The emotions creeping in,
too heavy a burden tonight,
as they all eventually became
--become,
in time.
Time is a silent monster,
a stealthy creature that makes his way in the dark,
on his belly,
his scales feeling for the vibrations of hearts nearby that are too strong
or too soft,
or too anything,
really.
Any victim will do.
And that night time stole a chunk of me,
caught up to me,
because I had finally decided I had a reason to stop running,
take some respit,
at least for a little while.
And he mocked me as he ate a hole through the two of us,
there, in the dark.
And I should have known.
And I whispered to her that I was sorry,
because I was,
because I had stopped running and she has stopped to sit with me,
and whether time had come that night for one of us, --whichever one,
he had stopped for both of us.
And so I sit now,
alone,
in my own darkness,
because I would rather be eaten alone,
than to hear the screams of my partner beside me, as we face the perilous jaws of time
together.
And unwhole.

Could I tell you, if I wanted to?
All that is going on inside.
In one corner is all that I wish to be.
All that you make me feel.
The scent of watermellon.
The feel of your hand flat on mine.
The smell of your shoulder.
I touch the blades of grass and I think of you.
I think I am crazy.
I think I am in love.
I think I am stupid.
I know not what I am.
Not truly.
Maybe because I don't know what you are.
Where you are.
You look at me,
In my eyes,
And I feel connected.
Peaceful.
But entirely alone as well.
As if I know you but don't know you in equal parts;
It's not a contradiction I enjoy carrying.
On the other side is life.
The one that keeps moving while I stop to contemplate.
While I stop to look at you.
While I stop to smell the watermelon and look at the greenery.
It keeps moving.
And I stay back.
I think I need to.
There is a part of me that is unresolved in you.
There is a part of me that needs to know you
And who I am within you.
But time is painful.
The clock points at you, taunting me,
Reminding me that I am slow,
A turtle in comparison to a lion.
I do not know what animal you are.
If you are one at all.
If we are compatible.
Or if I am the prey and you the predotor.
Or maybe, simply, two different species.
Appreciative of one another,
Living in cohesion but never fully present.
I think I know you.
But I also know nothing at all.
This is what it is to currently love you.

You are the girl that sits with me,
the mirage of long blonde hair thrown over your shoulder,
Shoulders alittle too wide for your liking
But,
To me, perfect.
The perfect place to set my hand, or my head, or my words.
You kept them soft.
All of me, soft.
For moments.
For months.
For years.
It never ended, that spot on your shoulder,
The way I felt about it.
The way I feel about you.
You
are not that girl anymore.
And I
do not need a shoulder..
But the pillows still feel like you at night.
The brush you used to comb my hair with
still soothes me, even though the needles
have long been thrown away.

You don't understand.
And I wish you would.
Maybe if you knew,
You would return, just once.
Let me rest on your shoulder just one more time.
If anything, just to prove that the shape has changed.
That maybe your arms have been scarred with the ink of your husband's tattoos.
Or that they have become muscular with the weight of carrying your newborn son.
Maybe I could say goodbye, then,
If I could feel that they had changed,
And you along with it.
But I can't.
And you don't.
And my pillows still feel like you.

So
I fall asleep every night,
Still dreaming of your arms.

I can't change it.

Maybe one day
You

Will decide

To release me.

You are the girl that sits with me,
the mirage of long blonde hair thrown over your shoulder,
Shoulders alittle too wide for your liking
But,
To me, perfect.
The perfect place to set my palm, or my head, or my words.
You kept them soft.
All of me, soft.
For moments.
For months.
For years.
It never ended, that spot on your shoulder,
The way I felt about it.
The way I felt about you.
You
are not that girl anymore.
And I
do not need a shoulder..
But the pillows still feel like you at night.
The brush you used to comb my hair with
still soothes me, even though the needles
have long been thrown away.

You don't understand.
And I wish you would.
Maybe if you knew,
You would return, just once.
Let me rest on your shoulder just one more time.
If anything, just to prove that the shape has changed.
That maybe your arms have been scarred with the ink of your husband's tattoos.
Or that they have become muscular with the weight of carrying your newborn son.
Maybe I could say goodbye, then,
If I could feel that they had changed,
And you along with it.
But I can't.
And you don't.
And my pillows still feel like you.

So
I fall asleep every night,
Still dreaming of your arms.

Maybe one day
You

Will decide

To release me.

"Stop yelling at me," I tell the walls,
as if they were the culprit.
Stop keeping time with my fingernails,
tracing squares in chalkboard wallpaper.
I have forgotten you.

If only you would forget me.

You trace lines on my skin,
Like a cartography of forgotten myth.

"Don't tell me what to think."
You don't own me.

"Don't tell me how to feel."
That is a priviledge you no longer possess.

"Leave me alone,
Old friend."

Leave me be.

I want to get out
To run away.
Far from here.
Far from you.
But you are a mirage that travels with me,
A line of coke the addict can't fight.
You steal inside me, like a bear in winter.
You are biding your time,
As I bide mine.
For the fight.
The eventual fire of our meeting, yet again.

It's the same fight.
The same surrender,
Again and again.
A repeating cycle of fists thrown backward against the wall.

Tell me if you have time for this, still,
After all these years,
Because I'm not so sure that I do,
Anymore.
I'm not so sure that I owe you the audience.

Stop traveling with me.
Stop biting me with your sharp claws
And even more twisted stipulations.
I'm over you.
At least I think I am.
At least I'd like to be.

Why can't you be water under the bridge?
Evaporated under a resilient pink sky.
Why can't I be the pink sky?
Soaring over everything that is temporary.

One day I will be.
I know I will.
I just wish it was today.
But instead
I wait in trepidation for tomorrow.
I wait for the day that your shadow stops stalking me,
The day your voice stops echoing in my ears.
Won't the mirror break?
Won't you stop calling if I stop picking up the phone?
Only time will tell.
Only time knows your true power.
Or maybe you die with me.
Maybe you end when I end.

If that is so,
We have many more miles to fight.
Many more miles to see.
Many more fists to fly.

I just wish you would surrender.
I just wish you would surrender so I didn't have to.
Why can't you be the half that breaks?
Permanently this time.
I'm begging you, break away from me.
Break into pieces.
Break, so I no longer have to.

I am being made new.
The egg, cracked in half.
Taped together with scotch tape and super glue.
The yolk entirely devoid of its once-consistant home.

This is emptiness.
This is being renewed.
This is what it is to feel and not feel.
To be and not be.

The hand dips me.
Reaches for me.
Dunks me in a solvent of cement and tissue paper.

I am rock.
I am eggshell.
I am tissue paper.
I am two parts vulnerable,
one part entirely indestructible.

I weigh 1000 tons.

I would sink in a river.

I miss the yolk that once inhabited me.
Golden yellow:
So much promise. So much desire.

A gray mallet cracks me open.
It ecavates me.

I miss my terrible weight.

A hot glue gun binds me back together.
I am neither egg nor rock nor air nor yolk.
I am all and none at all.
I am egg soup.
Egg solid.
Egg squared and solidified.
Egg smashed and built again.
        ...The limitless persistance of life.

I feel alone in this
Place of instabilty and fear.
I did not know that love
Was so indeterminant,
So creatively malicious.
I want to be my own lover.
My own assurance.
But I also know you now.
And therefore,
My point is useless.

Your hands were heating pads.
Your fingers, soft and lithe, heating everything that they touched.
We started with our fingertips,
yours between mine, casting shadows on your bedroom walls.
We marveled that the shadows looked like twigs above a burning fire.
And so we stopped.
And made each other marshmallows.

You taught me what it was
to be chocolate on graham crackers,
place them on a metal rod
and cook them over an open fire,
chocolate burning and rolling across my tongue.
Also, like a campfire,
we traded secrets and pinky promises.
Your darkest secret
was that you hated everything that you loved.

Later, we rode your bicycles through the town that you grew up in,
over the railroad tracks,
across the old bridge where you told me you once took a lover.
It was just a kiss, but he stays with you still.
You and I shared that same phenonemon,
in that same spot.

Along the path, splitting up to your house,
we took turns being the leader and the follower.
Again and again, we would change positions.
Had our tires created tracks, you would have seen one tread crossing another crossing the other, pushing and crossing over each other,
like the way our bodies did, in time.

You had to get stitches only once when I was around.
I took you to the doctor and you told me
that you hoped your future husband would do the same.
I assumed the pain that I felt in that moment was sympathy
for the doctor pulling on your bruised and bleeding elbow.
It was not.

That night, you convinced me,
as you always did,
to try something new.
I ran ******* -but with a bra- across my dorm room floor.
No one besides my sister had ever seen that skin before.
You convinced me to dye my hair brown.
You told me I looked **** and I should have more confidence with the boys.
I didn't have the heart to tell either of us that they
were not what I was interested in.

I sat in the back of your car as you and your drug dealer smoked ****.
You asked me about the experience
and I laughed and almost told you
that i was tensed and waiting
to jump into the front of the car
if either of you were too ****** to turn the wheel yourselves.

Later, when he left,
we baked no-bake cookies and bought chips because you said they were the best combinations for romance movies
and ghost stories
and hot tubs.
I smoked **** for the first time there in that hot tub surrounded by the smell of chlorine
and refer.
And you.
In time, I stopped thinking about the inch or so of extra skin around my middle
and started thinking about yours.
You had much more than me
and you
were a goddess.

When we had dried ourselves and went inside
you said you were scared of the ghost you had planted in your house,
the one of your father.
I held you then and I held you later in our dorm room when you cried and told me how you felt
responsible.
You said the darkest thing you know is when you look in the mirror and you see dark eyes,
unrecognizable,
like there is someone else behind them.
Ghost stories never felt real until I met you.

That night,
You laid your body on top of mine
rough like logs
and then softer like marshmallows
and I knew then what it was to create heat out of nothing
but two objects
and a small span of oxygen.

The next day
you took my hand in public,
in the town they called Raystown,
in the chilly cold air,
and I felt the possibility.
Then,
on the way home, we got lost,
and under the dark trees  
you drew ghosts in the branches
and said I would never make you feel
safe enough
to be happy.
The trees looked like charactures at first,
and then just twigs,
and then the dark shadows moving behind glowing wood.

And then you reminded me that you hated everything that you loved.

You hated everything you loved.

You hated everything

that you loved.

Your voice is the roundtable
I choose to sit in.
Eating loafs of bread,
Warm and hot.
Your breath is a heartbeat
Echoing mine,
Without a single sound.
Don't leave me,
The trees whisper.
They need you, also.
Don't leave me,
They whisper.
I am absent
Without you.

And then you spoke to me.
A soft voice in the darkness.
One I'd waited for for far too long.

And I told you not to move:
Not to stop talking.
I broke the spell--our spell.
Like a balloon, so afraid for you to fly,
I held you too tight.

I didn't craddle you properly.
I didn't let you fly and return.
…I couldn't.
I knew you would leave me.
And I am sorry.

I am also sorry that you hurt me along the way.
That I let you.
I let you form static electricity around my heart again and again as you laughed.
You laughed at me, in the dark.
Inaudible were the words, but I found out later.
I found out who you were, later.

I found who I was, too.

I found out that I gave you more than you deserved.
And I hurt you far more than what was called for.
And I never let you go.
Not then.
Not now.

This time I hold the string
not to keep you with me
(You have already flown away;
You flew away without my permission.
And you flew away with it, too.)
I hold the string because that string is love.
And you were my first.
And I would never want to get rid of that part of me.
I couldn't if I tried.

So I hold the string to remember;
Because there is no sky that could contain the both of us in this lifetime.
But I can hold who I was when I was with you.
And I can hold who you have made me become.

And I can remember you.

You taught me how to properly let go.

But most importantly,
You taught me how to properly

hold on.

I think you might be magic.

The way you hold me.
Like a fragile but beautiful piece of pottery.
A treasure.
One you make clay with in only a few breathes of intoxicating tenderness.

With everyone else, I am combustible:
A glass-like object, a single place to hold.

But for you, I have curves never explored.
Ones I created.
Ones other created for me.
Ones you hold so delicately.

I have never felt more protected and valued.
More safe.

You are magic.
For making me feel this way.

In silence, I pray with a reference never before known to me.
It is soft and fragile,
tentative, like a child,
small, like a grasshopper.
It floats from one ray of light to another,
with a loud whoosh that does not ask for pardon for its sound.
It speaks in a tight whisper,
throat raspy from lack of use,
or maybe too many cigarettes.
It flips onto that same cloud it floated on earlier,
moth wings flapping like some incandescent bug
lit up by the electricity of a bug-zapper.

Fear does not silence it.

--It rings its glamorous wings without entropy--

And so I offer a call into that wide madness of space.

It does not answer.

       I did not expect it to.

And that is okay.

I just feel alone.

A single weight held tight across my jaw.

A timelapse of sorts.
One that repeats itself again and again.

Again and again.

Again and again I wish.
For more.
For less.
Less weight.
Less surrender.
A single shield is all that is left of me.
If I raised the sword, would I collapse?
A single wall falling in on itself.

I am a single wall, falling in on itself.

Why? Is the gold-leaf not enough?
To show favor? Gain favor with the gods?
Whomever they may be.

The sword falls.
Clatters across my side.

There is too much weight today.

One I can put down.
The other, I cannot.

I swallow the sword as I swallow the pen.
It never feels like enough.

Break wall, break!
Tumble, sword, tumble!
Clatter life, clatter!
Make noise, for God's sake!
Make some noise as you fall!

Make noise as you fall.

Do something, Lord, something.
Don't let this be your last breathe:
Your last exhale into an open space.

Yawp greatly into that rotten apple sky.
Cast your own poison into its folds.
Leave something behind.
If it is rotten, then let it be so!

Let it be rotten.
As rotten as you are.

Maybe something will grow from the soil.
Another apple perhaps.
Or a single tree.

I would prefer it.
Leave something behind, by God!

Leave them
Something

Nostalgia is fire:
a flickering flame resting somewhere lightly on my collar,
like the lipstick of a woman that once told me she loved me.
The kind that is soft and wet
and so so red.
It is a reminder of things done with no regard for anyone but us.
It is a reminder of night skies,
blue clouds hidden somewhere amongst the lack of color;
an enveloping darkness that is tender and warm
with just the slightest hint of rainwater.
She sits beside me, her red dress only slightly as stunning as her mouth,
blue nails not quite as perfect and flawless as her bluish eyes.
Her hand is also a hug.
She sets it on my knee cap.
And then the crooked space inside my arm.
And I am held afloat.
Not dissimilar to a spacecraft,
or two hawks grooming one another.
She is purple:
Layers of red and blue stacked along the tops of one another.
She is purple grapes ripened and smashed
siphoned into a bottle
and placed to my lips.
She is a soft place to land.
She is a soft place to kiss.
She is a soft place to touch.
She is every sense wrapped up neatly in a box;
every sense wrapped neatly in purple.
She is, in every sense,
All that is all of me:
Nostalgia.
Rainwater.
Purple fire.
She is a cradle for all that is all of me.

I don't feel anything today.
Nothing.
No stirring sounds.
No limitless voices.
Just a silent reverence for noise.
Noises outside and within.
That's all I feel.
Noise
and
Nothingness.
It would be a great title for a book,
If I could only pick up a pen.
But the pen bleeds.
And so do I.
On the inside,
because my brain would be too ashamed to be known otherwise.
I've tried walking.
There is a peace in nature I wish I had.
There is a peace in some people I wish I had.
This must be what Michaelangelo's David felt.
A beautiful figure.
Made of stone.
This is what Notre Dame's gargoyles felt.
Loathsome creatures.
Made of stone.
This is what my soul feels like.
An empty vessel.
Made of blood and sinew
And stone.
An empty vessel
Sealed in stone.

"Don't you know?
Poetry ain't my thunder today,"
I tell them.
It ain't my muse.
It doesn't fill me with sounds and suppositions and beautiful, beautiful melancholy today,
No.
No,
It hurts me.
Stabs me,
No,
Rolls me like dough in it's
maleable, hardened hands.
You
Are weak.
I
Am strong,
It says.
It snears,
A lion lurking over it's rounded and bloodied prey.
No.
Poetry ain't my friend today,
Friend.
Poetry won't save me.

Not today.

There's a voice inside me that says I am home.
Like a watermelon or a sunflower.
Something natural and large.

There is also a voice that says I know nothing at all.
Not the smell of the sky
or the crunch of the dirt.
Instead, I am empty,
like a filter for air.
As though all passages have been opened;
No airway blocked.
As though the vents are fully opened
and I would let you walk through
if you wanted to.
But even so,
I do not know
what that would look like.

Your hair is pulled up in ringlets around your head
and I think I see you clearly
But then again,
Are you just an open vent as well?
And if so, what does that make the two of us?
What are we when the smells don't make sense anymore,
When the flower becomes unrooted from the ground?
What are we then?
What are we now?
Sometimes I think I know.
I feel like we are so many things
and yet all of it undefined.
I've never felt like there were so many possibilities existing at the same time.
And yet no label for any single one of them.

Your breathe reminds me to come back to the present
and I realize that the watermelon
is coming from the candle on the windowsill
the flower is a painting above your bed
and I am just a figure within it all.
A human with a heart and a mind
both open the way that a vent can be
both receptive the way that our senses can be
both bodies existing in a plane in which there is no reality clear enough for who we are.

I just wish there was one thing i was entirely sure of.
But then again,
Maybe there is.

The one thing I truly know for certain,
is that I miss us

when we

are gone.