scrap thoughts:

I lift my head up for a breathing look, here, above the ocean of my living:

how strange, how lonely and afraid I feel, when so much of my days are filled with the pressing hopes and loves of others.

how constantly ravenous for love (the distant flutter of wings, suddenly up close), despite just how much of it I have somehow stumbled into receiving.

I remember that it is human to be afraid. I look at the snow. 

I remember that it is human to long for that which you already have. 

I am, as we all are, a creature of longing. I am snapping with the jaws of time. 

I sit at my kitchen table and I imagine, briefly, a row of plants on a sunlit porch and the sight stabs me in the chest.

I think: I just want to be the kind of slut I want to be forever, and I want that to be yours and yours and yours, to hitch our circus wagons up and take in tightrope walkers as they come. 

I think: these boys all mean a lot to me, and I need to find someone I could ever trust to read this compare and contrast essay I’ve been writing in my head, this painting of the different locks they pick in me. 

I think: I’ve gotten in over my head and I probably like it. 

My skin breaks out in red because I like sleeping in your cum.

I tattoo your name on the inside of my mouth while I’m dreaming. 

I’m in love all the time, I’m in love all the time, but time is always running out on me, collapsing in on itself. 

I am lulled by a chorus of voices, but yours is the one that speaks my name the most. 

I want all my one night stands to know how fucking cute you are. 

more fragments from sorting through my studio papers:

god give good rest to all our misdirected saintings, give us sleep that does what it’s supposed to—not this restless acting out of dumb desires, of these titanic litanies of fear.

and what devil should I turn to when gods prove unkind? all this foolish talk a shorthand for the real desire

(brother, you know it, and all the boys I schoolyard chase with password guesses must know too):

to be the sharer of an esoteric knowledge, a reader-out of codes

to hold in your head the symbols others miss, and know their meaning, whispered in late-night treehouse voices. to know yourself a seeker and infiltrator, a caresser of truth hidden in the glut of life in all its details, falling on your body without pause. 

-

Oh, help, for I am a ceaseless reader of signs. Put all this serial attention to use before it kills me. All these messages grinding away on their silver wires, dangling before my twitching eyes. 

Let me slowly build a language, a tongue for this country I inhabit:

one the lips can shape while swollen, one that a drunk and lonely man can hold within his arms. Let this flood of words finally find its route. 

-

Perhaps I fold the lot of you into the vast poetic mannish shape of all those tragic lady poets, stuff my mouth with yearning words. Or I fit you each with wings to float above the Castle Duino. Or I plunge this hot and foolish lust to the bottom of the lake, and count my heart the bubbles rising up. 

-

Watch me quietly abandon my folly. Take a knife to tongue to spare the night air all this too-much speaking. What good language misdirected, lost? all my nurturing instinct led away from my collapsing house and brought instead to lay at the broken feet of pretty men that I would fuck to solace in my stead. Caregiver to all but those who hold its greatest claim. 

-

Give me, then, this pleated suffering–let me tangle all your aching limbs in my dark hair, grown back longer than the darkened hall. Abstracted desire stifling itself into the form of some arbitrary object: this is how I love a stranger, and so keep your secrets just like giving a gift. But still, I want to know what Furies follow you. Give you some spare night of safer harbor, to look the Kindly Ones in their dust-filled eyes and say yes, I know, for you follow me too, but please, just these few hours rest? Our cage-beaten hearts in brief proximity, the solace of a decoding ear and a soft tongue in your mouth. So much pain and mystery to speak of, but every word I write speaks “loneliness,” a keen into the adolescent dark. 

cleaning up my studio as we approach the semester’s end, sifting through all the scraps of paper I’ve been writing on the last several months. here are some fragments.

You took my hand and inscribed in it the notion: touch. Your tongue with which I taste.

I watched the darkness walk into you with certain step. The mare, the flame, the rippling pool. We work our foolish magics on the night. 

I am older now than you were then.

We quiet ourselves in soft absorption, the edge of Mina’s eyes before us, untethered. The dampened mats are cry repent, repent, belettered in mist.

Taped to the page, a piece of writing from years and years ago:

you said: I will wait,
I will sit and watch
but which tavern did you speak to?
you know I would stay with you,
a lamb at the edge of the tub,
gleaming

She bends her body into me and says, why don’t you come here anymore? Too tangled up in river weeds and rough men to remember where you come from? To take time for hot stew and soft company? Well, no matter. You can blow me off, but you can’t pick me out your bones.

Our Lady of the Fallen Star

your head, bowed. your eyes, clear. the world, the world.

the shape your eyes made in leaving. the embrace of a wall. the part of you that is always ever and ever without cease disintegrating. the word of acid and the word of blood. I could never, oh I could never–the unhinging of my thought’s jaw the record’s crack unveiling, your little sister a missionary of grace, your body a balloon in spring, the fields are then the field below. we climb the mound and the mound becomes us. the well, then, the well.

uncovering, we loosed our tongues among the matted reeds. our stray unfurling edges bent to please the aching of some distant path, and as our spinster bodies were undone we leapt, like light, from branch to branch, becoming and again the things the world had been to bolster us against.

we let our blood speak for itself.

and the words were like a flood that brought us under, the discovery of some new species living quietly within us, feeding on our terror, and our spit. 

take your long, curling thoughts, and douse me in them; the fire that crawls in will not crawl out.