In the center of your mouth, under your warm tongue, is the home of all my designs and desires. For the taste of you, what wouldn’t I build? A future rapt with happiness, taut with promise. For the touch of you, what wouldn’t I destroy? I am no diplomat, I am not peaceable, but for the slowness and sureness of your breathing at night I too will keep a patient pace. The blueprints written between your hands and mine shine with future work. I graft a shelter against your goodness, prop myself up in the safety of your heart; you grow me stronger, prouder, absolved in the soft structure of your love.

Self fulfilling prophecy

I woke up calm today. Do you know what that means? To wake up calm, after weeks of hurricanes and riptides, chunks of me swept out into that grey expanse. I woke up calm, and even looking something like myself again.

You’ve figured out how to look me in the eyes. You even had a whole word for me this time. And I? Have nothing left to give you in return.

For a heart so used to love, and then so filled with hate, I am surprised it remembers how to beat with no emotion left to turn the wheels.

That if I could spend all the time and depth of my days pleasing you, it would please me—that if I could anchor your smile in the works of my hands, it would give me reason for joy—I am no Bethsheba, I am not temperate or a peacemaker or a diplomat but that if I could only solve for the problems of your heart I would be at peace—that I can learn patience for the slowness and sureness of your breathing soft at night—that the labor of my body is bent toward the trajectory of finding you at the end of my roads. I am exhausted, emptied, pressed gross and hard into the template of my last ten years but for you my bones creak over old breaks, skin heals over old holes, I am reaching for a wholeness I thought I’d never find. In the center of your mouth under your warm tongue my soul grovels for you.

The very special time I had in the suburbs with you

I daydream about threatening to tell your wife that we fucked
Responding to your next invasion of my space with a retort spat syllable by syllable through a decade of withheld  contempt
On the days when I want to kill myself I think maybe you are the only man I ever actually wanted
I remember, you see? I cannot forget.

On the bridge over the river in Ohio, on the bridge over the creek in Maryland, on the bridge over the metro in DC, you never tried to hold my hand.

I dream about pulling your teeth out with pliers, sometimes all of them and sometimes just one, in the front, handing you gauze, wordlessly walking away.
I dream about my workplace being shot up by a man in a mask, having to smear my body with the blood of others and hold my breath while a man in a mask inspects my body for signs of life.

Generations ago the women who stood close to death were part of how we all saw ourselves. They presided over births, deaths, weddings, the digging of new foundations. They watched as death roamed farther and closer, and lent help where they could, knowledge where it was actionable, solace where it was palatable.

We think ourselves so removed, now. Safe in bubbles of technology and isolation and security and noise. How safe are you really? Blinded as I am by modern anxieties and frailties I can’t see death on its paths, but I can feel it as it waxes and wanes. We are not so far from it now. How do you know the next bar fight won’t be your last? How do you know the furnace isn’t spitting out invisible, odorless death? How do you know that I won’t turn the ignition the next time you’re pumping gas into the tank?

i am holding myself together, two hands wrapped around a mess of raw and bloody meat. my dependencies rise like so many maggot children from the spoils of my guts, feasting on the decay and every declaration that i am sane, or safe, or sober. i entrench straitlaced behavior into all of my interactions, cinch artificial boning up tight around the stack of compromises that i am, but there is no corralling the sweet slop. wrecked, i am holding myself together, but in my grip the marrow slides out of the bones, and the rot is my gradual destruction.

Loving you is my heart stopping when you express dissatisfaction in how we interact. Loving you is terror when you begin a sentence with “can you not”. Loving you is exhaustion after an emotional exchange. Loving you is navigating different communication styles. Loving you is recognizing my trauma and my mental illness and owning them in our interactions. Loving you is supporting your need for space, for expression, for absolute honesty. Loving you is finding solutions.

I build an altar in my house, then tear it down for lack of devotions. My prayers are bruises left on the inside of your thigh, each mark one word in the sentence that climbs toward ascension. The litany of graces I am asking for: purple blooming on your neck, your chest, your shoulders, your hips. I purl you like a rosary, turning you over and over and over in my rough hands. 

In the beginning there was heaven and earth and rage, which mixed with mud to build my home. I have been void, restless, crawling over the face of this planet in search of soul, or apex predators. And then I saw your face, and I saw that it was good. 

When the grey clouds gather, they will already know your name: I have whispered it to every drop of mist that waits, like me, to fall. In the quiet moments before the thunderstorm sinks its teeth into the earth, I call you to service: let me worship with you, in the grace of your body. Let me earn, inch by inch, the sacrament of your taste. 

to love someone with the freedom of acknowledging and putting down all the baggage i have accumulated in loving those who came before

i am not pleasant to you because i have forgiven you, i do not keep my peace because i have forgotten. when you stalk someone, you prove them negligible, make them silent, erase their visibility: there is no boundary that can keep me safe, there is no sentence that will make you understand. i wait for your next harm, i expect your next transgression. i accept you in the public circles of my life because there is no space in which my presence is prized more than yours, there is no world in which my safety is more important than your ego and self-assurance. i will never be believed over you. but do not mistake me not picking this battle for the quiet of a truce.