You take me to places only nightmares
are allowed entry to; the juggler in our midst
has now taken your hand and my head
and we are lost somewhere between wonderland
and purgatory. Bound to you with strings,
I am no longer an instrument of love,
I do not make music, nor do I burn
with impassioned colours. I only hum
the songs you've forgotten, and I refuse to.
We were born in a wrong time and we've got
to get out of this place, before the maze
in your thoughts swallows me
whole.

We have lived our lives on clotheslines
and antiquities; I carry my home
in the soles of your shoes:

home is where you are,
and happiness is where my arms
always find yours in the dark.

Under the clouds of hope
I married your kind eyes with the faith
of a million flowers bringing
back the spring
to the wild gardens
of my left atrium. I swear
I did not know that you were born
of rain and alcohol, because every one
of your touch could douse the flames
your kisses light on my skin.
I tried to write more about how every
time you said the word “halo”, your mouth
would curl like a serpent waiting to attack;
how your hands always were a warm
reminder of thoughtless touching;
how your feet are tired from all the walking
down flights of a paradox of stairs
and still wanting to run
away with me.

Cyclonic is your kind of adjective;
I suppose I was born to love storms
like you.

I could never really keep my hands to
myself. Nor my mouth. Or my words.

I love you like hurricanes love destruction
and mornings love reckoning.

Today I wrote a song about your teeth.
They are crooked and imperfect.
Just like this. Our hands. And these
songbirds are all liars. We haven’t learned.
Flesh memory is overrated. Last night
I felt the linen, and it whispered to me
nothing. Not even the shape of you
reminds me of happiness. What is the use
of these metaphors if they can’t
beautify you anymore. No longer as fierce
as the inferno I allowed you to become.
Drowning in bedclothes, trying to understand how streams of consciousness
are becoming bodies of water. Today
I wrote a song about your teeth. And I
read it aloud to the voiceless, and now
they know what love tastes like.

Touching you was like static electricty in a dark room,
a makeshift thunderstorm in your fingers,
you had more noise in you than a little heart could handle;
so you came bursting open:
screaming, hands punching the air and gasping
for sanity; they said if you hear God it's probably purgatory
what would they call it
when I hear the windclap of your hips a sonic boom
and the quiet of your eyes like blood rushing to my head
in an anechoic chamber;
would they call it madness or delusion
or a mix of a little bit of both; could be alcohol,
could be love
because when I lit a match
in your darkness,
it burned the whole house down.

Find coastlines along the edges of your body,
mark your territory
and invite gallant young men to try their hand
at crossing a huge wall made of crystal glass
and steel verses.

Let them be afraid of the tombstones gathered
at the gates; tremble at their own risk
because your heart can't handle an unsteady hand:
it's filled to the brim.
And as the tourney dies down,
as the men scratch the surface
and leave with pieces of your arms,
your eyelashes, your cheeks,
there will be one
who is there when the dust settles.

Allow him to love you,
in a most consuming way; let him
take your body a shrine and let him
call it his only home.

Finally,
break his heart,
and watch as the poetry
spills out of you like
an angry river, from a spear
he wishes he'd hit into your chest
not cupid's arrow instead.