we are slowly making our way to naked.
with every sip of poison
(eighty proof and amber brown)
another inconvenient article
of clothing falls away.
it was sweaters, first,
(under the pretense of heat)
then socks, one at a time,
belts are fumbled undone
but we are both pretending not to notice.
we pour another drink.
you pull off your shirt in that nonchalant,
that unabashed way that bony boys
wear their skin.
we are kissing now,
i don’t know when we began
i don’t know where we end.
the problem
(as i see it)
is that she falls in love about six hundred times a day
(with a ray of sunlight hitting the curb, a
feather floating in the air, a
stranger smiling on the street)
and he falls in love just once
(every morning, upon waking up
to the smell of her hair)
she will swim around the corners of your consciousness
while you kiss another goodnight
her thinly veiled memory will drag across your frontal lobe when you undress for bed
the ghost of her laughter will haunt your empty apartment
and even though you turned the photo of her to face the wall
you will still feel her eyes on you
there will always be reminders
the scent of her shampoo
someone who looks just like her from behind but when you get up close
the differences disappoint you
a stray bobby pin on your bedroom floor or someone buying her brand of cigarettes in front of you at the corner store
there will never be enough one-night stands in the world to make you forget her
never enough gin
she will float along beside you until your dying day
you and me will never be the bourgeouise but goddamnit if we can’t still french inhale
the sunrise pales in comparison to the plume of smoke breaking the horizon
of your perfect upper lip
if i could link this ink to my limbic system where the basest urges are born
these words would come out pure
but until that day they will be muddied and they will not do justice
to remembering the mornings of straining sunlight
through balcony windows and sliding
into consciousness with the scent of your neck and your hand on the small of my back
i could spend the rest of my life in the first five seconds
of waking up next to you
let’s talk about disaster and barrelling faster and faster towards our doom and sitting alone on the floor of your room pondering the end of the world and wondering if there’s anybody who wants to kiss you on the mouth
flying south for the season for no other reason but that the birds do it, too, and god, flying looks like heaven
deafen yourself to the voices urging you to make good choices — honey you fucked up, sure, but god you fucked up well and if you go to hell
be sure to say hello to the televangelists and CEOs and poor girls and boys who called their god by the wrong name
it’s all the same
every day
salt meets wound
same old pain
I wish this were a testament to the healing of love, a gaping wound sealed up be unconditional devotion and patience. But the truth of it is, she sat crying on the floor of the living room with her eyes enormous and wild and she screamed at him to leave, just leave her the fuck alone, and he did.
And no, he did not come back. He did not offer any grand gestures because the truth was, it hurt too much to love her. It just hurt too much. So when she told him to leave, he left, and she was alone.
It just got to be too much. The first time, with the doctors and the medication, it was an exercise in promises of love and support. The second time, an exercise in patience. The third in futility.
There is a limit to the number of times you can watch the one you love bleeding out in the bath or vomiting an overdose or wandering the house looking for the sturdiest place to hang themselves. When you hit that limit you can’t love them the same way anymore. The love becomes tenuous and delicate, the way you love someone very old, someone whose days are numbered. It’s a cut-your-losses kind of love; it’s like trying to hold something that is constantly slipping through your fingers. It stops being about giving yourself to someone and starts being about guarding yourself. If you give yourself to someone with one foot out the door, what happens to you when they inevitably step the whole way out?
my hobbies include inhaling toxins in the form of smoke
stealing a quick breath of a young death
religion and physics make me dizzy
the billions of particles of everyone who has ever lived, floating around me
maybe what i’m inhaling is the ashes of an angel
fallen from grace a thousand years ago
maybe it’s the remains of someone else’s pain
maybe it’s cancer
maybe i’m just a lonely atheist on a diet of anxiety and caffeine
everyone’s got secrets and mine are no darker than a stranger’s
who ran over his neighbour’s cat while backing into the driveway
in the dark
(though i’d like to believe mine are more intriguing)
it’s rubbish, all of it, really
monsters under beds and the twenty-four hour lives of fruit flies
and flicking away my cigarette butt
say goodbye to this angel’s ashes
and light another
so this is my face
run your fingertips down the knobs of my pale spine
feel the ache in my winter bones
i see the phases of the moon
circle your head like a halo
you are galaxies
you are home
soft blush over blue-white skin
welcoming the rush of your warm breath
hanging visible in the air like smoke or fog
tumbling out of your mouth with every soft syllable spoken
in your low voice
fill me
warm these winter bones
let wildflowers grow here
where ribs meet
to protect my heart
they meet by accident
and no one is sure whether it is a happy accident
or not
serendipity or a sad twist of fate, either way,
their north and south winds collide as he lights her cigarette
and they talk while it burns down to the lipstick-stained butt
and for a long while after that
it is not a whirlwind romance,
more like thunder and lightning
loud and intense and catching them both off-guard
and unprepared
counting one-mississipi two-mississipi
to see how close the storm is to striking the both of them dead
and when it ends, as all storms do,
they are left with the faint smell of rain hanging in the air
and a memory of dark clouds overhead
