25, Incoherent Love Poem

I'm surprised its taken me this long to post one of these. These used to be my speciality. One time, I wrote 30 love poems for one girl (hey there, jay-z) and posted them all over the glass walls of my high school. Two months in, and I am being careful not to let i love you drop. I am being careful with this one.



If All This Were Up to Me



Then this would be the last love poem I'd ever write.



I want this to be a manifesto of all that moves between us

(the slow stutter of your hips when you want something you can't have,

the way you stumble when I lean into you {the way you manage to catch me})

But we are in the pre-write phase and I'm afraid that what I want is the ninth edition paperback of us, dog eared and stained with mint tea.

I'm afraid that what we between have is barely even a first draft. This tenuous thing between us is as smudgable as the pencil marks

(you run the pad of your thumb along my eyelashes, and smudge black mascara)

I am interested to learn how you're going to hurt me.

Now we move around one another in highly choreographed waltzes, and I let you rest your hand on the small arch of my back,

but I want to know what I'm going to say that's going to make your face go hard and as private as a weekly appointment with a therapist.

I want to hear the comment that you're going to toss off that's going to leave me bawling uselessly into my unwashed pillow.

I am afraid to let you know that my insides run together with rot.

(maybe I am also afraid to see what you are made of)

Because biology was all blah blah enzymes and blah blah blah reactions until you taught me something about collarbones and the tangent curves of thighs.

You are the explanation I can understand, a religion I can believe in.

And champ, you ask me when we're laying in bed at nine on a butter and toast Sunday morning,

but I never told you this fantasy:

I think about grocery shopping for you a lot. I want to set up a joint checking account. I want tax returns and a pantry with your favorite brand of peanut butter and your laundry mixed with mine. I want to can tomatoes for you.

(I want everything+everywhere and I am learning how to deal with the fact that I can only have today.)

I think about walking in San Francisco and how someone's going to fucking regret it if they look at you the wrong way (it calms me to have something to protect) and

I'm terrified because we are children playing with a very adult form of fire and

I'm scared because sometimes I want to throw my whole body at you and I am still learning how much you can take of me.

I am scared because you make the noise in my spine drop dead.

I am scared because you are so beautiful you make the breath in my throat curl up and whimper

(I am scared because you tell me I am beautiful and I am still deciding whether I trust you).

You are the river I've been looking for, a religion I can believe in. Even your anger is as constant as the waterfall and I would pick your eyelashes over the Louvre. You love dogs. You want kids. You fit my bones.

The only thing left is charting out where my vast selfishness and your unchartable goodness will collide.

I swear, I'm ready.

Two months in. Wish me luck.

24, In repentance

This is an old one, for a boy named Spencer Slattery, who I don't really talk to anymore but wonder about sometimes.

Resplendent Quetzal

 

Others have told me this, and that makes sense because sometimes I only see myself refracted in the eyes

of others but their baby blues never stick

(biologists have documented fifteen colors on the resplendent quetzal):

 

"You smile when you lie. I know that's not really much of a tell, but it's true. Your entire face lights up like it's fucking Christmas morning or something, and then you tell the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard. It's kind of classic"

I don't know what to believe any more but

I'm a mascot for what you've become, and I love the mayhem more than the love

and I read that off the printer paper and I'm like

damn, I'm an ass and a half but I don't care what you think just give me attention attention attention

(the skin of the quetzal is thin enough to be torn by daily flight)

 

I've always been able to tell when people were looking at me. As vain as I am,

it's not exactly considered a talent, more a natural ability.

in case you're wondering and I know you were, don't pretend

it feels like a hum buzzing just beneath my skin and

I like to dance like broken ankles aren't just a misstep away and the music vibrates

like mercury on my skin

but that might have just been a chemical juxaposition

(the resplendent quetzal is poorly adapted to cope with its environment)

 

And at this point in this narrative I'm pretty sure Enda St Vincent Millay ain't got nothing on me because

m candle isn't just burning at both ends

my candle is a firecracker torch pinwheeling across the dirty rhinestone sky

and this town eats its own puppies so as soon as I hit the ground with loafers

that cost more then I like to think about

I am sprinting, I am getting out of here until my lungs burst and my

legs are on fire but I am getting out of here

 

I am too

afraid

not to

 

(the last color of the resplendant quetzal is iridesence)

Oh my goodness, I feel like a genius

Totally just figured out how to upload blog posts from word, about three years behind everyone else. Here is a sample of my thinky thought pamphlet to start making up for things.

 

his brother and sister glare at him like maybe if he weren't around they could have nice things.

cheerfully unrepentant sociopaths

 

I could have gone to Reed and gotten really pretentious. Instead I came here and got kinda gay.

 

Mr. Picciotto: 'Do you drink copious amounts of coffee before coming to class?'
Student While Jittering: 'Nooooooo, I'm liiiiike thisssss allllll the timmmmme.'

 

when someone tells you who they are, listen.

 

He looks, for the first time since she met him, tired

 

a kindergarten teacher whose class are all armed with semi-automatics and filled with sugar and hate

 

that's my weapon right there

 

and as long as he was breathing he would Know Things about Shit

 

Bert's eyelashes were long and thick and his bones were thin as grass stalks. He could walk on his hands, recite the periodic table backwards, and set the whole damn thing to music.

 

get the hell out of Gomorrah

 

YES WE ARE ALIVE.

 

Do you think any of us are in a situation we want to be in here?

 

"Welcome to the new church! Can I get an amen!"

 

Ninety-eight years of love. He supposed he could have done worse for himself.

 

Floyd and Georgia are gettin' married…

 

Narratophilia

23, Welcome Back

for amina, who i love

and suddenly, my life doesn't seem such a waste,

pretty girl with flames at the tips of your fingers.

you wear your clothing like those girl saints wore armor

all hedonism and martyrdom

but you (you are the most you), never bothered to learn how to drown

so you butterfly through the water with a kind of glorious imprecision

and you've got this magic you deploy like chemical warfare.

Force of personality, you are the rajah of your own ottoman empire of oakland.

May you always be this, darling of the fates.

22, I'm so behind oh my goodness

The Young Musician (for willie)

His youth is striking.
With the arrogance of the unpublished, he doesn't believe them when
they tell him he can't save anyone, he's damn well going to try.
He wears his insecurities like a banner draped across his victor's chest
Lovely, manic eyes alight with possibility and when he sings, the mountains strain to listen.

(if you were a singer in your own time and place, you would sing those stones to weeping
but magic died with Brahms and you are trying for something alive)

And the arch arch in his back as he bows telegraphs this as good as a smirk,
he's got this shit down to a science.
That trill remind the listener of the numbness and purity atop glaciated peaks,
that crescendo evokes the magnificence of faith.
This is as calculated as chemistry.

But all these academics are a metaphor for the vagrants
that tramp along the highways tucked in the ventricles of our hearts.
That dirty thing called love,
love and joy and how sometimes i'm better before you get to know me
and the way you sometimes feel about a girl you just met
how you want to put her fingers in your mouth and memorize all her cousins' names
right now, this very instant
but you don't, so you won't.

This is what I think about when I hear him sing.
This is strange and good, and very, very much alive.

sidenote

The formatting on the poems is different then how I intended, always. Which is definitely a bummer. So if you could read them as a run on sentence in your head, that'd be awesome.

I guess this is what oh shit feels like (21)

tocsin/toxin

(the afternoon leaves my nails chewed and golden, but i swear
all this breakdown started with such potential)

tonight i am trying to fly on my cardboard and spraypaint wings and i just might
figure out the secret of uplift and rising, and i can, i totally can
if those guys over there will just put away their goddamn cameras

the reason i hung my ballet flats over the railing of the dormitory balcony in the first place
is because there's always a voice in the canyons of my head that tells me
if you bust all your crooked teeth, you'll be rendered perfect, weightless

this night is the first warning bell, softer than all the others.
tonight, i might be all magic but i don't know these people and i'm homesick
enough to go sit outside on the smokers bench and call my mother and cry

this is the first swallow of shame and it burns as it goes down and it's doled out in red plastic cups

(i'm trying to tell you the truth and the shape of things
but i'm afraid there aren't words for a truth like this,
a faith that makes you huddle in your closet and bawl and anyway,
most of the memories are a tangle of legs and pumpkin seeds
and it all smells like loreal hairspray and cigarettes.
the photos from last night reveal a distinct sensation of fluidity and grace
just restrained by the weight of misery-to-be)

i guess i'm in this here mess because i like striking matches and watching them almost,
but not quite burn my fingers, in the same way i like kissing girls whose last names
i don't need to know.
some people say that's a waste of matches and youth, but i'm eighteen
and there's arsenic in the water these days.

finally
stumbling down telegraph avenue, he tells me
angels are only good because they aren't buffeted by free will
and we'd all be so good, if we couldn't choose.

starting to scare myself.