IT'S COOL WE CAN STILL BE FRIENDS

I hated how’d you worry & felt
stifled by your umbrella, your not
quite questions & my never really
responses.

& now I sit barefoot in a courtyard
the sun is everything, the trees are everything
& I am feeling the opposite.
I know the difference between me
&

The earth is cold & it remembers
the sizzling heat of summer
it hated to sweat, but now
it shivers.

people that look like him
aren’t him.

if you know his face it is because it is his not
anyone else’s.

the concept takes a vacation
when i walk down Locust. i see him everywhere.

the scribbles of a hallucination
that cover the true memories.

i imagine my hand on his right shoulder, i place it from behind 
him sitting on a park bench.

he is startled, but this is 
the correct action. 

i know no perfectly placed 
affections. the recipient should always shiver.

your body fell like rain
hard on the windshield
into the nooks and crannies
of lesser bedly domains.

how I sometimes pictured you softly
sitting at the edge of the bed
counting the eggs in the basket
determining if it was overkill. 

but you still persevered in 
the courting gestures of our parents;
taking my hand to dance with me.
I often wondered what it was worth.


in the morning there are clouds,
opaque full and blocking my view
of you, bundling up tightly underneath
your comforter, dark and thick.

the air wet, my body aches under
the weight of peering out the window
wondering and waiting for anything
else, the strain from the glare.

in my mind’s eye there is nothing
more worth it than the emergence of 
the sun, even if forever it feels like there is
nothing but the rain.

my—

“i love you unequivocally 
and always.”

bits of poem at the corner of your mouth.
i take my thumb and press it to the fold of your lips
i push the rest of the poem onto your tongue. 
can you taste the alliterative allegory built from the model
of your bones i’ve constructed?
 can you tell that every line break is just how much more
i ache making it for you to eat? 

my hands are tired. your teeth are being kept hidden. i press my letters to your paper and now the poem resonates down each of our throats.

i never have felt it as “if” it’s always just “when”

swallow now. 

it is as if i am choking, it is another
poem, it is its own poem, it is a cliche

the whole mystic side of it: 

it sits in the pit of the stomach
like a heavy meal, like another poem

you are standing there and i am taking a long time to tell you
that i didn’t choose this, and i know you didn’t either,
it chose us.

long enough time that it is almost never
as i haven’t said it yet

i haven’t begun

“you’re the one
thing… person… you’re the
… i feel
so… there is comfort in…

i want to be
with you inexplicably
at least
in my stomach…at least
in name… at least as long
as I can breathe and be sure
because i want you
to myself and i will not share
you. i want to belong
to you.” 

the passive voice comes into
use and the quote is stricken, and i avoid making
eye contact, or letting you know i am, or you
with your hands
on someone else’s hair,


i resent your hands,
you giving your smile to someone else, and not to me.  

He is what is and what always will be as the

nissan we are comandeering drills itself

down the pot-hole lined street riding north and bakes

itself into the eyes of the passer-bys

with its speed and luminous

exterior.

His hand drifts towards mine and slithers

over the tendons, bones, ramps itself up my

ghostly white forearm and now i know how precious my last

camel light was, as it had the privledge of knowing

my hand that now knows this man, again, and

always.

Under the winter coat I find myself and there is no fault for how we got here

somewhere north east before, somewhere on an interstate highway

somewhere tree lined evergreen the cold is bearable

as i bear the weight of his space-heater hand spread eagle on my 

hand i find myself remembering and wanting and 

it is just too much to handle. the sensation boils

the inside of my stomach, acidic i feel it rising and i am no longer

and i am forever, and he is always as he is always again

a fire, the absence of not,

And the wind shucks itself through the cigarette slit in the window, we listen
to breath and there are stars, and i am remembering hands
of before being the same hands, a new scar, never the same river
but always the same skin twice, even if it is with hands
that are dying i am holding on to something with both
hands and i could kiss you, i could remember the act
as a substitute for the action, but it is never enough and there should
be an again, and there is in a poem an again, implicitly, you hold
a candle up to the words. 

i look up at you and still i am pretending to be sleeping, as i am always actually
aware and constantly waiting to feign to wake up to the morning of finally having,
as i constantly am looking up to see if the coast
is clear , as the coast was clear over the summer so i laid 
in the sand and i waited for the sun to tell me when to
turn over.  i waited for you to say it was okay to turn my head over
and i took your face in my hands, as i am always taking you
into me. your face fit perfectly, against my face
always holding your face in my hands, lit with the certainty of moments
as the car is holding at the same speed, as i am holding this as if it were never

again
holding you very close to my heart, in your hands, again

always 

I smelled you today, having
a missed connection with
myself – you, eye-
fucking the shit out of
me you ask me
my name twice?

when you walked out,
I heard someone call you Melissa
I’m assuming that is your name

Me - I’m a newspaper
a shaved head
waiting outside the bathroom,
mostly dark colors,
nothing and never
(but definitely blue
even put on t.v.)

Where did you wander off to,
the outside line are you in?

I want you to fuck me with you’re huge dick
I’d sleep a thousand nights in your crappy broken bed

When I turn to get my barings
please don’t just disappear
some of you was pretty attractive

i feel like i have lost you for a thousand lives
as if the time spent curled up or keeping
busy in wait of a phone call, this has happened
before and again and until. that your hands
are only a part of it, but your eyes tell
the same and your embrace a mutual
transcendence, to reach
moksha.

to begin the cycle again
to let me love you for the first  

we remember the beginning of the battle
the siege of the capital, the bulwark, the bunker
never the coffins coming home.

 

a misfired gun, a gaping wound
a sewing needle: action moves
through the skin and out the other side
creating an unnatural pore, to see
through.

here we are now, only our blood
and a fire-heated iron to sear the skin
shut, to solder two wires together
to eliminate a crease.  

the space between barbed
wire and the fence.  

to say it feels like

a stranger in your own house
the forks are to the left of the knives
you do not remember organizing that drawer
or his hair parted that way, him wearing sweaters.
it looks new.

a moment has passed and you look down at your hands
to have used your hands, to have loved with them,
to know they are disappearing is to see that they are
as each finger was its own orchestra
now the violins are silent.

if I could just

silently push the chairs in
hang up the photographs,  call out
an echo up the stairs the words “i am home”
and hear in return anything but the dull
white walls ring my own tones.

hear a “hello, i moved the forks,
i bought a sweater, i cut my hair. i’ve missed your
hold
it feels like i’ve been waiting
forever for you
to come home.” 

i have been sitting on sunsets, standing on
the edge of night banking my good thoughts
in lieu of creating new ones those moments
where my breath is short & your hands
are trenches, your body is hidden in someone
else’s hands.

i am now wearing camouflage, camped in the woods
of my desire, spearing small animals
and roasting them with the fire i have held
inside of my body.

i have made my home here out of small stones, i
turn the tv on and lay on the couch expecting
to want to be laying down in my cover, my trench, i check
my mail, the computer, the mail, the window.

maybe you have surprised me.
maybe it is over. 

but the sidewalk is empty and there is only ever fire
and i cannot hear you over the rounds, round, round again.  

i see tonight through car windows and reflections
of neon hung, strung, stapled to exterior walls
of italian bakeries, on my way south in the back
seat.

i’m convinced that orange hues clashing, lit 
denote a difficulty with adjustment towards the blood
red of honesty; i take it as a mystical 
intervention to my owning
feelings using lips, using 
words, because it is raining,
because it is
anything else
that i can excuse—

(when the path is only lit toward a decent pastry).


it is not in me to deny you, but it sure is me
to do so.  

(and tonight i forget what language i am supposed to use and there is barrier between my breath and my mouth and what language you would want to hear is unclear and my words are swept away i hold my  and i cannot and you must know, surely, you must know—)

it isn’t enough to tell you that i am hiding and i know i am
and it isn’t. my body translates backwards from itself into
verse and out of a language i can speak into short sentences, questions:

my entire body is    poetry for you. you are
pages, other people’s words i have
coveted. i cannot speak my own
that is all i am:

a puddle of syllables washing, waxing over the past endlessly toward misused punctation, ink lifted and wet, and sunken, and between the lines

my breathing is a line
breaking endlessly heart
breaking endlessly to turn
a stanza over your mouth to link
your hands to my
hips  for you to never
let go. 

i await your return, the way your
lips move when you speak in
tongues of bullets, spitting 
from the pain you have swallowed 
 
i am a causality,  jeans
and a t-shirt, bent
over backward, as i tear
myself apart from inside 

i am in part a part of
you, and you depart, i ask
why won’t you stay
gone, why did you come
back, are you thinking of
me in your tent, on your tour
in your sleep?

please. let me sleep without
thinking of you and waking
in starts wondering if you
are alive or loving me or kissing
someone else on moonlit sands,
forgetting.


tell me i am the only
one and that you will say only
hello until the day i die.