I felt like I could be me around you. I have rarely written that sentence about
another person. I only give my authentic
self out in pieces like slanted glances at a prism. You felt expansive in your spectrum. I saw us as two people who refuse to stop
growing. Like two perpetually pruned
bushes, the internal drive coupled with the cuts have left us fonts of
creation, but wary of the next slice.
There are aspects in what I sensed in
attempting to connect to you that are unique in my lifetime. Those prompt my strangeness. You passed this cup, which orates volumes
about the difference between our desires to continue to explore what we each
witnessed. I appreciated the complements
I felt because I so rarely find them with another in such a soaked aquifer.
I wrote this to my sister-in-law last
December:
“Her artistic and cerebral mind was the
closest to being on par and kindred to my own in anyone I have ever met. I
wrote poems and letters to her that are the most genuine and spiritually laced
to my being writing I have ever written another human being. She didn't break my heart, but I felt an
intimacy with her that was dearer to me than either of the other two
relationships. It wasn't affection as
much as feeling like she and I were made of dust from the same star.”
The night was a novel
wrapped in a whisper sinking six hours to emit past two a.m. We were staring eyes to the ceiling, head to
the edge of stairs tumbling towards the ecstasy of reverie falling somewhere
into stories. I am wary of women pulling
the rug and the rabbit hole underneath never stops for arms up above, mind gone
into the blackness.
Driving here tonight I
accelerated on the interstate in a quiet pulse my hand gripping your leg
thumbing your flesh between my fingers closer to the inside of your thighs
slipping my index brushing a stroke towards your pubic hair watching the road
the whole time. Eyes focused on the lane
pressing the speedometer to vibrate heat passing in through the vents knowing
the velocity turns you on. You grab the
side of the door and just stare forward, both of us locked on the exit to my
place. Feeling my hand come lower into
your fold feeling the moisture building and the forest getting its sweet rain.
I start to fix you a
Pimm’s cup slicing the cucumber and lime in my kitchen, fresh next to my Old
Fashioned with the orange and gentleman Jack.
You curl your feet inward as you pass a word trumped in the body like
every story has a twin, parallel world to another within and my toes feel out
of practices like wizened heirlooms of pornographic folk tales of wanting to
see air of understated empathy that I know is in you. But I am wary of how quickly a bootlegger has
to make the turns past midnight with the headlights signaling the police.
I pick up the
libations from a prepared counter-top provision for the aroma of attention
moving towards the living room. So it is
a man acquires cucumbers, condoms, and a carafe, a stocked liquor cabinet in a
prepared retreat from the city to make simple syrup available.
Our legs rest on the sofa
with Irma Thomas on the stereo as you say you danced to one of her songs once,
turning your legs longer in front of me like a lure for that moment where I
will let the waters settle in non-speech to pounce in the pull of a tiger to a
tigress in the glade. The slice I cut
floats in your Pimm’s cup and you ask me if I am going to eat my fruit. My teeth gnash the orange and you warn me of
the lime’s tang soaked in a potion. I bite; you ask for another, I oblige, you
read on my sofa in the interim wandering into Calvino’s fairy tales.
I place the glass on
the coffee table watching you; your eyes don’t move from the page both knowing
you like my eyes lingering like sniped doves.
Your tongue finishes the short story mouthing the words of the last page
inside your mind. Tornado hips lift
silent and moving into my foyer with the glass panes of the front door shining
moonlight onto the corned wall in form of a cut lead rose stenciled to the
wallpaper.
You stand there for a
second with your palms at your sacrum, high heel tilted, eyes magnetic. The voyeur-paned glass lights you up. I press your body against the wall, our loins
connect as my knee hits the sheetrock. You
look out the side panels of my front door and see it all coming.
I will never look at
that alcove of my home the same again below where something use to hang on the
wall tumbling into forget. The cool
darkness swallows me like delightful madness in the maw of the universe
crafting felicity in the bite of a vampire away to be something else like a
clown fish pulled into the anemone, I was built to take your sting.
My hands round your
breasts as our tongues dance. I snap
your palms into mine like nails into the wall keeping you balanced with my cock
pushing beneath my pants as my mouth gives and takes breathing seeing you flirt
with me in the shadow like a fly in a spider’s snare. Your hair smells like flowering Rapunzel.
I ask if you want to
take the stairs. No words steps to the
room where I write. You see excerpts of my
novel on the wall like a beating heart behind glass open for surgery. Depending on the sentences where your eyes
rest you will see things. Poems from
2010, the paint in blue lines and thirty-three colors on the walls.
E.E. Cummings sets
your head to that hard pillow at the stair as I ramble in the slow shadow of
how like an animal you find your spots like a vagabond on the move finding
fresh shelter each eve in the torpid pace you breathe to tell me, “I am going
to be vulnerable now. Childhood there
were moments, but it was hard, pretty bad.
Sure others have theirs, but I had mine.
Maybe I was in love once, after that no I dated men and women, they
always wanted things.”
I paused and passed my
hand across your leg up through your black mermaid locks. Your breasts were spread like gushing water
from a dam, your cleavage like a flood plain.
You said people try to change you, pull you like an interesting creature. I saw Jean Grey like the Phoenix always in
other people’s minds fire in your own, a burst, light the inferno to ashes because
these tethers feel like immolation.
When someone tries to
wander in, unprepared, uninvited, the house burns and you do not do well in the
domestic, residential stereotype. Suburbia
and its Jesus left for a spirit and a magic in the night. I think of thunder road and a graduation
dress in rags at your feet of a girl wanting to be burlesque like just what you
were built to be beautiful and others want, but you do not want them. That second part is segregated, emotions in a
capsule like a split cache blunt callus staring at the world like a straight
shot of whiskey.
We let the moment sink
and you want to the bed like marshmallow white sheets and baking flour. Your pheromones are buzzing my olfactory at
how real a moment Frida Kahlo could have grown from the Earth as a woman in a
full body cast. I think about where have
you come from; relinquishing yourself to stay over like permission that this
might not end in a bus wreck. You text
to make sure your roommate knows, the way women do and men do not. Worries vary with what’s exposed just for
walking down the damn street.
I think, my God your
body, but want you to hear it in my eyes in some foreign tongue. There is a bareness maybe you have not felt
in a while like the scent of a complement you wish to preserve before the winds
carry the permission you have given yourself to experience this, to open up and
be, away. The allowance swaying in the
press of skin like medicine and felicitous sincerity hinting something has us
acting on the verge like hitchhikers on the road Kerouac’s searching for an
engine. Could the page turn; the man
without a net learned long ago to let it be.
Settle nudity in the
darkness, the not sleep, wanting to devour and be devoured, rough, tease, legs
wrestling, pulling, wrapping in heat, pressing, biting, pinching, grabbing,
thrust, pulsing fingers rounding hub, hands in playful seek, mouths hiding,
peek. The moon is not quite full.
The strength in your
legs straddling skin to slide and pin. It
may be the first time you danced for me.
I saw ballet in the darkness and felt happy drunk besotted body
blood-flushed hung like a portrait of how much fun we could have. The texture of what alive is as Dali stands
there on the wall melting time wanting night to expand so that alarm clocks and
work demanding sleep for the roles of day get paid.
But this, oh this; my
elbow is stretching in every compression of hand to firmly take skin in
scapula, bicep, breast, buttock, and gliding above perineum circling in lines
like a trace of pheromones coming home stretching the stamps on my passport
waiting for a visa contemplating citizenship of where this might go, wanting
that emotional root to genuinely implant because the wizard sees potential and
wants a woman that believes in magic to believe in magic so he might believe
too; to say she is thinking about thinking she might begin to care about him.
I can hear your smile
in the charcoal; I place my leg below your knees and cradle in, glide my fingers
across your back, pressing firm in alternating currents. The sun, the hours pass in a morn, the
flowers’ stems appear across the tattoos on your back in red and blue, purple
and green. I think of the thousands of
words I want to share.
You say you’re a
natural blonde painting another living metaphor in my head. My tongue too busy spelling the letter F over
and over again to notice. I think, why
do I close my eyes?
Beasts on the savanna
startled, welcomed into weird little worlds locked under breast bones, intoxicating,
extrapolating underlying meanings the effect like sinking into a warm bath reconciling
the calming waters with fear of intimacy.
The liquid cannot get too clear.
The animals will spot each other better the algae and the lilies make
safety zones.
You want molasses
speed and an emotional veil like a bulwark.
At three a.m. I felt you glaring wide hooting eyes jaundice and dilated adjusting
on the perch of telling others no, facing the possibility of saying yes to
yourself. Like the pendant hung around
your neck from your father, personal and ephemeral, ungraspable but in plain
sight. Venturing into the prohibited
taboo of the emotional like you had your hand on the stick-shift the whole time. You can’t let it go on anymore.
It’s easier if I’m a
ghost like all the boys you’ve sent away slobbering to slip into a script
written before I ever opened my mouth to lick up from the fourchette. That way when you try to forget about me I can
be just a taste tester morphed into a footnote to the pages you speed-read, a
treble clef to the dance beat for regulated choreography of who wants who and
how much and when.
That this feeling is
optional if you choose it to be, the book can be closed, the record needle
lifted.
I think you are afraid
because so many of your cities are moaned ashes, so you blow this one up so
that you are not standing in center square if I bail first. You told me you might have been in love
once. Show was cancelled, like affection
or concern is dirty jargon more obscene, then fuck me harder make me
break. Feelings are contraband kept for marmish
soccer moms who give blow jobs to their lawyer hubbies once a solstice. As if you have to lay down your stage-antlers
or start sleeping in camisoles and Spanx slurping whole milk obeying Captain
Crunch driving car pool and another speeding ticket equals another divorce.
I saw beauty in the
suffering of hope, in the cycle of phoenix feather flesh and ash. Dead-joys are like snake-skins loosening for
grown bodies. Tiny lifetimes do
somersaults peeling layers of Lazarus almost-lives revealing nubile derma
erasing wrinkles plumped with the wisdom of pain. I don’t know what you have been through, but
I saw these cycles in each of us whirling like roulette.
All I wanted was a god
damn woman I could talk to without paring down my words, spend a little time
with, maybe take care of on occasion and play in bed. I wanted a lover to sit next to flying to
Seattle not be a sleepless cookie-cutter intimidated by a cock ring.
Baby, all I got is
poetry and you used me, you lit me on fire encouraging me to write for you. It is like me asking you to choreograph a
dance just for me in the quiet where only I could see to look at your body vulnerable
in true nudity and then closing my eyes and walking out, because I claimed it
was too much, too soon, saying, “I was not ready to look at the sun.” The dancing feels like a world where others
enjoy, but cannot pierce the illusion of an intimacy of who you are personally.
The glitter and the nudity costume the
place others are not allowed more so than any business suit. We saw each other.
You covered your
breasts the first time you pulled off your shirt to slip in my bed. Before the sex, no pasties, no doe-eyed
shadow peering at me exposed with castigated stage names, just raw. The rule says when the airplane starts
shaking uncontrollably put your breathing mask on first so you can help
others. I was writing to try to sew us
parachutes, to leap together because even if you can fly, maybe I can’t. Maybe when I said I needed to go slow too I
meant it and if you ever asked me why maybe you’d know maybe you wouldn’t be so
damn scared. Maybe you’d open up a
little and the world wouldn’t explode because I am not the one who said there
was a bomb on this plane.
Maybe you wouldn’t
have to fly away when the airplane starts to shake. You are an owl built to sail the skies alone;
I get it. The thing is I am a turtle
built to walk this Earth the same way.
Hearts are not meant to be kept in diaries and makeup cabinets.
I would never try to
convince you of a damn thing, I certainly am not doing that here, but I don’t
want to watch you walk away from me without fighting for you. I was not done; there is too much you shared
of yourself whether you intended to or not that tells me you are just running
away afraid.
Breathe
I am just a human being,
naked empathetic looking to share with a woman who might actually get me.
What are you so afraid
of?
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