back in my mother’s house, shifting through long-abandoned stacks of paper from my foolish youth:

I regard my intellect with a rotten eye. Blood on your hands like a bedroom stain. A new hyphenated love of comparative emotion. A new unbinding of a tangled rope. An immense detachment convulsed and split to give you entrance. Give hope to your butterflies and let them consume me. I am amazed at my kindness and at my cruelty. I am chipped, I am scratched, I am unbalanced. I have remarkable potential for failure. You have a remarkable capacity for pain. We’re no two of a kind; I’d have slit your throat by now. I don’t know the space between tolerance and cowardice. Indecisive, I tear myself to bits. I don’t need to make a choice but I need to know what I want. Disjointed, yes. A plane flies overhead. Fidelity is nothing in the face of desire. We will see where my desires lie. You will contain all my irrelevant secrets. Sending desperate messages over temperate climes. Encompassing a world in a few cluttered lines.

scrap thoughts:

I lift my head up for a breathing look, here, above the ocean of my living:

how strange, how lonely and afraid I feel, when so much of my days are filled with the pressing hopes and loves of others.

how constantly ravenous for love (the distant flutter of wings, suddenly up close), despite just how much of it I have somehow stumbled into receiving.

I remember that it is human to be afraid. I look at the snow. 

I remember that it is human to long for that which you already have. 

I am, as we all are, a creature of longing. I am snapping with the jaws of time. 

I sit at my kitchen table and I imagine, briefly, a row of plants on a sunlit porch and the sight stabs me in the chest.

I think: I just want to be the kind of slut I want to be forever, and I want that to be yours and yours and yours, to hitch our circus wagons up and take in tightrope walkers as they come. 

I think: these boys all mean a lot to me, and I need to find someone I could ever trust to read this compare and contrast essay I’ve been writing in my head, this painting of the different locks they pick in me. 

I think: I’ve gotten in over my head and I probably like it. 

My skin breaks out in red because I like sleeping in your cum.

I tattoo your name on the inside of my mouth while I’m dreaming. 

I’m in love all the time, I’m in love all the time, but time is always running out on me, collapsing in on itself. 

I am lulled by a chorus of voices, but yours is the one that speaks my name the most. 

I want all my one night stands to know how fucking cute you are. 

more fragments from sorting through my studio papers:

god give good rest to all our misdirected saintings, give us sleep that does what it’s supposed to—not this restless acting out of dumb desires, of these titanic litanies of fear.

and what devil should I turn to when gods prove unkind? all this foolish talk a shorthand for the real desire

(brother, you know it, and all the boys I schoolyard chase with password guesses must know too):

to be the sharer of an esoteric knowledge, a reader-out of codes

to hold in your head the symbols others miss, and know their meaning, whispered in late-night treehouse voices. to know yourself a seeker and infiltrator, a caresser of truth hidden in the glut of life in all its details, falling on your body without pause. 

-

Oh, help, for I am a ceaseless reader of signs. Put all this serial attention to use before it kills me. All these messages grinding away on their silver wires, dangling before my twitching eyes. 

Let me slowly build a language, a tongue for this country I inhabit:

one the lips can shape while swollen, one that a drunk and lonely man can hold within his arms. Let this flood of words finally find its route. 

-

Perhaps I fold the lot of you into the vast poetic mannish shape of all those tragic lady poets, stuff my mouth with yearning words. Or I fit you each with wings to float above the Castle Duino. Or I plunge this hot and foolish lust to the bottom of the lake, and count my heart the bubbles rising up. 

-

Watch me quietly abandon my folly. Take a knife to tongue to spare the night air all this too-much speaking. What good language misdirected, lost? all my nurturing instinct led away from my collapsing house and brought instead to lay at the broken feet of pretty men that I would fuck to solace in my stead. Caregiver to all but those who hold its greatest claim. 

-

Give me, then, this pleated suffering–let me tangle all your aching limbs in my dark hair, grown back longer than the darkened hall. Abstracted desire stifling itself into the form of some arbitrary object: this is how I love a stranger, and so keep your secrets just like giving a gift. But still, I want to know what Furies follow you. Give you some spare night of safer harbor, to look the Kindly Ones in their dust-filled eyes and say yes, I know, for you follow me too, but please, just these few hours rest? Our cage-beaten hearts in brief proximity, the solace of a decoding ear and a soft tongue in your mouth. So much pain and mystery to speak of, but every word I write speaks “loneliness,” a keen into the adolescent dark. 

notes from this long late winter:

The great something to be said for the presence of hands, the letting out of blood, the weighing of voices, dried, the ever inlet of the body, the night.

Their eyes wet like late-night small-town duck ponds, smoke curling upwards, bodies pulsing in quieted machines, all bathed in grocery store moonlight.

-

Let us speak in the bodies of code: one listing sigh, two pulsing wrists, one blossoming eye. 

Let us speak in the rhythms of time– your breath, my ballooning ribcage, faltering and stiff, the membranes of my thoughts of you that cover me.

Slowly tease the teeth from my mouth, play oracle, be kind and deft and murderous in your dispensation of truth.

-

All my letter-writing could not do what your canine tooth accomplished in one aching moment.

-

Let your long blond hair wrap itself around my teeth, shake the sugar castles in our midst with all our quaking limbs. Turn to me on the end of a bridge and say, “Look, the life that we once clung to, slowly slugging its way downstream. And here, we, above the river, gleaming, are.”

-

I held all her steaming sentiment inside my mouth, the wolf I kept there keening. The littlest of girl smiles like a hunter’s horn. I am drooling for a bloodletting, and so the words seep from out my lips, and I don’t know about the changing of the guard but I know a high wall I could throw you over.