once upon a time, there was quiet
and that distinct smell of bodies,
which have been perfumed but have sweated it off.
there were pillows to share,
a gasp of breath that was mutual
and gaps between the blinds
that let in little bits of world, one at a time.
you were simple, i was softer,
and the love we made was like sap
that dripped slowly down the face of a clock.
now we are older, we bear burns
from volcanic fights and arsons
born from fear and loneliness.
now we are older, will i be able to find you still
sitting by the side of a lake
with sunshine in your eyes and
sand between the folds of your hands?

a bird among the bushes
hops close and sings to me,
a body in the grass:
you don't belong,
you don't belong.

because maybe this is what it is to be dead,
i lay still,
and wish violent things for the songbird.

a bird among the rushes
hops close, dares, hopes,
close enough for me to see the frail wings
and wiry feet.

and in my turn, i stretch out arms
long and burdensome
which frighten away the little bird,
flatten out a pool of grass
into a circle of green around my form.

because maybe this is what it is to be dead,
i stop breathing,
and will my heart to quiet so the bird will return.

love, eve

adam, you fuck up so perpetually,
i am at a loss to keep you from it.
so what if i am an apple,
ripe with contempt for your sincerity?
sincere is not the same as honest,
and i am ripe for the picking
but have no illusions about what happens next.
(consume, consummation, get it?
it's a good allegory for the way you swallow me whole.)
and you, adam, you are all possibilities,
a million paths and directions all open
and unable to choose a single one.
your broad shoulders slumped with discontent,
and i, an offering of the body,
cannot compete with your spirituality.
from the outset i was struck
with the deepest ennui for your love,
so your abandonment is not a surprise
just a disappointment.
you've learned to be something new
here, adam, than ever you have been before:
a war of sexuality and intellectuality,
a star shining bright in the heavens
that offers direction
but no answers: why wouldn't you walk
to see, why wouldn't you seek to find?
always a failure, and here i am,
the apple rife with blood on the tree
with no eye or hand or mouth to please.

in a dream you were an airplane,
all sleek and metal and modernity
that flies past
and seeks the ground unknowing,
floating in the sky like seaweed on the sand.
in a dream you were the body incarnate
and thought only of the dirt,
in a dream you flew like iron being forged
from viscous possibility
into caged strength.
and i was all the things that you were not:
soft and simple,
a shape melded together with love
and all the things the past can mean,
a guitar chord softly strung
by someone who knows the words to the song.
in a dream i was your opposition
and left inside the earth,
unmined, unwarranted, i learned the path
up amongst the caves to find the surface
and dig you up too,
the way to the surface that let dirty hands
mire you and mesh you into a machine
that flew and groaned and did not return,
and i was what you are not.

in a dream i was a lioness,
in a sterling silver dream i had golden webs
weaving themselves, streaming themselves
out of my fingertips:
and i pointed you out, i drew you out
and up from the crowd and there you stood
all shining like a wave on verge of breaking
and said to me:
it is not enough, it will never be enough
and you will not learn to be still until
time and death and stairsteps force you
down into the dirt.
and from this dream i was slow to wake
yet when i did your face swam silent,
slow inside my mind, a vision staring out
at me your dark eyes:
and i said to you it is always enough
to be always in motion, the constancy of
activity it is enough to be convincing
and this love,
it is a cobweb in the corner, it is a strand
of moonlight that drips down onto beaches
when we weren't there, when we were standing
on streetcorners shouting and pretending
there was something to save,
there was something to save.
in a dream i was a lioness and built houses
with gigantic paws,
in a dream i was a spider and spun webs
out of sunshine.

all the signs of the world
could not convince me
(thunderstorms in winter,
the peaks cascading off of mountains)
to give you up
no matter how they shriek
(waking terrified from dreams,
hearing sounds in silence)
there will always be your body
and these memories
(a word unwittingly spoken,
eavesdropped relevances)
to keep me from walking away
from this semblance of home
(a door off its hinges,
new floorboards which creak)
as long as you are offering
i will accept
(a glimpse around the corner,
your body in the corner of my eye)

oh, i am tired. an exhaustion born of grief
and born out in silence, solitude.
someone else's voice reads out instructions, now:
someone else directs the feet along the path.
but maybe loss of power does not mean
loss of self, maybe it indicates nothing at all—
a mere change in circumstances.
and that, as a whole, is an apt description
of my living life anyway, a constant flux
of comfort, or not, of what home and
the language of money might signify.
there is power enough in touching you now,
a potency in the heat and mire
that makes me willing to give up the solitude
and the pleasure of self-determinacy.

at some point you have to be willing
to break the rules,
to have a little come-what-may.
if you can't even tell me your destination,
how can you decide
what steps you'll take to get there?
or what i will mean to you
when you arrive.

the seeking of danger
is a side effect of the same poison
that kept me burning for weeks:
your words, your words,
they are still embers glowing in the dark.
so take the curve at 70 mph,
bet on another round of shots,
since the words
are all that remains of the path.

we find the will to keep walking,
you and i,
and whether that source is each other
or nothing and everything
is up to us, and no one else.
there are only two sides to this story,
the things i want to take from you
and your willingness
to give them up:
a little sanity, love,
and another road to walk down.

oh come ON, aren't we supposed to be
young and easy, something simpler,
something less likely to be sober??
aren't we young, aren't we young enough
to still play and still find toys
in the junk drawer, out in the gutter?
be a little easier, love, be a little
more likely to find rhythm in a day
lived without expectations, find
a peace with chaos, make friends
with the fact that you cannot stay calm
and stay alive at the same time!
there is no excuse, let your bloodstream
pound a beat that makes you quick,
let your heart push the sounds that
will make you run to open doors.
announce your presence, love, and then
swing those hips my way. yes,
you can shake your head as much as
you'd like, carry that sweet scorn around
in your pocket like a charm-- like
it works at all, like i will allow that--
bring your lips over here, bring your
fingertips and that little dance you do
when it's late and you're drunk.
you know, no one has ever regretted
playfulness in the way that sitting still
might be regretted; no one has ever
regretted finding treasures along the way.

what you could be for me,
some sort of daydream lost for better wakings--
a plot left behind for character development.
a word, these days,
meaning something and signifying little,
squalling its way across time and space
to find your ears,
to find your fingers and your heart.
what can i be, here and now, what is there left
to accomplish?
there is only the dreaming,
and what it means to the soul.
there is only the heart and what it demands,
something solid
or only just half-waking, starting up
at outside sounds,
the heart a moment from lucidity that decides
to let you in and let you stay.
what is there in forgetting that cannot be found
during the art of staying awake, during the time
spent saving,
spent keeping the body from its own blood--
because the body runs on dreams,
runs on possibilities,
will not be denied.

i suppose it is a sort of testament
to human spirit, or stupidity, either one,
that i cannot help but feel for you.

you compile all my possibilities and
limit me to only one: what i can be for you,
only for you, for the remainder of my days.

during a summer sunset, you are everything
i can imagine, a sort of staring contest
with the lowered gaze of the sun.

the most beautiful face i have ever had
i had with you, i don't forget
it is your hands that made me shine.

you have given me an entrance into
my own heat, a doorway into the anger
and the sadness i should never have found.

so one time, darling, let me just say
it has been enough to know you, it has been
enough to have survived those days.

we narrow down our possibilities,
one by one,
and that's what age is.
the process of maturation,
a whittling down of desires until
one single opportunity
whether golden or not
is left.

i am still young, so many doors
remain open for me:
and although you have flung open
this opportunity to me,
i must have age enough
to refuse.
you make me break my own heart,
in the process of breaking yours--
but none of this is my fault,
and that
i think
is where your tears come from.

you act like
you never get tired of the blood
and the fire that comes after.
all you can see
is the bright colors and
flickering light,
proofs of action and emotion.
is this what it takes, to feel?
you act like
you can't even see what gets destroyed,
the carcass that was love
is something less than dead.

invisible bruises,
the body letting loose under the skin
to try to remind you that
i still exist,
and i don't need your fire to feel.
there is enough stimulation
in memories,
it is enough to remember
what the burning looked like last time.

it is easy to say
that it is hard to be a woman;
it is harder still to look at that mountain
of cultural shame and societal rules,
to see man perched on top,
and still be able to offer you my heart.
that is a woman's real strength,
and the source of her real shame:
she can offer up
the same parts of her soul,
time after time,
and let you make a mess of her,
all the while believing
you are capable of loving her.

it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter,
there's no one i can't be
when i'm alone,
there's no one i won't love
where i'm on my own.
there aren't any numbers left to dial,
you know?
there aren't any dreams left to me.
a vibrant childhood,
i have dreamt them all already:
have stood them all up in a line,
and toppled them like dominoes.
it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter,
there is always another game to play.

it doesn't make sense
that i should work this hard
to become all these things:
and i can be many things, have many faces,
be sweet when you think i should be
and soft when femininity is impressed upon me
and hard like steel when
you force my hand, words like daggers
when you make me mad.
it doesn't make sense, then,
that there is nothing here that is attractive
but i cannot seem to keep you,
i cannot keep my hands on you,
i cannot keep you in sight.

i suppose it matters less when
there is enough money to go around,
or enough love--
aren't they the same?--
but it is nice to feel cared for.
and what i am capable of becoming,
the woman i am capable of being,
doesn't know how to be cared for any more,
doesn't know how to take your
outstretched hand
as well as i'd know how to take
an upraised fist.
isn't it sad, isn't it sad,
it doesn't matter.

somewhere far away there is a home
and it is mine.
on weary feet i move towards it now,
stepping into uncertainty for the hope
and the fear that there will be something
on the other side when i arrive.

i used to hear these opening chords,
and put down whatever was in my hands--
i used to recognize the beginnings of the melody,
and stop to listen.
for a few short weeks,
this song was all i needed to be calm
and all i wanted to be happy.
when the drum track stepped in,
i would roll with the rhythm
and step inside the lyrics:
let love set you free.
i used to hear these opening chords,
and my heart would stop for the sheer pleasure
of having silence instead of beating.
i used to look at your face and know
that my world was better for you.
i used to hear your voice, more than your words--
used to keep you close at night
and all during the day.
i used to hear these opening chords
and imagine your body close to mine.

it should be so simple,
some dark room, a stranger's hands,
a story written in wine.
it should be so easy,
finding you late one night,
sometime underneath a harvest moon.
there is nothing solid about it,
this malleable future
of love shaped by alcohol:
except maybe one night,
you learn to find me where i roam,
to seek me where i stray,
and then it becomes complicated again.
it should be so simple,
replacing one man with another.
you are each need and heat anyways,
and all i can do is provide.

this too shall pass.
sooner or later, everything ends,
and the only thing you get to decide
is how much of yourself
will be bound up in that ending.

as winter lapses into spring,
i know my thoughts will turn to you.
you ought to have been a beginning:
something smooth and pretty,
a flower opening to the sunshine
or a wind just sweeping in from the south.

you too shall pass.
though here, in the winter of my discontent,
you are all power and ice and movement,
in a few months you will be gone
and i will be alive,
i will be wandering around a world
gone verdant with youth.

do you know what the story of Ruth is,
have you ever heard of the woman Naomi?
it is a story of destitution, of lack,
and of providing for your mother, your sister,
your aunt, your cousin, your friend, and yourself.

maybe in the next telling,
the wheat will be toxic, the chaff
unknowing and silent.
maybe in the next telling,
the earth is not benevolent,
removes herself from the circle of women.

maybe in the next telling,
Ruth will stop wondering what love is
and find it in kindred hearts
instead of the heated knock or heavy steps
of adam, prone to failure.