I don't know why I jumped out of my skin
As if it was wrong of me to be standing there in the dark
And holding a close-to-worn-out handkerchief to my cheek
Remembering.
Looking up at the stars and trying to feel closer to someone
Who I have subtly but artfully made
My entire life.

I suppose I might have been ashamed to be so raw.
Here I see how close to the surface I am living with my soul,
Like a live wire with the metal part exposed
Sparking,
Eating away at its casing a bit more every day.
Sometimes you look at me like I'm sizzling
And I realize that I must be very foreign
In some ways
To you.
Maybe that is why I was so shaken up, so off balance.
I look at you
And I see someone who is free.
(I doubt your feelings
Make you dance
Like a marionette
And weep
Like a leaky faucet.)
I have always admired your composure
And been puzzled by it.
Sometimes I think we are different creatures
Who, underneath, don't know what to make of one another.

Maybe that is why.

Maybe I jumped because in that second
I wondered what you'd think if you'd seen what I'm like.
If you knew that sometimes when she touches me I shake
Like a leaf fluttering in the wind
Because the whole world couldn't hold all the concentrated longing and love
That cuts through me.

If you saw me in those bare moments
When I've lost control
And run my fingertips across her cheeks
Like she is sacred
Because she is.

Maybe I wondered, if you knew that my nights are actually sleepless
Because I lie awake loving her,
And sometimes it courses through me with such force that I have to move
Go
Run away and find a place under the stars
To tell her that she is beautiful over and over,
What would you think of me?
Me,
Ruled by love, worshiping it,
Every errant tear a sacrifice to someone I think of privately
As close to a god
And certainly more important.
What would you think of me?
Crushed under the weight of these feelings-
Not even current-
Just the echoes, the reverberations
Of what I've felt in her arms.

What would you think?
If you knew that when she kisses me I can only compare it
To being slow-motion pulled apart by the atom
And feeling all the little spaces between fill up with light,
Wishing I wasn't merely a flesh and blood body
With flimsy bones and a stuttering heart.
Wishing I wasn't a hopelessly tiny vessel
Trying to hold a feeling that forces me to my knees,
Wishing that instead of holding it tight in my lungs like smoke
I could breathe it every second
And expand.

Maybe I jumped as if you'd seen me naked
Because you had.
And what if what you saw in me
Was just a child,
Just a fool, tricked by the world,
So naive and so victimized and so
So
Young?
Because sometimes I see that too.
And I would want to tell you
No, I'm not the fool,
No, I'm not the hopeful little girl
About to be shown that the world is seldom fair.
I'd want to tell you that, see,
But I wouldn't be able to.
Because I don't know if I believe it
Myself.

Maybe I felt ashamed that you saw how much love moves me
Because love moves me
So much.
Because I
Am also ashamed to see it.
(Because I
Am a little ashamed to feel it)