Time.

IS THERE A PLACE TO FIND

WHERE I CAN RIGHTFULLY HIDE

—IN TIME

I WILL REWIND THIS TAPE OF TROPES

AND RAPE OF ROPES

TO A DISTANT PEACEFUL KIND OF LIFE

to a distant peaceful kind of life.

So that I May Never Forget

I have tripped into such a trap of travesty, with your apathetic tapestry draped over my trembling torso.

Time has become a constraint on my being. I am seduced by the eternal and bound by the finite.

I’ve got a fever I can’t shake and a shake I can’t quit. My legs want to wave, my eyes want to speak and arms want to sit. You have taken my bones and made them flesh, while the looms of my skin are loosely knit. Wont you stay? Just a little bit? My see-saw appendages are flipping their pages, turning and burning through written health stages. With no monsters left between my legs, I feel a yearning for your returning and whiskers on my tits.

I claw at my back with imaginary thoughts, of churning the muscles and tensions you’ve graciously brought. I can’t breathe, as luck would have it. And because of your absence, I’m left in a suspenseful but terrible fit. Won’t you come home? Quick. I can’t take it. I can’t take it.

Surreal

I’m seeing everything in dreams in the nights before I sleep.

I wake in sweat, drenched in regret, watching the day acted out in a play. Meet me, he said, at our favorite place. We’ll get some tea and live forever in our dreams. Where reality isn’t real, and the most I can feel is a solemn display of a familiar face lost.

Enough

Still in secret places, you exist, sewing your strings within my fabric. Still, in pages so full of bliss, I find you hidden within my sentences.

The Great Crime of 2009

    Things in my head rarely come out like I want them to. The things with the heart, they’ve been pretty tough over the years. I thought I’d be true to myself, to my lovers and I let someone under my skin, again. I forgot how terrible of an idea that was. I found all of my pieces and decided to venture into love again. I made a mistake with that. I am oddly psychic. I can tell very quickly how I feel about things, how they will play out, and almost predict future instances to a tee. I have a sixth sense that keeps me out of immediate danger and karma that sends me gifts frequently.

    I loved someone for a very very long time. I put myself through a very long list of things for the sake of that love, and I do not forgive myself easily for how things turned out. Regardless I wanted to do something good for myself. I met someone who really brought me to a place that made me question my previous love. I was young when it blossomed and over the years the pain had diluted the solution of our success. I have never believed at a love at first sight, but I do believe in having such a connection with someone very soon to be able to write about it. I met someone. I met someone who will haunt me forever. Not in a haunting like the previous lover, not in an ability to let go kind of coma. But in a haunting that will scar deep parts of my soul.

    My first love, and all that followed him up until my new discovery had been very youthful experiences. I can’t remember much of the deepness of their beginnings. I will not say that I didn’t love him, the first. But I will say that over the years I grew to hate him. There will never be someone who knew me like him, and there will never be someone who will make me laugh like he can but somewhere through it all I lost that initial bliss. The short time we spent together recently( And by recently I mean a year ago) was beautiful. We really shone bright in eachother’s company. And under another light, we could have been something far more remarkable than we were. But there are some stains that just will not come out. It took me years and years and years to finally find a place to forgive him. It took me falling in love again to remember what our love was like. But it was done. And I will not be so quickly to forgive again.

When I saw him, the second of my loves, I knew. I felt something burning in me the first time I even heard his name. It’s hard to explain. Words do no justice for the senses my body has acquired. I feel like I have to get this all out. After him, after the first, I thought I had learned to love again, over and over. And every single time I was incapable of giving myself fully to them. There were times, often, that I was distant and wanted only to talk to the first love. I knew, down each line, they wouldn’t be the same. I wouldn’t feel the same. And I didn’t, and one after another I left them. It’s rare for me to admit such childish emotions. I dare not tell anyone of them that what I told them I had felt was never real. Some I might have, but the big ones, the big two real relationships between, I didn’t. They were head over heels for me and I just couldn’t break their hearts that terribly. After all they had made me happy for a short while and things were good for the time being. But, this, this has to be said.

    You know how when you’ve been stung by a bee, you feel it immediately. That’s what I felt in the first conversation about this past lover I had had. Before even meeting him something felt odd in me. It wasn’t an enamoring conversation, either. It wasn’t a long tale of some explicit exploit he had done that made me want to talk to him. It was something in me that told me that I had to. And if I didn’t I would be severely sorry. My life works out that way often. I have sixth senses of things that would make no sense to other people. I even had a dream about something that would happen, very detailed and precise, between us. And when it did, when it happened exactly like it was in the dream I had had before I even met him, my heart felt deep and I knew I was in trouble. I have been very fickle with hearts in my years. I have been very hesitant to make anything official with ANYONE. This is perhaps the curse I must pay.

    I was very very true to how I felt, very very early in my last love. I found it so often in so many moments that I was drunk off it. I had completely forgotten what this was like. Completely. I remembered immediately how I felt when I was fourteen and knew I had met the man I wanted to marry. I knew once, and only once, and the second I found that again I ran with it. Hard. This was probably mistake number two. When I am honest and true with my love it comes out in the most intoxicating of romances. I did somethng stupid and let him drink from my honesty. Wasted, he fell deep into me as any man would who had been so emersed in such a liquor. I had beauty, true, and I gave it all away instead of keeping it to myself. Now, with my heart sore, I realize that I gave it to him too early.

    I just didn’t want to let him go. The second his fingers touched my skin, I questioned what love was like before him. I knew how my previous lover had felt, but with so much pain underneath it I never got to experience such an amazing comfort. This was innocent, and I loved it. In moments I found myself giving up things I would never give up. I compromised things I would never compromise. Men upon men upon men of all different ages and sizes and looks would never believe the things I did for my last love. It was so unlike me to be so free, and ready to give up anything. I set myself up early on to fail. I don’t regret a second of it, but I guess I rarely do in my life. But I just wish I wouldn’t have told him so soon how I felt. I wish I wouldn’t have let him have so much of me so quickly. I don’t for a second believe that he even for a second felt a fraction of what I felt. I believe that in moments I got him so drunk with my romance that he may have believed it in those moments. But I never live up to being as amazing as I can lead some on to be.

    Much like I feel when Charlotte is away, I feel a sort of emptiness now in shallow and deep alike parts of my bones. I lost any ability to sleep with the realization that I had one again captured love between my hands and once again lost it. I share only the poker face that I can with those who see me, but I have really broken down this time. I want to get it back. I want to know if theres any way I can erase the ugliness that has occurred, but I know it’s not possible. He is not a man. He is not old enough, yet, in his mind to be where I am at now. That may sound very condescending but to be honest, it’s the truth. He’s at a very fickle point, where he doesn’t have to man up to anything, including his own emotions. That was his decision.

    How things happened, I really don’t know. He is fickle with his love, and his emotions. He hands it out very loosely to anyone who will make him feel regardless of the trueness to their response. I can’t blame him. If I wouldn’t have been so deeply struck so young I wouldn’t know how to hide myself so easily. I just wish I wouldn’t have fallen in love with him.I was probably too blind with my happiness to really see. He fell out of his coma-love with me very quickly and I was only learning how beautiful and amazing it really was. I feel dumb for looking at it so childishly. I feel stupid even now for how hurt I still am. But I know, the only reason why it is, is because I was so true. I was so sure I could be the foundation, the glue, the wood, the wiring, everything to keep us together, but love is really never enough. Especially when only one person wants it to be.

    I don’t know what is next. I don’t know if I want to ever let this happen to me again. I am so young. I am so young and I don’t ever want to trust anyone with my heart again. And it is quite possible that it could be another 5 years before I do. In a very short time I felt years and years of pain. I didn’t expect it, but I should have known from the very second that I felt my toes tingle in hearing his name that I was way in over my head. I usually know the future, maybe just little things, before they happen. It’s weird. Yes. But I see it often. Esp style. It’s a curse sometimes and its a blessing sometimes. But I let myself love again because I knew, before saying a single word to him, that I could.

    Now things are really a mess. I’m a mess. I’ll tough through it like I haven’t done this a thousand times before, but this time I’m just ashamed. I cry to myself, alone, and remember what it was like to cry all the time over one person. Even as I type this, I find tears rolling down my cheeks. It’s odd as well because I havent cried like this in a long time. Years. Not like this. Not so often, not so random, not so painful. I loved again. I really did. And now I wonder why I ever let myself do it. Why I let myself fall in love one more time. I remember now why i spent years avoiding it. I don’t want to anymore. Not unless my first love could save me from myself. Because for the first time in years I really need saving. I need to be saved. I’ve never looked for handouts or helping when it came to my inner tormoil. Never from anyone but him. I don’t think he’s capable of it, saving me that is, not now, not for a long time, but I doubt anyone besides these two men will ever be able to get to me again. I am locking this away, in my last words ever on the matter, deep somewhere in me, where not only will it never surface, but it can never be touched by another.

“I do not want to ever ever feel like this again.”

Like Mute Answers/ If Only It Were Enough

” The ice has melted. ” Charlotte said to me from the floor. I was sitting above her in the white chair that accompanied her wicker desk. I turned my head in her direction to analyze my own glass. Fingering the rim, I noticed that sure enough, the ice had melted. All that meant was that the whiskey would be watered down by now. Charlotte laid sprawled across her floor, her gaze fixed on her ceiling fan that was as silent as the whiskey that sloshed around in her glass with her every movement. Before I had realized the severity of the ice situation, Charlotte had already pulled me to the floor by the crevice of my arm.

” It’s better down here, it makes everything alright.” She said to me, tugging on the pleat in my skirt.

“Even the watered down whiskey?” I say, leaning my head back unconvinced.

“Nothing makes that alright, but who knows what will solve watered down whiskey, girl. “

” Someone knows the answer.” I said.

” There is nothing to found, ” she said, facing me. ” except for more whiskey of course. “

I laughed at this and smiled in a way I had been unable to recently. We had just disowned our acquaintances in the rooms adjacent to us, with only the mindset to escape. On her floor, I felt comfortable. The slow hum of the conversations taking place in the living room began to drown out as Charlotte moved her head down to my shoulder. We were safe in our solidarity. Glancing down at my feet I noticed the binding of a thin yellow book. It was a collection of short stories, and Charlotte insisted that I read the first one to her. I knew she loved it when I read to her, so I picked up the book, kicked off my shoes, and did.

“You’re so serious when you read. I’m not used to it. You’re always smiling. ” She said.

I paused in the middle of a sentence to look at her, scrunching my nose at her claim.

” Well, at least around me. ” She said.

“Only around you. ”

“I feel everything and nothing at the same time. I understand how you feel now, and I’m so so sorry. We don’t deserve to feel like this. ” She said, leaning up only to sip on her whiskey.

“Yeah. ” I said.

She finshes a few sips and looks at me seriously. ” We deserve more than this. ” She said.

“Yeah. ” I said.

Conversations With The Ghost In My Bed

I used to find in your palms
 a sense of an overwhelming unknown
         -the
 stitch in the sweater impossibly sewn.
 
 Where there were once words I could 
formulate
 To articulate the simple straight states
           you’ve created in me
there are now silences unable to speak        
 
It is because when I talk to you
            in metaphorical words
  I think about the first blurred night we fell asleep- how safe.
And how stupid I was for feeling shielded amongst
   your innocent umbrella gaze
            What a state.
 
How comfortable I was being stately bare, right there
when you pulled my shirt over my head,
           down to my boots.
 I found a safety amongst your beard and clavicles- how dull.
And how silly I am for letting you in
Beneath my foundation
           Into my roots.
 
And when you carved our naked names into a tree
I naively believed, you see! that this was something so permanent
           How stupid I am for believing
 
With your songs, you brought out a laughter
Of great immeasurable tongues
That barreled out like I were a child
whose voice knew no calculated distance- how young
           
There were paragraphs of my torment
         that were already mapped in a deadly pen, I think
         that you effortlessly erased against my better judgment
And I should never have let you read them
For you found an even darker and more permanent ink
 
Now, now, now no words of your own
                      could 
ever get in me like
                      how your touch brittled
                      my bones.
In moments like these, you 
have me so full
to where I can read your silence
         like a novel

When flames of fires flicker in fright, failing to light, oh dear, I wonder, will fall leave our fallen leaves behind or will they become brittle and unkind- pulled asunder. I have tethered you here, my frail little finch, tied to my finger for fear you will linger. I have kept you inland from flight and from making home amongst the bright seaside. Have you planned your escape to make nest in the waves. Have you my feathered friend? Where will you bitterly begin? In the place where I so withered to an end? Where have we? Where. Where do we belong, no better yet- Where have we gone?

I am waiting for it. It sits on the brim of my lashes, waiting for emotion to carry me away. And to which way does my wary heart sway?

When I would cry when I was younger, the tears came to me in violent storms. They were silent at times, and others wild and windy like howling against a window pane. But the storm came and it poured until all of the water from my clouds, that had rained upon my cheeks, ceased to fall.

There is a moment in my life where the tears became less frequent- no hurricanes left to flood only scattered Florida rains not even worth an umbrella.

And there are now times of scarce water- my emotions fearing an endless drought.