A beautiful mind

Surrendering bits of myself to you comes with a distinct kind of pride. It’s what I imagine singing an insomniac to sleep or slow dancing with the bed-ridden would be like. And in a way, that is what you did to me. I was a closed door — airtight as tupper ware — but instead of continuing on down the hallway when the lock scratched your key, you stayed in my shadow and devised a plan. Now your voice grants me slumber and your arms melt my paralysis and I’ve never felt safer so high above the ground. Finding stability in the shaky trumps any treasure box discovery.

In the scheme of things I am probably still only ajar, but that is beside the point. The light leaks through the crack, a pleasant surprise for the cynical parts of me who thought they’d never see another day of sun. A strip of dust motes dance and my hinges could be revived any day now. The sour scent of mildew, once as good as home to my nostrils, is smelling more and more like hope. There’s a change on the horizon, in your blueberry eyes, in the uncharted parts of me.

This one is for you

Because you are keeping my legs from folding.

Because when I am tired, I am leaning on you, when I am sad, I am crawling into your comfort. Because you are hooking my lips and pulling them into a smile, building a fire in the belly of my soul and warming me from the inside out.

Because when I am lost, you are pointing in the right direction, when I am shaking, you’re holding my hand and whispering it will be alright.

And because when I’m incoherent you’re closing your eyes and saying my rambling sounds a little like a creek. Because when i’m jumping from thought to thought without leaving a trail, you’re laughing and calling it hopscotch, never missing a beat.

And, oh, because you’ve carved your name in the back of my heart. Because you’ve tattooed your words in the palms of my dreams. Because you are the pulse of my wishes, the tempo of my hopes.

Because, because I love you.

And that was my final request.

This’ll be the last time I put my heart on your porch and the last time I’ll slip faded pieces of poetry under your door when you’re asleep. When my song has been sung, I’ll stop painting my wishes on your ceiling and humming lullabies at moonrise. I won’t come knocking at your door any longer or whispering into the back of your neck when you’re walking away. You won’t feel my fingers pulling on the edge of your shirt or slipping in your back pocket or clinging to the corner of your heart, because it’s obvious that none of it belongs to me any longer. 

I promise, this’ll be it.

So, don’t run or ignore this or throw it away, because I swear, this will be the last you hear from me. I’ll erase myself from your life and throw the pieces into the wind to be carried to wherever it is you aren’t. I’ll fold in the corner until I’m nothing more than an ink smudge on your personal history. I’ll erode and fade and diminish until the morning comes when you wake up and wonder if I was anything more than a persistent dream. The day will come when you forget my name.

And all I ask is for one thing, one final grace. 

Just give me a tear, a pause, a hitched breath in the middle of goodbye. All I ask is for trembling fingertips or a clenched jaw or a small crack in the smooth veneer. Give me a lie or a fib or fabricated truth. Give me something to cling to and remind myself it all wasn’t the product of an active romantic mind or a clever plot from a masochistic imagination. Give me something to hold in the middle of the night and warm my frosted bones, to wrap around myself like an aged sweater or pin to the wall like a curled-edge photograph. 

It doesn’t have to be big, I don’t expect it to be a sprawling speech or a rambling poem. I don’t want something to clutter the new life I’m trying to build or to overpower my heart, because, love, I’m going to need the extra room someday. I just want something small, a trinket, a tattoo to look at when I’m alone so I might think of you. Consider it a reminder, a comfort, hot soup on a cold day and cold tea on a hot one. Show me it’s as hard for you as it is for me, lie and say you still ache when my name slips through the river of your thoughts.

Just hold my hands, look me in the eye and whisper: “I cared.”
And, I swear, I’ll be gone before the echo stops ringing.

<Refrained from posting this for some time now, many months to be honest. But I like it and can’t keep myself from posting it any longer.>

What we have is something that’s alive - beating, throbbing, fluttering with the sound of our intermingled erratic heartbeats. It changes as the seasons wear on. During dark, stormy nights it pounds deafeningly, thrumming with white hot electricity like the lightning that streaks across the large expanse of starry sky. On sunny days it quivers, as gentle as the breeze, touching the tips of grass tentatively with gossamer tendrils of warm air.

It lives.

What we have is something steady, constant. It flows almost involuntarily through our veins, stirring from the inside and pulsating beneath our skin. It is hidden, not seen by our eyes but felt by our hands as your fingers intertwine effortlessly with mine. It hums like a colourful songbird through worn, coarse fingertips, listened only through ears that have heard too much sadness and not enough love when we both so desperately needed it in our lives.

It breathes.

What we have can only be described through our impulsive actions - not our words, never our words. Because it is the way you press your lips recklessly against mine before I can finish my sentence. The way I reach out to clench your shirt in my fist, how your teeth lightly but maddeningly bite down and I can’t help but expel the breath in my lungs.

It feels.

What we have is uncontrollable. Just like you can’t help but pull me closer as our thoughts become foggier and our breathing heavier and everything else but each other seems to melt away. This is what we are. When you sigh and for a split moment I can almost taste it; I swear I can practically taste your feelings on the tip of my tongue and they are tangy, and sweet, and maybe a little bit confused but I know that my feelings must taste the same way.

It is us. And to me there is nothing more beautiful than that.

If I could save you with a song, I’d pry open my jaws and sing Pangaea out of the milky-way-ocean. 

I’d open my hands wide, part my lips and pour my heart into the wind’s silver arms. I’d let my voice ride high along the horizon and dip below to fish the moon out from her hiding place, tease the sun into kissing the silver light. And when the world was bathed in gilded chrome, I’d grab your hand and haul you from your watery grave. I’d pull the murky sea from your lungs and spit it out, breathing deep the toxins and filtering out the silt from beneath your tongue.

And if you were to cough and dredge death up again, I’d sing you hymns to calm the earthquakes and tremors from your palms. I’d trace your veins with comet tails until they burned through your flesh and set your bones aflame. I’d press meteor kisses down your spine, carving the chorus along your hips until you believed the words that sparked wildfires beneath my ribcage.  

I’d sing until my throat was dry, until the words ran together, until it was nothing more than the warbling of the wild river. I’d plant orchids between your fingers so you could hold life, drape velvet promises over your shoulders to keep you warm at night. 

I’d cradle your head and sing us through the valley’s shadow.
Until we sat showered with celestial light, I’d sing to you.

Oh how I long to hug your hips. Tight, like the embroidered pillowcases we once sewed violently in delicate lace. A symbol for forbidden desire beating like fragile fabric that clings and grips warm thighs pressing in a flesh-on-flesh contradiction. I am swirling in your abyss and I no longer have any desire to escape. The windows to my soul are wide open. Flowing out in tiny purple butterflies that bat against your eyelashes in some sacred promise, like a quiet kiss that explodes in feathers against my cheek. I, too, now know the safety of a tender vow. I lock it in my heart. Conceal it inside a padlock of rusted lips that bear a memory of a kiss. A kiss pressed tight between the envelope of Night’s limitless passion. You think yourself so rotten. Well. I want to lick you clean, like strawberry jam toasted on the warmth of your neck. You are live beneath me, against me, and it is this notion that I will always hold dear, even as I lie awake on this bed — this ocean and sea that carries me to where ever you may be. Where ever you are.

What we call war

I have devil’s water running through my coal-veins. Every morning, I get up and touch the mirror just so that I can fall into the reflection. Every change branded into the underside of my skin so that I can see their bitter stones sinking slowly through the uncharted rivers of my body. I am a façade. I am a lie. I have swallowed hearts and slung love at walls of destruction just to watch the plumes of smoke rise up the city atmosphere. I have watched my crumbling capillaries tie together into hangman’s knots, my lips dyed red with lover and enemy alike. I worry with every bloodied swallow, with every collapsing groan - oh lover, I worry you are next.

If I were anything but ash and molten hopes I would worry too. But I have lost myself in the cracks between desperation and shame, and now I find myself drowning, pouring out your devil’s cup into my wanting throat. Scalding my teeth, numbing my tongue, twisting my spine until the heat of it breaks me down, and knocks me out. I am falling into dark dreams, and all the walls are painted with your curves and your oaths in a language I no longer recall.

I am a reverse phoenix who finds eternal death instead of everlasting life. You see, life is survival of the fittest and I am nothing if not a survivor. Life is survival of the fittest and I am the strongest one of all. I have fed and found nourishment in despair. My life stained with regret that even the strongest bleach cannot rid me of. Excuses may bubble in your throat, but I know the truth. With every day, this second skin stretches tighter and I can hear the monster bubbling under the surface. I wake in the middle of the night and run wild-eyed down the street with bloody footprints in my wake. Running from the fear that one day I will turn on you, find myself with my teeth at your throat, my knife at the tenderness of your belly, my gun pressed cold against your temple – and that, oh that is just a thought I cannot stand to bear.

My inverted acceptance of your shadow-terrors and night-screams is a madness. It is a jagged nail pressing into my thoughts; crawling, burying, squirming into my skull. Stealing its way into the soft underbelly of all that I am and unraveling my sanity. Behind my glazed eyes your venom spreads into the gray, and from the inside I burn. It eats at my veins until I am empty. Hollow. Broken. But there, among the scars and the bones, though I drown in my own silence, though I am riddled with holes and torn from navel to throat: my dementia distorts and becomes something more.

Your eyes glaze and your mouth thins. These are the things I notice in the morning when the sun slants through our windows. I can’t help but notice the scratches down your slender torso – the red marks that mar your otherwise clear skin. I have put them there. Like the puckered flesh under your jaw and the burn behind your right elbow; these are the battle scars of what the world calls love and we call war. When the world looks at us, all they see is lovers with dipped heads, mouths praying gently against one another, but we know the truth. (We know the vases against the walls and the shuddering cries against throats.) Still, when you sleep curled loosely next to me, touching my hip nervously as one might tenderly hold a trigger, I cannot help but love you. I am to blame for this battleground, this warzone, but still, I cannot help but love.

In the aftermath of every struggle you believe your vicious tongue and ragged nails leave me dizzy, weak and raw. But you’ll soon find that this is the silent annexation of everything you’ve ever known. You pour your malice and your violence past my lips, gouging canyons into my skin and thinking, always thinking on the damage you have done. But you have missed the whispers in my coughing, the secrets in my fingers and the poetry I dripped into your blood. So hush now and listen:

A demon cannot stand the flame or douse the ancient sun.

Love, you cannot win a battle, if the war has not begun.

Don’t let me run.

I’m scared.

The fears are pressing anxious palms on my shoulder blades and slipping through my skin to ride trembling waves through my veins. They’re biting at my ankles and tearing up my dreams, present wherever I look, because no matter how hard I try, I can’t run away from you. I’m shaking and clacking and falling to my knees before springing to my feet and running until my pulse is just a canyon wall echo.

Please, forgive me for running. Forgive me if you find me hiding and sobbing in the corner with my head buried between my knees, my fingers buried in the mud and my heart buried behind the rosebush. Try to understand that I want to share my darkest secrets with you, but I’m scared I’ll wake up to an empty bed with the window thrown open and my vulnerabilities pouring in with the sunshine. 

You see, I’m scared I won’t be enough or I’ll be too much or you’ll get tired of beating your head against a wall and running into the dead ends I’m made of. I’m scared you’ll get exasperated with my insecurities yowling in your lap and my demands breaking the skin of your lobe. I’m not easy or simple and one day you’re going to wake up to find that particular truth is larger than you ever imagined. You’ll realise I’m roaring complications and angry fists and thousand foot walls guarding a treasure you might find wanting.

But, despite this, despite the frustration and pain, I’m hoping you might think I’m worth it. I’m hoping you’ll fight me when I’m wild-eyed and trembling, that you’ll chase me when I’m leaving crescent moons in my wake. I’m hoping you’ll want me enough to convince me otherwise. I’m hoping I’ll share these fears and you’ll kiss my temple, hold me tight and whisper promises against my mouth.

Murmur lullabies to ease the quakes from my palms,
[shh, darling, don’t breathe a word].
Hum truths between chapped lips until I believe, 
[quiet, love, I’ll still want you come sunrise].