romanticize & catastrophize

They are waiting for someone who can walk on water because they think that’s the only person who can save them from drowning,

Forgetting that god gave them their own arms and legs,

So that they could swim.

Hold please—

Like a secretary at an office,

Spinning an old rotary phone,

Going through the motions,

Waiting until 5 pm.

Hold me—

Like I am a pen with a flower attached,

Attempting to not get lost,

While I help you write your life,

And you steal my ink.

No se,

Why I am chained down,

Stuck to the spot I’m in,

Legs wrapped around an idea,

While you whisper pretty lies.

Counting,

Down like I am going under anesthesia,

A fog that swallows me whole,

And makes me feel like nothing,

Else in this world matters.

Lather,

Myself up with soap,

To remove the places you touched,

Scrubbing on hands and knees,

Until I feel like myself again.

Hold please—

There’s another caller ahead of you,

Is this an emergency,

Can you call back later—

We will call you back later,

What’s a good call back number for you;

The number you dialed is not in service—goodbye.

Light pollution blocks out the stars.

I worry that I am like a streetlight,

Stealing attention away from greater things,

Binding lovers to the concrete.

They always seem to not see anything else,

Believing me worthy of being on a pedestal,

Throwing offerings at my feet,

As I try to balance on the marble.

But that adoration turns to grief,

Lambasting me for my straight spine,

The way I know what’s coming before it happens,

Because I could have shielded them if I’d wanted to.

Even gods don’t have everything in their hands,

Yet I am treated like I have the finest clay,

To sculpt their life from,

To pack into their wounds to make new flesh.

At times, they want me to be vengeful,

Casting punishment down as a meteor crash,

Leaving the earth covered in craters,

And the slivers of ill deeds.

They yell at me that my pedestal is my own choice,

That I believe I am better than them,

Because I do not cast violence down,

When I tell them they’ve done wrong.

People forget that they are who placed me here in the first place,

To look at me as a sacred object,

When all I ever wanted,

Was to dig my toes into the soil.

If gods ever walked among us,

I believe we chased them away,

With our own unwillingness,

To accept control without hatred.

If gods ever walked among us,

I believe they held up a mirror,

And humans blamed them for what they saw,

In their own reflection.

I am tired of this cold stone,

That never gives under pressure.

These offerings are not for me,

But for their conscience.

So they can say that they gave everything,

To someone too high,

For them to reach.

Grief is sometimes anticipatory and not reactionary,

Like gripping the steering wheel harder,

Before your car wraps around a pole.

Letting go feels like breaking the fingers on a cadaver,

Like shattering a bottle over a tables edge,

Pointed ends turning inward rather than out.

Crying feels like a pointless action,

Only serving to make me dehydrated,

With swollen eyes and a headache.

Yet I shiver all the same,

My body feeling like a leaf,

Against a coastal wind,

Being batted by sea salt,

And assaulted by sand.

I whisper out your name,

Like its a secret I want no one else knowing,

Because you’ll never be as pure,

As when you were in my hands alone,

Not yet known to the others.

Hiding you by tucking you under my ribcage,

Feels like the only option left,

Because you can’t see the road in front of you,

And I can’t keep waiting for you,

To stop living like you’re already dead.

Unknown to you now,

I am leaving offerings in the form of the softest kisses,

Writing my farewell as I trace along your skin,

Mourning these last moments of sleepy morning,

All while attempting to act as if I’m not breaking.

I’m a terrible keeper of secrets,

But I hope that this is something I can keep,

So you can easily move on without me,

And I can drown myself,

In memory.

Even in this moment I give to you,

Hoping that my devotions will be enough to keep you here,

Skin to skin to smooth all my corners,

Your mouth disarming me,

This dagger fall to the ground instead of cutting the cord.

I know it’s inevitable,

But in my desperation for you,

I tell myself lies I don’t believe,

So that my tears don’t stain both of our cheeks,

While we tangle in the dark.

Know that I love you,

In all your dirty and broken,

Despite what I must do for us both—

A flame creeping down twine;

A sister with a pair of scissors;

A deer on the side of the highway;

And end.

Understanding others but never being known,

Providing but finding yourself barren afterwards,

Giving grace but being taken advantage of,

Wanting with every atom in your body but it’s not a hunger that is shared,

Knowing why it is you suffer but being unable to change to material conditions,

Being joyful and confident but being resented by the miserable,

Surviving but with a body that is falling apart,

Loving well enough that you can loosen your grip but hard enough that it’s like breaking your own fingers.

I curl into myself to cover the pit that eats my abdomen,

Like a gaping battle wound,

Carved out by someone’s bare hands.

It aches like going to bed hungry,

A rolling empty that turns like the tides,

On a cloudy day.

My hands shake as I stretch out to find,

That which will fill me,

And allow me to stand upright.

Joints crack and muscles snap with the effort,

Reminding me I am a bag of bones,

Raging against my own will.

Blood gets replaced with saline,

And I bloat,

Stretching like the expanse of time and space.

With this void beneath my ribs, ,

I move my arms,

And cover up with my red coat.

In this way,

I pretend I feel anything,

Pockets turned inside out in search of the notes you left me,

Scrawled on napkins and receipts,

Like you knew the words would vanish.

Waxing poetic won’t take me from my senses,

Including the sense that you would be,

The kind of debt that ruins a generation.

I’m sure you see most things as transactions,

Thinking that if you can shell out enough,

That you will make people like you.

But there’s no perfect way to dance,

And while your eyes are turned elsewhere,

My toes are getting crushed.

I’ll never be so small as to be crushed myself,

Will die happy knowing I share my Abuelita’s wry lopsided smile,

And flair for the dramatics.

Lovers come and go,

But I know that for me,

I must stay.

When I am alone late at night,

I whisper my thoughts to coax myself to sleep,

As if externalizing them,

Will make my ears roar less,

Staunching the rain by killing the thunder.

It is not meditative because that requires intention,

And I am not present when it’s happening,

My aching back drawing my mind back,

Into its most primal recess,

While my heart clangs against its prison.

I think this is what people mean to do when praying before bed,

Washing yourself of the days thoughts,

Offering them up to someone who can take everything that is too heavy,

So that your lungs can easily expand,

And let the light in.

I feel my most primal now,

Like an animal trying to gnaw off its own limbs,

To escape a cage that is my only salvation,

What protects me and hinders me,

An action with no good outcome.

In this most raw state,

Where I cannot pretend to care about anything else,

I am a desperate mass of anguish,

Clawing against my sternum in the hopes of removing,

That which can never be removed from me.

This violence makes me filthy,

A quiet gore that can’t be washed away with soap,

Only scraped off over and over again like a thick coating,

Regrowing every time I open my eyes,

Covering me in rot.

It’s all I have ever known,

This feeling of being not of this world but being of this earth,

My home being with the isopods and worms,

Not with these people who never wanted me,

And who cast me away because I am too knowing and strange.

When I return home,

I hope the bugs tell me how brave I was,

The amoebas how beautiful,

Mycelium how mutinous and merciful,

The stones how soft and warm.

I want them to hold me tighter than any lover,

Because this shadow is more intimate than anyone could ever be,

And I am starting to think that the only love I need is of the darkness,

Both desolate and teeming,

Like life within soil.

He thinks himself less human than the rest,

A sub terrestrial slime who quivers in both excitement and fear,

Edges rounded out until there’s nothing left to grab onto.

A stranger to himself he fails to see that he is steeped in everything—

Tears over a world of suffering,

Gentle hands that cup delicate parts,

Daydreams of faraway places—

A strange creature who feels cosmic and terribly earthly,

Bitten down nails scraping into the soil,

Verdichromia — the condition of having green eyes.

A painting of an eye sits as an omen unfinished

One birth mark forms a smattered tear

Like someone started to cry but pressed against the spot hastily with the end of a shirt sleeve.

It’s under a warm olive green iris

That looks like it could be love but may only be dopamine—

Being dressed in oxytocin makes it hard to know

Like I have smacked my skull against something hard

And my brain is still sloshing around

Brushing against bone rhythmically.

That’s a euphemism for just what you think it is

Because I’m too dick drunk to make a good decision

About what I should do with someone who is terrified of commitment

And saying anything with their whole chest

As if the vibrations from talking would turn their spine to dust

Leaving their body in a pile on the floor

A mound of clothes and regret.

I want their clothes hanging up in the closet next to mine

And to bicker about closet space

Because I have too many damn clothes and shoes for one person

To which I would say that I am too fashionable for a capsule wardrobe

And I’d rather die than leave the house in sweatpants and a t shirt

And they would tell me I am dramatic.

But instead they sit in a corner of their own closet

Whispering promises into the night that they will not keep

Because how could they build a life when they can’t even stand on their own two feet

Much less keep me on mine was the ground is being shifted out from under me

Crashing upwards through the ceiling.

A private school education for a degree that’s not worth the paper it’s printed on,

Failing courses for no other reason than lack of ambition,

East Coast industrial smoke mixing with the weed in your lungs,

Dancing over and under lines but banging a knee or shin,

Evading but still reaching like the push and pull of a tide,

Caught by the glow of a moon that you can never reach—

And I wonder…

If you could ever understand night classes at a community college after a manual labor job,

Needing to get an A on everything because you need the scholarships and awards to get you ahead,

A sky that glitters because the light and smoke haven’t made it into a haze,

Walking on the line suspended too high up to fall down from,

Crawling in desperation to get even a sliver of survival,

Caught by the glow of a moon that you can never reach—

And I know…

That even when our eyes connect as our bodies tangle in my cheap bedsheets,

Your fear is not my own,

And my struggle is to be carried alone.