When I wrote about beautiful strangers,
I only wrote dreams of them. Fantastic little stories. Fantasy.

I didn’t know her.

I knew I didn’t know her.
I wanted to.

It's so strange. A pain comes to me, and I think: I'll feel it, because this is what one should do with pain. This is what one does with emotion.
And once I feel it, I find that it's gone- away and done with, walked into a mist in the wood.
And there it all is, beyond the threshold of trees-- all this pain I once felt, and have let roam free as deer one can never encounter again.

I’m absolutely hopeless. I can’t say anything that matters with my mouth. Sometimes I can’t even write it, or say it with my eyes. Sometimes I think maybe I could say it with my hands. Maybe I could say something so tender, so terrifying and true, if you’d hold my hand. If you will, please pay attention to your fingers. I’ll write it there.

PRAISE BE THE GOD THAT MADE YOUR QUIET MOUTH. PRAISE BE THE GOD THAT STRUCK YOU AT YOUR CORE, SO SHE’D COME INTO YOUR LIFE AND NURSE YOU BACK TO HEALTH. DIVINITY IS YOUR HAND THAT HOLDS HER GIFTS. HOLY IS YOUR SHARED JOY, HOLY LIKE BURNING. HOLY LIKE THE DEER STUCK IN THE FROZEN LAKE. I AM BURNING IN MY FROZEN PAIN. I AM BURNING AND I CANNOT MELT IT AWAY. HALLELUJAH, HALLELUJAH, HALLELUJAH. CHRIST IS MY SUFFERING. CHRIST IS THE MEMORY OF THE FIRST TIME I HEARD YOUR VOICE AND KNEW I WANTED TO FALL IN LOVE.

You were honey. I’ll say it unashamed—you were honey.

Not in spite of the acid,
but because of it.

I’ll tell it to you, my greatest fear.
I’ll tell it to you because I must say it. I must say it.
It is the refusal to be forgiven for my still-bleeding,
for the color of me, for the rivers of blood
that might spill out of me.

It is the coming of the moon
unchanging in its quiet loving
the waking of the sun,
fiercely singing in its ever-burning,
and their never-meeting
never-touching.
It is God’s demanding of this.
It is nature’s demanding of this.

It’s to sit and look past some baby’s eye
as she tells me with her softest breath,
“I can’t love you. Not like this.”
because it echoes, and it echoes,
The moon and sun in their never-meeting,
the joys of life inevitably ever-fleeting,
Nature. Nature. The will of God:
“Nobody will want me.
Not anymore.
Not like this.”

I'm tired of seeing the good in you. I'm tired of giving and watching as you sit and receive. Did someone tell you you were a king? Your made a crown from paper when you were twelve and you still walk around with it on your head.
I don't want your apology. If I see you I want to punch you in your mouth for all the times it could've said the words and didn't. Even now you have no idea what an apology is. Even now you have no idea what it all did to me.

I'm tired of trying to see the good in you when I know you've never tried doing the same for me. I'm tired of giving and watching as you sit and think you have a throne, that I owe you myself, like a jester, that I exist to fix it like you asked me to do that day in bed in that nightmare of an apartment. I'm not a hammer. I'm not your mommy. I'm not your dad. Go to therapy.

You idiot, you stupid idiot. I nurtured my own light and you never even tried to do the same for yourself. I watched you run that day and kept my wide, unblinking eyes open as your body gave next to the finish line. I sat in the hallway and you came back so I'd chase you. If I looked inside your skin the bruise on your leg would still be there, unhealed to this day. Now you get nothing. There's nothing. You didn't try and now nobody gets anything.

It gives me so much joy, to look at you.
Sometimes it’s too much, and I worry.
Is it okay?
Is it okay to feel this much joy?

Is it joy?

I don’t dream of you like that anymore.
but if I did, what would you say?

I imagine it.
“It’s okay.”
I breathe. I smile. I know it isn’t for me.
The day is still bright.

I thought I was a desert, but the chaos of my longing was water.
Water, and water, and more water.

It pained me to say it before, but now it is simply a fact—Sweetest darlings, I drowned you away from me.

Divinity is not in my suffering but in the opening of my arms when it walks, all definite and sturdy, like those perfect marble statues, towards me. Yes, to me, crying is holy. When I weep, I am closer to God.

And what will you do to me, in the narthex of God’s palace?
What Terrible Thing will you become,
unto me, and before the eyes of God?

The saints buried below will hear our loving, and they’ll thank us surely,
For what good catholic enters a church
and knows to offer themselves to God
the way you offer your lips to mine?

In cathedra sits you, a creature so mighty.
The only proper throne.

O divine Beast, so wicked you are in your loving.
I kneel before you;
Cleanse me of Godly sin, O babe o’ mine—
Unbuckle and Feed me your Wine,
so that I may know, with every inch of my tongue
your everlasting paradise.

O,
And my longing;
I hold the Christ in my hands

And offer it to you.

“I need to get ahold of myself” I say, scolding myself for wanting (and forgetting what I’m needing).

The warmth of your arm.
The love of a friend.

I am confused in my needing, my yearning;

I have dreamt of being on the floor, and you offering your arm to me.
Yes, how whole it must feel, to be cared for with love.
How warm it is in my dream.

There is love in your breath
When you speak to me—
But oh, when I look at your mouth,
It is there behind your teeth;
And you clench your jaw so that none of its legs peek out.

Will you tell it to me?
Will you tell it to me like a story—
The dark thing that hides in you, amongst the wind-kissed fields of your love?

I’d love you.

You, blood-drenched horror,
God-weeping and golden.
You, who’d make me see love in all its terror.
You, the treasure sitting at the bottom
and the thing that guards it, its body a mile long, it’s mouth of teeth.
You, the wet world around it.
My greatest fear. Sea of my life,
You’d be.

Darling devil; some endless Light
Who would take from me
The sun in my mouth, and turn it back into moon
And leave me as I should be
On forest ground
Howling into the night;
A freedom in my suffering.

And I’d tame with my hands
That burning thing inside you
that boils the lake water around you,
Rage and Steam in calm air.

I’d love you and love you
Until the world is all tattered and green
And I’ll love you still
when the green takes you with it.

I’d love you with whatever I have.
With nails, with teeth, with shaking hands,
With the struggle of the bloodied bull,
with its one good eye.

I’d love you, all measly and small,
I’d love you and in my loving I’d grow
And I’d become light, Light like your heart, Light like the kindness in your eyes, and I’d stand next to you
And we’d glow.
In my learned own-loving, in our own-loving, we’d glow.

She looks me in the eye, and she is all smile and mischief.
She wants me to play.
I better learn to— I’d be a fool surely,
to disappoint a playful angel.

It is the time to weep. It is the time for sorrow. Watch the dog howl into its darkness- learn to do the same.
The heart is made sweeter through its bleeding; and by God, you must accept that.

All you know to exist is, in its nature, chaotic and nameless;
there is no meaning or reason to anything, nature has no plan for you and in this way she is greater than God.

Appreciate the sweetness of nature’s indifference, reclaim freedom from the man who speaks of law, and **** him when he tells you, “Freedom is for the man who has earned it.”

I feel tired and small. Like I’ve disappointed you. You, who know nothing about me, except that I may have been good, but am now decidedly too small, too little, too little.
And how pathetic of me, to think any of me matters to you in this way. Yes, how small. How very small.

I miss you. You, a mystery— You who are something in flames. You who are something risen from the waters. You, and you, violently winged and tender. I think of you and it isn’t you. I think of you and you are a memory underwater. A blurred face. Something in flames. You, and not. I miss you.