insp.

For the sake of poetry, you told me what you wanted to do to me on a bus full of people. You pressed your palm in between my thighs and kept talking while God and forty people sat in silence. I knew it was for the poetry. Knew you were just saying pretty things because I’d find a way to make them prettier. How hard you wanted to fuck me, how much you loved my hair in your fists, how pretty, how pretty, how fucking dirty I am.I loved you because you knew what to do, what to touch, how to fuck. Because it didn’t feel like giving up. I bit clean through my lip trying not to move away from you, trying not to want it more, to always want it more, but you. You held onto my skirt the whole ride home.

Like any other man I was born with a knife in one hand and a wound in the other.

Ocean, how do you improve your ability to read and write poetry? In "Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One," Ryan Boudinot writes that "Writers are born with talent. Either you have a propensity for creative expression or you don't. Some people have more talent than others." Do you agree with this?

I think that love poems are really powerful when they’re written by people who aren’t in love. Almost as if to say:Look how much I can hurt without anyone’s help. Look how full of no one I can be without collapsing. This love poem is proof that I know how to carry a torch. This love poem is proof that I’ve had the dream with a king-sized bed in it. This love poem is screaming out an open window, is screaming into my pillow. I know what I’m capable of.

He doesn’t like to cuddle. He likes to grip my hips and pull the fibers of pink tissue in shreds from my lip with his teeth. He throws his hands in the air like a messiah and leans his head out the open window. easy. breathe. codeine. breeze. We laugh loudly and kiss loudly and moan loudly. He mouths vulgar things that make me giggle in front of our friends. I run my hand along the seam off his tight black jeans beneath the table top. He rolls his eyes and smirks at me. We take every opportunity to touch, to feel, so secretly. So public. Exhibitionist pleasure. We play like children, tousling my hair and I climb on his back. We roll spliff after spliff and talk rapidly and vigorously and trip over each others sentences like a sidewalk crack. He says “us” like it means “amen” and his eyes burn wild with a fire of passion. We get drunk. Off of wine and skin and things we love. His smile erupts across his face like it could shatter his cheekbones. His eyes glimmer like a lake catching the glare of the moonlight. A glint of silver is growing up the side of his hairline. He thinks it makes him look distinguished. I laugh and agree. He loves to be so much older than me. He thinks it makes him wise. We spend a lot of time in hotel rooms with the doors shut. (We spend a lot of time outside of hotel rooms with our mouths shut.) He thinks the Xanax makes the sex last longer and I don’t argue. I always wake up first. I sit at the desk and work quietly and glance at him in the sheets. Vulnerable and quiet. Soft face. Soft sounds. A warm cup of coffee and marmalade light through the windows. We bond over love for our brothers. We fight over where the chord change should go. We tease, oh we tease. He likes clean socks and messy hair and he runs his fingers down my overall straps with a tigers grin. He writes his name in the fog on the mirror from where he grabbed a fistful of my hair and pressed my face against the glass. He loves soul music. We sing confidently and triumphantly. I tap my fingers like spiders legs across his bare chest and undo his buttons one by one. I toss my head back and laugh maniacally and pout my lips when he won’t be fair. He speaks like a pastor and trips over his words, his tongue struggles to meet his brain. That’s how a prodigy thinks. (Or it’s the drugs). He knows when my words are about him and he lets it all go to his head and I don’t care because I love to watch him love himself. We laugh and fuck and play and write and plot and say goodbye and never worry. He is my occasional constant. A parody of himself. A paradox of ever present and transparent. I don’t care what he is.

You say love so fast you always forget to taste it. It comes out like a spill at a bar no one wants to clean up.

Here is the topography of false starts. Here a whole constellation is lousy with desire. Here what passes for love is the same as anywhere. Here no one has said a prayer for the stars, and here no one comes, except to leave, except to stay long enough to bruise.

He says ‘I don’t get it, why are you still a virgin at 24?’ He says ‘I don’t believe you, I’ve seen you walk, virgins don’t walk like that’ He says, ‘That ain’t natural, people are supposed to fuck.’ He asks ‘Why though? No offence though.’ I ask ‘When was your first time?’ He says ‘I was 12’ He says ‘I know what you’re thinking, that’s too young.’ I look at his knuckles, he has two good hands. He says ‘She was older than me.’ I ask ‘How old?’ And he says ‘It’s better that the girl is older, that’s how I learnt all things I know’ He licks his lips. I ask again ‘How old?’ He says ‘I could use one finger to make you sob’ I think of my brother in prison and I can’t remember his face. I ask again ‘How old?’ He says ‘Boys become men in the laps of women, you know?’ I think of my mothers faced lined with her bad choices in men. He says ‘If you were mine you wouldn’t get away with this shit, I’d eat you for hours, I’d gut you like fruit.’ I think of my cousins circumcision, how she feels like a mermaid, not human from the waist down. He says ‘I’d look after you, you know?’ I laugh, I ask for the last time ‘How old?’ He says ’34.’ He says ‘She was beautiful though and I know what you’re thinking but it’s not like that, I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a man. No one could ever hurt me’.

There are some feelings you will never find words for; you will learn to name them after the ones who gave them to you.

but have you ever known a night with an unabashed grin, with a laughter that emerges from your chest in delicate bubbles to catch the red-green-yellow of the streetlights or the neon marquee flashing bright and lovely. the velvet maroon womb of new dark wraps around you and your hands rise above you as if they know no gravity and the kick of the bass electrifies the marrow inside your swaying hips

The heart can drink bleach, too. Punch a hole in a fortune cookie. Please me. Remove my need to be pleased. This world is drunk on binaries & I want a truer planet.

My wound existed before me; I was born to embody it.

The ink was faded. Here and there I couldn’t tell what thoughts occurred to the reader but through the bruise-like blotches I could sense urgency, as though tears had fallen.