I want to sew our lips together
and
I want to speak your name when we kiss so
my breath will always be in your throat
and then,
you’ll never speak in a voice I don’t know,
never swallow a gift not mine,
and even when
you write her name on your bedroom window
the mist you make,
the fog you breathe,
will be mine.
Kill your politicians.
Let their blood dry and crust
and blanket the pieces
across the seas.
Let us walk together.
Shed no tears
and travel with peace in your feet
(water and rumbling
could ressurect the dead,
turn the blood into pink liquid
used to fill their champagne flutes).
Fill their skins with injustice.
Stuff and shove the bombs,
the lies, and the empty bottles
of power
into their shells
(empty like their eyes).
Kill your politicians.
So your children can sleep
so your soul isn’t heavy
so your arms don’t fight.
Hang them in the streets
with a banner overhead:
HUMANITY SHOULD BE CONTROLLED
ONLY BY THE HEART.
Weird that
your body only faces away from me when we sleep.
Strange that
I love you the most when I scream down the telephone.
Funny that
We can’t hold hands because my fingers are too small.
Sad that
One day I might not say your name anymore.
When I was 11 I wrote my love’s name in the shower
hearts and roses
fingers on mist
when I washed it away it appeared again.
And I worried every heart I had drawn
would come back to haunt me.
I’d pack my bags and forget to fold
all my secrets on every shower
I’d ever dreamt in.
And you’d know I loved you even when I didn’t.
So now
I just write your name
on the screen of my iphone.
When the tears and my make up
have formed a film
once we finish talking.
Love me like a car crash
that leaves stains on my clothes.
I want to see your reflection
in the veins in my wrists
I want to feel your love
on the back of my thighs.
Love me like your daddy’s funeral
blacken me like your coat.
I want to feel calm like
your footsteps on marble
and hateful
like your only photograph.
Love me like the winter months
curse me until I change.
I want to see you when I come home
to a porch light left on
I want to hear you
when the sun melts our chains away.
Have you ever tried to sleep with a twitcher?
I want to sew our bodies together
With kisses
So he stops trying to fly
I can feel my tiny box of silence
breathing with my smiles
remembering your face across the river
when I threw myself to you
and you whistled me away.
A feather in the water
I floated away
until another boy found me
and put me in a glass cage.
I have seen you so many times inside my head
and I have loved you so much I think my heart is dead.
But I have known you so few days
I think the world must really be flat -
the Devil at one end and God at the other.
I think your head is pulling me
non-linear
off the road
so we are nowhere in this world
with no good or bad to go to,
just your lips on my breasts
or my hands on your head.
Tell me you’ll love me on my death bed
because feelings like this aren’t supposed to come quick.
When they burn this fast then the flames must stop
so if it stops burning,
turn me into ashes.
Because you’re a candle I want to cradle
to save from the wind -
I am fucking terrified that I will blow
your soul back onto that path to heaven or hell.
Kick you out of the cave I have hidden you in
this little box I marked:
DON’T TELL ANYONE WORDS DON’T EXIST
The world won’t be kind
to someone who can shatter dreams into flowers
storms into showers
war into the most beautiful light.
I will not give up this fight.
You are so beautiful sometimes my eyes go straight to the little pockets of pain my fingernails press into your heart
and I want to kiss them with wet lips,
after I’ve cried and my tears have tickled my ears,
and I’ve forgotten that I yelled at you and made you walk up fifty flights of stairs while locked stationary in my car.
I want to love you
again and again and again
and I want to cry while I wonder how to tell you,
on top of the hill once I’ve beaten you to the rise and planted kisses on your knees
where you bent down
and begged me to forgive you
for making me feel this way about things other than the sunlight rippling through the trees
as old, but not nearly as wise, as love
(as what I feel for you)
It’s like death in a bright room,
all you can see is light.
I write you letters as I pretend to work,
every morning as I stare at your socks.
And when I’ve pretended to kiss you
(with knives in my teeth
god knows that’s how I treated you
before)
I pass your lunch room on my way
downstairs
and see you sitting there in your shirt
and your tie
(remember when you hung it around my neck)
unconsciously chewing the notes
I wrote earlier
(you pulled it tighter than I ever hugged you).
Tomorrow, I write
on the recyclables
(Jim from environmental
makes sure you know this)
you eat,
SWALLOW ME LIKE I SWALLOWED YOUR HEART
and suddenly,
your unconsciousness all makes sense.
I picked at my skin, bit by bit
(kiss kiss kiss
kiss kiss kiss)
I watched as I tore it
And it floated away
(I saw you catch it
with your fingertips)
and the blood ran
It was thick and strong
It trickled and dripped
All down my arm
(like when you face the sky
And your tears run down
Into your ears
And you giggle)
It curled at my fingertips
Formed cells and clots
Only to release
A heavier dose
(I saw you make words with it
On the sidewalk where it fell)
And I think some must have spilled
onto the windowsill,
Or thereabouts,
Because when I tried to catch the air
To retrieve the dreams I threw
(at you, that summer
when it rained)
I had blood on my shoes
as I fell on you
(thank goodness you never left me)
We’ll kill your sweetheart together, baby
Love her like you do, with a knife between your teeth
I’ll pull out her hair and feed it to the cats
give them a taste of what they can finish off next.
We’ll crush her and mould her
til she can’t scream, can’t run.
Pull her teeth til she smiles
We laugh
She cries
It’s done.
Snap her fingers darling,
Til they can grip your heart no more.
Pull her ears from their sockets
Place them on a tray,
Give them to me tomorrow
So I have your secrets, not her name.
such a macabre beauty
Such fearless games !
And as I stuff it all back inside her
We’ll laugh, I guess,
as I shove it back inside her,
And think how silly for her
To think she could love a man
I already claimed.
Sometimes I’d make him pray to me.
I’d sit him on my knee,
hold his shoulders and direct him
to treat me like he treated the God
whose void I’d never fill.
I gave him everything and the next.
Kisses were magic,
to me.
To him they were
explainable and ordinary,
just what his faith let him see.
And so I’d make him sit.
Sometimes, just lightly,
I’d dig my nails into his skin.
Pray to me, pray to me, pray to me,
show me I am more than what you need to live.
Tell me I
am
this
person
that you are to me.
Revere me, hate me, worship me,
let me rise above you.
I want you to feel me not in your heart,
but in a place in your body
that no one can explain.
Let me transcend science.
Write scripture of me,
let me kill you, make you shriek,
wreak havoc and have you sit,
quiet and alone,
with hands trembling from the beauty
of the divine,
as you talk to me.
Do unto me
as I do unto you.
Like him, I’ll be here
waiting for you.
