c.e.r

Oh I love your head, honey, and everything in it I just forgot you were human for a minute

To love grandly. To mean it when I say you bring parts of me back from the dead. To start over again. To bring back the crowns, the kingdoms undone by someone else’s leaving. To stop crying in the shower. What I mean is, I am tired of love being an airplane ride away. The post card in the mail that says, “wish you were here.” The message in a bottle that finds the wrong shoreline. You’re the map I finally read right. You’re what it feels like to become un-lost. Everyone else is a train I missed or an elevator closing too soon. What I mean is, you’re the only person I’ve loved on purpose. You’re the only poem it didn’t hurt to remember.

…merely touching you, is enough—is best…

Love isn’t above starting this way: you can drop me from a second-story window if you pin me against it first…. Sure, I’m sick of the source of great fire always being the sun. A few nights ago he peeled off of me as if he were my own skin and he didn’t want the job.

You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you. Even if the brain has forgotten, perhaps the teeth remember. Or the fingers.

She laughs, and the sound of it crinkles in my chest like a candy wrapper in a quiet room. I want more.

Their faces I thought were knives. The way they pointed them at me. And waited. A hunter is someone who listens. So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon. Out of his hand and impales. Itself.

I look at her and light goes all through me.

I just love that feeling when things are about to change. Like when you know that in a few seconds you’re going to do something and become someone else.

later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt? it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere.

Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but ‘Mom’s’ probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breathe in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.

Don’t think about what can happen in a month. Don’t think about what can happen in a year. Just focus on the 24 hours in front of you and do what you can to get closer to where you want to be.

I wasn’t insane until someone touched my heart.

I knew that I was dying. something in me said, go ahead, die, sleep, become as them, accept. then something else in me said, no, save the tiniest bit. it needn’t be much, just a spark. a spark can set a whole forest on fire. just a spark. save it.

o how he loves you, darling boy. o how, like always, he invents the monsters underneath the bed to get you to sleep next to him, chest to chest or chest to back, the covers drawn around you in an act of faith against the night.

all night i stretched my arms across him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing with all my skin and bone, ‘please keep him safe. let him lay his head on my chest and we will be like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed to pieces.’ makes a cathedral, him pressing against me, his lips at my neck, and yes, i do believe his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me like stars.

ask someone to tell you a true story and you get a murkiness. ask someone to tell you a lie and they’ll betray themselves. (the body always betrays itself—it blushes, it trembles…)