a cautious malcontent, i wait always for the breath before the rain.
hovering close to the skirts of the swirling thunderheads
i have waited always just over your shoulder, in the corner of your eye.

i weave a bright web of possibility, washed dull in the years
that preceded the advent of your mouth. i have always waited
and spun, carding gristle out of the warm wool of the past. 

i could lie and say i have waited, but all these quiet years i have planned
waited and planned for what my future could look like
but the years turn me over, bend me toward a different scheme.

purled into a more sinister shape i grift my way through days
seeking shelter more than love, comfort more than care.
a common moth, i fly to your flame, flicker only at the edges. 

house of wounded things

this is a rescue: the way i hold your hand
and you hold mine. in the world, i show up whole.

blue paint, bleach, smoke: chemicals i use to cover up the past.
at least the smell of blood is gone.

the taste in my mouth, ochre after the noise of you is finished.
i crave, i crumble, i cum for you.

when my voice was small i used my hands.
wrapped in the truth of the body, there is nothing i can't see.

so this too: the lines of you, long and laid out in front of me, the crook of your knee, the curve of your shoulder.
the look of you: expectant, content.

an open mouth retching truth up into open: i wish now for silence, having fought so long to speak.
i never promised to be healed or whole, only that i would live. 

a thousand thoughts between me and a single spoken sentence.
i wait for the breath between your words, the motion of your mouth and the rise of your chest.
break me here: the rapture has come and gone, and you and i the wiser for it.
the density of prolonged suicide, the weight of the consequences i carry: i cannot make you understand the tectonic shift of your tongue in my mouth. i would not show you how deep the scars run.
if ever there was peace, it is for us. if anywhere there is joy, it walks toward us now.
break bread for me, the body offered up to the soul. armageddon is your mouth, and i welcome the sudden heat.
oh i am hungry for you. i am the chrysalis, writhing. 

on the morning after the fault lines got clear
the sky was blue and the clouds were white, and the taste of you
stayed in my mouth. i have never been fearless
but around you, i ache for freedom:
for a body that doesn't creak with history, for an
ego unbroken with others' weight.
on this morning my heart stays light.
so steeped in the natural order of things are we
that even the warmth of the sunshine
is a mimic of your arms, the breeze
a kiss between us. remnants all, and memories
i will stay proud to claim. 

 the lines of your body long and lit
soft in the first rays of the day: i reach for 
the warm weight of you, the rise and fall,
ballast of my own ability to get still.
i have never deserved mornings like these.

i have had to develop my own toxicity
in order to remain a predator not prey, and every
poison and vice and sin and trick
on which my freedom relies is too visible,
too easily tasted on my mouth and cunt.
i owe too many debts, culled too much damage
out of the world we wake to now.
too many months lived outside my body,
kite lashed hard against someone else's suicide.
too many months spent quiet, hard, static.
i am too strong to break, too smart to fail, except
at my own hands, the true cost of escape. 

for you something inside of me grovels, wet,
an instinct doused in fear and shame.
i want to bleed. i want to crawl. i want
the pressure of your teeth on my skin.
i want to be measured and found wanting, be seen
and be silenced. take me home. 

i could never have expected the depth of you, the way your mouth can douse me whole. i have been swimming for years in the wide open grey, a tide wrenched against her own lunar needs, capturing detritus and refusing to crest. who i am is more refraction than fact, more illusion than carbon; they see my work, but cannot see me.
you rise me pure over the arch of your eyebrow, the slant of your smile, a soft crash on the rocks of my ego every time. i am bloated with these years, belly-up and hoping for the sky.
in the water are a million ways i could love you, leave you, drown you, breathe you. i could no more demand you than separate any single drop of water out of my body.
you are story already, shaped in air and earth. what you design will stand for decades.
so a myth and a legend meet on the shore, standing in quicksand and shaping the world. the shine of you on this morning meets the glow that's been building in my blood.
like all things in the tidal pools we could grow forever, an ecosystem all our own. or we could get drawn out, in moments or at once, tossed free or crawled home, the moment gone. questions of coastline and current i cannot answer; i can only hold my salt and shells and bones in both hands while the moon moves me around. 

the healing always hurts worse than the original harm.
i am the conglomerate effort of everyone who has ever hurt me: i am the cobined detritus
washed up on the beach of my name.
(my name which is not mine, and is not me.)
those of us walking our own coastlines 
have turned tidal ourselves.
there is no piece of this continent i have not bounded with my own feet, no stone
on this shore i have not cried over, adding my own heat and salt
to the absolution of these cold troughs.
bury me here: i would stay unknown.

in the searchlight of a bright moon i move down the coast piece by piece.
you thought to join me, or witness me, but i leave no map and this land protects my body
as pure as only trauma can.
you will never be close to me, you will never know my mind, and the body
is cast off as easily as kelp.
i bless your intuition, knowing i can run faster than your eyes can see.

which cove should i start to bail, which cypress copse has the most bodies buried?
i was not made for excavation
(mine is a lunar mode of being, metaphysical, not mechanical)
but i have been told this is the only way.
i dig with slow hands, cupping the grit into my lap one palmful at a time.
there is no end here and never will be: only the surety
that i will leave, keep going, keep digging.
i will never run out of reasons to keep running.