People like you always fascinate me.
Mercurial, distant, unfathomable, sometimes harsh,
You remind me of cold waves crashing on cliffs-
Separate, guarded, a depth so icy it calls, hypnotic,
At once the grasping fingers of a brutal undertow,-
"TOUCH ME."-
And the punishing fists of the swells that batter the rocks,-
"Stay away,
Kneel."
Violence and gentleness wrapped up together.
Are you lonely in there?
I wonder if an ocean swirls beneath your skin,
If the pent up power of it ever presses out and strangles you,
Demanding a freedom your bones cannot give.
Sometimes I see you staring out at the rain.
I don't mean to, but I pause and study your profile silhouetted
And for a moment I think I recognize the look on your face-
A longing for that kind of release,
A private, hushed need I've felt in myself a thousand times when the clouds have broken and flung rain at the earth.
A craving so heavy and urgent it becomes a wound, precious but aching.
The silver of the sky got all caught in your eyes today for the barest second, and I knew I was right to search your face for pain:
I've rarely seen a storm reach inside a person like that and grab hold.
I tried not to intrude, not to witness it, but...
You were so still, gazing out into the cold.
So isolated, so contained.
You strike poses like a cut stone, almost hostile, almost fragile-
"Do not lay hands on me.
They will leave no mark,
They will find no purchase.
They will change
Nothing."
When I look at you, motionless as a marble statue [if just as chiseled]
I can't help but think of every time I've ever truly suffered,
How it stilled me,
How the more chaos roiled in my veins the more the little humanities of me slipped away-
Breath, blinking, the fidgets and shrugs and sighs that make life apparent-
Until I may as well have been made of porcelain,
Brittle and hard and
Compressed.
I wonder what turns you to stone.
Pain? Wariness? Apathy?
When I see you, arms crossed, face closed,
I look at your eyes
And they reach.
As the rest of you presses into itself, crushed into hard lines by a mesmerizing desire
To push the world away,
Your eyes betray something slight inside of you that seems to ache for contact, for escape.
It is that part of you that bids me look.
That little, desperate glimmer of yearning that makes you a hurricane on the sea,
A wild, frustrated, chaotic force of nature
Barely held inside a marble body.
You're like a play, did you know?
Caught in amber, caught in ice,
The push and pull equal, opposite,
And tragic
Because they are impossibly and flawlessly matched.
It is this tension that makes you beautiful,
Not your sculpted face or smooth chest:
I can never be certain if you feel trapped by the very loveliness that brings things to you,
More vast than it allows you to be
And more complex.
I know only that when my porcelain lips clinked against your marble ones,
I recognized you
As something a little bit like me.

sweetheart, what have you done to us?
you may have broken me
I've enough pain to last the rest of my life
all that's left to linger is meek wind through my wild hair
you used to call me lover
and now the sunshine doesn't touch my skin
and my cursive is just as sloppy as my thoughts of you

sweetheart, strangers watch us through the night while we're sleeping
poets have a certain touch of sadness in their eyes,
a certain touch of sadness that only another poet could understand
my violet lips taunt draw nearer
the sapphire in my eyes warn keep your distance

you want to hear the words that separate whom I was to who I am
but darling, it's not that simple
I prefer to dream in silence
there's a past I've never known and it reels me to this same place of
searching without finding, of lonesome noon's of writing

We made love in your car once
on the rooftop of a thirteen-story parking structure in Los Angeles city
the faint smell of liquor warm on your breath
the full look of night-sky ablaze in your eyes
you mended my skin with soft parted lips
sewing my wounds shut one kiss at a time

It’s been six months since and now I sit here, alone
in the parking lot of a train station some miles away from town
observing the dismiss and arrive of lives I'll never get to be a part of
my insides are still bleeding just as much as that night in the city
when you held my naked skin in your mending arms
/ /
sweetheart, you used to call me lover
when I didn't know what love meant