When you dream of somebody you love,
Sleep until noon.
Sleep until you can't keep your eyes closed anymore.
There is no winter sunlight better than a smile you thought you'd forgotten.

Every time I see a photo of you
I think you are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
And every time I see your face in person
I realize that you are so much more than even
That.

When I was 14
I loved a girl named Amanda.
She swore she'd die for me.
She held my hand.
I never kissed Amanda:
She was with a boy named John.
For 3 years, we burned together like a flame,
Never touching.
And then one day, she understood, and ran away.
She loved me,
And I loved her,
And she ran away.

Then I found Mickey.
She did touch me.
When we kissed I felt gravity shift
And so did she.
And we held on,
We held on as hell rained down
We held on and hurt each other.
We bled
We fought
We loved
We reached for one another
With a need so immense it destroyed.
We fell apart
And then fell back together inevitably, involuntarily.
I looked at her like she was my god.
She looked at me like I was her judgement.
Eventually there came a time when there was nothing she could not hurt me with
And my love for her became an accusation in her eyes.
She ran, too. She boiled herself in guilt
And threw the scalding remnants in my face,
And I was blind,
And I loved her
And she loved me
And we never spoke
Again.

Therese kissed me on her anniversary with Nick.
I'd never had anyone look into my eyes
With such joy.
She broke down my resistance
Melted it.
When she touched me I shook.
I told her I loved her
And I saw a craving in those eyes
For exactly what I offered
And it
Leveled me with longing.
We danced for months, for nearly a year.
She would kiss me in the dark on the little bridge by the lake
And tell me she shouldn't
And kiss me again as if she couldn't stop.
I drowned in her.
If I could have pried my ribs open and offered her my heart,
I would have.
I said things to her
That shocked me.
I kissed her palms.
And she looked at me with those eyes
Full of joy.
Slowly, she opened before me like a rose,
She told me who she was.
She showed me what she hid.
And then one night
We sat at her kitchen table drinking ***** with juice
And we said everything.
She showed me her diary
That she keeps in fear that she will forget who she is.
It said, "Galaxies" on the inside cover.
She'd never shown anyone before.
She kissed me, she tucked my hair behind my ear,
She smiled at me,
And every time my heart broke with love I saw it hit her
Physically
Like a kiss, like a drug.
She held my hands, said they were beautiful
Said she wished she had hands like that
And I said take them
And she saw me mean it.
She took a black pen and wrote "Galaxies" on my left thumb,
Right next to the scar I got the day after Mickey left.
Later we pressed our skin together as if it could make us the same,
And I have never felt so safe or so whole.
She was like velvet
And through everything her eyes held that joy that squeezed my heart.
I knew she was afraid.
She was afraid because she felt it when I touched her.
She felt it when I loved her,
And she wanted it
Too much.
And so when she said she couldn't,
I already knew.
I haven't heard from her in a very long time.
She loves me.
I love her too.
And she may not come back.

Love is not told by touching.
Love is not told by kindness.
Love is not told by staying or going.
Love has no caveats, no clock, no rules.
Love is.
Love is in the eyes: They never lie.
It doesn't matter how chaste,
How cruel,
How brief.
Love is.
It is not required to be joyful, or easy.
Love is not bound to give
Answers--

What is love.
Can one just walk away?
"Sometimes."
Sometimes?

Sometimes.

It's 2 am
And something familiar inside me spreads its wings
And ***** drunkenly against the windowpanes,
The ceiling fan
The moldings.
It
Wants
OUT
And I do not know how to tell it
There is no out.

It's you, isn't it?

No, it can't be, you can't linger like this.
Not safe-
You are not allowed
In here.
You are not allowed to snare me in beauty and complexities and answers
And make me feel.
I'm not sure you know
But
Your words stick around after you have gone.
They course through me, filling up my bones
And try to force their way back out through my skin
My fingertips
My lungs.
And I try
To be still.

Something about who you are upsets the balance of me
And the thing I have learned to cage stretches and begins to press out,
Having heard the echoes of permission to exist.

I've swallowed a thunderstorm like a pill
And it has seeped into every vein and capillary
And made it all chaotic and full of motion.
My skeleton hums and vibrates like a struck tuning fork.
I am aware of the power in me and it demands release
And I have no answer for it
Like always.

I have no answer for you,
Go back to sleep.
Your screams would break my bones
Your song would still my heart
Your embrace would crumble me to dust.
I have no answer for you,
For if you emerge we are both finished.

It shudders.

I shudder.

And all of me except my body rises up an inch
And crashes back down like the tide.

I think of how I always end up painting with my fingers
No matter how many brushes I have
Because I need to feel the colors.
I think of holding hands briefly
As a child
With a beautiful, silent marble statue in the museum
And enduring the rebuke for wanting to feel its skin.
I think of the moment before a kiss, when I'm so close I can feel the heat of her lips
And how I have to pause there and let that moment smolder
Even though it adds to a longing that will not diminish with contact
Only grow.

Whatever lives in here with me writhes and reaches for the inky black windows and the whitewashed fields beyond.

I think of Ellen wiping her friend's tears away with her thumb- a tenderness I'd never seen in my life until then.
I think of pressing Therese's palm to my cheek and wishing with all my heart that I could give her every breath I'd ever taken.
I think of you kissing the scars of a girl you didn't know.

The idea of it
That unnameable moment of rising
Undoes something inside me
And the house fills up from the basement to the eaves with what I can't rein in.
It consumes me, it drowns me.
I forget where the surface is.
I forget that there is a surface.
I leave the house and fill the sky,
My fingers sifting through the cold velvet of night
Desperately searching for an answer,
For an assurance that, somewhere, this longing has a limit
And will not engulf the universe with its agony of feeling,
Forever hungry to the point of pain.

I find no edge.
Is this freedom? Is this the last moment?
Is it
Supposed
To hurt?

And then
Just as suddenly
It all returns to me at once
Slams into my chest
And my temples itch with electricity:
Once again I hold the tension of every wish I never dared to speak.

Resigned,
I turn out the light.

i'll just let the words fall out
of my fingertips

i can't believe
that baby.
and me,
silly therese
would give anything
to trade places
and raise him right

i read
somewhere on the internet (so
who knows how true
this will prove) they are
planning to add
fertility control agents
to our water supply

just going to poison us all,
it's no big deal
i can't help but wonder
what the **** these up-
standing americans
are thinking
                                                       ­       we ****** 3,000 babies a day

last year, alone
those "providers of the alternative"
(an alternative which soon will be mandatory-
providers of communist limitations)
made one billion dollars in revenue
and here i am, living off of cereal
with a side of
they-must-feel-bad-for-us food
thanksgiving left overs

we are guinea pigs
i feel
sometimes
there is no one looking out for us
"the number of children a woman wishes to have is up to her
with no interference from the gov'ment"
dear mr president said that,
(well, something along those lines
i've never been very good at verbatim)
then he put sterilizers in the reservoirs
coercion

i'm going to bring a child into this world
some day
and the government won't know he exists
although i'm sure that by then
we won't have a government
we will be in chaos
and unsure


not no one looking after us