191.
I must be a masochist because I love loathe love loathe love
feeling compressed under a body’s feet.
Don’t take yr boots off baby, Lace em up tight.
Push the tread into my thrombosis.
I got the disease of not lovin’ love, of lovin’ it’s leftovers, lovin the ditch love leaves
when it leaves.
Shove me in it and don’t you dare hold me.
Put me on my knees and squeeeeeeze
me outta myself.
I’m the last of the toothpaste. You’re the guy with the bleedin’ gums.
Had you wanted me before you needed me you wouldn’t be standing before the mirror, vice clamped to a tube of Colgate, spitting into the sink and bearing teeth to see the spittle frothed with red, now would you?
We’d be, maybe, sitting by a stream and eating salads and laughing without one fleck of spinach stuck in our teeth.
197.
We forgot to turn the heat on for last night, when the cold snapped.
I wake up to our skin stuck together and his breaths in my ear,
talking in his sleep about the time he told me, “I like you, I love you, I need you”,
and it worked.
6 AM I’m up.
6 AM I‘m standing.
6 AM I look at the bed I slept in.
6 AM it’s not mine.
6 AM I’m impatient.
6 AM I’m fine.
California, come back to me.
My thin skin blues in this 7°,
seven degrees of separation between my lungs and the snow.
7 units of warmth. 7 minutes to get out of bed.
7 seconds to feel the fear that the boy in the bed looks vulnerable with his mouth open, asleep.
I should stick my fingers down his throat the way he does to me when I’m on top.
I’d grind up inside his gizzard, I know.
I’d do it anyhow, I know.
Psychopaths and sadists don’t exist in a vacuum.
Not that he is. Not that I am.
We’re just playing house.
He pours the tiny tea that scalds and I drink it.
I pound sugar cubes down to dust for him to snort.
He serves his truths rare, they sizzle louder than his lies.
I left him, once, for the West Coast
to see what would happen, if we could be happy on our own.
We were.
We hated it.
Sensitivity is not a lack of strength. It is the hoarding of it.
Knowing you need to hoard it. Knowing it needs to be hoarded.
In the cold like this I want to get fat. Watch my nipples get puffy, see my tits swell big as my belly. Live inside the human heat that melts me.
201.
Maybe I waited too long.
Maybe I should write my prayers to god.
Maybe love letters are prayers to people.
208.
I line my lids, dust my cheeks with pressed powder
to cover the ashen state of my skin.
Mascara makes those who, at best, will pity me this night look me in the eye.
Patting dry my hair I think on one of our first dates,
when I peacocked my fresh plumes of feminist-intellectual feathers for you:
“I view make-up as a choice.
Putting it on, I perform a ritual of feminine pride.
My mask is one of beauty in which I control the medium and the message”
, thinking at the time that I was blowing minds.
My rhetoric had little-to-no affect on your habits and,
when it came (later) to your lies you landed them soft on the cusp of my ear like a kiss;
winning the ongoing debate of Us by playing at virtue while dealing in vice.
210.
He left me as if in a dream.
I could not get any closer to him than to throw myself up against his wall of self-defenses.
What I feel for him in anger is a mask made for my fears.
“I’m living downtown”, he says.
Yes, living in the lifestyle of rats and cockroaches.
“I’m clean now”, he says.
Even if that were true, he already ripped right through the fabric of safety and love his Mom and I wove together from the rags of who he had been, Before, and the person we invented of him from the glittering nothings of his potential (who he could be After).
In the mornings after realizing there is no After for him, just the timelessness of use, I don’t want for much.
Coffee, silence, and a select few memories to move me into afternoon.
Like the moment I was bolted to his bed unable to deny, following much denial, that I was deeply in love and there was nothing to be done about it.
He mumbled, he murmured, halfway to ranting, starting up his morning routine of sputtering like an old car to get its engine alive.
Still naked from the night before, still with a slice of fat lining his stomach from the not-having-started-to-use-heroin-yet.
He paces and I eat up his absurdity, how he embodies symbiotically a cherubic young boy and grumpy old man.
It was easier to see his drug addict’s ineptitude as a creature endearingly unruly as the very young or very old.
I admire the child in him that circumscribes, in chalk, the periphery of his personality: the guy with the bare, hairy ass standing in the window ledge with his limp dick facing the hapless patrons of the gas station across the street.
I fell in love with how there was something hidden in the way he smacked his lips that would never bore me. Or maybe it lay in the way he rounded his shoulders and averted his eyes while he smoked a cigarette. It revealed itself in his innocent approach to sexual deviance which would start with a meek request for a pinch or poke and end with my fist up his ass.
This erasure and remarking of the bounds of his depth sank down deep within a few months; then buoyed up within him as he took to the needle. It was now chained to his spine.
I watched it dip and dive from my post along his rocky shore. I thought it was a message. I thought one day I’d have the courage to swim out to it. I did not know that these are designed to alert one to danger.
I must be a masochist because I love loathe love loathe love
feeling compressed under a body’s feet.
Don’t take yr boots off baby, Lace em up tight.
Push the tread into my thrombosis.
I got the disease of not lovin’ love, of lovin’ it’s leftovers, lovin the ditch love leaves
when it leaves.
Shove me in it and don’t you dare hold me.
Put me on my knees and squeeeeeeze
me outta myself.
I’m the last of the toothpaste. You’re the guy with the bleedin’ gums.
Had you wanted me before you needed me you wouldn’t be standing before the mirror, vice clamped to a tube of Colgate, spitting into the sink and bearing teeth to see the spittle frothed with red, now would you?
We’d be, maybe, sitting by a stream and eating salads and laughing without one fleck of spinach stuck in our teeth.
197.
We forgot to turn the heat on for last night, when the cold snapped.
I wake up to our skin stuck together and his breaths in my ear,
talking in his sleep about the time he told me, “I like you, I love you, I need you”,
and it worked.
6 AM I’m up.
6 AM I‘m standing.
6 AM I look at the bed I slept in.
6 AM it’s not mine.
6 AM I’m impatient.
6 AM I’m fine.
California, come back to me.
My thin skin blues in this 7°,
seven degrees of separation between my lungs and the snow.
7 units of warmth. 7 minutes to get out of bed.
7 seconds to feel the fear that the boy in the bed looks vulnerable with his mouth open, asleep.
I should stick my fingers down his throat the way he does to me when I’m on top.
I’d grind up inside his gizzard, I know.
I’d do it anyhow, I know.
Psychopaths and sadists don’t exist in a vacuum.
Not that he is. Not that I am.
We’re just playing house.
He pours the tiny tea that scalds and I drink it.
I pound sugar cubes down to dust for him to snort.
He serves his truths rare, they sizzle louder than his lies.
I left him, once, for the West Coast
to see what would happen, if we could be happy on our own.
We were.
We hated it.
Sensitivity is not a lack of strength. It is the hoarding of it.
Knowing you need to hoard it. Knowing it needs to be hoarded.
In the cold like this I want to get fat. Watch my nipples get puffy, see my tits swell big as my belly. Live inside the human heat that melts me.
201.
Maybe I waited too long.
Maybe I should write my prayers to god.
Maybe love letters are prayers to people.
208.
I line my lids, dust my cheeks with pressed powder
to cover the ashen state of my skin.
Mascara makes those who, at best, will pity me this night look me in the eye.
Patting dry my hair I think on one of our first dates,
when I peacocked my fresh plumes of feminist-intellectual feathers for you:
“I view make-up as a choice.
Putting it on, I perform a ritual of feminine pride.
My mask is one of beauty in which I control the medium and the message”
, thinking at the time that I was blowing minds.
My rhetoric had little-to-no affect on your habits and,
when it came (later) to your lies you landed them soft on the cusp of my ear like a kiss;
winning the ongoing debate of Us by playing at virtue while dealing in vice.
210.
He left me as if in a dream.
I could not get any closer to him than to throw myself up against his wall of self-defenses.
What I feel for him in anger is a mask made for my fears.
“I’m living downtown”, he says.
Yes, living in the lifestyle of rats and cockroaches.
“I’m clean now”, he says.
Even if that were true, he already ripped right through the fabric of safety and love his Mom and I wove together from the rags of who he had been, Before, and the person we invented of him from the glittering nothings of his potential (who he could be After).
In the mornings after realizing there is no After for him, just the timelessness of use, I don’t want for much.
Coffee, silence, and a select few memories to move me into afternoon.
Like the moment I was bolted to his bed unable to deny, following much denial, that I was deeply in love and there was nothing to be done about it.
He mumbled, he murmured, halfway to ranting, starting up his morning routine of sputtering like an old car to get its engine alive.
Still naked from the night before, still with a slice of fat lining his stomach from the not-having-started-to-use-heroin-yet.
He paces and I eat up his absurdity, how he embodies symbiotically a cherubic young boy and grumpy old man.
It was easier to see his drug addict’s ineptitude as a creature endearingly unruly as the very young or very old.
I admire the child in him that circumscribes, in chalk, the periphery of his personality: the guy with the bare, hairy ass standing in the window ledge with his limp dick facing the hapless patrons of the gas station across the street.
I fell in love with how there was something hidden in the way he smacked his lips that would never bore me. Or maybe it lay in the way he rounded his shoulders and averted his eyes while he smoked a cigarette. It revealed itself in his innocent approach to sexual deviance which would start with a meek request for a pinch or poke and end with my fist up his ass.
This erasure and remarking of the bounds of his depth sank down deep within a few months; then buoyed up within him as he took to the needle. It was now chained to his spine.
I watched it dip and dive from my post along his rocky shore. I thought it was a message. I thought one day I’d have the courage to swim out to it. I did not know that these are designed to alert one to danger.