timberfigure

Can I break you in the process of making you my own?

A few miles south of my hometown lies the corpse of my youth and a dead army of days I don't remember.

"What's the motive for your latest behavior? She liked the praise, I loved the worship. You're who I thought of when my skull hit the pavement. Sometimes a saint. Mostly a servant. And I'd love to curse the name of god or fate for space between us. Your hair in braids, Your hands still bloody. I'd dive from heaven's gates to devil's flame to join you now; til death, then past it, sacred matrimony."

"What am I to you tonight, sweetheart? A fallback lover? The burnout boyfriend? Arm candy to cover for what I am not to you, sweetheart. Something steady? Security and comfort as a man or as a body? As a faulty mechanism, coping isolating systems that you made and you sustain and you defend, a habit maybe, but you’re at fault nonetheless, and it couldn’t ever be different. You’ve grown too attached to playing your own god and your own victim."

I was 6 years old when I was born. My favorite colors are earth tones. I had a garden, about 20 square yards, at 11 years old. My favorite animals are often those that show up anxiously to eat your crops, like white-tailed deer and rabbits. I am 6'5" now, and sometimes I worry I will be taller next year. When I was 16, I died by the railroad. When I was 20, I died by the church.

I wish I met my friend when he was six years old. I could have known him as he learned himself. I wish I had seen him out in the rain, with rubber boots and a cheap smile that only revealed itself in the seconds spent looking elsewhere. He was missing a tooth for the first few lives he lived. I wish the man I know now was the boy I knew then, was the kid I met when we were 12, when we decided to be friends.

I call out to the poets and scholars who preceded me. I reach with my hands, like a child grasping at stars. Sometimes, I consider everything so intensely, one might think I’m trying to move mountains with my thoughts. I try to observe the mountains as deeply as they observe us. I kneel at the stream and press my palms to the water’s surface— my hands become submerged in the gradient between sediment and river. Suddenly, the moment I hold in my hands is all there is.

string me out between your thoughts. dew gathers on spiderwebs in the mornings and my fears seem to collect themselves the same way at dusk. i saw you in the pasture and you waved to me. string me out between your thoughts, sweetheart. where is a mind like mine suppose to dwell if not on you? string me out between your thoughts, sweetheart, and see what becomes of us.

I followed our love as it entered its grave. i held it in its last moments as it used to hold me.

My lover wraps around me like a vine. I thank her, of course. When the roots of her reach into the depth of me I don't know what to do except thank her.

Your morning routine was welcomed; my morning routine became joining you for yours. I watch your eyes struggle to break into the day. I hear you mumble lyrics to yourself in the shower. Everything you do is known by me and everything you do is loved.

A soft evening holds the words that were meant for tomorrow. In our love we found them too early.

I leave my core with you. I build a house around you. You build a house around the memory of me. I was nothing until you called me your lover. You turned me from an absence to a source. What if is all for you? What if everything I've built and every word I sang, every bead of sweat and every pool of blood, every moment of eyes meeting and every night spent alone, were for you?

you said you wanted someone willing to go to war for you; I went in your name, with your banner waving above my head, only to find you on the other end of the battlefield.

here are my hands, sweetheart. i give them as a reminder of my love for you. these hands will work for you and bleed. they will cook for you and make art for you. they will hold you when you ask and break themselves when you need them to. this abstraction is my dedication. take my hands, sweetheart. the rest of me is here as well. take whatever of me serves you.

I will heal through loving, not as an exchange. I will heal through loving when it is returned to me and when it is not. If all of the earth receives all of my heart and still turns its back to me, I will still heal. This is my resolve, my core, and my prescription.