Feeble Words

a7

Damn you.

The day was covered in falling leaves and the threat of snow, the sky as white as the dress I wore.  Your presence wasn’t even a blip on my radar.  Refusing to appear the day of my vows was a clear sign that you refused to accept the clipping of my wings.

Three days later, sitting on my back porch, painting with my fingers and my grief and my acceptance, there you were.  You were barefoot and roving my yard with a stick, like you had all the time in the world to examine the rocks and the earth rotating beneath us.  You were drunk, plain as day, and night was threatening to interrupt us.  Twilight hugged your face with soft shadows, and your hands with gentle curves. 

“I’m more than 3 days late, you know.  Nice overalls—they suit you better than an expensive dress.”

My back became as stiff as a tree trunk, my shoulders drawn like a string tugged them into proper place.   I searched your hollow eyes, and traced your hollow cheek bones with an invisible brush.  Wiping my hands on an old oil rag, I met you at the mid-point of the yard.  Little animals were singing their good night lullabies, but your eyes were hungry with awakening as I approached.

“I wasn’t your favorite book?” The heat in your iris was tangible, your mouth searching for an escape where you could fly and fly and meet me in the cloudy setting sun.

None of the answers that came to my lips were appropriate enough for this.  A chill went down my spine, as you stepped closer.  My skin rose in little ridges, matching the rhythm of my heart.

“You’ll always be my favorite.”

“Then leave today, come with me.  We can travel and escape into one another.”

“I’m tired of running.”

Your jaw was open but your hands were overflowing, roaming my skin, searching for an answer you could accept.

“I’m about 3 years late, aren’t I?”  Your cocky eyebrows wiggled, and that half smile that could melt the full moon made a famous appearance on our last night together.

Kissing you stung.  It stung with longing and regret and acceptance. 

“I could stop running, as long as I could stop with you.  I could, I swear it.” The words tumbled from your mouth, begging me to respond in favor.

We both knew; you could never love like this, if you weren’t perpetually lonely.

“You’ll find some wind beneath your wings.  But if you ever need to land, I can be your patch of soil.”  My words were like even gulps, drinking in the bourbon on your lips and across your tongue.

And when your tears hit my cheek, I felt them burn down to plant our remorse into the soil.

Love is a burning, and sometimes you can’t help but come out charred.

New Age 1

Age finds us in the velvety dark of night, robbing you of the spark behind your iris, and blinding you with sleep.

We always promised to stay young, carefree, gilted with energy deep into the stars.

Yet there you are, sleeping and steeping in dream lalalaland.

Conceived of deep breaths and sandy eyes, as you awake, we are reborn.

Old in this new age.

i don’t want soft and nice

i want blood to rise to skin

as you pin my wrists and wrestle me down

lapping up where the sun has kissed.

i want to feel every grain of sand

rub my skin dry

prickling and scratching on an

infintisimal level

as my back scatters rhythmically

on this beach.

i want to wear your finger pads like trophies

scattered down my back like freckles,

my lip pronounced  and swollen

from your ravenous attention.

i want evidence

that this was real

and not a dream.

i don’t know why i compartmentalize these parts of life

into stop and go moments

i pull them into the reel

string them through the tourniquet

turn on the strobe

there you are.

you once made me music

so that i could dance.

now your music haunts me

up my veins

and down my spine

decisions i’ve made

and time i’ve spent

where have those breaths gone

the fog from the snow

and the wood chips on the ground

i said yes to a vow

that i never truly believed was real

but you were real

and if your existence was validated

than why not an abstract concept

and here i lie

burying myself in melodic sighs

my spine arched in a hell bent angle

trying to see my way out of you

we forgot to punctuate our life’s sentence

and so we toiled on in this coma

a play on words and harsh analogy

of analogous actions and 

userped words

words

words

spilling down the front of

our tongues

lapped up on the page

where our bed was nicely laid

yet lying in it would have been a crime

and so this run-on sentence

of rings and bonds

will only come to a crash

when one of us decides to

give the other the period

the exclamation point

the emotion

that they deserve

it was when your sighs went silent
that i realized
just how
gone
you were

and i mourned
with the moon
for your amber
eyes
and glowing
skin
to grace us
once again
like
honey and
wine

a6

I don’t know how to fight this and the thought of defeat is crushing me by itself.  If I don’t win, neither do you. The pressure is building like magma on sand, and if it cools too fast than the transformation of glass will be nil; it will crack into a tiny spider webbed pieces.  There is no strength in being broken.  There is no love in being opposed to one another.  And I am blind, blind, blind; I cannot see.  I’m blinded by the idea of fire consuming me.  I want change but I don’t want pain.  This is gibberish but I know you understand.

So I’m giving up.  I concede.  You win.  Burn me away.

a5

Fighting within myself, I have to find the motivation to breath.  This facade of non-phased insurrection can only stand if I let things tumble and fall to the side; I feel to poignantly to allow myself the luxury of indulging in those emotions longer than a few moments.

If I’m absent in attention, draw me a little closer.  Despite my tendency to keep to myself, I promise not an ounce of myself is a secret.  I’m an open book; the key is to keep me against your skin so I can breath you in.  The pages will unfold like the petals of a late-blooming flower, and there I’ll be in full.

db3

Tender in age and forlorn in knowledge, I delved right into the stories you read to me and the pictures I watched on the television.  These characters, flawed and incomplete, were filled-in, within my mind, to create the perfect story arch of heroism, triumph, and infinitude. 

I was five the first time you made me sit with the stranger, inside of a room that looked like it was housing hundreds of toys, but felt like each corner was swelling with secrets.  Swinging my legs in the plastic chair, this stranger asked me questions of identity, and was eagerly surprised at my articulately detailed responses.  At one point, I remember her laughing and admitting to me, “I would pay to talk with you, just to hear your point of view.”

Fascinated with the brilliant mind of a kindergartner, she would flash inkblots before my eyes, and met my responses with delighted applause.  The way she patronized me didn’t escape me, and neither did her avid note-taking.

She didn’t know.  There was no trust between us; we weren’t bonding into secret sisterhood, where I spilled my deepest desires and cried about my lack of intimate relations with children my age.  I was pointing out the obvious, and she wasn’t listening.

Time rolled forward, and everyone acted the same.  My stories would make them cry, laugh, beg for more—they thought they knew me, but they weren’t listening.  Once, a friend who thought we were intimately close came to the realization that he didn’t know more about me than our average high school teacher.  He asked me why I didn’t share with him, and I could only reply that he wasn’t listening. 

There were bouts of haunting loneliness—why can’t I connect with the rest of the world?  Why do they not see the beautiful things before them?  The golden egg from the goose?  The doorway that will turn you into fairy dust?  The opportunities to outwit or become stronger than what was before them?  Why am I stuck inside of this cube of colloquialism and mystery that I unravel effortlessly?  Do they not realize the tumbling of consequences to actions and the rational in the seemingly unreal?

Eventually I accepted my mind for what it was.  I wrapped myself up in words and rhythm and plot twists and visualizations, and I stopped worrying about everyone else.  People today don’t listen any more than pigs can fly—that’s why story tellers are so important.  They listen, and they add it to the collective history of the world.  After all, history is what we chose to remember.

I dove deeply into books, movies, music—I couldn’t get enough of the emotionally perceptive and complex abstractions in each story.  Life began to errupt before me, onto my paper in the form of stories.  Every tragedy in my life was narrowed down to a story arch and graphically described story, where I was able to remove myself from the situation, and become the omnipotent god over each path and twist a character could take.

Life was easy to excel at.  Tiring at times, but I always triumphed in the end.  And that’s all that matters.  Story tellers are few and far between, and someday I’ll meet one with just as much passion for collecting perspectives and disseminating it into the words that create this world. 

Until then, I’m still stating the obvious.  And you aren’t listening.

db2

I just want to evaporate like the rain in the sun.  I want to be collected in the heavens, within the embrace of the clouds.  I want to forget pain, and feel the rush of falling for a purpose.  I want to live.