you not are a battlefield but i am a gun by wish-sticks, literature
Literature
you not are a battlefield but i am a gun
you stare solemnly out of the window,
telling me that you just feel empty:
i think of the months i have spent
levering chunks of myself out,
chipping off pieces and pressing them
into the jigsaw shaped holes of you
like a nurse on a battlefield pressing the bandage down
you have buttoned your jacket up tight
to keep your wounds in and the doctors out,
you are a veteran in your own right and yet
i want nothing more than to bite your scars open
and hang your swords over the fire
like two curved metal cadavers.
i want to sew your pain into history,
and amputate you from it. (you are not a jigsaw,
or a soldier, but i am holding a hacksaw.)
peaches and cherries and us by wish-sticks, literature
Literature
peaches and cherries and us
there will be other girls,
with bloody nails shorter than their tempers
who
in the lazy hours of the evening will compare you
and the creases of your stomach and the lines on your face
to the beach and the sea and the onslaught of a wave,
there will be other girls who will love you
like they are punishing themselves for something :
but they won't be me. if you are a beach,
then i will be landlocked; i am burying my past at
the bottom of my garden, six feet deep,
with a stake through her bitter little seed of a heart.
i am growing a tree through her throat, and eating
of the fruit, and i will never cast my eyes seawards again -
no matter ho
loving you the way i do now is like a revolution
bodies swarming back into the streets
flags and hand signs and guns thrown into the air
loving you now is thick ropes with sharp hooks
necked around the bright marble statues of you,
pulling and pulling and shattering,
loving you now is fallen idols in the streets
and the smell of sweet breads, and the sound of
hammers and nails and wood skeletons going back up;
loving you now is like rebuilding a city i nearly bulldozed
(loving you as a friend is easier than loving you as a god)
loving you now is so much better than loving you then
winter:
he slides you a coffee across the table and says
the ladders in your tights look like rollercoasters
and the bottom of your stomach drops and you smile
because he has nice eyes and he bought you coffee
and you want to be a girl that wants these things, you want to be
a rollercoaster, and you take a sip of your new drink
even though he ordered one with everything you hate and you say
thank you
and you hope he doesn't notice that you touch the cup again
spring:
he hands you a picked daffodil from just down the road and says
your smile isn't half as bright as this
and you take it in your hand and you snap the stem gently near the bot
Science says that one day there isn't going to be any time left.
Science says - it does, I read it, on the internet
or on the back of a newspaper left on the bus
or I heard it on the radio come zooming by through someone's car window
(although why you'd listen to that and not music, I'm not sure,
so maybe it was the bus, or the internet, or someone at a party)
but science says that time is going to scrunch in like
gravity around a black hole, that time is just
one day not going to be there, and that
we won't notice when it starts to leak out of the world
like a broken radiator or a bottle in your bag
with the lid not quite on, science says t
they tell you that you're strong and you
imagine them handing atlas the skies
and whispering the same thing;
you only wanted to put everything down for a few moments:
it is not weak to need to breathe in again, it is
not weak if your lungs cannot hold down saltwater
it is not weak
it is not weak
it is not weak
I don't write,
- any more
I don't think I remember how to
or how to take my dry-throat swallows and let them be birds
how to turn words into things that matter, or how you
wrap up your heart like a four-cornered blanket
like a bundle on a stick before you leave town.
I don't remember how to start a sentence with "you are"
and end it in anything besides "drifting away from me".
I don't write, any more. Not even to you,
I just sit cross-legged in front of a thousand screens
and I touch my palms to the keyboard like you'll feel the heat of them,
and I
I don't write.
"I would like to kiss you,
very slowly on the mouth
as soft as a sunrise."
I have a pen between my teeth
and this is all I have written to you
in shaking letters. I have plasters on my fingers
like my goal is to keep my claws in,
when they are really there to keep my teeth out
and I have not washed my hair in days.
I am the parody of the beast and my letters to you
are fumbled and dropped and bitter peeling
behind my teeth. jammed into the gums, and I
cannot write anything that does not growl with a lie.
I want, I want to kiss you, just once,
just one single time to know what your face feels like
under my hands, I wa
Hey, I just wanted to say I read your poem: "i rest by the rivers and bloom" all the time (maybe once every other month). I don't know if you lost steam or have other things going on, but I'd really like you to keep posting. There are so few actual, talented poets these days. It'd suck if you stopped.