a million broken hymns

i will tell you about selfish people. even when they know they will hurt you they walk into your life to taste you because you are the type of being they don’t want to miss out on. you are too much shine to not be felt. so when they have gotten a good look at everything you have to offer. when they have taken your skin your hair and your secrets with them. when they realize how real this is. how much of a storm you are and it hits them. that is when the cowardice sets in. that is when the person you thought they were is replaced by the sad reality of what they are. that is when they lose every fighting bone in their body and leave after saying “you will find better than me”. you will stand there naked with half of them still hidden somewhere inside you and sob. asking them why they did it. why they forced you to love them when they had no intention of loving you back and they’ll say something along the lines of “i just had to try, i had to give it a chance, it was you after all.” but that isn’t romantic. it isn’t sweet. the idea that they were so engulfed by your existence they had to risk breaking it for the sake of knowing they weren’t missing out. your existence meant that little next to their curiosity of you. that is the thing about selfish people. they gamble entire beings. entire souls to please their own. one second they are holding you like the world and the next they have belittled you to a mere picture, a moment, something of the past. one second, they swallow you up and whisper they want to spend the rest of their life with you but the moment they sense fear, they are already halfway out the door. without having the nerve to let you go with grace, as if the human heart means that little to them. and after all this. after all of the taking. the nerve. isn’t it sad and funny how people have more guts these days to undress you with their fingers than they do to pick up the phone and call. apologize. for all of the loss. and this is how you lose her.

Stay away from people who make you feel like you are hard to love.

If you do something with your whole heart and it’s a mistake, you can live with that.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin! When I press summer dusks together, it is a month of street accordions and sprinklers laying the dust, small shadows running from me. It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper; it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water down littered streets that lead you to no water, and gathering islands and lemons in the mind. There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame. I would undress you in the summer heat, and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.