Tuesday, August 26, 2008

darkness

even the sunshine
through the window is dingy
today, as though my brain sees
everything
through a thick cloud of pessimism.
i'm not trying to cultivate this lens
to focus the world within,
it comes unbidden
much like your dreams at night
when they snatch at your ankles
and you run
faster than you really can
but they never let go
and they always catch up.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

life's too short

we spend too much time
on the unimportant things,
what will leave us,
in the end -
laughing times with friends
you'll never hear from
again
when they leave the city,
girls who want nothing
but your naked body
beneath your sheets.
we misplace the time
we should use with the friends
who will not leave our lives,
the time we should spend with family
and the types of lovers
who won't go
when the reality of life begins.

your priorities are an exercise in
error of judgment.
and i am sick of waiting for you
to decide
sickened by the fact that you
don't know what you want,
or who, or why
so if you don't feel
like coming over,
fine

but don't make me waste my time
waiting to see, if
this time
you'll be thinking of me
for once,
instead of being
so caught up in your own head
you lose sight
of everything

Thursday, August 21, 2008

only years, love

i wonder -
how little
truly separates me
from the people
i have been?

Monday, August 18, 2008

the things we know only when sleeping

i ran through the sheets
of a portland thunderstorm
splashing through freezing puddles,
laughing at the crash of lightning
coinciding
with the city.

i was still warm from sleeping
in my lover's empty bed,
curled up and contemplating

"stay," he said
despite his weeklong absence,
with the half-hearted excuse of
watering his plants

i know well enough
it's not about tomatoes, or
a house that needs no sitting
this is about having someone

creating a home
to return to,
about sleeping solitary,
but not alone.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

"you really love that, don't you." "yes, i do."

i'm breathing you in and you
are already inside

i don't know what this means, or
why

my mind slightly dizzy
tasting the scent of you

our heat melts the worries
our troubled heads tumble inside
like stones waiting
for polish

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

coping

now even the alcohol
will not dull me enough,
not even mixed with
the pills i use
to keep my mind to a dull roar.
the mixture just drugs me
to sleep, which is
torturous enough,
with dreams i do myself in
without having to drag up
your memory.
perhaps my sudden freeze
will splinter you
into fragments, too,
after i am done
cracking in two

you float to the surface
unbidden
and you are a ghost
that will not be set into its grave

Friday, August 8, 2008

compunction

profanity & inanity
all that seems to flow from me
when we speak
on the phone.
i'm by turns enraged
or just stunned,
sometimes trying to remember
what it was like
when we talked
without the compunction that
now separates us

sometimes when we
are both falling asleep
on opposite ends of the line
it's like being in
your arms
would be, if i
were a million miles
away from home

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

sagittarius

you were shocked, i could tell
as i snorted
some stranger's coke

off a long, dusty mirror.
i was staring into you
daring you to say
anything.

i watched that stupid girl
you wanted to fuck so badly
gaze at you like jesus or,
failing that,
a minor saint at least
watched as she inhaled the
drug she didn't really do,
except when trying to please you

she was already drunk.
i knew
it would make her sick, but
said nothing.
my mind was clear.

you were quickened,
quivering
with the insipid anticipation
that comes when you think you might
get your way,
but haven't yet

i wanted to hit you, but made do
with fucking your crush in the backseat while
you drove my car home,
thinking

fuck you.
just
fuck
you.


at that moment
i would have been happy
if i'd never seen you again
at all,

much less when you
crawled into our shared bed
ravenous with desire

i wished for the last year of my life
to disappear

it wasn't about the drugs, good
as it was to
deaden myself

i wanted to hurt you
as hard as i could.
i didn't care how.

Monday, August 4, 2008

loneliness equals desperation

i would have given anything,
last night
for your recognition.

i needed you to touch me roughly,
erase her presence from my skin.
a fluke, her presence in my room, and i
with no reason not to let
her in.

but i was dreaming you, eyes
closed over her gentle fingers,
waiting
until i could hold you again
and lose
myself in the frenzy of our joining

but instead, i held you
as you slept, fury barely held back
over the time we don't have,
the reasons that keep me
driving back to my shell of a house
at two in the morning,
waiting out your obligations.

stifling the urge to cry
as i wrestle with my mind.
but it is not enough, no.
i need more.

i want you to bruise my body.
let me know i'm still here.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

prolifery

the sidewalk sports proverbs in its cobblestones
tells me to go slow.

i do.
i keep wondering as i walk this path
each day,
how one could be slow
enough to turn to stone.
curl into
the cobble until my backbone
solidifies, hardens.
make my skin
go granite.
every day i pass in too
much of a hurry to read the stones
although they shout as i pass:
time is nothing to a stone. their
thoughts will remain, their silence
retained.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

after i cried

i carefully licked
blood from the scratches you left
me off of my face

Friday, August 1, 2008

readings

i sat in the bookstore, listening
to Ursula Le Guin reminisce
lamenting
the lack of lost lovers' names

and i thought,
that's
why i write them,
each
a pebble in my stream

words unimportant in the memories of pressing skin,
but still
i want to name them
preserve the small part of myself
that chose: you.
you, and you, and you.