Tag: love

make room! make room!

I’m so high on love
right now. I know
it’s just chemicals, my brain
releasing oxytocin in response
to a possible opportunity
for pair bonding, it’s really just
nature trying to trick me
into reproducing,
but it feels like heaven.
it feels like sheer bliss,
like I need to merge
my heart and soul and mind and body with another.

but I remember
the other times I felt this way.
I remember how I couldn’t stand
to be apart for a second, how quickly
they moved in and how that was the
beginning of the slow death
we both dreaded until the moment
it ended.

I have my life
and I would be so happy
to share it with you
but
there’s no room.

my heart is spacious enough.
my heart is an abandoned warehouse
populated by angry ghosts,
who I’d really like
to put to rest. it’s my apartment
that won’t house
another person.

fuck. I really love
this apartment. perhaps
some form of time sharing
might be possible.
I’ll just scoop myself
up off the floor and pour
my jellied heart
back into its steel-sided mold,
and try again to get close
without losing my identity.

personal.space

I need to be alone
but not quite so lone as to be
lonely. my personal
version of space is at once
as vast as the cosmos and as cold,
and as short, warm, sparking, and electro-conductive
as the distance between the atoms
of our skin, even when
separated by two layers of cloth,
or one when I take off
my hoodie.

I want you around
all the time; I talk to you
in my head constantly while
we’re apart – and do you do
the same? do you think of things
to say to me, save them up like flowers pressed inside a book, to fall out years later, forgotten? – and yet
sometimes it seems
I can’t bear to be in your presence
for the ocean of longing that rushes
through my veins, the blood-warm sea
magnetically drawn to its icy moon,
for the welling words that lap
behind my eyes but cannot be said
out loud for fear they’ll be denied,
canceled out,
stamped illegitimate.

as if you can cancel chemistry,
rule out relativity, pass
on physics, legislate electricity,
nullify neutrons, negate magnetism,
deny the very dinosaurs
and stamp out science altogether
because you say it ain’t so.
go ahead and rewrite all the textbooks
if it makes you feel better. I know
my feelings and the physics involved here
like I know my own bones, my own skin.
I have all the faith in the world
in science.

I’ll make space for you in this station
and bring my lonely rocket in
if you can open your own airlock
and let me breathe your rarefied
atmosphere. a little mingling now
and then could refresh us both.
I’ve been sending out the signals,
won’t you acknowledge and respond?

light (s)miles

I’m sorry,
but I can’t be sorry
about this:

every time I look at you
my entire body tries to smile
until the feeling bubbles right out
of my eyes and mouth uncontrollably
like I’m drowning in happiness
and I laugh for no reason
except that my veins are
too full of bees not to, my blood
has been replaced with champagne,
being around you in the flesh feels
like my finger in a light socket,
as if all my molecules are shivering
gladly, passionately shocked awake
by this lightning storm of pure raw energy.

please note: it’s not just you.
it’s also the way the light bends for you –
as if I can see all the tiny little atoms
and their electrons spinning around their neutrons,
and the force keeping them
in that constant whirling motion is love;
as if they are building a subatomic golden shield
of purest beneficence around you
that no negative ions can penetrate –
as if it loves you every little bit
(every jot and tittle, every microscopic cell
and quark and mysterious particle)
as much as I do.

canceled

I’m so sorry to inform you
that love did not get renewed
for a second season.
my heart has been canceled.
it wasn’t testing well
with audiences,
especially the one person
to whom it was floated.
Mr. Neilsen said no; it was a hard pass
by the head of the network.

so.
it remains to be seen
whether there is a market
for my nonsense.
perhaps a reboot
ten years from now
would perform better
in the target demographic
of crazy cat ladies
and the men that love them.

I know this might not be kosher, but
I’d still love to see
the show come back to life.
if you happen to know anyone
who might be interested
in a romantic comedy that’s
heavy on the comedy,
light on the romance,
maybe you could
give him my number.
if you don’t want it, there must be
someone out there who does.

the maze

I understand how and why
you have this labyrinth of thorns
around your heart. it’s to keep
you safe, innocent
while savagery is inflicted upon your suitors
as they hack and slash
at the cruel, cutting brambles,
dodge and duck the sharp-toothed
greenery, hunt and search through these dead ends
in the ramble surrounding your true
feelings. it’s to make sure
that only the most worthy
and determined would-be lover
gets through to your hidden and
vulnerable, secret soul. Sleeping Beauty
would be jealous of this spread.

I get it; we all have our own defenses –
sometimes the way looks clear,
even inviting
right until the moment one falls into
a moat full of angry crocodiles –
that we use to see how badly
someone really wants us.

I think part of you is hoping
I’ll give up if the going gets tough
enough, because
this will prove you right
in rejecting my advances. if I
was not worthy
to begin with, then your own courage
forever remains
untested.

what you don’t understand is
how my own armored knight of a heart
dearly loves a challenge,
how having to fight for something
only makes me want it
that much more,
how the single best way
to get me to try harder
is to say unequivocally
that it can’t be done.

so if
you really want
to discourage me
all you have to do, dear,
is invite me in.

car.talk

as soon as we reach
the place where you like to
drop me off,
you turn off the engine
and turn on the hazard lights
so we don’t get creamed by a bus
while we talk.

we twist and turn,
side by side but
in our own seats.
contained,
constrained,
conscientiously
abstaining.
I take off my seat belt or
put the top part behind my back
so it doesn’t rub me on the neck
like a tiny straitjacket.
we turn to face each other
as we talk, and then squirm
awkwardly away. I roll my head
against the headrest just like
I do on the pillow at home
when I can’t sleep, which
is always. I’m so desperately tired,
crazed with it, and yet
I can’t seem to bring myself to leave
and go back to my home, alone.

you always roll down your window
if the temperature outside
is above freezing.
I’m often cold, but I
don’t say anything.
I’d rather suffer slightly
than inconvenience you,
especially to make you
turn the car back on
just for the blessed heat
which would also
make you sweat uncomfortably.
I just hunch and snuggle
in my coat,
snap and unsnap it nervously,
or eventually take the excuse
to get out and smoke a cigarette.
if I’m going to be cold
anyway, I might as well
be smoking.

we talk about everything
under the sun, make each other laugh
when we least expect it
and neither of us wants
to say goodnight. and yet
I never dare
and you don’t seem to care
to suggest
that we sit in the back seat.
what would we do,
who would we be
without our safety precautions?

I’m afraid to find out
if I’ll become a stranger to myself
or you’ll decide you can no longer abide
my bothersome corporeality
in such a confined space
and yet I secretly long
for a some sneaky, underhanded
chance, some miracle,
some blessing,
to let me get
just a little bit
closer.

body.hate

it took me 40 years to learn
that my body is not my enemy
but my oldest, longest-suffering friend,
that my being fat doesn’t mean
I don’t deserve love or am
any less beautiful, that
when you love someone,
when their soul speaks to yours
and you can see it clearly,
unclouded by your own doubts and fears,
the vessel they are currently incarnating
becomes sanctified by its beauty –
like a candle holder,
illuminated from within – that
my body is always worthy of love
because I’m in it.

I didn’t learn that by myself,
many people taught me these things;
I first learned to love myself
by seeing myself through the eyes
of those that loved me,
and I’m still learning these lessons,
still on the path.

so
I understand.
you aren’t there yet.

I wish I could be the one to teach you,
but even if you can’t/won’t let me –
because my body reminds you too painfully
of your own abundance, because
the idea of us together
probably makes you feel sick,
because the only way
you can imagine yourself
as sexually viable
is if a thin person wants you,
because the idea that I could be fat
and still be attractive
is scarily close to
the same being true
for you –
it’s all right.
I hope someday you get there.
you deserve to be free
of body hate, too.
we all do.

the weight you need to shed
is not measured in pounds of flesh
but in the self-hatred
you’ve been carrying
your entire life.
let that burden go.
put it down, take it off, release it.
you don’t need it.

I’ll be waiting for you
at the pass on the top of this
mountain of self-respect.
the air is thin up here,
but we don’t have to be.
it’s very clear, heady, transcendent.
I can see for miles
and we don’t need our baggage
where we’re going.

scrimshaw

by far the cruelest thing
you ever said to me –
and there were
so many candidates
to choose from –
was “I believe in you”.
it seemed to be
so kind at first that
I could not believe it –
too good to be true, not real
my stunned gut said –
and it turned out I was right.
you did believe whole-heartedly
in the version of me
that you wanted to see.

you spent so much
of our time together
trying to destroy my belief
in a whole self, specifically mine,
by trying to carve me
into what you wanted,
painstakingly cutting away
all the extraneous pieces of my
life, my heart, my body and my soul
that didn’t fit the image
you held so dear.

but.
I fought back
with all my might,
having been taught
by my mother’s example
that I’d rather be a
lumpen, misshapen
piece of raw ivory
that is uniquely mine
than a carved masterpiece
of someone else’s creation.

the gamble

in our little game
of mutually assured destruction,
I betrayed my hand too soon;
I gambled big and lost it all.
now you hold all the cards
and I hate it.

in the past I admitted
certain things to a certain
heartless psychopathic fuckboy;
I lost my cool and revealed
just how very much I cared
and my feelings were turned into a weapon
that was used against me
countless times, while he
said many things he later claimed
he never meant, but never
the important one,
never the L-word
without a “we” in front of it.

see. given my ancient
and not so ancient history,
it’s no wonder I’m angry.
show me that you can be trusted
not to abuse the upper hand,
and I’ll stop feeling so outraged.
if there’s a world
where the house doesn’t always win,
I’d like to know about it.

pyre

I’ll be the one to light
your funeral pyre.
my heart is already aflame,
steady as a sanctuary lamp,
it won’t take much
to set the rest of me alight.

if I do it quickly enough,
no one will be able
to stop me.

maybe once you’re
beyond the veil, you’ll see
how pure and steadfast
my light was.
maybe then you’ll wish
you had let me love you.