rage is a desire,
scurrying through the marrow of my bones,
flirting with my heartbeat,
the way in earlier years a flush of pleasure
might have traveled through my blood.
oh but these days,
long and tiresome and heavy-hearted,
these days you are a different kind of love:
self-invested, self-seeming.
i give only what is needed,
i lay quietly screaming in the bed at night.
you want, you need. i rage.

I only miss you in the moments when I do not miss myself.

4am premonition

the purple sky is yawning when i wake up alone:
bared teeth, pearly muscles,
defrayed promises and a set jaw of sunrise.
the thought of you, like an egg yolk on the horizon,
unborn and unblemished and unfertilized.
maybe i am fuller without you! maybe
i am a scramble of color and gloss on my own.
the predawn light pollution, sickly and grey,
spreads itself across my sheets like a cancer.
i am sticky with fever, ill with salt.

what there is in the dark:
maybe memories, maybe unleavened love,
rising like yeast in the desert for the deserted.
maybe solitude, maybe peace,
maybe the ability to self-edit is gone:
maybe the penchant for self-hate is stilled.
maybe the body is a miracle!
and the heart, an unwarmed stone,
an unturned wheel, ungreased cog
in the machinist's list of things that are wrong with you.

so many rules, as we grew, hemmed us in:
don't shout, don't run, don't cuss, don't blush, don't flower.
now we must be encouraged,
like so many little birds,
to fly or soar or sing, or other foreign things.
now our mothers prod us angrily out of nests;
now our fathers sigh and take a drag of their cheap cigars,
blue smoke and the smell of tobacco
filling the living room and our memories of home.
now the world takes us in hand,
bends us, or breaks us if we are unlucky;
rends us, tears our hopes and hearts into jigsaw pieces
for the men of our generation
(who were raised loud and brassy, fast, secure)
to puzzle into shapes of their own liking.
now we must be encouraged,
and we are barely able to break open our own shells.

silence, in its wrathful, sedentary postures, envelops all the corners of my home.
curving through space and time, your anger finds me,
fuels me, joins with my guilt and sets the whole heart ablaze.
oh to be simple, oh to be free.
in the years where love was yearning, and affection, and sexual potency,
we were easier then: we are dying, now,
like filmstrips, each frame a treachery, each break an avalanche.
black and white and soundless, the mirrors reflecting hate,
silence here means that i miss you.
silence here means that i lack.

A room full of candlelight, but where are you, and who am I? 
A thousand words to beg you with, a thousand loves to shape you with. 
An error in judgment: this room can get so small.

yellow gold bright warm sunshine butter mustard sand goldenrod daffodil banana lemon

orange neon cheddar poppy sunset copper pumpkin melon fire

red berry love rust blood rose blush lipstick cherry ruby warning brick fever wine communism hot cardinal wrong

purple violet indigo twilight eggplant plum hyacinth amethyst grape lupine lavender royal gay

blue cool ocean aqua navy sad marine sky pool night water sapphire cerulean cyan breeze peace air

green lime forest leaf spring pea jungle teal chartreuse ivy growth grass money emerald

silence like a blanket, catching on the skin,
muffling, smuggling sounds away from ears:
oh your words, your scorn, your purity.
i am putrefaction, disease, disuse, desire!
the stinking retch of passion, night-before, night-after.
if i spoke, would you hear—would you listen—
the task of millenia,
for all the words i wrap myself in.
mummified with verbage, wrapped and rolled
into a cocoon of self-repetition.
an old army blanket, stale wet wool, the pressure
of preserving oxygen in that environment.
too late, i am permeable, i am pregnant,
i am dilated and losing self
and reaching that pale, peaceable purity.

what i am:
solvent, secure,
awash and afloat in self-love
and self-pity.
what can i need, but you?
what can you need, but truth?
a hard bargain to strike,
the chameleonism must be struck dead:
part of the soul,
part of the psyche,
can it be done?
no matter the priority,
there is only phantom love now.

rivers and lakes and oceans,
we have mounted stands against them all
and come up dry as deserts.
dehydrated, tideless, motionless:
i am drowning in dust and disuse.

sylvia

ankle-deep, the waves
just lapping at bare skin:
green translucence
swirling around the knees:
the cool bath leaching
bloodheat from the hips:
float, face-up, as an angel
when the sea is shoulder-high:
salt smell climbing into nose
embedding sinuses
tasting fresh
starting
to burn

grey instead of white, grey instead of black,
greyscale that spreads out over an entire day
and can't be turned back:
the plague of insensibility, tsunami of emotionlessness.
when, content to be empty, filler is forced upon you,
what means can you use to refuse?
you slide so easily into hatred, here;
lapse so easily into disgust.

the pressure slowly building behind the wall:
the dammed up reverence i am supposed to have for purity,
the damning neglect i give to faith.
and when, finally, it all spills over into sin:
relief, acceptance, surrender, sexuality.
the momentary lapse becomes a sedentary lull,
a calming of the synapses and skin,
and i am replete of devotion and lust altogether.

it was only after the abandonment
that i found the will to hate you,
only after your obscene, excessive absence
that i could figure out how to really loathe.
in all the mutations of my desires,
in all the fucked-up coercions and
the great white lie of combative reluctance:
at the end of the day there is only guilt.
silence, and guilt.
with your big stupid paws, soft pink fingerpads,
you managed to retch up some wild fantasy
that i swallowed, that i lapped up
off the floor, so much spilled milk,
sweet and frothy and feeling of fake freshness.
(my own clumsy ideas get lost
in that sway, get sidetracked and disproportionate.)
the story you sell is so golden! and at last,
burnished with years of stress and shame,
the ego breaks.
what am i now, lacking in love and spirit
and full-up of history and doubt, what am i?
some brazen trek through self-hatred,
a dry, pallid mask of last year's face creams:
some coppery pail full up
of chalk and powder and the grindings of teeth.
calcified, fossilized fissures:
a body old while i am young.
what future is there for used-up whiteness?

i watch you, the short curves of your fingers,
the smile that lurks in the corner
of your mouth and is never quite born--
the way you turn a page,
the way your face is lit in the light.
i hear you-- i am listening for you--
the inhalation, the exhalation,
the slowing swell, i swear i can hear
from here the sturdy, firm thump
as well as i could if my ear was against
your spine, if my lips could graze your neck.
and i am imagining the smell--
your smell-- your body, your soft temperature,
baked bread or summer nights or thunderstorms.
my eyes catch on your knuckles,
the pigmentation on your palms like a secret--
closer to the heartstream, brighter, softer--
the hands that i could die inside of,
skin i could swim laps inside of,
the texture of your fingertips and ribs
and your mouth. oh fixation.
the taste of physicality, since the body
cannot lie: iron, chlorine, calcium, steel.
your mouth is a playground where i
hesitate to invade but
am always sore to evacuate.
your body heat has a permanence, a way
of attaching itself to my hands and my lips,
till detachment is a bruising inferno.
observation is my only action
until my heart bursts out of my mouth
in a rage of heat and rhythm and pulsation
and seeking you, finds you:
finds each corner of your body
and the curves of all your words and
each bending offer of a future.
where we crawl in together,
the places we adventure and discover,
are nights like no others: endless,
and star-studded with the cyclical expansion
and collapse of blood vessels.
we are chemicals and reactive, your fingertips
on my neck, my lips on your shoulders,
journeying between constellations of lust.
tonight we make a cocoon of cool sheets
and a warm blanket, blinds drawn and streetlights
pinching them back for gold-patterned walls,
so that tomorrow when we emerge
our discoveries and expansions can be quiet gains
and vouchsafed memories.

soon realizes that her ego
its height and architecture
are borrowed, are the combined efforts
of everyone who has ever been a part
of this new kind of religion.
her will, it can't, it doesn't,
who are you to say it does?
what is light, what is future, what is fear
without a little sugar to rim the glass?
and she says,
i will i will i will,
all like that, one big rush.
elementary, my dear; the dreaming
of the fools as they rush!
the screaming of the tiny, broken bodies
and the slick seeping of their skin.
whose ego is it now, sirrah?
whose feet are creeping now,
a bannister on their own of path-breaking
and trend-making, whose red lips
are you seeking now:
her architecture doesn't bend down to you here, now,
her arches and her columns and her curves
are made of sterner stuff, sturdier stone,
wrapped in quotation,
mired in imitation, the strain
of development and voice.

i thought i caught you wishing--
thought i saw you dreaming there, a bit--
i suppose that somnolescence is almost the same thing.
who is worrying, here?
who is callous enough to imagine that kind of terror?
no no, we are all bright future
and open windows with a fresh summer breeze.
(in winter, when the shutters close, it may not be so easy.
but here, but now, but in this moment:)
i thought i caught you projecting
sex onto objects,
objects into sexualized action,
what is a gesture without a viewer, what could
a symbol mean without contextualization?
i thought i caught you interpreting
but it was a passing whim,
a fleeting thought.

what should the body be but a tool?
an ends to a means, a pausing and grating solution
for a great many problems,
causal relationship to jealousy and rage.
shall i be held back by a negative aspect,
shall i be propelled forward by good enough cleavage?
oh ridiculous. oh sublime.
when kant dreamed of the female form
he meant a mountain, for keirkegaard a perfect ellipse,
and marx a single floating feather.
(all are wrong.) oh ridiculous.
the mary tyler moore of ethics, the lucille
of seeking and finding: it is trial and error
and it is funny! it is the winding story and the german
bildungsroman come alive,
for the modern woman to see her toes
is miracle enough. where grape vines meet the earth
maybe in california, maybe in italy,
somewhere under the sunshine is a table
set with round, purple globes.
they stain when you break them,
they shriek when they bleed.
and the wine that drips between fingers,
coalesces and dries in the webbing,
sticky and sour and dark
(was your skin already brown or did it always glow like that)
oh ridiculous, this obsession with melatonin.
fine, lay it down, pick a bed,
pick someone else's, not your own!
pick an adventure, pick up a book, pick
serotonin and the preciousness of sexual desire.
what should the body be but a tool?
silly, to try to make a narrative out of it.

like
maybe
we used to just be together in a room and alone and that was enough?
like maybe the white of the sheets or the white of the walls or the white of the daylight in the morning could keep us stark enough and make us sane, could keep us clean enough from the outside world.

but there is always family to compete with, always neighbors and friends and coworkers and all with their two cents.
who am i to be ashamed of what my love is? who am i not to be?


oh you beg the question.
oh my slivered cliche.
i would that you were here now to split me open and make me bleed.

so clear, concise, and independent,
the road forward marked and well-lit,
i am a leader with a sharp heel,
striding with a tight step.
oh yes, doubtless, firm and secure
and deciding each day decisively! i
am a dodecahedron of clarity,
a polymer of absolute ease.
with enough time and the current tide
i will sway even myself to this path.

we have erased ourselves,
whittled down years and years and hours and nights and dreams
into what we think is a coherent narrative:
in love, out of love. in bed, out of bed, never love again.
we have taken black ink
and covered up entire weeks, months of history,
faces and words and thoughts and photos,
for the sake of never reliving what was felt so keenly then.
on the other side, now, of healing:
was it worth the loss, to prevent some emotions?
was it worth the deficit of self,
the ousting of soul, to prevent circumspection?
i am not so sure, now; but with our permanent methods
we have only blank pages to look back on.

what is race, in the race to the bottom?
what is gender, when the gentry hates us both?
what is class, if cash is the only currency?
in the search for new descriptors,
there are only old adjectives and definitions of power.
privilege like slime, an ooze on the skin,
visible and reeking and passionless.

i used to write about breaking barriers,
speed of sound, tensity in touch.

so much less, now, than there was before.

with the pulse racing and words pacing,
the mouth moving but the ears not keeping up--
we are a race! and i am winning,
swift like missiles, stamina like mustangs.
whose blood can pump this message loudest:
i am not, i am not, i am not! with
no time for an afterthought,
no hissing hangers-on or latching, leperous letters:
only speed here, see?
how fast can you get here, how fast
can i dissolve

the pregnant syllable,
dissension waiting to burst:
like ruth at the well,
like bethsheba at the pool,
the truth is hauled out of me
drip by drip.
i am no reluctant gossip,
nor blushing bride nor eager mute;
when words are anathema,
a pursed mouth is the only resolve.
like sylvia and the ocean
we will be friends first,
then lovers.