I hold nothing. I let all the aching limbs of tender lovers float away, their tastes fading from my lips, my memory a city swathed in fog, darkening brows half-glimpsed at sprinting distance. 

No body’s weight upon me holds me to earth, but in the depths of me there hang these crystal visions, the blue, blue eyes of untouchable desires. 

I can hold nothing in my arms, all that can be pressed against me can step also slowly back, or so quickly forward as to make all embrace impossible, but the foolish saintings of my heart are so far from the truth of men that for me to lose them the very continents and constellations of our lives would have to shift.

I daydream of the cracking of these seals, a sudden breaking of silence or an appearance at my door, but I know, I suppose, the truth:

I will love these men forever because I owe them nothing, because they want nothing from me, and so I tumble over all my burning body to give and give and give of myself, to pour the libation of my life upon them, and I know these are a good deal too many pretty words to say I want to fuck the ones who will not have me, let me say too:

what a thing it is, to be in love without love getting in the way. 

I torment myself, but these romantics from warmer places, their voices ring the clearest in my head, all my words formed for those who would keep my lips from their necks, and perhaps every poem of lust makes me more myself than its satiation could. 

but still (you), to reach across a table, to sit quietly with my head in your lap.

or (you), to climb aboard a bus and then another and then another just to tend your wounds and hear your voice running like an engine in your throat.

a jagged ear, a crooked smile. 

someone, something real, is always temporary. inevitable ending sneaking into a familiar voice, slowly, or the plate glass fall of a quick unraveling, or the messy pulled out stitch. 

an idea I can love forever.

it would, perhaps, ruin it all, to pull one of these strings of all my fancy down into the dirt of living and to try and reconcile these vast seas of feeling with two glasses of water in a small kitchen.

but I want, I want, I want, I want, I want.

I begrudge no one their happiness;

and yet I do at times recoil with the sense that all my dark thoughts will slick out across them like oil on the waters of my childhood

at times I feel like a machine that turns time into unnecessary sorrow

a machine that turns affection into sickness because all the volume knobs are missing and the cables cut in and out 

at most times, I think, I do not feel like a human being.

I am trying not to faint, or to weep, or sink my arms around the many bodies I have no claim to

but I think I could handle loneliness if only this vertigo would leave me.

Tie me to this bed so I cease my drifting. Stake me to the ground with your polished tools, for I am a floating cloud of blood.

all the hours spent in sleep at the wrong points: the mid-afternoons, the work-to-dos, the missed appointments and neglected friends. all the hours I should have spent sleeping that I spent instead in lamentation of nothing.

at some dark appointed hour the iron gate of my chest swings wide – the sensation is physical. from the center of my chest up through my teeth and pulled taut up into my brow across the eyes. the thing that in my head I keep calling “the keening” but it lacks that clarity of cause.

this little girl should put herself to bed, but has always been the type to prefer staying up all night, picking at her thoughts.

forcing her nodding head back up again and again to know just exactly how lonesome she can find the night. 

hold me, hold me. without fingers at the back of my neck my thoughts will roll away. 

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. 

cleaning up my studio as we approach the semester’s end, sifting through all the scraps of paper I’ve been writing on the last several months. here are some fragments.

You took my hand and inscribed in it the notion: touch. Your tongue with which I taste.

I watched the darkness walk into you with certain step. The mare, the flame, the rippling pool. We work our foolish magics on the night. 

I am older now than you were then.

We quiet ourselves in soft absorption, the edge of Mina’s eyes before us, untethered. The dampened mats are cry repent, repent, belettered in mist.

Taped to the page, a piece of writing from years and years ago:

you said: I will wait,
I will sit and watch
but which tavern did you speak to?
you know I would stay with you,
a lamb at the edge of the tub,
gleaming

She bends her body into me and says, why don’t you come here anymore? Too tangled up in river weeds and rough men to remember where you come from? To take time for hot stew and soft company? Well, no matter. You can blow me off, but you can’t pick me out your bones.

Our Lady of the Fallen Star

your head, bowed. your eyes, clear. the world, the world.

the shape your eyes made in leaving. the embrace of a wall. the part of you that is always ever and ever without cease disintegrating. the word of acid and the word of blood. I could never, oh I could never–the unhinging of my thought’s jaw the record’s crack unveiling, your little sister a missionary of grace, your body a balloon in spring, the fields are then the field below. we climb the mound and the mound becomes us. the well, then, the well.

uncovering, we loosed our tongues among the matted reeds. our stray unfurling edges bent to please the aching of some distant path, and as our spinster bodies were undone we leapt, like light, from branch to branch, becoming and again the things the world had been to bolster us against.

we let our blood speak for itself.

and the words were like a flood that brought us under, the discovery of some new species living quietly within us, feeding on our terror, and our spit. 

take your long, curling thoughts, and douse me in them; the fire that crawls in will not crawl out. 

Moving through the ache of all this diaried time, all the yous of all my youthful romance, my heart turns back to look at itself down a long hall. 

I misquote myself from seven years ago and shift all my words around.

oh devil, I’ve missed you

you’d slipped from all my hungry sight

then there you were, in the grin to my left side

sliding back your sleet-wet hair with one hand.

you shuffled ice from off your shoulders

and bared your teeth in welcome.

for all the desperate phone calls of my life,

your name is the most hooked up to Thou

you who do not come when called

and when my heart breaks itself to open water,

the wolf grin blooms from your jaw.

you, unlike the others, always seemed to know that I was bluffing weak,

that there should be no tolerance for all this wringing of hands, all these averted eyes.

One day I will spit the last of fear from my mouth, so I may glut myself on sun and sweet warm night. 

I’ve been digging through my archives again.

The following is a diary entry from January 8th, 2007. I was 19 years old. 

This weekend, I told someone that I want to spend the rest of my life with him, that I want to bear his children, to wait until he gets home from work at all hours of the night, to see just how much he looks like his father thirty years from now. That I would leave school and move to some new city, that I would work, that I would stay at home, that I would do whatever love asked. But love did not ask. Love, in fact, would rather I did not. And love isn’t so much love as novelty, some memories, a skilled body and a few clever words. And yet I was once the knife that split apart his chest, left him with the breeze from the window in his veins. Perhaps again. Perhaps.

There is a church, abandoned, on the street where I live. I have mentioned it before; it haunts me. On one side, cut stone words pronounce:

DIVINE LOVE ALWAYS HAS MET AND ALWAYS WILL MEET EVERY HUMAN NEED.

On the other, ivy had covered the words, rendered them unreadable. I showed him, turned his crater lake eyes on the leaves, and we said, one day, one night, we would tear the ivy down and see.

The winter has killed the ivy. A strange cross-hatching of dead twigs is all that remains. And today, alone, I stared. I stared until the words were clear through the remnants.

COME UNTO ME ALL THAT LABOR AND ARE HEAVY LADEN– I WILL GIVE YOU REST.

I stood a moment longer with the mud and the graffitti and the broken glass, and as I walked away I called him and gave him my dead twig translation. But he was not there. I had his voice, but not his hand.

Independence is so very disappointing.

Today, now, I remember standing at the ivy, and not the conversation with the man. The church, I believe, still stands, but I have not gone to see it in many years, although the whim has struck me. The man I have not seen in many years, and in a good deal of those years the whim has not struck me. I have caught myself a goodly number of other foolish idols since. I have rent my heart on other wooden porches, made a few more men sick with misheard words.

Times and names and blinking eyes are ever-changing; longing remains the same. 

remembering, vividly, the dreams I had about you seven years ago, and the lust of eight and the poems of two, your vivid eyes and wicked grin filling in the devils of each tale I wrote before I found my footing–

no matter what time or I may do, some people’s names are simply etched inside your bones, their hearts too much of what you grew around to be plucked out of the person you’ve become.

I hope you understand. I cannot imagine you do not. 

turn your fingers into the night. pull.

hook the long, stringy hairs of all your darkest thoughts through each other, try to make something like a scarf, or a carpet, or something that might have some use.

look at the matted thing you hold in your hands; discard it. 

consider all the things around you that you consider “yours” or perhaps “you” [mine, me]; imagine how fragile the boundary that keeps each thing from being any other thing. 

notice the arbitrary way in which I have called some pieces of dirt “my body,” and others “my words,” and also how I have claimed some others as not-of-myself, as of the world, in some way that implied that I was not another collection of scraps in what that world contained.

this is a language of convenience. 

I disintegrate into all neighboring surfaces. 

My mouth, my hands, my cunt, my thoughts–these are are all also small black beetles, shafts of light, a muddied rock, a patch of night sky.

here, do not cry, not because you are not sad, but because you are all things, because you are no things. forget all the languages the world taught you with its racking pains. speak only softly into the night, with sounds the night understands. 

[ shit is pretty dark right now. ]

I wonder, how many times can you say: I wrote this song instead of killing myself, before it loses its luster? Before the postponement is ineffective, the audience insulted? Here, in the face of this excruciating pain, I was only a little unkind to a small number of people? I tell myself this impresses no one. 

This running-myself-into-the-ground, this why-isn’t-this-better, this i-am-ashamed-of-producing-anything-that-is-not-perfect and thus i-am-ashamed-of-producing-anything, it is, at the dark times like these, tangled up in the knowledge that every thing I am doing is, as it is happening, the thing I am doing instead of giving up. the sickest part of my brain gives me her litany: this is what you’re forcing yourself to keep on going for? this? to show someone the scraps of some half-started project? to write some crap essay? to be unkind, needy, and neglectful of the people you love? you tolerate what it is like inside your head in order to be simply mediocre? 

That, she says, is embarrassing. 

Allowing every single action to oscillate between the fuck it all of catatonia and the impossible pressure of this is what I’m staying alive for, so it had better be remarkable, this is not a way to accomplish tasks. this is not a way to get things done. this is not a way to live.

look. today you woke up. you took a shower. you put on clean clothes. you left the house, only an hour after you said you would. you drank coffee. you ate food. you overpaid for both those things, but now’s not the time to beat yourself up about that. you worked on a project. you averted a crisis; others arose. they always will. you didn’t throw yourself off a bridge into highway traffic or the dark waters of the Chicago River. 

you imagine a world where you can drink shandies forever but never get too drunk, and all you have to do is stand in a spotlight in an uncrowded bar, singing Roy Orbison songs into a microphone, all your friends smiling at you from the booths. 

you hang on, because that’s all you can do, forever and ever and ever.