Miscellaneous Unfinished Poetry

Rain outside, tongue dry. You told me my hair reminded you of angel dolls. Our cities sleep in different directions.

Here are the things I think about you when my hands can’t sleep. Your body is an enigma. I like when you lower your voice, and let it smooth and stretch. I have no interest in falling in love with you. I want to know where your hands are. I want to follow you through cities. Unfortunately, interests aren’t always attended to. Unfortunately, your eyes are as big as your lips.

Everything connects to you, psychotically

It feels like each poem or song

was written for us only partially

And we know the parts that don’t fit instantly

how we’re something new and ever familiar

It’s warm but it’s heavy. You sit by the AC and speak your loquacious drawl over the phone, dripping sun against my legs. I think we both know there’s a time coming up where everything fades into the horizon and I lose your laugh for good. I sit and watch the sun as it sets. It is pink and fecund and teeming with flush.

To know

To know

To know

I collect your raw data in puddles. You’re all over the lawn and the sidewalk and the spaces where everything isn’t.

Tell with everything you have.

Lend me the indents in your skin and the stains in your clothes.

If you decide to go I will not let them take you.

The elderly Asian lady working the counter calls me “honey” like she pities me and looks at each piece of produce disapprovingly.

She may not be my mother but she is this afternoon and I feel 6 inches too small to take this ride. I have periodic setbacks of my ever changing selfhood. It becomes difficult to gain assurance when I seem to morph so quickly it becomes difficult to identify where I fit amongst my morals. Where my morals lie.

I’m dressed in too much clothing and my body feels like an afterthought. The waves course through me and my vision turns to analog. You can’t set the goalpost too high or you fail to exceed expectations. I set them high and find ten ways around them. My innovation is survival. My selfhood is lacking. The lady at the counter is waiting for my money.

Do you need relieving of your duties?

A big strong man in the shape of a girl?

Look no further, for cat-stretch incarnate.

For ripened pears, skin hot with sun.

I cook a mean curry,

and can make

the little hairs on your arms stand up.

If given your permission.

I’m thinking of pure light.

I’m reading Tom Robbins.

I wish you could smell me.

I’m like spiced exhaust,

or coming home, carrying rain.

Seeking a mirage.

A woman with every kind of eyes,

who hates indifference,

and can think up several ways to kill me.

If you don’t know how to swim.

If your hands know how to strum.

The dirt beneath my nails comes naturally

You return, later

teeming paper bag in your arms

And it doesn’t need to feel real to feel organic

Like I know something in a dream

without having to learn it

How our bodies swim in nothingness

Until we dry off

Under burning Venus

Quietude in your laughter

Like everything is frozen, except for time

Which takes us into elderly domesticity

And tucks us in the earth

These humble clichés withstanding

Besides, your leather coat sustains

And keeps within its pockets

These stones, napkins

Patchouli

Your eyes like glass blown marbles

Our bodies sticking to the sand

Collecting all these itchy fables

The lives we keep on touching with

the pads of our fingers

And you across the water

Sulfurous

Playing seven minutes in heaven

with the girl next door

We can’t tell each others hands apart

in the dark

Her fingers rap across my spine

and make no noise

It’s not as easy

as telling apart the shades

Or picking a thread

as it slips through the spaces

I haven’t a mind

To do anything

besides find her insides again

At the coffee table I grow ill

and grip against the edges

My body no longer a willing captive of my mind

I watch her climb up trees

Bleeding palms

Sap and blood indistinguishable

These foul and sweet nectars

From which I lap

You aren’t infallible

But I don’t seek safety

My intentions

are not to take you into my hands to contort

It should not come as a comfort

My idle observation

does not betray indecision

Come

seek my fingertips

a subtle reprieve

The point before the muscles snap. You cannot keep holding your breath. You cannot tell the girl she is metallic,

Multicolored, like oil on the surface.

Something like, I’d like to kiss you before I have to get on a plane, then try to forget you viscerally in masochistic ecstasy, my fingers pressed at my mouth until it feels like buzzing.

It’s Karmic Radiation. Transference of heat.

I don’t know why I hold back. I think of being six and hiding how fast I could run in front of my older brother.

I knew he was faster, so I thought if I held back I would always have an edge.

This is how I continued. Writing in secrecy. Keeping the parts of myself I liked away from view, because if I was disliked, it wasn’t really me.

I think you have to choose your evils

I am not your adversary

Yet, our canine teeth have

touched each others bodies

Show me on this doll, where nothing stings

I will tell you the backs of these calves

these corners in my waist

There’s parts of me you haven’t found

How long do I refrain from decision

It’s hedonism, the ways we deprive ourselves

the only ways we truly need heed.

we find ways to fill everything but.

Our mouths suckling on smoke

or rain

The world, a sphere, an oral fixation

the money isn’t good

But when is it ever

The spaces we fill are endless now

Crude and basic, lacking in my sense

She is covered in my hands

On my cheeks, in my hair

How it didn’t used to be

How she’s stolen my reflection