The smoke will nestle in the fur of my coat
and I will bless the glass with every sip I take.
You will hear my steps- boots of long gone animal-
and when I am drunk with wine and lust,
you will taste the halo in my mouth.
The Lord cuts my wings, but I remain holy– holy,
holy am I in all my blood stained glory-- Amen.


—L, *The Mortal Angels of New York (1995)

October, 2017

When I was a child, my mother convinced me that i was surrounded with fine pearls, and that her motherly love was the warmest embrace I would ever feel.
She had told me that when I was born, I was like a small bird, because I fit perfectly into the grooves of my father's hand.
She tells me, with unsettling wistfulness, that when I arrived, my eyes were wide open. She doesn't seem to understand the weight of this; I opened my eyes to the truth before there was ever one to see.
I was never blind.

I am sitting on the tongue of my mother.
Her breath is warm. Her teeth glisten.
My mother is a crocodile.
I cannot leave you, your jaw will clench shut. This is how you love me.

You keep me, loving me like a precious meal
and I- the child that I am- trick myself into thinking you love me.

I, the thing that keeps you company.
I, the small thing.
I, the small bird.

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.

My love for you is this: I am ready. Water me; I promise to flourish. Even if it’s only a drop. I will always know exactly where to put your love. I will always know exactly how to spend it. And even now, that I am underneath rot; something that has grown on me, that has me in its grasp, weary and slow, I promise to bloom.
Sink my head in your waters. I’d never drown with you. Only grow. Only become.

I know where I need constructing. I know where I need loving. I know which parts need the warmth of my own hand, and which parts need the warmth of another’s. I’m not some irreparable disaster. I need to know kindness. From my own mouth. From another’s.
It is only the possibility of never receiving it, that sends me into a panic I almost can’t come back from. That swirling despair, like a whirlpool that can only pull you into black, filling your lungs until you die. Lovelessness. And you desperately try to cling to the surface, but your hand sinks again and again. It’s this that I do, only instead of the surface, I reach to find that warmth, the one I’ve only known the absence of. I am teaching myself to catch my own hand when I reach out, but this doesn’t always save me. I think I’ve exhausted myself. My arms are tired. I worry that if nobody is there to reach for me when I reach for them, that I will drown.
I wonder if loving myself won’t last. I wonder if it is worth it, the attempts to soothe myself, to bring myself back from whatever despair has me in its grasp. I wonder if isolation will finally **** me one day. If trying to survive alone is a good thing at all, when what I need is the warmth of another. Their patience and kindness. I wonder if I’ll finally give up one day, and let myself drown in that lovelessness, and find that the only thing at the bottom of the sea is death.

November 11.
Your sister is so small, mother.
She’s made herself a mouse. She hides from anything that sees her. She bit me. I bit back, then I sang her fears to her.
Tomorrow I will check if she’s grown in size.

*— L, from the journal “Winter And Its Waking Breath”

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.

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

And offer it to you.

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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.