The pink of the cotton
failed to hide
the tip of my baby breast

It would be a lie
if I repeat
what Sylvia said

I have never been so pure

O, the wall of my nostrils
reeks of *****
Face-washing
has never felt
so pure
The hot bath
***** no ice
Ouija board and
the lost breath
They all are
yours
To keep
my psyche
shut.

I have never been so pure.

Thirty and the
sun
are what I
secretly
desire. In
my dawn
I lose my mind.
In
my dawn
I come running
to the
runaway rain
but she
desires
another. The gulp of
her
revenge --- ice-cold
scorch
of the throat.
I sip you, my
love --
I sip you so
much I
be the clouds
where God
hides their
tip of
their baby
breast.

God has
never been so
pure.

We come running
to the
crack.
We come running
as
she keeps desiring
another.
My clear
mirror has
stopped
telling the
future I
did use to
know. O, cursed
bathroom
stall;
my mirror
falls
yet it won't
shatter.

I will never be so pure

I'm too nice. It makes you feel bad. It makes you feel mean. It makes you uncomfortable, being silent when I reach out.
Reasons to leave.
I'm too attentive. You can always be sure I'll try my hardest for you. Buy you little things. Bring flowers. It's boring. You know it shouldn't be but somehow it's just too predictable. Somehow you wish you wondered if I'd stay, and every day I reassure you that I will.
Reasons to leave.
I'm too in love. My love for you makes you feel guilty, as if you can never match it. My sensitivity to your desires makes me sensitive to your dissatisfactions, and although you know it shouldn't, it irritates you that you can hurt me. It makes you feel uncomfortably inadequate again. You remind yourself that love is not a contest between lovers to be the most devoted, nor to be the least injured, and so you've neither lost nor won, but still you have a sense of both, an unsettling sense of both.
Reasons to leave.
Your discomfort leads you to anger. You lash out, ashamed even as you do, and my forgiveness enrages you. You want me to hate you. Want me to react as you would if you were abused. Wish you weren't the abuser. Wonder how you became so. Hate me for bringing it out in you, for before you met my soft, pliant love, my understanding heart, my forgiving mind, you never wanted to strike anything lovely with the flat of your hand to watch the welt rise, a satisfying flaw.
Reasons to leave.
Who are you becoming? Who have you become? It can't be you who is wrong, not when you've only been reacting. I've laid myself down. That must be it. I have goaded and invited you. I've tricked you into hurting me and then shed tears as if I didn't know it'd sting, and yet I refuse to fight you. It must be because I can't. If I could, it would mean that you were attacking someone who meant you no harm, only love, only LOVE! No, no it must be that I have no fangs of my own, only guises. It must be that the only way I can hurt you is to lower you, to make you hurt me and then feel the guilt of it, to turn you against yourself. I have engineered this. You won't be tricked by me! You will keep on until I admit I planned to control you.
Reasons to leave.
It has been too long. Something is amiss. By your estimations, I should have folded by now- confessed that I was never nice, only weak. Repented. Explained that I tempted your cruelty in order to make you loathe yourself. Apologized. Begged. But it has been too long, and I am still forgiving, I am still hurt but not vicious. You decide I need to understand I've done wrong. Apologize, you say.
Reasons to leave.
I do. I am sorry. And you find that the sorrier I am, the angrier you are. The more I tell you you are right, the more you want me to tell you you're wrong. To fight. To be cruel. Untoward. Wrong. You want me to fight so that I will prove I am like you, show my colors. After all, I made you this way. I must be as you are to have brought such venom out in you with such skill. I apologize again. I beg. And you find that the begging makes you want to hurt me, sink a knife between my ribs to watch me squirm the way you're squirming, spitted on the notion that perhaps, just maybe, I was never cunning or sneaky, never manipulative, never trying to take you down... The growing, sickening feeling that maybe I was telling the truth, maybe I loved you, love you. Maybe I really just wanted to bring you flowers.
Reasons to leave.
And now you can't look at me. You wish beyond anything you have ever wished before that you still believed me underhanded. But the part of you that respects me is growing, that understands me, and with it grows a horror that you have acted on a false certainty. And now even as you realize that, you realize that if you apologize, I will forgive you. And if I forgive you, you will hate me for it. And if you hate me for it, you will no longer have any excuse outside the boundaries of yourself. If you hate me for it this time, it will be from a dark, ugly thing inside you. Something you will have to be responsible for.
Reasons to leave.
Because if you never acknowledge it, never apologize, I can never forgive you truly, right? And if I can't, then you can't hate me, and you can't have been so wrong. And so you don't. And for a while it seems to work. But then you realize that somehow, I am not holding you responsible for your cruelties. Nobody is. You've not acknowledged them, and I've found some infuriating way to ignore them and love you past them. And you realize it's not fair. You need it to be fair. It's maddening. It makes no sense.
Reasons to leave.
And now you understand that there is only one way to escape the torture of being forgiven for something awful that you never even apologized for, having sidestepped so many imaginary snares that you've tangled yourself up in your own assumptions and insecurities.
And so
You leave.

Sometimes I feel so deeply
it burns me like kerosene.

The addiction is in superposition
and I'm ready to go.

Do you feel me?

Sometimes at night when I turn over and my hand slides along the small of your back
I can feel the changes beneath your skin.
Sitting next to you, I read you like braille
Like something you need to touch to feel the meaning of.
I know you are a storm beneath your skin.
Sometimes I feel lightning reach out
To the answering chaos in me.
Our suffering makes our togetherness
Electric.
Cataclysmic.
We could crumble mountains.
I don't know if you know your own wildness inside,
Wilderness.
I think inside you are vast and lonely, wonderful but vaguely sad,
The way the trees sound when a breeze sighs its way through them and makes them sway.

Sometimes I feel a coldness from you like a chilly night without a fire
The kind of cold that starlight and silence bring-
Not a hostile chill, like the sharp fingers of frost or ice,
But just a distant kind of... Containment.
A solitude, like the desire to curl into the rocks by the river and become one by touch.
A desire to be still.
It scares me. I don't know how to reach that part of you.

Sometimes I look at you and I see storm clouds and wildfires in your eyes,
I see the end of days, and earthquakes, and brutal hurricanes,
But I see them through glass, as if you've stepped inside a mirror and imprisoned your rambling hurt to keep the world safe-
I see it through the cracks in a briar wall that's sprung up suddenly and sharply, tangled and complex, a warning.
And although I don't want to be
I am warned.

I want to touch
But I am so very good with boundaries
So very
Sensitive.
I feel the changes in the air
The way a deer in the forest may shoot its head up at the scent of a hunter miles away, caught on an errant breeze.
You change what I breathe in and out,
You change my weight and my texture.
Sometimes from you I can close my eyes and feel what warm honey must feel like in essence-
If sunlight found purchase in the air.
I feel fields of wildflowers and slow, dreamy, balmy nights and days at the seashore with diamonds capping the waves.
Sometimes I feel from you the tickle of cut grass, and the smell of fresh rain, and what a butterfly's furry wings would feel like if stroking them wouldn't make them crumble like spun sugar.
Sometimes I feel from you the slow, deep pull that I remember from sitting at the bottom of that coral reef in St Thomas-
The heat of the day sinking in layers through the water to hold me suspended in graceful pressure-
Poised to be swallowed by something much more significant and much hungrier than me.
And sometimes there is simply cold, the way I said,
As if the wind has somehow changed and left me adrift, sails dead, in a sea that offers no sustenence and no explanations.
In those times of stillness I wait, breathless,
Cautious-
They always pass,
So far.

I sit beside you and hold my breath
Hold my hands.
I sit and look at the grass
At the sky
But I see you instead
Silent beside me,
An unknown, a mirror maze
All of a sudden sunlight
And all of a sudden shadows.

When you go dark and silent I want to start digging.
I want to sink to my knees and pull apart the earth,
Find its heart, hot and sticky and molten,
Burning with the secrets of a forever life in the belly of a fragile stone.
I want to claw it out and put your hands on it,
Watch it feed your soul and sear away that terrifying cold.
Light you up so that you will never curl up silent around a black glass starless hailstorm ever again.
I feel the dirt under my fingernails and how
Odd it is
That it is familiar, from scrabbling out of grave after grave,
Confused and reborn and shivering.
How odd that now I am tunneling towards what remade me so many times
To try to break the laws of nature and bring it to you
Before you ever have to sink towards it.

But I feel from you. And then I don't. And then I do.
And it wakes in me an unsettled longing more powerful than my history.

I feel from you the silence right after the last note of a symphony fades
Before the audience applauds
Before anyone has even taken a breath.
I feel that exquisite beauty
And the fear that it will shatter.
(The fear that is the knowledge that it will shatter.)
I feel all of this from you
For you and
I think it might be
Love.