A Girl, Burning

I never wanted a firestorm; I never wanted a love so terror-laden that it        apparently passes for passion.

 I wanted the quiet-smiling-purple evening on an orange-sun lake. You didn't need a hurricane to help me want that, but I guess, You got it anyway. 

I’ve got nothing left for me and I think that’s the way you wanted it.

You shriveled and died and then died over again just to see the tiniest                            bit of appreciation;         admiration;                adoration.

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I sometimes worry about what I want and what someone else wants; where the two part and converge and where I even begin. Because I’ve seen nothing but the need to destroy myself so that out of my ashes something beautiful might have the chance to burn and consume everything around it and be told “this is what you wanted”.

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Somehow pop songs about being tied to bed in a burning house no longer seem  romantic to me in that sick way.

You knew you wanted to die, but for it to                    at least                             mean something before it came.

And tornadoes and volcanoes do not seem like the best available metaphors for love and passion without you hopelessly insisting so into my ear as they finally did burn and consume everything you had.

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My preferred method of self-soothing, these days, seems to be the rubbed blanket lie that I               am better because I am               doing                            better.

When you woke me because my screaming, choking, laboured breathing seemed like it was becoming too much, I told you that I had been dreaming of drowning. It was a plain-faced lie,

  And I sweetened my coffee with a sense of purpose I wish I could say that I assigned to every detail of my life. And this afternoon I was sure to be mindful as I put one foot ahead of the other.

  I wish that I could say that I was careful and deliberate. And that I did not give the people who r e a l l y matter a reason to wonder or worry. And I wish I could say that the things I choke on at 2am were of no real consequence.

  When I brush my teeth yet again and take my tights back off at the end of the night, I wish I could say that the things hovering over my head throughout the day died with my consciousness,

  but they don’t.

Last night my lungs gasped out the blood-red glare of 3:34 am, having conjured in the dust of intangibility a new reminder of my own personal supply  of dearth and privation.

And for all the thought that I have had to consider that maybe I can – if I could just – remember this time that the substantial, phenomenal hallucination of that  place is the product of my own fabrication,

I find that,

kicking and screaming, and tearing and biting are devices I have kept in the back of my pocket from time to time… tools made for particular circumstances and places.

But there are times when contention and struggle strangle and snap when they meet the hollow in one’s arms. And all the pugnacity I have determined at one time or another turns to choked silence and submission.

Yielding to the words and the touch that both alike burn in ways I guess I won’t forget today or tomorrow or tonight.

But somehow even through my apologies you quiet all the pieces of me which, shameful and shivering and scrambling to hail some distant placid harbour, call for excuse and censure and taut and true and without demand, you brush them away from the brackish air around our bodies.

And I know that there are nights when you, waking and pacing and panting, shiver with a vibration in your pulse that echoes the dread that I have greeted at certain hours, with a store of support so depleted that it is a self-struggle to just stay still.

I have known love as a game of pick-up,                                  make-up, I’m sorry I was wrong quiet down yes please thank-you-very-much.

Never no no       n o

‘No’ was the word I whispered in the dark to ears that didn’t understand that a heart can still beat under a ‘no’; that a person can’t breathe when, hand to throat, they are silenced - gently but surely, boiling in the pot from tepid to scalding before they knew where they had unwittingly settled.

Now I am surrounded by the potential of     ‘no’ – to hands that never asked at all and lips that part the salted water in my ribcage with words that drip with truth and ardor.

Swirling in the chromatic dust that surrounds the world of possibilities – finally a question of what do I want                       what do I want ?

The inky, lightless feeling of closing in and losing one’s direction – I was never able to acclimate to that place, though it seemed – more and more – that I belonged there.

And yet         these days, that sombre ambiguity clarifies into something bewitching and instead I study the enigma that is your hands in mine and I know that the shadowy dusk is the purple-grey of twisted sheets and whispered heartstrings; and that the sunset smells like your breath in my hair.

He wanted to be the one to fix her he wanted to ~* show her the world *~ and open her eyes.

And that painted smile of his smearing over those words told me more than I had ever elsewhere learned about infatuation – this boy loved her simply for believing she was damaged goods for denying her own importance.

  I cannot be fixed I cannot be m e n d e d the way one would fill the cracks on a grimy fear-stained bedroom wall; the way one would scrub away the panicked blood from the grout of a bathroom floor.

  I was born to be fragmented injured crippled split shivering - the skin on my skull itself pulled taught and searing at the very task of existing as a part of me. The pieces that came together to create me So maladjusted and insufficient; what putrid toxic union of violence and rage and hate and pity.

  I am the product of hatred So it is only natural that I should loathe my own existence down to its origin.

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and everything I’ve ever drawn

                        or made

I had no idea that what was missing until now

              was you.

I never know how clear the air could be on a Sunday morning on top of a tangle of sheets. Your rumpled hair and

mine always falling in your face.

I never knew how rich a cool pale blue could seem

when it shone in from a window onto our entwined fingers.

Staring at the ceiling with you as I speak with my hands of

some new thing.

Your laugh is the first to have made me stop and stare.

And smile,

my eyeteeth showing in the reflection of your outstretched neck and the squinted eyes of your smile in that pale blue-clear air of a Sunday morning.

I could turn inside out on your sheets when you whisper into my ear of perfection.

I don’t know much about perfection

                             but what I do know

    comes from you.

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where the bone juts up and meets the air

when your fingers brush that delicate place

up

     and

              down

and when I found it for the first time I did not know where it came from. It crouched there so shy but emerging at the touch of your skin and,

my bashful disposition so palpable in these moments,

I’m trying much harder these days.

I did not know that I had it in me to face the daylight and full-facedly understand that I want to be a part of it. I did not know that I could curl up in that warm belly of the flame and know that it was love

I didn’t know what love was

until your light shone on my face and, my cheekbones upturned, you brushed them and told me you felt that yellow glow as well. 

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that would explain away my entire existence

and it is the numerical counterpart

of the curve of your jaw

and your upper lip

when you smile so softly in the morning.

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You are the moon on the night I looked up and asked you how it was shining   so brightly. I don’t need or want you to fix me but

I wish I were not broken in the first place.

I wish I could be whole;you deserve to love and be loved by something whole. There are days I tear at my skin looking to find out what is underneath. I’m sure that if I am thorough I may pry open my own secrets and understand that I have something inside of me that may explain away my being this way.

I have no excuse for my ruthless disquiet in this skin – it stains my sheets and its rank existence saturates every atom I come into contact with. I’m ashamed of not loving me the way you seem to love me. I’m ashamed of not taking more care and being more whole and for trying to crack myself open and make excuses for my existence.

 When you give off that celestial light I believe  that I suck it all away; a black hole in the darkness and no matter how many times It’s said otherwise eventually all I can hear is the whoosh of my emptiness and unworthiness and

crack

tear

I try to find the source of it. But all I’m left with are the too-real marks of it all over my body angry and redder and they get angrier and redder each time nowadays it seems.

I don’t deserve to do this to myself. I have no excuse for feeling this way. I’m a theif of emotions, just trying to find what I am and in the process appropriating the struggles of those with A real burden to carry.

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  I will grip each shoulder tight like a precious parcel and look square into each mirrored eye and tell them that they are beautiful because they breathe in the recycled wind of each millenneum.

  And it will be my very own covenant with death to protect them from every  single  thought in my mind that tells me otherwise

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  I do not make pictures                because I’m talented                                and I do not scribble ciphers  because I have something to say.                I write because                         you gave me teary eyes blurring out the stars, a grey desaturated pond in the park                              the rain falling loud but somehow less frightening.                    And I draw because     the trailing ink stains through the paper and onto my skin.

  I do this because        you make me see                art        and wonder                                       and possibility        in e v e r y t h I n g                              and I don’t know how to    contain it.      And I don’t know                   how else to                                 articulate it.

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  You are blue and black and the           white                           burst of pinprick stars;          winter air over the mountains and you look up and feel                    d i z z y because you remember that there is always so much     more

                to this world

                                       than you can ever see

              or feel  and it towers over you so

                                  clear and so    big

             but you forget                                       until you are there once more            on a blue-black winter night.

  You are green and cream and             bronze               when life pushes its way up and                                  out reminding you that life                never stops emerging and re-emerging and that goodbyes happen                      for a reason and you know                                that the linen sheets breezing dry                       smell like home here, too.

  You are a spectrum of life                erupting     life, and crackling lightning-fast across a palette of light                        and dark                             in tandem multi-faceted and new                        and old                   and real but all       sublime.

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  I swear to god                  that I’ve never been so lost      in the fabric of desire                              as much as I am with you                      when I inhale your hair and drink in the                             a r c h of your back.

              To hear your voice pitched                        and tacit -               my bones run fluid                       following the path of least resistance         and I cease to recognize the boundaries of  me

        and you.

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