imsorrythings

Poetry is dead and so am I my pen had a stroke, my well ran dry, poetry is dead and so am I.

Jesus H Christ. Find me a prescription for whatever is going on before I go comatose, hardly daring to get out of bed, barely hacking up a couplet into the nearest tissue.

My new sick is backwards-sick; love, pain, sex - terminal, a boring mess on the floor, coaxed into the shape of a poem.

How I long for the old sick, my tongue in your teeth, your God in my throat, hands as syringes, drawing blood from anything you touch.

For me, this was always my way of talking to you, how I love you, how I hate me. But I have nothing left to talk about and I won't pretend that I do.

Ten stories high on the stovetop

fists cabernet-bloodied,

lips flushed with impudence,

"coming down is for fevers!" 

you'd say,

linen hands thrown aloof to God

ribboned balloons

ready to let, at any moment.

And the hours kept slipping by.

Your legs hushed a tight parallel

to the heavens against porcelain bright,

your hips laid in wait at the living room station.

Come down come down come down

I'd laugh, I'd say, I'd beg you, please.

And the hours kept slipping by.

You were ready to throw back your childlike refusal

you were ready for take-off,

you were, or I was,

always looking out into space

I rest easy or not at all, in your absence,

and the hours keep slipping by.

---

New love is just a someday maybe,

trying to distill eternity, trying to decant it

from your place on the kitchen counter.

But our love is a never-ever forget,

and I will never ever not love you, darling

even though your fingers

scrape the inside of my mouth,

looking for what's left of my whittled tongue.

You see all I get is the stem of you

darling,

All I get is all dried up,

petals ready to catch wind, floating off

to anyone else.

What's left of your scent is gone, and darling,

I seem to have forgotten your name.

Most love is always the same

You, and you,

unique as your moment

unique as your line in a poem.

There was a word for this feeling

for being a somebody to anybody

but I seem to have forgotten it's name.

Old love is an always-never,

trying to understand

how quickly it all went by.

How what you did made you deserve it all,

whether its a good or a bad thing, that it happened.

And I will never not deserve you, darling, though somehow

I have forgotten your name.

---

My grief is a missed appointment,

failing to meet you at my own doorstep.

I'm always staring ahead or behind,

missing the point.

Spring is like a perhaps hand, but

winter doesn't touch, instead, only breathing,

hushing my neck stiff,

fall's regret on her breath.

The shivering she brings

are your death rattles,

a decade still convulsing,

a body empty of you, nearly forgetting

your touching scent, or sweat so sweet

it nearly raises you from the dead

however alive you may be,

somewhere so far away I can barely breathe.

Will you remember me, when

Death comes to visit?

She won't take you for a while, but nonetheless,

she'll greet you with eternity,

pushing you to consider the thing that kills us;

choices that never seem like choosing.

--

My first poem on a while after a dry spell. Special thanks to @haikkun for responding to my ask looking for prompts.

Halp

You never thought you'd find me

on the patient side of midnight

sober as the dusk, offering my last light

to the flowers that grow on your windowsill.

Your petals are upright in this passing time

absorbing me until they can't anymore,

thirst for alcohol ebbing into the dark.

I never thought I'd break like bread,

even in accidental breaking--

in your hands, at your table,

dissolving beneath your easing spit.

Say grace before you begin with me,

and in my halving I might bring you peace

either distilling or

a collaboration with the extraordinary @thegoblinbee 

___________

We dream you up in the dusk beneath a retreating sun, or else in the dead of night, all alone in our beds.

We thread you through the eye of our needle to stitch you into another stanza, to lay you down in another line, looping you ‘round our wrists, binding you to us, hoping to tie you up in knots. This our rite, our ritual, a high hallelujah dug up from the pit of us, a sweet sacrament, an offering from our pulpits:

Let us sew your melancholy to our memory, measuring out the shadows of your past, tailoring our longing to the shape of you, Let us cloak your closeness with our candied skin that we may embody you, growing fearsome and large as the great day sinks. We yearn to wear and be worn, to be witnessed; twin ink planets converging to embrace you, blotting out the sun.

We descend on you from the id of roses, making our oaths in blood, setting to carry you off. Our hunger rages lustily all around you, beats back the wind that dares chap your immaculate kiss. Ardently, we lunge for you, shoving away continents, stumbling sloppily to feel the soft of your skin.

It is a dire situation, this dastardly craving, this craven need. We draw the four corners of the world up around us like a quilt, insulating your siren song, ocean’s depths spilling over the sides, drowning in your sugar-salted seas.

Not a lot can stop us now, love – We’ve found you somehow in the midst of all this madness and deafness and greed and now we must erect our altars at your feet.

We venture ever-onward to earn you, writing our psalms on your skin in spit and by fingertip, pleading that you may love us alive, allow us to live long in your exquisite grace, breathe your breath into our lungs that we might speak in your voice, exalted above the coarse and simple everything-else. Drop a kiss in our collection plate and watch us falter, bend, wilting into the night. Self-warring leviathans, we await your imminent retreat. We offer no explanation to you, except that we have no choice. If we must be temporary, we will be tempests, turning all teacups into teeming ravines. So forgive us this, our transgressive ache, our interminable need. Forgive us our unraveling hems, our endlessly-unfurling confessions dribbling from our mouths like wine.

Sometimes you just hang humid in the air,

threatening to finally drop in

loquacious silence, deafens me

until you manifest again.

Thick mist droops the shoulders of fall evening,

threatens to begin

condensating the glass of October,

dripping off onto my skin.

This potential of you is rain, in a tilted stick,

rattling me through to the bottom;

listen to my monologue spilling out,

ricocheting beads on the back of autumn.

The ritual is practiced for hundreds of years,

so eventually, you precipitate

I'm drenched in you, but you're damp with me

I love you.

I know, I know. Cliche.

And it's not time for you to know, but

how am I going to still the way that

these words

percolate like helium

from the pores on my chest?

They leak from my arms,

clawing their way through the ducts

in the skin of my hands,

escaping in my sweat and spit,

adding weight to each exhale.

Maybe you can taste them

when I kiss you,

secret under my tongue

sweetening the consonants

that hiss from behind from my teeth.

Maybe you can feel them tug at you

from my fists, clenched full of your back,

clutching the skin on your thighs,

or from my teeth, gripping your neck,

so innocuously and hungrily.

I grasp at you so fully, so sweetly,

as I wait for the right time to loose them,

saying without saying without saying,

hoping I can steady myself