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When I ask you what I should yell into the Pacific, you remind me I do not need to be angry, and I don’t get it. How should I know any other way to show my love, but split open, wide and gaping—a wound, a mouth.

thrum, v:

Everyday since that bad thing happened, I’ve been practicing                   a spell: how to disappear from yourself, within yourself.

1 So, it’s morning. Or maybe afternoon. There’s light pouring through the window and it’s got you looking the kind of haloed and soft you only see in movies. I’m only half awake but I’m already writing poetry about your eyelashes, can you believe that?   2 In the mirror, I pretend to watch myself watching myself brushing my teeth. Instead, I watch you run your hands through your hair: again and again and again and again. More than once, I’ve seen the way you try to rearrange your body into negative space. Like one of those optical illusions— the vase with the two faces. You forgot you could be both of them. You forgot that when you lean too close to a work of art the whole picture blurs and disappears.   3 A new painting: one with no negative space. You as steady hands and solid ground. You with a ukulele and a dog. Coffee and cayenne. Cheap wine and expensive whiskey. All that blue in your closet. You as the perfect first date and something soft to come home to. Bad jokes and good intentions and all that— light.   4 Yes, light. Listen, so, it’s late. Or the time of night some people call morning. It’s dark in the car, but you laugh— I mean, really laugh. The kind that catches you by surprise and crinkles up the corners of your eyes—and it’s like a camera flash in a windowless room. It’s the best thing I’ve seen, all day.   5 Every morning, the sun has to relearn how to outshine you. Sometimes even she is not bright enough.

the thing is, i am also a knife. i will leave you bleeding all over the floor. this is why i’m afraid of sharp objects. the thing is, steel meets steel will always resulted in falling in love, and the thing is, this will always end in disaster. the thing is, it happened before. first there was the scalpel, in the life where i was the doctor. this is why i’d always perform small autopsies on everything i do, why i have a morgue in place of a heart. then came the sword, in the life where i was the star-crossed lover. this is why i’d always slit my own throat whenever i fall in love– the result is always the same. after, it was the gun, in the life where i was the soldier. bullets are sharp objects too, and oh, how they throttle and kill. this is why i’d always march obediently into my own doom, why i’d always play the same part again & again, even if i know how it will end. the thing is, i am the poet now, and i play with pens. pens and pencils and words, all sharp things, all atomic bombs, all weapons of mass destruction. the thing is, i am a weapon, and i don’t know how to stop. the thing is, i don’t know if i wanted to stop.

Scientists, somewhere, are still looking for stillness. They don’t know the silence of your ghosts. This is the love they were trying to tell us about. At night I listen to my dead heart and name it after a dead country. The birds in my blood stop mid-flight. When I think of you, a war ends. You tell me about the time your world went quiet. How you howled at love like a moon. You warn me of your dark, and I stay. I stay, and I swallow your shadows whole.