It’s the kind of night for a midnight shower
Because being naked makes me feel more human
Than babysitting a textbook at my bedside.
Because the slow and methodical nature in which
I shave
Makes me feel dangerous and foxy and downright
Beautiful.
Because the chill of the air after the temperate water
Turns me on more than any history book,
Filled with yesterday’s news,
Ever could

Think, small heart.

Don't say
sad eyes know things.

Don't say
hurt things make poems.

I raised you wrong,
told you lies to console you.
Now you speak in five cent fortunes.

Now you don't know anything.

The storms of late summer did not snap
and surge. The pepper plants did not 
kneel , weary, beneath the rains 
that came
and came.

(or was it a drenched swoon of devotion?)

You didn't hurt my feelings
in an otherwise unremarkable moment
and I didn't react with silence.

I didn't cradle that silence like
a delicate, damaged thing.
(the bird that each of us
tries to save—
shoebox, eyedropper;
our mothers knew it would die,
but let us figure it out)

I didn't have myself convinced
that no one had ever hurt like this.

My silence didn't get deeper.

You didn't wade through it to get to the door.

I'm not good for you.

I'm better at seduction 

than love; love is hard.

Evening swells and spills
across his back and farther.
I collect handfuls.

You say
finish it

like  I have fallen upon you
a moonlit mercenary
eyes bright in the dangerous night

to find you sleeping,
unguarded;

like you opened your eyes
to an almost kiss

as I lowered myself for the ****;

like I would sink,
blade deep—
close enough, 
finally;

like I wouldn't love you still.

May gave us tall grass.
Clumsy hands pressed my clean hair
into the cool mud.

I cannot deescalate you,
or pin you to a warm bed and
kiss the anger from your lips.

The trap is set, or sprung—
always in the teeth of something;
always wondering if it's best
to struggle or lie perfectly still.

Your words ****; they remind me 
that I've made all love borrowed,
having spent mine as I pleased.

Amid the fig and quince,
the bright pomegranate orchards,
the black mulberry and wild olives,
we were still hungry.
He called it the Tree of Knowledge.
How were we to resist?