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640 · May 2012
Drylands
Jane Doe May 2012
My nerves are dry reeds.
They cough his name in the lightest breeze,
they rub together.

Sparks or stars in the hot night,
we crackle like lightning along the riverbed.

The sun casts her jealous eyes down,
she turns the river to cracked clay,
and the wheat dries and dies in the fields.

She will starve us out. No haystacks
lining the paths home, the animals
have all moved on.

Our love is an empty barn,
with dust rising in shafts towards the light.
632 · Aug 2010
Deep is the Water
Jane Doe Aug 2010
The water looks like the scaled back of a fish
Rippling with  its own quiet iridescence.
I place my hands flat on its surface,
Careful not to disturb the delicate tension,
And feel the lake as if it were one being.
A great mass that breathes in waves,
Catches  sunlight and throws it back just as quick.
The water reaches my lower lip
And my toes lose the bottom.

I am endless.

I am immortal and so is the lake, the green-gold depth
Of which I barely break the surface.
In which time exists only as a gentle ebb.
We have been here forever and will still be here
When everything else has died.

A breeze picks up
I clear my eyes and turn away from land.
My heart is a metronome beating in my ear
As I stretch my arms to meet the small lake-waves,
Joining them in their illusion of greatness.
625 · Dec 2012
Last night
Jane Doe Dec 2012
I found myself facedown on the floor in the bathroom of my tiny east-German apartment with my cheek pressed against the ***** tiles and it certainly wasn’t the first bathroom I’ve found myself facedown in but it was the furthest one from home and I turned over and watched moisture beads gel on the underside of the sink and when I stared hard enough one looked a little like an elephant and it was a bad joke but I laughed anyway because it was just moisture beads and the only elephant in the room was me.
616 · Jun 2014
It'll happen in Belgium
Jane Doe Jun 2014
Brussels Bruges or Antwerp.

A slow-moving river
Streetlights

rain, but not anymore,
the concrete will shine.
Darkness, but not quite,
it'll smell like dusk

I will cross the street to where you are waiting,

then the rush:

I will have a wrinkle or two parenthesizing my mouth you will have bags under your eyes perhaps your hair will be going and a few whiskers will be gray and you will still be thin but no longer afraid,

every empty night and single meal will be forgotten and Peter Gabriel will play and I'll start to laugh and so will you because it is funny that we knew it all along,

you will be older and so will I but all those years years years years gone by is the time it took for the seeds to take,

the river will creep past us up and off into the great wide distance towards all the cities that we will live in,

the sun will rise every morning over you and then over me and we will get old old old old
595 · Jun 2014
Nomads
Jane Doe Jun 2014
We were nomads
under a great dome of foreign stars
on a hemisphere of dead grass.

Spinning in wide, looping orbits
around one another and everyone else,

so the points of light blended into
tilt-a-whirl trails
lurching sick circles overhead.

You said: look for anything;
anything extraordinary;
any signs of a pattern.
Anything.

But I was only looking for you darling
darting in and out of my equilibrium.
Search for anything,

any logic in our tides.

So that if we stop our spinning
and stand in the hush of our
naked souls,

I could open my eyes on yours
and lay my pack at your feet.
557 · Jun 2014
Alsjeblieft
Jane Doe Jun 2014
ik wil
ik wil
ik wil alles

you said to me
your eyes on my eyes
your mouth on my mouth
again and again
into the pit of my neck
alsjeblieft alsjeblieft alsjeblieft
554 · Aug 2013
Further and Farther
Jane Doe Aug 2013
If only the distance between our cities was enough,
but you still hang around the corners
just out of view.

I thought that putting the space of one country
between us would do,
so I rode a night train, crossed a border.

Your absence is in the language, I hear it in
the harsh Dutch syllables, they
remind me of you.

I need an ocean between us, but perhaps
even that won't salt-bleach
your shade from my skin.

If I was at the bottom of the Mariana Trench,
with 1,001 atmospheres of pressure pressing down
(1,000 parts water, 1 part  you)

It would not be enough.
If you were at the edge of the universe,
you would still be darkening my doorway.

If you died today
you would still be in my bed
come morning.
523 · Jun 2014
Ursa
Jane Doe Jun 2014
Like the muscles of a gull push on its breastbone
to complete a miracle of gravity,
so does my chest swell.

I felt it first

The night he showed me how to find the North star,
as if he knew that I have been lost at sea
for some time now.

As if he was taught as a small boy
the way he could lead someone home.

Ursa Major smiled from her seat in heaven
and gesturing north to remind us that
we are no longer lost.

But she is blind and she is cruel.

I knew it first

the night he showed me how to find the North star,
as love began to seep through my veins.

Ursa Major smiled and extended her claws
towards the North.

My boat had already lost its steering
but the sweep of his tide kept me
drifting in loose circles

Ursa Major closed her clouded eyes
and I lost my direction.

He called to me, gull voices through the storm
Jane Doe Jul 2014
he said to me,
and I put my head on his sternum.

A tight skin drum,
crepe over bones.
He had a man's hands but a boy's chest.

To say I only loved him anyway is an injustice.

He had a boy's chest with notches,
a ladder of rib and shoulder blades.
Divots and handholds,
He could be climbed.

And so I did.

I spend most of my time alone
he said to me,
and I slid my hand under his shirt.

You're a great man, I whispered onto his stomach,
a mighty oak,

my wisp of grass.
516 · Jul 2014
Thirsty
Jane Doe Jul 2014
Jesus,
with all this wine wine wine
the water bill's overdue.

Violet-stained hands don't
wash away no sins.

Baptism don't come from a
faucet that don't run.

And we ran out, baby

there's not a drop to drink.
504 · Mar 2014
You, Me and the North Sea
Jane Doe Mar 2014
I harbored you
quietly.

Like a shell plucked from the surf
and placed in the pocket of a winter jacket.
For months I'd run my thumb over your ridges,
and then I knew.

Love is no marching band.

It blooms in a slow creep;
a rose tint inside a scallop's
creamy heart.

The slight chill of a morning in summer.
Before the sun brags its potential.
It beams humbly with
the anticipation of a beginning.

But as does the heat of day,
loss stubbornly rushed in.
A shell slipping unseen through
some hole in a pocket's lining.

A shell lost in the sand at the North Sea.
You may fit to someone else's fingers,
but not in the same way you once fit me.
481 · Jun 2014
Die Letzte Geschichte
Jane Doe Jun 2014
If I describe to you this dream of mine,
could I distill sorrow into drops of sweetness?

Let me write you one last story:

High summer, our heroes are apart but speeding
together at 250 km/h
(the average speed of the ICE 599 Berlin - Stuttgart)

Image the sweetest, deepest blue sky day of your life,
how the warm bath of the air flows over your skin,
and that is this day.

Her face is pressed against the train window.
She wears a new blue dress that matches heaven,
her hair is a halo of golden sunshine
and everywhere she smells a
field of honeysuckles.

She’s holding a scrap of paper
on which the names of several
German towns are written in pen
(the stops where she will stand
waiting on a platform looking west
towards you)
She is folding and refolding it in her lap.

And you, buying cheap train station coffee
at a kiosk because you don’t want her to know
that you barely slept last night.
Willing the golden face of the clock in the lobby
to speed faster towards noon.

You wait on the platform, hands in your pockets,
contemplating another cigarette (your fifth or sixth)
Wie Vorfruede!

An older man breaks custom and lightly asks
if you have a Liebste arriving on this train.
You smile that closed-mouth smile of yours
and he nods then falls
quiet to his own reveries.

She drums her fingers on her knees,
unfolding the paper one last time,
and asks the women beside her,
wo sind wir?

The city comes into view, greengold trees,
People walking along the river,
old stone arches of the train station.
Everything becomes very quiet; she steps
down and looks left then right.

The train heaves a heavy sigh and rolls on,
the breeze of its wake rushing first through her hair
and then through yours.

Every desperate song and poem and
cry in the night are filtered back to sweet water.
The winter has never been and will never come back,
the birds sing of you.

If everything that is dreamed or told of and never chosen
exists in parallel shades set side by side,
than in some world you and I are walking towards one
another through the dappled summer light
forever.

The End.
461 · Nov 2020
Guilt Sonnet
Jane Doe Nov 2020
I itch my neck, my chest. The skin is raw -
a caustic burn, not flame but chemical.
I feel his gaze press on my breast, his jaw
is tight, he finds this guilt desirable.

I want to scratch a pattern on his back
in runes. A pictogram, occult, obscene.
An animal ensnared, its leg entrapped,
through blood-slicked fur and bone, will gnaw it clean.

He says: “You are no songbird in a cage.
And I’m a man, respectable, with wife
at home. And yet, your racing pulse - you rage
a storm in me, a spirit rose to life”.

This spirit, rose to life when first we met,
won’t die without a sacrifice of sweat.
I attempted to do the sonnet form justice and stick with iambic pentameter as much as possible here.
Jane Doe Mar 2014
I've been letting these crows pick at my insides.
Dry-mouthed mornings, stumbling home.
I've been letting these vultures tear out my eyes.

It's hard to feel clean with my busied upper thighs,
like rotting stumps on which mushrooms have grown.
I've been letting these crows pick at my insides.

And this boy, this stranger, he squeezed like a vise
so I wear his red hand on my collarbone.
I've been letting these vultures tear out my eyes.

Now, my love, my sweet, would you even recognize
me? Hiding my face in the towel he's thrown?
I've been letting these crows pick at my insides.

This garden is poison, I didn't realize
that I'd have to eat from the seeds that I've sown.
I've been letting these vultures tear out my eyes.

Oh shame, shame. I desensitize.
I see you in the dark when I'm sleeping alone.
So I've been letting these crows pick at my insides.
I've been letting these vultures tear out my eyes.
Jane Doe Apr 2019
You come in dreams.
Dark neon with a purpleblack sky,
surreal and tropical.
People with the heads of animals
dancing a slow-motion conga in the street.

Crooked dream logic
through which we walk side by side.

The cobblestones and alleys I invented.
We walk past buildings painted pink
painted dark by my purpleblack dream night.

Cuba perhaps, but I’ve never been there.
The sea is full of swimmers and sharks and sideways waves.

You cry and say you are not alright.
I clasp you to me.

In another we paint a teacup with colored birds
under blooms and blooms and magnolias.

Always touching:
rubbing your cheek on mine,
your hand on mine,
your wet kisses -
I wake and feel their dampness still

burning a crater in me.

I wake up sweating with the ghost of your touch.
My mind puts your hands on my body

and I feel them linger still.
442 · Oct 2018
A Personal History
Jane Doe Oct 2018
The starlings rising from the fields,
white sky and bare trees that are almost purple
from a distance.

A certain tint in the light,
sad in the way a happy memory
can be sad.

Have I fed your ghost because
it makes me feel deep and depleted,

the way starlings and November
fields make me feel?
A peek at the mystery;
alive in that melancholy.
Are things that are beautiful to me
always sad?

Is that why I built a museum for my
love of you?
Framed my evidence in gold
and set the times we’ve touched
under plexiglass?

A personal history,
a relic to marvel.

In museums you can live in your head.
Love is easy because
symbols mean something.

I press my lips to the print of yours
on the glass you left at my table,
while my husband sits in the other room.

Birds rise from the fields,
my soul feels far away.
441 · Jul 2014
Family
Jane Doe Jul 2014
Give me your last name.
Not her not her not her

me.

I will shed my skin and assume yours.
I will pluck the rings from my fingers
like overripe cherries

and assume yours.

Your name clashes with mine.
It is hard to spell, it rolls like a stone pile.
But I will wear it every day
on my brow like a crown;

on my tongue like communion.

Until some unknown hands chisel it
letter-by-letter onto the stones that will mark us.
440 · Sep 2018
Storm Warning
Jane Doe Sep 2018
One drink wakes it in me –
the reckless storm that ignites in my belly
and spread to my head,
my chest.

Run.

I issue an evacuation order for myself –
a hurricane of stillness gathers on the horizon,
pack a bag and go.

Leave everything you don’t need behind.

Your job –
you’ve always gotten another.

Your home –
you’ve always gotten another.

Your love –
you know you love another.

Everything is undoable,
transit is safety, movement is comfort
stasis is death.
Plastic bags dragged into your throat.
***** water rising in the basement.

Go.

Before you’re too old,
before the cement dries,
wipe it off.

Two drinks crumble it in me –
the recklessness becomes hopelessness.
I’m so tired.
I am sandbags;
heavy, full, put up to weather the storm.
I couldn’t go if I tried.

Heaped on a beach and the water is rising.
418 · Sep 2014
The German
Jane Doe Sep 2014
The woman feels the man's presence beside her
like a vacuum.
A darker shape in the darkness of the room;
beads of sweat dry on his chest.
There is an ache in the deepest part of her
but she bears down on it, lets it throb against the sheets.
He turns over and over.

The woman watches the man's long back get dressed.
Convexes and concaves.
He looks at her with alien shyness,
a stranger in her routine, too big for the house.
She swallows the ache and coffee; two cups
with painted birds. He drinks and rises from the table.
She goes to strip the bed.
411 · Sep 2020
Ghazal
Jane Doe Sep 2020
In the dark I memorize the blueprint of my crime.
I raise the beams and pace the hallways of my crime.

Retracing steps, the wallpaper in each room is obscene.
In hot breath on the window I betray motive for my crime.

Chest hair and a collared shirt. Enough muscle to hurt me.
If he wanted to. I acquiesce, my thoughts are not a crime.

My abdomen twitches, his lips touch my cheek like a brand.
I have nothing to confess - a kiss as custom is no crime.

In the jurybox, his thin-***** wife, my meek husband
tut their tongues, demand an explanation for my crime.

I am no lamb, I am blood and I am slaughter. I am feasting.
I would pay. The punishment would be worth the crime.

Take me like a forest fire - a destruction and a rebirth.
We’d consume one another, leave no trace of the crime.

My husband turns in sleep on the other side of our bed.
I retrace my steps, over and over the scene of the crime.
407 · Jun 2013
Sylvia
Jane Doe Jun 2013
tongueless bird singing
prophesies of her madness
from underneath glass
Jane Doe Sep 2017
You sit across from me in three increasingly
intimate bars, nearer than you’ve been in years,
under lights that darkened and softened
incrementally, old wood and candles,
swallowing beer and the fear that there was only so long
this could go on until you had to catch a train.

There are only so many hours we can face one another,
talk about love and the sting of its absence
and pretend as if we are not addressing
the absence that lives in the space between our bodies.
The space that we dare no longer cross;
our bodies that we dare no longer allow to touch.  

You say that we live in cages woven from the things
we want and the things we cannot do,
and so the freedom we waited for is a lie.
We were betrothed before we knew we had a choice,
we are wed to circumstance and responsibility.
You say I still look lovely, after all this time.

Who are we now? Two strangers at a bar table, leaning
in as close as we dare, thinking that your smile is
still the same, your hair is shorter but your smile is the same
one that I remember from the night I held you to my *******,
sleepless, until the winter sun rose pale.
When we learned our love was born too late and too frail.

One more round you say. I have someone waiting for me,
you have the last train home to make, but yes,
of course, one more round I say
251 · Dec 2017
Sestina for a friend.
Jane Doe Dec 2017
He’s gone again, a plane to India.
The North Sea foams cold, its current
pushes him always away, he goes
I stay and think of him, the woman
he could know - is he alone?
He only feels in love when riding trains.

We last parted frantic, running for trains,
promising let’s meet again, after India.
The doors slide closed, and then I was alone
in the wake of his train’s current,
cursing myself for being the woman
who hang her hopes on a man who goes.

But sometimes I’m the one who goes.
To foreign countries I too have ridden trains.
I’ve played the role of Independent Woman
(although the North Sea was closer than India)
I still fear I lost him in its current.
We kissed goodbye then walked home alone.

Has he counted the nights that he’s spent alone?
Turning over and over – when sleep comes and goes
does memory flow in a deluge, churning current
of possibility lost or missed like trains?
Is he dreaming now, sweating on a bus in India
in all the noise, is he missing a woman?

He told me he cannot find a woman
he can talk to, so he is alone.
It’s adventure he lusts for, it’s India.
It’s only the act of going he loves, so he goes.
But I'd fill the seat beside him on trains
if I could give myself away to his current.

Time rolled over us in its driving current,
now I, always a sentimental woman,
imagine him when I’m riding trains;
remember him when I’m sleeping alone.
I cannot shed my life to go where he goes.
But I count the miles - the North Sea to India.
231 · Jun 2018
Phantom Pain
Jane Doe Jun 2018
I haven’t shed him like I should have,
an undercoat that I didn’t need.
Too hot on my belly, stifling
and dangerous.
Heavy layers that take on water –
if they get wet they could pull me under.

I should have shed him like a snakeskin.
It’s wrapped around my throat, taut over my
thighs, my *******, my eyes.
It aches familiar, a size too small.
I’m wrapped in it like chicken meat – sterile,  
unable to grow.

His heart is a rejected *****.
It looked plump and pink but it didn’t fit.
His organs and my organs pressed together,
Hair, bone and skin, but the sepsis had set in.
Now it lives in my throat,
a bile I can taste but I can’t throw up.

I offend myself with my desire.
This tether, woven by my own fingers  
going over and over the same patterns.
His mouth, my mouth, the words we say
are not magic, not a promise
but a sarcophagus.
186 · May 2021
Hard Man
Jane Doe May 2021
He said he left it all far behind him,
on an island in the Caribbean where he was born,
in a city on the North Sea where he was a child.
But it crests in white-green surf behind his eyes.
He speaks of it in the space underneath his words.
I wonder if he can hear himself.

He said eight years of beatings at school made him into
the man that he has become. It has toughened him.
He holds his broad back strong and high,
heavy shoulder blades hard like beetle wings.
It’s good for children, he said,
to learn that not everyone is kind.

He said he doesn't think about it. He’s proud of it.
It made him it into the man that he has become.
But he runs his hand back and forth through his hair.
He said that he will **** himself if he loses it.
Back and forth. He said sometimes
he can’t look at himself in the mirror.

He said that at ten, watching cancer **** his father
on the couch in the living room, helping clean
black blood ***** off the bathroom floor -
it made him into the man that he has become.
He said he never speaks of this memory anymore,
then he pulled me in and kissed me deeply.

His expanse of skin swallowed me, his lips pulled my lips,
the bulk of his chest rising over me blocked the light.
But his carapace of flesh was cold under my hands,
his breath was coming rapid, like a trapped rabbit.
My mouth on his neck, I asked - are you alright,

and he said he’s fine.
126 · Oct 2019
Old Love (1-50)
Jane Doe Oct 2019
It is blanket
I wrap around myself
sometimes
when I can't sleep.

2. It is a series of places

3. An alley near the canal (rain)

4. Amsterdam by the station (rain)

5. Your parents' house

6. Your shoes near the door

7. Your mother's cigarettes

8. Your sweater she hung
near the window to dry.

9. Faded plastic placemats

10. The intimacy of knowing you that way.

11. Germany, in the corner by the bar

12.  The streetlights outside (snow)

13. Places where we kissed the first and last time.

14. Love that came stillborn.

15. A series of distances.

16. It is seeing you in the train station

17. It is your smile - all gums and teeth

18. Touching your arm, hugging you
hellos and goodbyes.

19. The backs of our hands touching
during networking drinks
surrounded by professionals and strangers.

20. It is knowing you've seen me
barebreasted and younger.

21. It is remembering that fact
surrounded by professionals and strangers
during networking drinks

22. It is in the passenger seat of your new car

21. Sitting outside the train station
the day you drove it off the lot

22. Taking the long roads
to your village (familiar to you)

23. showing them to me.

24. It is telling you I still love you
after the networking drinks
in the alley by the canal.

25. It is not knowing why I still
love you.

26. It is a stillborn thing
I still pump the heart of.

26. Blue faced, hands shaking
you stuttering.

27. It is goodbye, take care,
see you when I see you.

28. It is agreeing to marry
someone else.

29. I love him too.

30. It is realising love is
not one cup from
which you drink.

31. It is a deep reservoir from which
you can ladle servings, you can float
below the surface
you can drown.

31.  It is a reservoir inside
myself.

32. Love can be collected
like rainwater.

33. Channels running deep
deep below the ground.

34. It is crossing metaphors

36. It is finding reasons
and coping mechanisms

37. It is taking an anti-depressant
pill with my anti-conception pill
every night.

38. It is being truly happy and grateful
and then not.

39. It is talking and talking and talking

40. To my mother, to my sisters,
to my partner (the worst part of all.)

41.It is sending an email that says
I hope you're well

42. I hope it's okay I write.

43. Where are you living now?

44. I hope your happy.

45. I'm going to get married.

46. Say hello to your family for me.

47. It is signing off with nothing
but my name.

48. Old love goes loudly
banging around the space between lines.

49. Old love becomes a part of the fabric
of everything. Sewn into your seams

50. Who are you now?
It is who we have become.

— The End —