Time to Heal

I'm trying to find myself
Complete
And I'm worried you won't wait for me

Because right now you don't even know you're waiting
Just bookmarked in the front of my mind

And I'm so afraid to tell you
Wait wait
While my delicate heart spun of chipped glass and spiders web
Whispers softly wait wait
And do not waken love until it pleases.

When infatuation makes me ramble on like an insane person

I lay here at midnight

And run possibilities in my mind.

Wondering how do I tell you that I've loved you for six years

And that your smile is the only one that's kept me alive,

Kept me in hope.

How do I calm these soft feathery stirrings when I see you

Biting back all I could say.

Keeping eyes averted

And hands grasping at the air at my sides, anything to keep from trembling. 

How does one stop loving so unrequited?

How to I separate my heart from what you are when we are both made of the same stardust?

How can I untangle myself?

When you are the thread that has been winding itself quietly through my days

Leading me to here

Why do I keep whispering to my heart

Wait, Wait.

So afraid?

Will I ever put these puzzle piece words in the right place

Finding the key 

To tell you what I desperately long to say?

Will it even matter then?

Will I ever be free from the haunting of you

When you have drawn patterns of your self on my soul?

And not loving you is like denying my body air.

Why am I so stupid,

So naive,

And painfully self aware?

Why do I love you?

Why do I dream recurrently of laying with you on a bed of moss,

The last generation of Eden.

And that you will turn to hold my hand

Embracing yourself,

The self in me,

Like a missing rib.

Where do dreams go to die?

6/19/11

All my relationships are like layaway.
Every moment you spend with me-
Just a down payment.
Leaving me hoping that this will finally be the day
That you will love me enough to call me your own.

And take me to a home,
A place I've never seen but dream about quite often;
Let me belong,
Finally to someone and somewhere.
I just need to know I am wanted
And for more than a warm arm on a handful of lonely Monday nights.

...

Softer Skin 6/30/12

I always remember the strangest things about you.
The way your hands look when you drive,
The way a smile looks like
Hanging from the corner of your mouth.

The linger of your self
 ( pitter patter of baby feet, shallow sounds of arguments now ended)
seeps into the cracks of your childhood home
And every floorboard tells a story of you.
Every wall and hallway still reeking with your sound,
asks after you.

I remember the way the sun painted you gold.
Early morning couplets we would make,
Arms tucked loosely around each other,
Face to face, as innocent as children.
And I do not know why
I could not keep the days
When we slept in our softer skin.

when you look me in the eye, in the intimacy of silence
I never know what to say to you.

I remember you in the hallway,
Hands hanging limp.
Accusations and questions folded in your brow.
And every memory ends this way,
The wind down and soundlessness
Of your heart and stomach on a race to the floor.

Falling out of love is a different music.
Chords being dissected and faltering haphazardly into silence,
The last ones courageously dying off in a handful of ugly notes.
So unlike the carefully constructed love poems I would leave in your mail box.

I only know how to end things sadly
So I will say this:
I love the way you reach out in the middle of the night to hold me.
I love when you are gentle,
Even by accident.

I have a kaleidoscope love,
Only good at
Half -reflecting.
Always undressing when I get nervous.
If breasts and thighs
Distract from eyes
Then I'm champion at hide and seek
When no one else is playing.

Your commitments smear,
Colors on the merry-go-round;
Temporal sounds
That didn't even have the grace
To last a season.

We are so changed.
Shadows of all the good things.
This will be the last offering I bring
To pass and be passed over.

Life takes you to unexpected places -
Warm lights and wood stands,
My fingers stuttering over the points of a Jerusalem Artichoke.

The shinny red moons of pomegranates.

You smiled at me and made small talk.
I kept my six year secret.
I never knew how to defend my heart against the disarming smiles of grocer boys.


He doesn't love you He doesn't love you
So stop. 

Restart

Tell me it's not the end of the story,
Tell me I can love again.
Black tree branches through our arms
And the January rain upon our upturned faces.

We knelt with paper and erasers
Rewriting the samesamesame story.
Again and again exploring our guts
Looking for loose and dead ends,
Holding our vacancies.

Alien atoms through our fingers and feet.
The neurons firing off
Always stuck on the wrong equation.
The missing math in our love
Left us empty handed.
Slight of hand,
A trick,
Joke.

Car doors and the sound of your street at 3am
Remind me
That some girls are for company,
Some are for keeping,
But mostly people just leave.

Can I just fall in love with you?

After ones heart has been broken
It takes a certain bravery to dust yourself off
And chose to go on loving
Another person,
The world,
Yourself.

I want to be brave.

E.

I'm trying to find quiet strength 
Again.
I'm sewing the pieces of my self back together.
Finding some bits in last years coat pockets
And some, hiding, have rolled under the bed.

There has been a consistency in loving you,
An invisible thread I have never talked about.
I've been keeping the secret of you in the back of my head
Tucking it between the pages of fear and hope, 
Wrapping it in the day dreams of "good enough".

I come to you in the too small broken clothes of others expectations 
Embarrassed to have you see me like this.
Wearing something that looks a little like dignity on my sleeve.
I am a master of pretending it's alright.

But there is honesty in my love
simple and undressed.
After all the stories and the rough lived lives-
Covering up the bruises,
There is relief in the quiet round sounds of truth slipping out.
I love you.
I have always loved you. 
I always will love you.

And I want the best for you
Even though I know that's not me.
You deserve innocence 
And all I can do is bring you grief.

I don't think this is going anywhere and we both know it.
I'm not really satisfied with this,
With being almost and maybe.
I don't want to keep spending time like down payments 
With the promise that one day we will cross that line and belong to each other.
That's not how this works.
That's not how any of this works. 

You know I'm not in love with you.
I know you don't love me,
And life is too short to waste on convenience.
I want a yes that is yes
A no that isn't maybe.

It's not fair
To either of us.

What does it matter that my love could not make him stay?
What does it matter that my love couldn't make him a better man?

I climbed into that sinking ship
And clung to it for dear life
Because being an anchor to a dying vessel was somehow better than the uncontrollable sea of uncertainty.
And I bailed out water with my little cup and for a space it was enough.
But the waters overwhelmed me.
I still carry the guilt of the shipwrecked.
I thought I could save them.

Too long I’ve played second best in other peoples bedrooms
Breaking my body like communal bread again and again
To be passed around
And not one lover ever looked to preserve the whole of me

While I wraped soft flesh and sweet words around them
Twisted and braided and bent myself to their comfort
I’ve stood mute in kitchen corners
Eyes cast down waiting for permission
To have my birth-right voice back.

I’ve paid with blood and sweat
And down to the bones of my hands
For free air
For a small corner of the heart
Vague promises that melted
Like soft butter over bread
At the smallest hint of imperfection

At any straying over the boundaries
The square lines drawn around me
Saying ” here I have given you space to live but no further-
Here is your spectrum.”
For once you had fallen in love with my vast and vibrant rainbows
I am now given a handful of shades.
And then complain at how well I
Color in the lines
While you chase more free and vivid lovers,
…Like I once was.

Past time

I'm never a viable ...." Option" ... To you,

Just a pastime. 

And maybe I do this to myself.

Always being out of reach,

Always being boring and predictable,

Always getting attached unconsciously and where I shouldn't. 

Always half believing under my breath that this time it will be different
 and I'll be loved, wanted, treated like I am valued and worth the kind of respect and long term affection that I want.

That I've always wanted.

That's All I want. 

It's never a graceful end with us.

Always cliff hangers and question marks.

Always the invisible wind down 

And never periods.

We love in incomplete sentences 

That we pick up the thread and start over and over but always stop at the tenses -

Were. are. is. was. will be.

Everything is hoped for 

And everything is hazy;

Nothing is complete

Or fully said.

Implication pairs its self with commitment.

Our tongues dance round and round the subject growing older each year. 

I want. I need. I love. I will. I am.  

I can almost imagine your room 

I can almost feel the weight of a wedding band.

Put Away

You only want to touch me after dark.
Night time holds affection captive
And I’m only familiar in half light.

Nobody knows you steal kisses
When stop lights and street lamps turn on.
My convex shapes blend and bend into your eclipse.

I return though,
Your front porch has become something silent I cross
In the few seconds it takes for you to open your front door.

I accept your hesitant touch,
The hurried way you make love to me,
Momentary sparks in the darkness.
Tracing and retracing the the nations of your skin,
The desert of your back,
The sharp stone cliffs of your hands..
The fields of grass stretching off into sighing plains
when the stubble of your cheek brushes the smoothness of mine
Almost by accident.

I kindle these fragments of quick light
So when I return
And climb into bed pulling the covers up over my loneliness,
I can retrace the feeling of sunrises on my skin.
The golden way it lit lovers interlocking in sleep,
The moments I knew what it was to be endless.
I remember a time
you wouldn’t be ashamed to hold my hand in the day light.
You wouldn’t be afraid to say my name
in more than a whisper.

It’s 2am, the streets are empty,
Your house is cold.
Tonight I will leave your neighborhood un-haunted,

Tired of being a ghost.

Shulamite

You will find me in the fields

With the empty of your fresh harvests,

Noosed shells swaying in the breeze.

These vibrant lives are now hollow vessels

Echoing the sound of your voice back to you.

Your love has sucked dry the fruit and left the rind.

And I am left to question how many other hands did you bring in to sow the seeds
Was I twelve or maybe thirteen?
Do I have a story or a history anymore
Was it all left in genocide and rewritten
Did I loose the lineage and the noble heritage on the alter
In my omission was assistance
In my passiveness, permission
My pale hands, stained, clutch a voiceless throat.

Oh my brothers, who have turned your faces in anger to me,
Has the sun not taken out enough vengeance?
I have tended your fields well,
my own I have not kept.

Waiting. - Alysia Harris and Jasmine Manns

I knew the kind of man I wanted to marry when I watched my father carry my grandfather's dead body down the steps.
My grandfather died in bed with my nana. She said she saw his soul soar right out of their attic window.
He left his body in that bed to remind her that even without breath she can still wake up to him.
She said he left silently, didn't want to wake her out of her sleep.
As he got ready to leave, kissed her on the cheek; gathered himself at the foot of the bed and didn't take anything with him - not even her smile.

The first time we met we stood on a winter beach.
Ankles deep in sand under a sky of unconstrained stars.
The second time it didn't work but I hope the third times the charm.
I've never had the audacity before now to wait for a heart
but you said "sleep on it."
so I curled up on your chest and learned patience.
Didn't want to let the weight of my tears wake your gorgeous and the mornings can be so mortal.
And you often have bad dreams, I've caught you mid-scream on a september night.
Swore then that I would kiss the fright from your voice, if only you would let me -
but that's your choice, my love.

I want to know there's a man in heaven waiting at the front gates.
Checking his breath, straightening his tie, waiting for me to arrive as beautiful as the day I was when he first died.
There is a chest waiting for my eyes to get heavy. There is someone out there finishing my sentences and the last of my laundry . . .
There is someone out there making room on his pillow for me, if not for my face at least for a poem or two.

You, are the first adult I ever dated.
The only man I've never had to lay before.
If anyone should ever ask, I would describe you as a wealth of sundays.
You gave me two feet of white cala lilies, made me feel like a bride that friday night.
You found treasure where thieves before you found trinkets. They used to gamble my bones for luck
but there is honesty in your touch from navel up.
I have sailed your spine as straight as a whistle and marveled at the industry of your mind.
The last time I saw you, you were just as beautiful as the first.
So don't blush.
Don't look away.
Just hold my gaze.

I sat on your window sill and I'm not sure if you were taking a picture of the new york city skyline
or me
But I'll take when I can get from you.

You are still the last person I kissed.


My grandfather left a dollar on the night stand.
He said "Gloria, go play these numbers for me.
Because this is my last dollar,
And you will always, always be my last dream."

life. life.

Today I counted my fingers.
for no other purpose
it was just a tick.
Something nervous to do to let out the anticipation.

I can weigh out what I ate today on a teacup saucer.
I'm not starving
but food seems like a great white elephant tug-a-waring across a line
and eating for comfort has gone out of style with me;
Grief has other forms.

I dreamt my sister died last night
choking to death on a dance club floor and no one heard her.
All day something has been off
And by dinner time I know that today is wrong.

"whats" and "why's" are only hanging
like noosed tree's in the wind
that sway and precariously begin to bump each other.
I think I'm beginning to lose my mind.

or only maybe it's that I hope to.
To bow out somewhat clumsy but with a little dignity
of to much to soon.
Life was never this hard.
And I care too much so not at all.

I just want a man who will write poetry about me,
who understands how words are a closer music.
that tells of heart beats and the color of your damp breath
long after the sunset
and it was warm
warm like arms that made me realize i had never known safty
but this,
this was something diffrent.

I just want,
I just want a man who will write me love poems
tuck them behind my ear in whispers
like love letters left on pillows in the morning
for the sunshine to kiss
"because i am not there and not able to".

inconsistencies

And all morning I have been crying
And shutting on off like a lamppost.
Sticky sandy eyes
And my wires falling out my front.
Haphazard sparks sporiticly twitch my insides
And mix me like an egg beater on the fritz.

Cold clean water is something to stare at when it falls out of taps
And the white of your bathroom tile matches my mood,
So I will lay here
Not soaking in the sun as I should.
Not being happy.
Wishing the day more grey
And my mood more compatible
Then a seesaw;
Then a no that is yes.