just addicted to lovelessness,
i guess,
addicted to the feeling of something that could be
a distant cousin of loss,
but can’t be loss when it wasn’t there to begin with.
a cousin of loss and brother of bereavement,
a lexiconical gap
in the english maw,
a space where the definition slipped out
but the word never grew in.
a gap where a word should be,
a word meaning missing something you never had,
losing something that was never yours,
grieving for something that never looked your way
or graced you with its pain.
insomnia of the soul,
unable or unwilling to droop into the catatonic stupor
of love,
until my eyes ache with open,
and my heart aches with empty
and just beautiful aches and pains,
like stiff joints filled with sterling silver
or arthritic necklace clasps.
my tongue is tin because the argentine
is in my hands,
silver in the space between the carpals,
oozing precious metals
onto the page.
writing in second-best so that it’ll stay.
writing second-rate love letters
and pretending they’re real,
like the words i moan mean something other than
hello
i’m lonely
who are you?
like i’m not the girl who cried love
because the village had already learned
that wolves are lies,
and vice versa.
because faking it has always been my favorite pastime.
i’ll write love poems forever,
keep feeding my addiction for as long as it stays,
let my loveless track marks bloom cantankerous sores
on my ribs.
while i’m young
i’ll write poems of arthritis and weakness
and death,
because oh now i am immortal
invulnerable and omnipotent,
but when my bones are brittle and my flesh is loose
and my spine makes me bow to the earth,
my poems will be of life and strength
and god
because darkness is only beautiful when it isn’t
an imminent looming
future.
when i know i may die tomorrow,
i will write of bluejays
and of a love that never found me,
though it knocked on all the doors and called all the numbers,
waited on my porch while i hid in the closet,
nursing my ache
trying to fill a lexiconical gap
with bukowski
and insomnia.
supersaturated with emptiness
because all the words in the dictionary
can’t make up for the one that’s missing.
it changed the locks when it came,
shutting me out of my skull,
taking residence in my chest
and growing larger with each slow breath.
every huff of oxygen fed my
resident,
every injection of
late nights spent just writing,
every pill popped -
the lies that went down better
if i said them with a gulp of gin.
so my lovelessness cracked my ribs as it grew,
replaced my marrow with sterling silver
and i watched it happen like
a glacier devouring a desert
because i knew i would never survive loving something.
deserts were never made to run bounteous
with water.
just addicted to lovelessness,
i guess.
addicted to silver joints
and words that don’t exist.

The floor was cold under my bare feet as I crept down the stairs, listening to the noises that the house was making. The kind of noises it made when it thought everyone was asleep – the hum of the refrigerator, occasional clunks, the creaks as the walls warmed up and cooled down. By all rights, I should have been asleep.
Outside, the night was the impenetrable black that you only ever see in the dead of night, in the middle of winter. My face looked ghostly and pale in the glass of the window as I turned the tap, water sluggishly filling my glass. It was a peculiar feeling – like being disconnected from everything around you. Freefalling.

“Bit late, even for you.” I jumped, when I shouldn’t have. I don’t think you ever slept. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Couldn’t stop thinking.”

“Ah.” Your shadow moved towards me across the room, and I watched your reflection in the frosty window.  “It’s cold.”

“I know.” This was how we worked, this shorthand. For a guy who never shut up, and a girl who never said anything, I suppose it wasn’t unusual.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“I’m not the one who’s half-naked.”

You chuckled, and I turned to look at you. Sweatpants hugging your hips and nothing else.

“Are you allergic to shirts?” I felt compelled to ask.

“I sleep naked. This is dressed up.” You smirked.

My cheeks flushed, and I was so grateful that the dark hid it. Suddenly, I was conscious of my pyjamas. Which was ridiculous – there was nothing wrong with sleepy sheepy.

You were watching me, that slow smile messing with my head.

“What?” I snapped irritably, uncomfortable with the weight of your gaze. “What?”

“Nothing.” You said, shaking your head. “You just look nice” you reached out, caught a wave of my hair, “with your hair down.”

I tugged away, making an impatient noise, and you dropped your hand to my arm. I looked up at you, wild eyed, and you stared back. I didn’t pull away.

For the first time in your life, your eyes weren’t dancing around, constantly distracted. They were still. We were still. We were trapped in that second.

“Are you cold?” I asked, and a part of me congratulated myself. That sounded almost normal, nice one.

You smiled slowly, your pupils huge and diluted. I wanted to tell them to stop, they were swallowing the green and it wasn’t fair.

“Not anymore.”

You reached your spare arm up and cupped the side of my neck, I watched your eyes, and they watched your hand. You tangled your long, pianist’s fingers in my hair, and looked up, into my eyes.

“Can I kiss you?”

Before, when we were dancing and I was so scared that the music was my drug, that I’d come around and know it had been a mistake, I had said no.

But there is nothing hypnotic about standing in a dark kitchen, skin crawling with the memory of shivers and when the soundtrack is the humming of the fridge.

“Yes.”

Your head dipped slowly towards mine, and I counted every second.

One.

I was falling.

Two.

Your breath touched my face, my eyes were closed.

Three.

Maybe you were falling too.

Four.

Your lips brushed mine, a whisper of a kiss, and then deepened. And suddenly we weren’t two, beautiful, broken teenagers with no way out and who were so, so tired. Suddenly, we were a girl in sheep pyjamas and a boy with smiling eyes. Suddenly, we were inconsequential to the grand scheme of things. Suddenly, we were all that mattered.

And when you pulled away, and my eyes opened reluctantly, I saw that you weren’t going to disappear. There was no pounding bass to hide behind and my hair was brushing my the bottom of my shoulder blades.

“Okay?” You said, and I watched the way your eyes sparked, my mind was humming.

“Okay.” I said, and I knew that, for the first time in a while, there would be no nightmares tonight.

I cannot stop you from loving me but I can start hating you. That would be my last act between us, with all your voice can do to me. When mine grows hard and nothing remains other than kind cruel empty. Then I would fling myself off the edge.
I wonder sometimes what it is like to start all over again, there is little to burn before I could do it. Take that risk. Go somewhere else with no one for a family or close in heart. How quickly I would find that prolific beauty that is stranger than its own kind. - There is this obsession with kindness and the word kind, I see. - But what of that place if it were not there, nothing inside tying its meaning to material existence? Even to all the people I know my kindness grows small and I snap off anything that could take any of me with them. Steal my heart, take my love, in kind, for granted. To use it for selfish grand or minor schemes. I cannot allow. I cannot let it. I will not.

Sometimes I smile and there is laughter, I soften to a response. All that was made before is still there, before anyone knew me, and stole those bits I could have kept. I shield myself, protection in hindsight. Is it still necessary?
There are those whom I love and they are far away. Where, when they are close by or shadows across misty seas of distance. This might eventually give me shelter. Possibly.

So now I make myself to hate you. Out of protection for my soul. But I feel cold. The flame is all I have to keep me warm. So I ignite inside with fierceness. I cannot be held in, this need for freedom is stronger than anything. If to feel this faith of an illusion is to be caged within myself again.
How would it feel to know it the right way? There is still the empty, the vast and vacuumed void to deal with. I ask God if I should dive into her and discover my true core. Acid stripped, bare and bleeding out. All that is left is what existed outside of my idea of you and all those whom I liked to be like you. Objects of some kind of figmented affection: clinging on and sticky with the tears for replacement of what I once had called love. Then I would walk the long road to healing again.

So, now I hate your voice and the memory of your broken English accent. All the ones who had come before and after you. They get not the reverence I give to you. Those clear brown eyes that turned out to not care enough, to save us. Or was it me that made it so, after our forced end? Only once, you showed the daring to break from my spell. Through redacted words though, not the voice that had given a haunted home to my thoughts. But they held no defence to my pleas of anguished honesty.

Once, I will be through with you. I will have learned not to hate despite your love. That one thing which makes me feel still so course. Your silence will have sanctioned my forgiveness and argued the release of my heart. Perhaps, I could cry with someone again.

© December 31st 2012

Touch me,
it doesn't matter where
and it doesnt matter how
I need to know I'm still alive
so someone touch me now
Shake my hand and say hello
or pat me on the back
kiss me on the cheek
that I may feel this sense I lack
slap my face and pull my hair
make me bleed I just don't care
dig your nails into my skin
so I can feed this need within
I've been numb for such a time
that even pain would be sublime
so touch me, touch me now
I don't care where, I don't care how

On my own island.
i sit on the golden sand.
as the pink, sun,sets into the blue ocean.
and the green and tan palms blow carefree in the slight breeze.

and the ocean waves,
crash,
crash,
   crash.

and i get sprayed with the sea salt.

my brown hair whips in my face as i rise up.
my blue eyes skanning the horizon.
my frail body tense.

and i walk,
to the ocean.

i dive into the tropical underland.
i stay there for an hour or two.
talking with the fish,
about the economy.

and when i am up to the land again.
i sit back in the chair as,
the sun rises on the otherside,
and the breeze is slightly harder,

yet the sun feels good,
on my bare skin,
as i sit on that island.

waiting for a rescue boat to come.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

There’s no other choice but to wear them,
The drawer offered nothing but these.
An odd pair of socks might be quirky,
Odd sizes don’t normally please.

The one at my ankle was spotted,
The other was striped to the knee
The latter two sizes the smaller,
The former quite large by degree.

This mismatch I thought to keep secret
And cover the dissonant pair.
I chose from the wardrobe some trousers
And shoes, with considerable care.

My ruse would conceal the divergence
From prescribed social standards of dress
And none would be any the wiser
My discomfort I’d have to suppress.

Now, it’s harder to mask discomposure
When physical pain has attacked.
The small sock had cramped my toes tightly
That blood didn’t flow, was a fact.

My colleagues regarded me strangely
For they could see nothing amiss
But I could feel cold perspiration,
Anxiety I couldn’t dismiss.

It was then that I felt a strange itching,
The striped sock began to descend
And round my right ankle it wrinkled
And bulged at the trouser leg end.

Dismayed at my great consternation
But clueless to what was awry
My friends made comforting gestures
Need of which I could only deny.

The moral of this story’s transparent
Socks are always best worn as a pair
Their nature is in the relationship
Which provides a well-balanced air.

And take the trouble to remember
Be congruent in all that you do
For disparity will often bring discord
And that path, you’ll certainly rue.